The phenomenon of sweatshop labor was made infamous to Americans by the Kathy Lee Gifford clothing line scandal in the 90s. Since then, about two to four hundred new articles regarding sweatshops are listed in LexisNexis each year.1 Yet, corporate garment manufacturers are still profiting from exploitative practices, as evidenced in a 2004 report of factory conditions in China:
young women work a double shift seven days a week to sew clothing for an average wage of 22 cents (USD) an hour, sixteen-year-old girls apply toxic glue with a toothbrush and their bare hands to build shoes for the Western market, garment factory temperatures are often over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and garment workers are threatened and coached to lie to factory auditors asking about their working conditions.2
With the exception of neo-liberal economists like Paul Krugman3, few question that sweatshop factories are moral failures. The burgeoning sense of obligation to consume only fairly produced items is seen in the growing popularity of consumer activist groups like the Clean Clothes Campaign and United Students Against Sweatshops. Moreover, the moral duty to only support fair trade has been legitimized by Iris Marion Young, Thomas Pogge and other prominent philosophers who argue that sweatshop conditions are a violation of human rights.
The development of the exploitative system that causes sweatshop labor should be predictable to historians. Individuals in power have sought to condense and expand their power throughout history. The power hungry nature of man was posited in the 17th century by Hobbes in Leviathan, “a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”4 The rise of nation-states from feudal communities in Europe and Asia are evidence of Hobbes observation. Though, in these situations power was condensed along according to religious authority. This is true from the Angkors to the Romans.
In the post-modern world the wealthy no longer unite temples and churches. Rather, the wealthy condense power through the merger of capital and markets. In the ancient and medieval times god’s authority was power (often times this was purchased). However, in the post-modern world the only entity that can grant divine power is the free-market.
The free-market has been described as a panacea for the world’s problems and its limitations are often overlooked. The market is used dogmatically as if it had a divine right to rule. In The Divine Right of Capital, Kelly Marjorie argues that the corporations have developed into modern aristocracies. What’s more, the corporate aristocracy’s right to rule is granted with a religious like deference illustrated by the fact that though there are many decrying corporate wrongdoings, none mention the illegitimacy of stock dividends, “for that is the sun around which the system revolves.”5
The cult of the market has evolved to become the only correct path to salvation from poverty. Harvey Cox explains that the dogma of free market cultists holds the market as an invisible, all powerful entity, acting in mysterious ways that only elite seers and saints, like Alan Greenspan, can understand.6 The market is the god that corporations invoke to justify their ascension to aristocratic power. Governments today do the bidding of corporations because they fear upsetting the all powerful market. If any person, idea, commodity or corporation is successful today, it is because the free-market has allowed it to be.
If the cult of the market actually brought the salvation that the University of Chicago economists preach then there would be no problem. However, the free market allows very deep inequalities to exist in society. Nevertheless, the North has bought into the divine right of markets to rule. As a result the market bred inequalities in the North are so great that the corporate elite have become more powerful than the governments and people they serve. Fifty one of the hundred largest economies in the world are multinational corporations.7 What is most troubling is that economic inequalities translate into political inequalities.
Montesquieu warned in The Spirit of the Laws that extreme political inequality leads to aristocracy, this occurs when the rulers seizes power from the senate, magistrates and judges.8 Corporations wield enough authority to make the rulers do their bidding, in turn empowering the rulers to take power from all forms of government. It is no coincidence that the executive branch of the U.S. government has concentrated the most power in the age of corporations. Like the king asserting political supremacy as a mandate from God, the corporation asserts it’s right to economic supremacy as a mandate from the market.
Granted, the corporate elite’s rule is preferable to the tyranny of command and control economies. Montesquieu warned that extreme equality was as unjust as extreme inequality. Extreme equality in the sense of markets is what occurred in the centrally planned economies of the Soviet Union and pre market China when private business was collectivized, becoming publicly owned. In order to balance the extremities of equality and inequality, Montesquieu prescribed separation of powers for government. Similarly, a balance between the power of the people and corporations must be sought.
Socialism, economic democracy, and consumer activism are just a few of the approaches that have appeared to challenge the divine right of corporations to rule. Economic democracy looks promising; however, change will come slowly. Until workers are unionized and owners of the corporation worldwide, the rights of the laborer will still be infringed upon. Therefore consumers have a moral duty to support fair trade schemes. To consume indifferently is to profit from an exploitative system and a moral failure.
Notes:
1. Harrison, Ann and Jason Scorse. The Nike Effect: Anti-Sweatshop Activists and Labor
Market Outcomes in Indonesia. http://www.econ.yale.edu/seminars/trade/tdw04/Harrison_032204.pdf
2. Micheletti, Michele and Dietlind Stolle. Mobilizing Consumers to Take Responsibility for Global Social Justice. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2007; 611; 159
3. Krugman, Paul. “In Praise of Cheap Labor,” Slate, March 20,
1997 http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html.
4. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan Ch. 11
5. Kelly, Marjorie. The Divine Right of Capital Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc, 2001. xxiii
6. Cox, Harvey. The Market as God: living in the new dispensation. The Atlantic Monthly March 1999
7. Kotabe, Masaaki, and Kristiaan Helsen. Global Marketing Management. New York: J. Wiley, 1998.
8. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws. ch 7
