In honor of the fact that my good friends Liz and The Beard (I am not entirely sure why I keep up the charade of screen names, but I guess it works for now) will be visiting me in the Big Apple this weekend, I feel that I should egg them on a little so we have something to argue about. Beard, this one's for you.
On my old stomping grounds, I linked to a column by Nicholas Kristof that suggested promoting sweat shops was in the best interests of developing countries. Craziness ensued as we all debated this shocking statement by someone with strong credentials advocating for the most in danger in developing countries. Now, while I can understand hatred for sweat shops and the large international companies that support them, what I don't understand is how a much greater evil often goes unnoticed and unprotested. That evil is American and European agriculture subsidies.
Instead of rehashing the sweat shop argument at all, I want to start by making a statement I think we can all agree with; there are economic factors in developing countries that help to keep wages low. Basically, that means that the manufacturing firms that come into these countries are paying a market wage. The last debate revolved around whether that was fair and whether anything could be done about it. But I don't think anyone can argue about whether there are economic conditions keeping wages down in developing countries overall. So if our goal is to eliminate jobs that offer terrible working conditions for unfair wages, one way to approach that would be to try to attack these conditions that push wages down. (Please don't think that I am suggesting this should be done instead of the types of advocacy and boycotting that go on now. I am only arguing for another, equally important, front in the war on sweat shops.)
The problems is that there are many factors keeping wages down; an oversupply of labor due to stagnant economies, corruption, underdevelopment and mismanagement of resources all have an impact - but are also a lot harder to combat that the one I didn't mention. Agriculture subsidies in the west would be easy to get rid of (in the sense that we control them - we cannot stop corruption for example) if the political will was there. And the harm they cause to developing countries is very real. The fact that agriculture in developing countries has to compete with agriculture in Europe and America that is supported by the government robs them of the opportunity to use one of the few resources they have in a global economy. These subsidies keep profits and wages extremely low as farms in developing countries struggle to have a product that will actually sell on a global market. Without the supports, farms in the West would have trouble competing and farms in developing countries might grow and help the economies in their countries expand.
The reason few talk about this is because American farmers are not as easy a target as international manufacturing companies. We love to hate big corporations - they are evil and greedy and exploit the worker whenever they can. Farmers though are a metaphor for the best things about our country. Farmers are thought to be the hardest workers, people who don't have the luxury of taking days off. They make their living from their own hard work; they are the rugged individuals that exist today to remind us of how our country began.
So it is understandably hard to try to pass legislation that could very well bankrupt our hardest-working citizens. But if we are to be serious about improving the lives of everyone around the world and ending labor practices we wouldn't tolerate in our own country, we need to abandon these practices fast. We cannot fall into the trap of only attacking symbols that we don't like. If we are going to make real changes, we need to be willing to advocate for the right policy even if, in the short run, it hurts the symbols we do like.
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