Sweatshops Research Paper

English 1020
September 18, 2013
Big Bucks in the Sweatshop Department Often when people, Americans in particular, think of sweatshops with the vision of ten year old workers exhausted from working long hours, children struggling to keep up the pace needed to satisfy the manufacturer’s quota for the day, and then after a hard day of work only ending up $3.00 for their time and effort. But do people consider how vastly the economical differences vary from country to country. Sweatshops are absolutely beneficial to third-world countries because there are very few other means of survival and anti-sweatshop activist fail to realize that banning these workplaces would ultimately leave workers worse off. “In one famous 1993 case U.S. senator
currency, if the employee works at least 9 hours they have earned a total of $21.42. Anti-sweatshop activists argue that this amount payed is too little, but activists look at it from an American point of view. According to a table provided by Benjamin Powell and David Skarbek in their article Sweatshops and Third World Living Standards: Are the Jobs Worth the Sweat, 94.5% of Costa Ricans live off less than $2 a day. The average Costa Rican sweatshop worker makes that in one hour! . “…. Honduran workers earned 31 cents per hour. After 10 hours per day, which is not uncommon in a sweatshop, a worker would earn less than $3.10. Yet nearly a quarter of Hondurans earn less than $1 per day and nearly half earn less than $2 per day”, pointed out in Benjamin Powell’s In Defense of ‘Sweatshops. So half earn less than $2 a day whiles their counterpart bringing in $3.10. “U.S. media compare $3.10 per day to U.S. alternatives, not Honduran alternatives. But U.S. alternatives are irrelevant” stated by Powell. And he is absolutely correct. If one does a little research the facts would be alarming. The official currency of Honduras is the Honduran lempira. The Honduran lempira is 0.049 of a U.S. dollar. So if one takes that $3.10, which is in U.S. dollars, and puts it into Honduran lempiras, it would equal $63.21. Really Americans?, so $63.21 a day for labor is the Honduran people being taken advantage of by American companies,
Almost every major country has been through this process of development, even the United States, in which the process took about 150 years. Sweatshops that open in these third world countries bring technology and more money to help these economies thrive. The better technology and money raises work productivity, ultimately resulting in an increase in workers’ wages. Many cannot help but come to the conclusion that countries such as Costa Rica and Honduras are going through an inevitable cycle that every thriving country once