Sweatshops and Moral Exhibitionism

There’s nothing like a little moral exhibitionism to animate some truly bad ideas. We all know moral exhibitionists. These egotists enjoy nothing more than to project their air of smug superiority over the rest of us. They raise awareness without accomplishing anything substantive. They use guilt and our moral insecurity as cudgels. And if they’re at all clever, and are not indisposed to turning a profit, they will morph into remora-like beings that attach themselves to the capitalist system and can turn their moral exhibitionism into a comfortable living. Ever heard of Michael Moore?

The latest example of moral high grounding to come across my desk is the move to make the entire state of Washington “sweat free.” No, that doesn’t mean that honest labor will be driven from the state, although sometimes that does seem to be Olympia’s goal. What sweat free means is that no state agency will do business with vendors that are deemed to produce clothing under “sweatshop” conditions.

States purchase a lot of clothing - $400 million dollars annually, from uniforms to souvenir tee shirts. And so whoever can gain control of that much government spending wields a great deal of power.

The concept sounds good. Promise only to do business with vendors who do not run sweatshops. There is even a consortium that, for a fee, will give its seal of approval to factories that conform to internationally approved labor standards.

But the unfortunate truth is that many countries around the world and many people have only their low priced, unskilled labor to offer in the global marketplace. If they have their livelihoods taken away because some guy in an Armani suit, sitting in an air-conditioned office, finds their working conditions substandard, then they have nothing. Manufacturers who build factories in these countries and take advantage of low priced labor are commonly accused of worker exploitation and even racism. And it is true that they build such factories, not to provide work to the needy, but to reduce labor costs and to make their products more competitive. But however exploitative this practice may seem, it’s a better deal for the workers than starvation.

Of course everybody would like to see everyone else on earth receive a living wage. Unfortunately, however good it makes us feel to proclaim this principle from the highest mountaintop, our moral vanity fails us when we search for the best prices.

What these sorts of measures accomplish is to drive apparel manufacturing out of truly poor countries, which desperately need the hard currency that their low priced labor attracts, toward communist China, which can get away with paying unskilled laborers as little as $50 per month. In this scenario, the people whom our moral exhibitionists would like us to believe are being helped end up being the ones who are harmed the most. A conspiracy theorist might imagine that such movements are the creation of Chinese secret agents trying to soak up all the world’s unskilled labor market for themselves.

On top of all this, I think I pick up a whiff of indulgences up for sale. To be in the good graces of the Workers Rights Consortium, the non-governmental organization that certifies adequate labor conditions, one must pony up $5000 per year. This is quite reminiscent of the civil rights protection rackets that overtook and then replaced the honest civil rights movement. To keep the civil rights racketeers off their backs, corporations have to pay a considerable sum of money to one of more of these civil rights racketeers. Failure to do so would result in potentially devastating accusations of racism or even boycotts.

Leaders of these so-called civil rights groups wear expensive tailored suits and $1000 per pair Italian loafers and can afford to keep their mistresses living in comfort.

Lately this same type of scam has infected the environmental movement. To get a green seal of approval, many companies feel compelled to purchase carbon credits, which enrich well-known, mainstream news media approved environmental spokespersons.

So why shouldn’t anti-sweatshop moral exhibitionists get in on the action?

Washington hopes to have its anti-sweatshop policy in place by January 1, 2010. I would like to believe that politics, payoffs, and cheap moral grandstanding at the expense of the world’s poorest will not play a role in the formulation of this policy. But, I’d like to believe in Santa Claus too.