Why feminists should support sweatshops

There have been some recent blog posts about sweatshops, citing Powell’s and Skarbek's piece in Tuesday's Christian Science Monitor (hat tips: PSD, EconLog, Cafe Hayek, Mark Thoma). This is a thorough analysis of the economic dimensions of garment working. But what about its social impact on the women who work in those factories?

Professor Naila Kabeer from the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, has visited garment workers in Bangladesh and written about their experience in a DFID-funded research paper Globalisation, labour standards and women’s rights: dilemmas of collective action in an interdependent world (PDF). There are, as expected, some negatives. But overall, these garments workers have benefited:

...problems notwithstanding, my own research in the Bangladesh context suggests that the majority of women workers rated their access to employment in the garment factories in positive terms because of its improvements on what life had been like before (Kabeer,2000). They valued the satisfaction of a ‘proper’ job and the opportunity to earn a regular wage compared to the casualised and poorly paid forms of employment that had previously been their only options.

Some of the women in my study had used their newly-found earning power to renegotiate their relations within marriage, others to leave abusive marriages. Women who had previously not been able to help out their ageing parents once they got married now insisted on their right to do so. Yet others used their earnings to postpone early marriage and to challenge the practice of dowry.

I would have thought most feminists - or anti-globalists, for that matter - would applaud helping women to leave abusive marriages or to challenge the dowry system. Other studies have also been positive:

Similarly positive evaluations are reported in other studies. Among the various advantages mentioned in relation to garment work were access to new social networks in the factory floor; the greater voice enjoyed in household decision-making, the respect received from other family members, including their husbands, an enhanced sense of self-worth and self reliance as well as greater personal freedom and autonomy

These findings, which come from a variety of different qualitative and quantitative sources, do not square easily with the one-dimensional portrait projected by the antisweatshop campaigners about export-oriented factories in the Third World.

Kabeer then goes on to cite similar broadly positive findings from research in Turkey, the Philippines, China and Latin America.

if you want to download this paper, though, you had better be quick. Despite the fact that the UK Department for International Development has paid IDS "more than £2.5 million" in funding for this and related research projects, the website home page advises it "will be removed at the end of September 2005". This report, among others, does not appear to be available either the main IDS website or the DFID site, so it will effectively disappear. Your taxes at work!

(Hat tip to Mr Econatarian for the link).

Comments

[Jacqueline]

Awesome. Thank you. I e-mailed a copy of this to some of my "globalization and sweatshops are eeeeeeeeeevvvvvviiiiiiiiiilllllllllll" lefty former professors. :)

[Andy Good]

I am surprised that it takes an expensive piece of Dfid research to show that garment workers feel greater sense of self worth once they have a 'proper job'. The indicators of this snap shot appear fantastic. The crucial indicators for these women relate to the sustainability of the jobs. What happens to these attitudes when the garment factory ups and relocates in a lower wage economy. What do these same women have to say?

Andy , Edinburgh

[johnny]

la de da

[kathryn hagan]

HI GUYS,

MY NAME IS KATHRYN
AND I HAVE A QUESTION FOR A PROJECT I'M DOING IN ECON. MY QUESTION IS THERE PROSTITUTION WITHIN SWEATSHOPS?

IF YOU COULD GET BACK TO ME SOON. THAT WOULD BE GREATLY VALUED.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME KATHRYN HAGAN