http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/12/hbc-90006262
The Sweat of his Labor: Kristof and the global apparel industry
By Ken Silverstein
I have an article in the January issue of Harper’s called
“Shopping for sweat: The human cost of a two-dollar T-shirt,”
which looks at the apparel industry in Cambodia. That country
promotes sells itself, with the help of major apparel companies
that source from there (like Gap Wal-Mart, Nike and Target) as a
model apparel producer. Two years ago, USA Today published an
article about how the country had “position[ed] itself as the
sweatshop-free producer in a fiercely competitive global clothing
market”; Cambodia, a Levi’s executive told the newspaper, “is a
special country.”
Despite this pleasing reputation, the labor situation in Cambodia
is as bad as in other cheap labor havens. According to a 2008
survey, apparel workers there get paid an average of 33 cents an
hour, lower than anywhere in the world but Bangladesh.
My article examines the work of New York Times columnist Nicholas
Kristof, one of the foremost advocates of cheap labor in the Third
World. “Before Barack Obama and his team act on their talk about
‘labor standards,’ I’d like to offer them a tour of the vast
garbage dump here in Phnom Penh,” he wrote last January, in his
inimitable prose style that resembles nothing so much as a den
mother addressing a troop of Brownies. “The miasma of toxic stink
leaves you gasping, breezes batter you with filth, and even the
rats look forlorn . . . Many families actually live in shacks on
this smoking garbage.” For families living in the dump, “a job in
a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty,”
and attempts by Obama to push for “living wages” for apparel
workers in the Third World would merely ratchet up production
costs for industry and lead to factory shutdowns and layoffs. “The
central challenge in the poorest countries,” he wrote, “is not
that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t
exploit enough.”
This column was remarkably similar to one Kristof wrote in 1998
from Indonesia (though at least in that one there was an absence
of forlorn rats). ” In the slums in Indonesia and in Thailand,
many workers even speak of sweatshop jobs as their greatest
aspiration,” he wrote. “Here in the Indonesian capital, Mrs.
Tratiwoon stood barefoot recently in the vast garbage dump where
she makes a living scavenging through the rubbish and described
her dreams for her 3-year-old son: She wants him to grow up to
work in a sweatshop.”
Incidentally, Kristof’s speakers’ bureau, APB, says his typical
fee is approximately $30,000. Hence, for an hour during which he
offers “a compassionate glimpse” into global poverty and gives
voice to the voiceless,” as his APB profile puts it, Kristof
pockets what a Cambodian apparel worker would make in about 50
years. Nice work, if you can get it.
---
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/NicholasKristof2.htm
Nicholas Kristof, Joan Robinson and sweatshops
Posted to www.marxmail.org on June 6, 2006
I imagine that most people who read the NY Times op-ed page--a
chore if there ever was one--might not make the connection between
the pull-quote that appears in Nicholas Kristof's 6/06 defense of
sweatshops and the leftwing economist who first articulated it:
"What's worse than being exploited? Not being exploited."
We are speaking here of course of Joan Robinson, whose general
political and economic views could not be further apart from
Kristof's. Indeed, the quote does not seem to appear in any of her
writings but was something that she stated in her lectures from
time to time. Michael Meerpol, the economist son of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg and someone much more in sympathy with Robinson
than Kristof, once wrote the following on PEN-L, a mailing list
for left-of-center economists:
I don't have a cite but it's not apocryphal. Joan Robinson made
that comment orally a number of times --- both in conversation and
in lectures. The first (and only specific) memory I have of that
was in the context of discussing rural poverty in places like
India, etc. --- where she said many people on the scene told her
that the only real solution for massive rural poverty in
overpopulated regions was "capitalist agriculture" --- and then
she went on to state, "the only thing worse than being exploited,
is not to be exploited!"
If there are written cites, I don't know about them.
Cheers, Mike -- Mike Meeropol
The opening sentence of Kristof's op-ed piece is meant to startle
the reader:
"Africa desperately needs Western help in the form of schools,
clinics and sweatshops."
Touring Namibia in his pith-helmet, Kristof discusses the
misfortune of a group of construction workers who cannot get
regular work. According to him, "they would vastly prefer steady
jobs in, yes, sweatshops."
Well, whatever. Mr. Kristof seems to have a real knack for
eliciting the truth out of the natives, namely that they hunger
after low-paying jobs for Western corporations. One can't imagine
anybody channeling these construction workers better--except
Thomas Friedman of course who has never seen a sweatshop he didn't
like.
Some things are true even though Phil Knight, the chairman of
Nike, believes them.
Mr. Knight recently made news by suddenly withdrawing a
contemplated $30 million gift to the University of Oregon after
the university balked at joining a coalition -- the Fair Labor
Association (F.L.A.) -- that was formed by human rights groups,
colleges, the U.S. government and companies such as Nike to
alleviate global sweatshop conditions. Oregon opted to join an
alternative group being pushed on college campuses, the Worker
Rights Consortium (W.R.C.), which also plans to combat sweatshops,
but refuses to cooperate with any companies, such as Nike.
The natural assumption is that Mr. Knight is wrong. The truth is,
Nike has a shameful past when it comes to tolerating sweatshops.
But on the question of how best to remedy those conditions in the
future -- which Nike has now agreed to do -- Mr. Knight is dead
right and Oregon wrong.
(NY Times, June 20, 2000)
The infatuation with sweatshops on the NY Times op-ed page even
extends to Paul Krugman, the liberal icon who really differs
little from Thomas Friedman when it comes to a belief in the
benefits of low-wage coolie labor. Basically, Krugman wrote a
column identical to Kristof's on April 22, 2001:
There is an old European saying: anyone who is not a socialist
before he is 30 has no heart; anyone who is still a socialist
after he is 30 has no head. Suitably updated, this applies
perfectly to the movement against globalization -- the movement
that made its big splash in Seattle back in 1999 and is doing its
best to disrupt the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City this
weekend.
The facts of globalization are not always pretty. If you buy a
product made in a third-world country, it was produced by workers
who are paid incredibly little by Western standards and probably
work under awful conditions. Anyone who is not bothered by those
facts, at least some of the time, has no heart.
But that doesn't mean the demonstrators are right. On the
contrary: anyone who thinks that the answer to world poverty is
simple outrage against global trade has no head -- or chooses not
to use it. The anti-globalization movement already has a
remarkable track record of hurting the very people and causes it
claims to champion.
The most spectacular example was last year's election. You might
say that because people with no heads indulged their idealism by
voting for Ralph Nader, people with no hearts are running the
world's most powerful nation.
Even when political action doesn't backfire, when the movement
gets what it wants, the effects are often startlingly malign. For
example, could anything be worse than having children work in
sweatshops? Alas, yes. In 1993, child workers in Bangladesh were
found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and Senator Tom
Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries
employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi
textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children
go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according
to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in
even worse jobs, or on the streets -- and that a significant
number were forced into prostitution.
So, you get the picture. It is better to get crumbs from the table
than nothing at all. Of course, well-fed bourgeois ideologists
like Kristof, Friedman and Krugman could never imagine that there
are alternatives to super-exploitation and starvation.
To begin with, Namibia has other sources of wealth besides a pool
of cheap labor that a Nike can exploit. It is endowed with many
different minerals, including diamonds. That Kristof can omit any
reference to these natural resources suggests a combination of
ignorance and bad faith.
The Southern African Development Community website informs us:
"Namibia produces gem quality diamonds, uranium, copper, lead,
zinc, arsenic, cadmium, antimony, pyrite, silver, gold,
semi-precious stones, industrial minerals and dimension stone."
Furthermore, "Namibia is one of the largest producers of gem
quality diamonds with around 98 percent of production being gem
quality." One imagines that diamonds can generate a better
standard of living than the wage you get for making athletic shoes
for Wal-Mart on an assembly line.
However, it is foreign companies who own the means of production
in Namibia, like the South African De Beers Corporation. De
Beers's Elizabeth Bay Mine in Namibia produces about 110,000
carats/year. At $300 per carat, that's 33 million dollars a year.
Multiply that by all the other mining, copper, uranium, silver and
gold operations in Namibia and you are dealing with serious money,
much more serious than sewing together play clothes for tots.
To my knowledge, this is Kristof's first foray into Thomas
Friedman's territory. He has spent the better part of a year
beating the drums for intervention in Darfur, for which he has
earned the Pulitzer Prize. Since my employer hands out these
prizes each year, I tend to be a bit more jaded. The President of
Columbia University is President of the Pulitzer board that also
includes such luminaries as Thomas Friedman, who is infamous for
having stated that:
"The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden
fistMcDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the
designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world
safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States
Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
But one wonders in light of Kristof's hymn to sweatshops whether
there might be a connection to Friedman's more openly mercenary
understanding of how the dollar and the bullet intersect. Could
this insufferable moralizing prig be possibly be more interested
in corporate profits than he is in missionary-style rescues?
For an answer to this, I'd recommend John Bellamy Foster's article
in the current Monthly Review, which does a really good job of
describing the emerging strategic interests of US imperialism in
Africa--especially in regions that are the focus of Cruise Missile
liberals like Kristof. In "A Warning to Africa: The New U.S.
Imperial Grand Strategy," Foster writes:
Here the flag is following trade: the major U.S. and Western oil
corporations are all scrambling for West African oil and demanding
security. The U.S. militarys European Command, the Wall Street
Journal reported in its April 25th issue, is also working with the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce to expand the role of U.S. corporations
in Africa as part of an integrated U.S. response. In this economic
scramble for Africas petroleum resources the old colonial powers,
Britain and France, are in competition with the United States.
Militarily, however, they are working closely with the United
States to secure Western imperial control of the region.
The U.S. military buildup in Africa is frequently justified as
necessary both to fight terrorism and to counter growing
instability in the oil region of Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2003
Sudan has been torn by civil war and ethnic conflict focused on
its southwestern Darfur region (where much of the countrys oil is
located), resulting in innumerable human rights violations and
mass killings by government-linked militia forces against the
population of the region. Attempted coups recently occurred in the
new petrostates of Sao Tome and Principe (2003) and Equatorial
Guinea (2004). Chad, which is run by a brutally oppressive regime
shielded by a security and intelligence apparatus backed by the
United States, also experienced an attempted coup in 2004. A
successful coup took place in Mauritania in 2005 against
U.S.-supported strongman Ely Ould Mohamed Taya. Angolas
three-decade-long civil war instigated and fueled by the United
States, which together with South Africa organized the terrorist
army under Jonas Savimbi's UNITA lasted until the ceasefire
following Savimbi's death in 2002. Nigeria, the regional hegemon,
is rife with corruption, revolts, and organized oil theft, with
considerable portions of oil production in the Niger Delta region
being siphoned off up to 300,000 barrels a day in early 2004.16
The rise of armed insurgency in the Niger Delta and the potential
of conflict between the Islamic north and non-Islamic south of the
country are major U.S. concerns.
Hence there are incessant calls and no lack of seeming
justifications for U.S. humanitarian interventions in Africa. The
Council on Foreign Relations report More than Humanitarianism
insists that the United States and its allies must be ready to
take appropriate action in Darfur in Sudan including sanctions
and, if necessary, military intervention, if the Security Council
is blocked from doing so. Meanwhile the notion that the U.S.
military might before long need to intervene in Nigeria is being
widely floated among pundits and in policy circles. Atlantic
Monthly correspondent Jeffrey Taylor wrote in April 2006 that
Nigeria has become the largest failed state on earth, and that a
further destabilization of that state, or its takeover by radical
Islamic forces, would endanger the abundant oil reserves that
America has vowed to protect. Should that day come, it would
herald a military intervention far more massive than the Iraqi
campaign.
Full: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0606jbf.htm
Returning to Joan Robinson, whatever she thought about the need to
be exploited, there are still the overarching concerns that she
brought to her economic writings and lectures, which--to repeat
myself--are about as far from the Nicholas Kristof's of the world
as can be imagined. Let's turn to her own words as a reminder of
where she stood:
"The United States record in Western Asia and Latin America
follows the same pattern. The good, well-meaning individuals [like
Kristof, giving him the benefit of the doubt] sent out to aid
underdeveloped countries are in a false position (as, by the way,
many of them admit) because the object of the operation is not to
aid the people there to develop, but to keep reactionary
governments in power."
(The Chinese Point of View, International Affairs, April 1964)
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