Deconstructing the sweatshop story

Every so often, a sweatshop story makes it into the papers. Every single time, middle class tossers get their panties wedged about it until the next thing comes along to distract their gadfly attention span.

So, let's go back to first principles a bit, shall we?

Outer Cuntistan is a poor, agricultural country. Not cozy, Range Rover-driving, John Deere-tractoring agriculture though. Manual, back-breaking, eking-out-a-miserable existence, with-nothing-left-to-trade agriculture. The kind that demands you have twenty children just to provide you with a labour force to ensure your survival. Education? Who's got time for that? You work flat out from the moment the sun comes up till the moment you can't see your hand in front of your face and then you stagger back to your hovel and collapse after eating a bowl of nasty gruel made with rotting vegetables, because you don't have a fridge. Fuck the fridge, you've never even heard of electricity!

So along comes this guy, a gaijin or a gwailo or a lekgoa - and an utter cunt to boot. He sees all these meatsacks that he can exploit cheaply to make stuff for rich westerners. So he organises a factory to be built, gets the government to set up electricity for his facility, and goes around hiring the very best workers for the square root of fuck all.

But these workers are now quite respected members of the community. They work indoors, they have ready access to tap water, they work the same sort of hours, but it's not so physically demanding. And they get money. They can actually buy things, something they've never been able to do before. And in terms of their value, they probably "earn" twice as much as they used to. It's a shit life, but it's marginally less shit than it used to be.

Unfortunately for the utter cunt running this shop, you can't keep a bargain quiet and soon, other people are opening up sweatshops there. More people are getting employed and suddenly, the hardest workers are in a curious position. Rather than just taking what life has handed out to them, they can suddenly find themselves choosing to go work elsewhere ... for more money!

Over a couple of years or decades, people forget the horrors of their agrarian lives, they start to hear about Western luxuries, something called "health and safety" and start assimilating these ideas into their own lives. Kids learn to read. Gradually, Outer Cuntistan stops being a great place to do business as they lift themselves out of abject poverty into a reasonable lifestyle via the sweatshop.

The utter cunt eventually gets fucked off to the max and decides to look elsewhere, perhaps Africa this time. And the cycle repeats in country after country as the utter cunt selfishly exploits the principle of comparative advantage, looking for ruined or non-existent economies to exploit in his quest for near slave labour. Country after country is painfully and messily lifted from agrarian hell to a semblance of Western standards.

Don't speak too harshly of the sweatshop owner. After all, after another decade of statist, corporatist, social democrat catastrophe, we can expect him back in this country soon enough.

And you wouldn't want to deny your children and their children the chance to a better life, would you?