Alvin Abraham
March 3, 2014
IMS 3310.003
Social dumping taking place in current international trade practices in countries like China should be considered unethical and a concern to the United States of America. It is known to be the “use of labor with wages and benefits that do not meet the set standard in a country for the purpose of cutting costs of production” (wiseGEEK). There are many reasons as to why social dumping is considered beneficial to entrepreneurs who are trying to increase products through cheap labor. Although labor protections are in place to apply to all workers, because of social dumping, companies go around laborer’s legal protections. Companies even relocate their jobs to make use of workers in foreign countries-causing one nation job loss while going after laborers in a different nation. Social dumping does not only allow companies to reduce wages but also avoid high tariffs and taxes.
A well-known example of social dumping is the production of Nike shoes. Nike has factories in third world countries such as China, Indonesia, and Vietnam that produce millions of shoes with labor costs at the bare minimum. Nike was known to pay “a minimum wage allowing workers to afford basic human necessities “ (Wilsey). Nike manufacturing operations in Indonesia were paying workers (mainly women) about $2.25 a day, which officially was 20% below the poverty line for an adult (Tsogas 34).
There are two main arguments as to why social dumping should be considered unethical and a concern globally. One is an economic argument while the other is a moral one. The argument being economic is that labor standards and low wages in countries that are developing threaten worker’s living standards in developed countries. The argume...
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...l on the people who are getting this unfair treatment and nations as a whole.
Works Cited
Golub, Stephen. "Are International Labor Standards Needed to Prevent Social Dumping?." Finance & Development. n. page. Print. .
"Stop Social Dumping." Stop Social Dumping. European Federation of Building and Wood Workers. Web. 3 Mar 2014. .
Tsogas, George. Labor Regulation in a Global Economy. 2001. 34. Print.
"What is Social Dumping?." wiseGEEK. n. page. Print.
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Wilsey, Matt. "The Nike Controversy." Stanford. N.p.. Web. 3 Mar 2014. .
Places like Pakistan, places with high percentage of poverty, children are being forced to work extreme numbers of hours making soccer balls for the rest of the world. It is ironic that almost all around the world children are playing with soccer balls but in high poverty areas like Pakistan children are not going to school but rather making soccer balls all day long. “About 7,000 children between the ages of 5 and 14 have no time for school because they work full-time manufacturing soccer balls, earning about 50 cents for each ball they produce” (CNN). A child does not wake up excited to make soccer balls every day. They are forced to do it because the family with those children belong to are generally poor and that is why they have every person in the family working to help each other bring food to their table. During the 1998 world cup sales for soccer balls increased “25 percent” (CNN) because of the hype that is drawing attention to the upcoming World Cup. Even though the world cup games were held in France and a lot of money was generated by FIFA not much was passed down to the families who worked on the equipment that was essential for a soccer game to be conducted. From the player’s outfit to the footwear everything was being generated by poor families that are getting paid less than minimum wage. This kind of situation spreads like wildfire. “Efforts in the 1990’s to expose abuses in the assembly of soccer balls in Pakistan pushed businesses into India, where children continue to work in this industry. The report shows that industry initiatives have failed to improve the lives of thousands of children forced to work in Meerut, India to pay off the debt of their parents. For years, companies have said that they have extensive monitoring programs to make sure child labor is not used in the production
Large corporations such as Nike, Gap, and Reebok and many others from the United States have moved their factories to undeveloped nations; barely pay their employees enough to live on. Countries such as China, Indonesia, and Haiti have readily abundant cheap labor. There should be labor laws or an obligation of respecting workers to provide decent working conditions, fair wages, and safety standards.
The General Accountability Office defines a sweatshop as a “multiple labor law violator.” A sweatshop violates laws pertaining to benefits, working hours, and wages (“Toxic Uniforms”). To make more money, companies move their sweatshop factories to different locations and try to find the cheapest locations with the least regulations (“Sweatshops”). There are not as many sweatshop factories in the United States because the industries have been transferred overseas where the labor is cheaper and there are weaker regulations. In the United States, sweatshops are hidden from the public, with poor immigrant workers who are unable to speak out against the injustices (“Subsidizing Sweatshops”). Workers in sweatshops are forced to work overtime, earn below a living wage, do not earn benefits, and encounter verbal, physical and sexual abuse. Macy’s, JCPenney, Kohl’s, The
Sweatshops are factories that violate two or more human rights. Sweatshops are known in the media and politically as dangerous places for workers to work in and are infamous for paying minimum wages for long hours of labour. The first source is a quote that states that Nike has helped improve Vietnamese’s’ workers lives by helping them be able to afford luxuries they did not have access to before such as scooters, bicycles and even cars. The source is showing sweatshops in a positive light stating how before sweatshops were established in developing countries, Vietnamese citizens were very poor and underprivileged. The source continues to say that the moment when sweatshops came to Vietnam, workers started to get more profit and their lives eventually went uphill from their due to being able to afford more necessities and luxuries; one of them being a vehicle, which makes their commute to work much faster which in turn increases their quality of life. The source demonstrates this point by mentioning that this is all due to globalization. Because of globalization, multinationals are able to make investments in developing countries which in turn offers the sweatshops and the employees better technology, better working skills and an improvement in their education which overall helps raise the sweatshops’ productivity which results in an increase
Corporations in the United States have proved time and time again that they are all about profit and not about what is good for America. One example of this is the fact that many corporations have factories in other countries, or buy from other corporations that do. Nike (an athletic shoe and clothing company) produces most of their shoes and apparel in factories in other countries, including Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, China, Vietnam and Malaysia. According to Nike’s factory disclosure list released May 2011, only 49 of it’s over 700 factories are located in the U.S. (Nike, Inc.) This means that thousands of jobs that could be filled by needy Americans are instead being filled by workers in other countries. This reason that Nike and other corporations outsource is very simple, it is very cheap to do so. In an excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair's book “Born Under a Bad Sky” the author describes the vast differences between Nike’s production costs and retail prices. “In Vietnam, it costs Nike only $1.50 to manufactu...
The United States’ welfare system is designed to help its citizens live regular and full lives with all the opportunities that higher class citizens are exposed to and to help the unemployed look for long-term work so financially, they can become stable. This assistance is very beneficial (especially to the lower class) but annually, thousands of cases of welfare fraud are committed. The poor do not realize that this program does them the favor and is not a requirement by the government. The welfare system is a great assistance to the needy but these programs do not enable the receivers to become motivated to get off the program; instead it makes them more dependent towards the welfare system and receivers tend to want more and more assistance as time goes on. If welfare fraud continues to occur, the United States should let the people that absolutely need it receive their assistance regularly and target those who need it less and make the qualifications for welfare more complicated and tedious so to make it harder for those to receive welfare benefits, to help prevent welfare fraud, and to make people less anxious to apply for welfare if they don’t need it as much.
While humans have for generations acknowledged the importance of children in the society, the government involvement in child affairs has been varied over the decades. In the US, the government did not play a major role in the promotion of the welfare of children and youth in the country by the end of the 19th century. This trend changed in the early years of the 20th century when the federal government started to demonstrate a major interest in child welfare. This took place in the progressive era which saw the immergence and active engagement of the child-savers movement. Owing to the efforts of such organizations, several policies and legislations were worked on by the US government from the start of the 20th century to promote child welfare in the society (McGowan, 2005). The marked shift by the government in social welfare was caused by some important economic and social issues that were taking place in the progressive era.
Linda Lim, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School, visited Vietnam and Indonesia in the summer of 2000 to obtain first-hand research on the impact of foreign-owned export factories (sweatshops) on the local economies. Lim found that in general, sweatshops pay above-average wages and conditions are no worse than the general alternatives: subsistence farming, domestic services, casual manual labor, prostitution, or unemployment. In the case of Vietnam in 1999, the minimum annual salary was 134 U.S. dollars while Nike workers in that country earned 670 U.S. dollars, the case is also the similar in Indonesia. Many times people in these countries are very surprised when they hear that American's boycott buying clothes that they make in the sweatshops. The simplest way to help many of these poor people that have to work in the sweatshops to support themselves and their families, would be to buy more products produced in the very sweatshops they detest.
Americans do not realize the amount of clothing we wear on a daily basis is actually made in Cambodia, such as Adidas and even the Gap. The women that work for these sweatshops in Cambodia sew for 50 cents an hour, which is what allows stores in America, such as H&M to sell inexpensive clothing (Winn, 2015). The conditions these Cambodian workers face are a noisy, loud, and extremely hot environment where people are known for having huge fainting attacks. When workers were on strike a year ago, authorities actually shot multiple people just because they were trying to raise their pay. There is plenty of evidence of abuse captured through many interviews of workers from different factories, and is not just a rarity these places see often or hear of. Factories hire children, fire pregnant women because they are slow and use the bathroom to much, scream at regular workers if they use the toilet more than two times a day, scam hard working employees with not paying them their money they worked for and more, and workers are sent home and replaced if 2,000 shirts are not stitched in one day. Expectations are unrealistic and not suitable for employees to be working each day for more than ten
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