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| A sweatshop. Cool. Kinda. |
Sweatshops are cool. I like sweatshops.
Well, kinda. Let me explain.
How do you leverage an extremely poor country out of poverty? How do break them out of the poverty trap?
The short answer is that you empower women. Time and time again we see wonderful things happening when women are empowered. Key performance indicators such as HIV prevention, GDP increases, and even political stability are tightly coupled with women's rights.
So how do you empower women? One way is to give them some sort of disposable income. Something that they can make choices with. If you do not have enough money to feed yourself and your family, then you'll be forever stuck in the poverty trap.
Some people will drink away their disposable income and spend their lives perpetually drunk. Some will gamble it away. Some will start a business and fail. And some will start a successful business which will feed their families and create even more jobs that will feed more disposable income to people and the cycle starts again.
One way for women to get a disposable income is to work in a sweatshop. They are not paid "western wages": that is not feasible, practical, or even desirable. But they are paid a wage with which they can make choices.
The sweatshop should - of course - respect basic human rights. The workers (most often females) should be allowed to:
- Work reasonable hours
- Have regular breaks
- Go to toilet whenever they want
- Be free from sexual harassment and violence from their bosses
- Be allowed to form workers' unions
- Afforded a share of the profits (radical I know...)
Many of the sweatshops around the world do not - alas - have these rights in place.
If all these rights were in place, then maybe the word "sweatshop" and all its negative connotations would no longer be appropriate.
We need a new name for places that :
- Gainfully employ women
- Returns profit back to the workers
- Prioritises human rights
How about instead we call them "places of empowerment"?
Better yet let's call one of them "Mama Pamba" and start making a meaningful difference.
"They are not paid "western wages": that is not feasible, practical, or even desirable. "
ReplyDeletePlease explain?
Market forces really.
ReplyDeleteI think a reasonable wage would be something like $10 a day. That would give them enough to survive on, plus put some aside for savings.
Paying them a western wage of - say - $100 a day would put them on par with managers at other companies. Then you'd have managers applying for the menial labour jobs and you'd have very few managers (or any other job type you care to mention).
As long as the sweat shops pay market rates and respect basic human rights, then I have no problems with them.