In Certain Countries Sweatshops have a Place

In Pietra Rivoli’s book, A T-Shirt in the Global Economy, Rivoli discusses factories in China and the women who work in them. In a chapter titled, “Sisters in Time: From the Farm to the Sweatshop and Beyond,” and in her UCSB talk, Rivoli talks about her encounters with individuals working in the sweatshop and their positive views about their situation. During her UCSB talk, she mentions meeting this one young woman who was all dolled up for a day a work in the factory with a pair of extremely high heeled boots on. This young woman was so proud of her boots because she was the one who decided to purchase them and was able to do so with her own money. The factory offers Chinese women the opportunity to earn their own money and spend it how they choose; an opportunity that would not be offered to them on the farm. Rivoli writes, “As generations of mill girls and seamstresses from Europe, America, and Asia are bound together by this common sweatshop experience – controlled, exploited, overworked, and underpaid – they are bound together too by one absolute certainty, shared across both oceans and centuries: This beats the hell out of life on the farm” (90). Rivoli sheds light on the fact that not all aspects of the factory systems are bad. Nicholas D. Kristof, a writer for the New York Times, also sees some of the positives to factories in his article “Where Sweatshops are a Dream.” His article uses the unspeakable conditions in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to demonstrate the potentially uplifting consequences of building a factory in Phnom Penh. The article mentions President Obama intention to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad, however Kristof explains, “while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.” Mothers in Phnom Penh can only hope that their children land factories job oppose to the alternative of digging through trash and looking for plastic cups that recyclers will buy for five cents a pound. The article also mentions while manufacturing can provide millions of jobs, sweatshops are often going to the better off countries with more reliable electricity than to the poorer countries that could really benefit from factory jobs. An example of a country that should not have sweatshops is the UK but as an article from BBC explains, investigators found a sweatshop linked with Primark in Manchester. While minimum wage is 5.73 Euros, the workers were being paid 3.50 Euros to work in cold, cramped, unsafe conditions. There is no benefit to working in a sweatshop for factory workers in a highly developed country.