bjbj,E,E In 1993, Senator Tom Harkin proposed banning all products that were made with child
labor from coming into the United States. The result, according to Oxfam, is that thousands,
quote, quote became prostitutes or starved. m Ben Powell, an economist at Suffolk University,
and I m going to talk to you about sweatshops. Defending sweatshops is not about defending
corporate profits or economic efficiency. It s about the welfare of the third world
workers. aAnd I think first we should say what we mean by a sweatshop. s a place in
the third world with very low pay by our Western standards and very poor working conditions,
both health, safety, long hours of work, predictability of overtime, maybe lack of breaks or bathroom
breaks, vacation time, many days a week, all of those things. With the appalling working
conditions that they are, the workers still choose to work there, and that choice is important.
Them choosing to work there demonstrates that they think that it s better than the alternatives
available to them. And the Oother alternatives are often much worse. It could be scavenging,
begging, or even prostitution. Let s take Cambodia for example. There s a trash dump
there where workers earn workers is actually an exaggeration where people savagingscavenging
earn about 75 cents a day for their efforts in the broiling sun. But yet working in a
sweatshop there can earn workers as much as $2 a day. This is a much better alternative
to that. Now of course that doesn t mean that this is all we want these workers to aspire
to. Of course we should want their lives to be better and for them to be able to earn
more. But it does mean that you we have to be very careful what you agitate for, that
you don t eliminate the sweatshop job to throw them into some much worse alternative that
s out there. We need to give them more opportunities in sweatshops and fewer opportunities back
in the informal scavenging subsistence agriculture sector. The good news is the process of development
is what cures the sweatshops. That brings increasing capital, labor, and technology
into the countries. aAnd this process can happen much quicker than it used to. Sweatshops
used to be common in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. For us, it was about
a 150- year or so process of going from pre industrialization to post sweatshop. What
s happened is, when the U.S. and Germany and Great Britain were going through this, all
the capital had to be created anew, all the technology had to be discovered. Now, it s
all out there. sSo the potential for growth is explosive., bBut first, countries have
to get their institutions right, things that protect private property, the rule of law,
give economic freedom. These things can attract the capital and the technology to the country
to make the growth explosive. It s still a process. Sweatshops won t disappear overnight.
But that process can go much quicker now than it has in the past. bBut it depends crucially
on institutions that promote economic freedom. [End of Transcription 0:02:48] The Unbelievable
Truth about Sweatshops Page PAGE of NUMPAGES |paRC l`l{lQ{Q`Q ZE3E RCRaR h'5_ h'5_ ~o`Q?Q
h4Ao hVm3 hJn0 h'5_ h'5_ |l\lL D@D@D@D@ hqe6 h'5_ h4Ao h4Ao hqe6 :plw [Content_Types].xml
_rels/.rels theme/theme/themeManager.xml sQ}# theme/theme/theme1.xml w toc'v )I`n 3Vq%'#q
:\TZaG L+M2 e\O* $*c? Qg20pp \}DU4 hsF+ ,)''K K4'+ vt]K O@%\w S; Z |s*Y 0X4D) ?*|f -45x
/Y|t theme/theme/_rels/themeManager.xml.rels 6?$Q K(M&$R(.1 [Content_Types].xmlPK _rels/.relsPK
theme/theme/themeManager.xmlPK theme/theme/theme1.xmlPK theme/theme/_rels/themeManager.xml.relsPK
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?> <a:clrMap xmlns:a="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main"
bg1="lt1" tx1="dk1" bg2="lt2" tx2="dk2" accent1="accent1" accent2="accent2" accent3="accent3" accent4="accent4"
accent5="accent5" accent6="accent6" hlink="hlink" folHlink="folHlink"/> User Normal Victoria
Andrew Microsoft Office Word Title Microsoft Word 97-2003 Document MSWordDoc Word.Document.8