Exploitation Case Study

Moral legitimacy of exploiting workers in developing countries Introduction

Under the term 'exploitation' the unfair treatment of workers is meant, who cannot exercise their labour rights/human rights and are exploited for their efforts in order to benefit from them. Since markets in the 21st century became highly volatile, the demand for cheap and easily accessible products increased in first world countries. Free trade would facilitate the advancement of the developing countries and supply the world with cheap and easily accessible products. But what makes prices cheap for consumers is cheap labour. The owners of fast-fashion brand factories realized that by moving their factories to the industrializing world, where employees are not

The literature consists of academic articals on sweatshop labour and the conditions workers in industrializing countries endure. In the first section I am going to describe the factors that have an effect on employee's working conditions and discuss why are customers contented with the fact that some of the products they buy are made under low conditions. In the second part, Schumann's framework will be combined with the utilitarian theory to describe what is moral. In the third section, the advantages and disadvantages of the usage of exploited employees will be

One possible reason could be that customers only care about the price of the products, and probably would not pay more for a product if it was made under better conditions. Simply put together, sustainability is not a primary value buyers choose. On the other hand, sweatshops provide work for people in underdeveloped countries. Even though wages are low, sweatshop workers can still be made better-off with earning minimum wages than without earning nothing. Take Nhem Yen, the 40-year old Cambodian woman who works in a sweatshop as an example. She lives in a life-threatening area where malaria is fatal. Without a sufficient mosquito net, she had to choose which of her children would sleep exposed and which would not. In Cambodia a large mosquito net costs around 5 dollars, so if that area would have had at least one sweatshop, Nhem Yen would have gotten the chance to work in it, to earn the money to buy a net big enough to cover her children and save them from the fatal disease (Kristof & WuDunn 2000). According to Nicholas D. Kristof, the problem is not that there are too many workers exploited, rather it is that there are not enough. Poor countries would be definetly better off having factories using cheap labour which would lift out the inhabitants from the severe conditions in the slums and towns (Kristof, The New York