Why Pakistani workers are making 29p an hour sewing for boohoo
Whether or not anyone at boohoo knew that people in Pakistan were being paid 29p an hour - as The Guardian alleges - is not the important point. Nor even is it that such a sum would be below the Pakistani minimum wage:
The fast fashion brand Boohoo is selling clothes made by Pakistani factory workers who say they face appalling conditions and earn as little as 29p an hour, an investigation by the Guardian has found.
In interviews in the industrial city of Faisalabad, workers at two factories claimed they were paid 10,000PKR (£47) a month, well below the legal monthly minimum wage for unskilled labour of 17,500PKR, while making clothes to be sold by Boohoo.
The important line is this:
One of more than a dozen workers interviewed said: “I know we are exploited and paid less than the legal minimum, but we can’t do anything … if I leave the job another person will be ready to replace me.”
The important thing to acknowledge, to know, is that £47 a month is a step up for many people in that country. It is only by grasping that that it is possible to gain that better world - the one with less poverty in it - that we all desire. For it is as Paul Krugman pointed out:
But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.
As that unnamed worker points out, these sweatshop jobs are better:
Workers in those shirt and sneaker factories are, inevitably, paid very little and expected to endure terrible working conditions. I say "inevitably" because their employers are not in business for their (or their workers') health; they pay as little as possible, and that minimum is determined by the other opportunities available to workers. And these are still extremely poor countries, where living on a garbage heap is attractive compared with the alternatives.
We are in that Marxist world of there being a considerable reserve army of labour willing to do whatever in order to gain access to an income.
These improvements have not taken place because well-meaning people in the West have done anything to help--foreign aid, never large, has lately shrunk to virtually nothing. Nor is it the result of the benign policies of national governments, which are as callous and corrupt as ever. It is the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It is not an edifying spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful but nonetheless significantly better.
Or as Deirdrie McCloskey has been known to note, the only thing worse than being exploited by a capitalist is not being exploited by a capitalist.
Sweatshop jobs are better than no-sweatshop jobs. We all do indeed desire that the poor of the world become richer. The manner by which we do so is to buy goods made by poor people in poor countries. For that increases the demand for labour there, something which solves that Marxian problem and raises wages.
Sweatshop jobs are, that is, the solution to the identified problem of poverty. We might prefer to be fastidious and skate over that fact but it is still a fact. After all, Bangladesh has followed this route and GDP per capita - not everything but a good guide to living standards - has tripled in recent decades. Not just improving lives there but reducing global inequality at the same time.