Benefits Of Sweatshops

Introduction

In the past 20-30 years and even nowadays, the term “globalization” keeps lingering around our ears. Definitions of “globalization” have long been diversified but it is mainly related to economics, so most people treat it as the development on or the changes of human welfare in different countries due to the economic integration of the world, under which goods, services and capital are more mobile. Economic globalization, as a result, has benefited a wide range of international issues, including trade of goods and services, labor transference, development of multinational firms, education (as mental capital investment), poverty reduction, to name but a few.

Although economic globalization benefits the world in many sides, some poor countries claim that such benefits are enjoyed by the rich countries

What sweatshop usually means is that the workers have to work with less skill-intensive, but tough and dangerous jobs, like coco beans cultivation and sewing under poor working environments, but they finally receive extremely low wage, just slightly above the poverty line of the poor countries. Most sweatshops are formed by the profit-oriented multinational firms which would like to maximize productivity as much as possible, so there many job opportunities for the labor in the poor countries. In short-term, that would fight poverty as there would still be income guaranteed for the poor workers. However, as the reality behind the sweatshops becomes notorious, sweatshop critics who fight against the existence of sweatshops stand out, forcing some FDIs to flow out of the poor countries. Take Nike as an example. Becoming one of the targets of sweatshop critics, it tends not to have highly labor- intensive factories in the poor countries, but rather more capital-intensive factories (where machines do more) in rich countries like Malaysia. The real losers are now the poor