>This is a moral dichotomy that's been around for ages and I have yet to see a satisfactory answer on: are sweatshops evil because the workers are grossly underpaid and work in terrible conditions, or are they good because they're better than nothing and people will apparently starve to death otherwise?

it is a false dichotomy for many reasons. One of them - the most basic one - is that we have high productivity enough in the developed world to not allow former sweatshops workers to starve.