Kristof's overdue fisking

Yesterday's Kristof editorial in the New York Times is why I decided blogging was OK. I will let others shred his sniveling style, and attempt to focus on the man's argument. If you're short on time, it reduces to him saying US college students arguing for dignified labor are responsible for the business decisions of multinational apparel corporations, and thus the plight of Africa's poorest is on student hands, because they deny work to the impoverished many.

Africa desperately needs Western help in the form of schools, clinics and sweatshops.

For a racy lede, Kristof ignores (or is unaware) that several countries of subsaharan Africa already have a textile industry, due in part to Clinton's African Growth and Opportunity Act, which allowed duty-free imports of African textiles to the US -- and which Kristof tosses in later without context.

He ignores or doesn't understand that African apparel factories exist, are failing quickly, and will never reopen, because of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement's expiration last year. The MFA was a global quota on textile imports worked out among rich countries to throw a little development around poor countries and bind them to Western markets, all the while restricting their access to protect domestic producers and control the South's development.

Its expiration allowed countries with supremely low costs and exploitative working conditions, i.e. China and Vietnam, to dramatically expand their production of apparel. Significant blocs of the apparel market are controlled by globalized apparel factory owners, who subcontract for the Nikes and Jansports and are mostly headquartered in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, although their factories are spread throughout the world. Not surprisingly, Chinese officials and these Pacific subcontracting firms saw the writing on the wall and have been investing heavily in mainland China for years. They built the infrastructure and speed-to-market capability in China's southern export zones that Africa lacks. Kristof says it's because Africa is corrupt and choked on red tape. Fine, but not enough of the story: much of the continent has no access to ports, goods must slowly traverse several national borders for export, and then there was that whole centuries of imperialism thing that conditioned the African economy to the export of raw materials and venal officialdom. But your word count won't handle that much backstory? Then stop writing about what you don't understand or can't explain.

Mr. Shaanika and the other young men noted that the construction jobs were dangerous and arduous, and that they would vastly prefer steady jobs in, yes, sweatshops.

Sweatshop jobs are anything but steady. Sweatshops are notoriously unstable, because the global brands that produce apparel constantly hunt for countries and factories that will shave cents off the production price. The prices brands pay for apparel drop every year. Brands do not renew contracts unless factory owners agree to these vicious prices, and if they do, workers' pay drops, or the benefits are chopped, or the leaky sewage pipe doesn't get repaired. And if the factory owner refuses the brand's price, the contract is cut, and the workers are fired. It's a chaotic industry because that suits the brands. One Department of Labor study of the Los Angeles textile industry found that more than half of factories had been in business less than two years. So, no, Namibia isn't going to be treated better than that.

Imagine that a Nike vice president proposed manufacturing cheap T-shirts in Ethiopia: ''Look, boss, it would be tough to operate there, but a factory would be a godsend to one of the poorest countries in the world. And if we kept a tight eye on costs and paid 25 cents an hour, we might be able to make a go of it.''

The boss would reply: ''You're crazy! We'd be boycotted on every campus in the country."

So companies like Nike, itself once a target of sweatshop critics, tend not to have highly labor-intensive factories in the very poorest countries, but rather more capital-intensive factories (in which machines do more of the work) in better-off nations like Malaysia or Indonesia. And the real losers are the world's poorest people.

Apparently Kristof has little understanding of how capitalism works, and no comprehension of the arguments sweatshop campaigners make. Business decisions in the apparel world are made on price, quality and time to delivery. Ethiopia is landlocked. Its nearest export border, with Eritrea, is perpetually uneasy, and saw a major conflict less than a decade ago. It shares another border with Somalia, site of a current war. So where are corporations investing in capital-intensive plant? Where the government offers paved roads, tax-free export zones, RFID-ready ports, and gulags to dispatch any inconvenient workers.

Ethiopia's people should not be ignored because they are geographically and historically disadvantaged. But to point to US college students as the reason for their poverty is a sick joke, and one that obscures the role of both colonial legacy and neoliberal trade policy in creating a global economy that destroys their chance of achieving a decent life.

Some of those who campaign against sweatshops respond to my arguments by noting that they aren't against factories in Africa, but only demand a ''living wage'' in them. After all, if labor costs amount to only $1 per shirt, then doubling wages would barely make a difference in the final cost.

One problem -- as the closure of the Namibian factories suggests -- is that it already isn't profitable to pay respectable salaries, and so any pressure to raise them becomes one more reason to avoid Africa altogether. Moreover, when Western companies do pay above-market wages, in places like Cambodia, local managers extort huge bribes in exchange for jobs. So the workers themselves don't get the benefit.

Studies of sweatshop wages suggest that workers receive from roughly 5 cents to 50 cents per piece, depending on season, country, factory ownership, type of garment and other conditions. Especially in apparel, because there is such a huge disconnect between cost of production and the price of the finished good, there is significant room for price flexibility. Wage studies say the average increase to allow workers to afford a local basket of goods would be more like doubling a 25 cent rate to 50 cents.

But regardless, Kristof inflated the amount sweatshop workers receive, and misdiagnoses why Namibian factories are closing. The problem is not that some people kill the "golden goose" by receiving non-starvation wages. The problem is the neoliberal scheme that allows unrestricted capital mobility and stifles labor mobility, pushes down wage, safety, health, development & other domestic laws around the world, and forces poor nations into competition with each other to produce the most perfect exploitation they can.

At base, Kristof is making an argument here against minimum wages, to which the only reply is: Then what's wrong with child labor? 80 hour weeks? Machines that sever limbs and crush skulls? Sicko.

If Western companies know about Cambodian wage theft and put to use their pretense of caring about their workers, the practice would be ridiculously easy to halt. But, thankfully, we don't have to rely on them. Cambodian workers are among the least exploited in the current apparel landscape because they boast one of the highest rates of unionized textile shops in the global South. Even if their local managers capture some of the wage premium now, they are the best positioned to challenge their managers.

The heart of the sweatshop problem is the unrelenting price demands and instability that brands force on factories and sweatshop workers. They will continue to play the apparel system in their favor until sweatshop workers, Western consumers and organizations between them make them stop.

One push needs to come from African countries themselves: a crackdown on corruption and red tape. But another useful step would be for American students to stop trying to ban sweatshops, and instead campaign to bring them to the most desperately poor countries.

American students aren't trying to ban sweatshops, and never have. They're attempting to create nodes of decently paid, unionized workers who can count on stable orders from US colleges and universities. By supporting successful, visible examples of high-road apparel production, and by strengthening the unions and NGOs who organize and support these workers and factories, they are working to spark organizing among the rest of the of sweatshop world. And the gross apologies for the servitude of millions of apparel workers by hand-wringing editorialists? Maybe those will never go away.