Back in January we had a discussion about sweatshops on this blog. It's a difficult subject, and the debate did affect my stance on the subject. That blog post was discovered by a producer from Truetube (a video magazine site) who was putting together a short video about the pros and cons of sweatshops. They wanted to interview me as the 'pro sweatshop' guy. I was pretty nervous about it fearing I might be misrepresented as some kind of pro-exploitation hypercapitalist but I figured it was worth the risk.
The resulting video is actually very balanced and a good introduction to the subject. There are two important points though that I don't think got enough attention:
The first is that both the pro-globalisation and workers rights movements play an important role in improving the standard of living for poor people in developing countries. Global trade is the best way for a country to develop economically; but at the same time, we need to put pressure on corporations and governments to ensure that working conditions continually improve.
The second point is more fundamental: Do we actually even need all of the cheap goods that are being imported from China and other developing countries? And is our culture of consumerism even sustainable, regardless of whether or not the goods are produced in sweatshops? The Story of Stuff explains this side of things in a beautifully simple way.
The Sweatshop page on Wikipedia has a more detailed breakdown of the arguments for and against sweatshops if you want to read more about this.
Here's the video. I'd love to know what you think.
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