THERE IS THIS IDEA in the academy: known as”cultural relativism.” It is sometimes used to describe the ethnocentrism that happens when applying one nation or culture’s standards to another and from it, making judgments that deem a flawed ideal of “right” and “wrong.” The world doesn’t work so neatly. There are not usually such easy answers to things, especially when dealing with the issue of quality of life in countries who are so destitute in every economic metric, that a popular form of employment is scavenging. Thus, providing an instance where principles are too high-minded and operate above the brass-tacks of an issue. Those ideals, inevitably, hold a level of disconnection and apply a rubric befitting another setting. The Western world’s hullabaloo over sweatshops and their politics in the late ’90s going into the millennium is an example.

Sweatshop labor in Asia and other regions of the world was a lightning-rod for companies like Nike and K-Mart and its Kathy Gifford line, as recently as ten years ago. Both companies and their headline endorsers morphing before the public eye into symbols of multinational corporations and their “inhumane standards” and productivity requirements that fostered a culture of deputy managers that ran factories slavishly. College-aged kids looking for a cause often campaigned against these companies, banned their products and even went so far as to demand their schools’ athletic departments, in the case of Nike, to forgo their use on moral grounds.

But the societal outrage while grounded in honest ethics; the disgust while commendable but ever-so-slightly misplaced, failed to see the entire picture of life in the exquisitely impoverished regions of the world; places where life on less than two dollars a day is a normative reality and a “scavenger economy” where toiling in the most disease incubating, sweltering space one can imagine is the best many could hope for. New York Times’ columnist, Nicholas Kristof, a man who has made a reputation on shinning a light on Third World problems, begs for a new understanding:

The miasma of toxic stink leaves you gasping, breezes batter you with filth, and even the rats look forlorn. Then the smoke parts and you come across a child ambling barefoot, searching for old plastic cups that recyclers will buy for five cents a pound. Many families actually live in shacks on this smoking garbage.

Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.

Talk to these families in the dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children.

“I’d love to get a job in a factory,” said Pim Srey Rath, a 19-year-old woman scavenging for plastic. “At least that work is in the shade. Here is where it’s hot.”

Another woman, Vath Sam Oeun, hopes her 10-year-old boy, scavenging beside her, grows up to get a factory job, partly because she has seen other children run over by garbage trucks. Her boy has never been to a doctor or a dentist, and last bathed when he was 2, so a sweatshop job by comparison would be far more pleasant and less dangerous.

As Kristof describes an area of Phnom Penh, there are many other nations with urban centers that have similarly constructed entire “trash cities” upon the refuse of landfills, and in these shantytowns citizens work longer hours in more putrid conditions than one can imagine hoping to eek out a life; hours longer than they would probably see in sweatshops. Knife fights and murders over bottles and other more valuable goods occur there, to the point that shifts have to be made by the local government—who find it fruitless to outlaw the scavenging practice— in order to organize the scavenger parties and provide a level of reasonable fairness that staves violence, and naturally combats against gangs who monopolize the areas’ “good dumping periods,” when more profitable scavenging is likely. And the children, they work there too, with no age limit, and they suffer from innumerable maladies as a result of working the dumps and their parents’ inhabiting of the landfill cities in which they make their livelihood. These are places where sweatshops are a step up the economic ladder—a ray of hope in nations where prostitution and more illegal means becomes accepted.

I know this world, not personally, but I know its smell. And I know the heat and the grime and rising smoky mounds: all the result of my passing trash cities on the highway, before Manila’s local government somehow hid them from the plain sight of the more economically developed areas. Most importantly, I’ve heard since I was a child, about the people in similar trash cities as the one Kristof mentions. Whether in Pnomh Penh or the City of Manila, Philippines, or almost any other densely populated Global South city—it always sounds far worse than a sweatshop to me. As a result, the kind of disconnected from the ground-truth politics I hear from American politicians and young activists are a waste. It is not that there shouldn’t be an uproar; there should. But their problem should be with poverty itself, the kind of poverty that makes sweatshops possible and appealing to the world’s workers and Third World economies. Developing nations agree with American firms to produce in such factories because its profitable for both sides. As Kristof points out:

I’m glad that many Americans are repulsed by the idea of importing products made by barely paid, barely legal workers in dangerous factories. Yet sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty. At a time of tremendous economic distress and protectionist pressures, there’s a special danger that tighter labor standards will be used as an excuse to curb trade.

When I defend sweatshops, people always ask me: But would you want to work in a sweatshop? No, of course not. But I would want even less to pull a rickshaw. In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn’t the bottom.

My views on sweatshops are shaped by years living in East Asia, watching as living standards soared — including those in my wife’s ancestral village in southern China — because of sweatshop jobs.

Is it necessarily ideal and up to “our standards” to be working in a cramped space with little to no break for long hours in oppressive heat? No. But for just a moment: consider the alternative. (Say: “scavenger employment” where death is more likely than in a sweatshop, and where disease is a near-certainty.) Companies who employ sweatshop labor provide a moderately safe environment, comparatively. The main of people in developing nations are not given the many roads of opportunity that are experienced in the developed West, their economy hasn’t the strength that ours has, and so they live at a survival level in the world’s toughest, most dangerous ghettos. “Sweatshops” are a far cry from what those on the lowest rung of developing nations know as “work.” There’s even, sadly, a dignity in sweatshops, by comparison.

We should demand more of our companies who employ overseas for more profit, after all, they did ship an American job out to help their bottom line, and so it shouldn’t come at even more cost of someone else’s health, but in all honesty: this is the best these people have for now, until we can lift their entire nation from the constant brink of economic, organizational and political collapse. (That is after all, what being a Third World nation is.) There is a moral calling for us with privilege to ask for a more considerate path by the corporations that operate beyond our shores, but we mustn’t completely lose the focus of the entire picture of global poverty being the contributing factor in sweatshop labor.

Read “Where Sweatshops Are a Dream” [Here]

Photo Credit: NY Times