Sweatshops, autonomy and structural exploitation a reply to Zwolinski

Abstract In his paper Sweatshops, Choice, And Exploitation (2007), Matt Zwolinski argues that a persons decision to work in a sweatshop is of moral significance because it represents an exercise of her autonomy. From this, Zwolinski derives a moral claim against interference in the conditions of sweatshop labor by third parties (Zwolinski 2007: 689). In this article, I question the notion of a sweatshop workers autonomy and argue that the concept of autonomy is only of little help as regards the sweatshop issue because it focuses too much on micro-level injustice. In fact, a persons decision to work in a sweatshop is based on conditions which severely limit her autonomy. The moral claim against non-interference which Zwolinski postulates is consequently diminished. I will exemplify my theses by drawing on the consequences of the Chinese household registration system, the hukou, for the recruitment of sweatshop labourers.

I. Zwolinskis argument of moral autonomy According to Zwolinski, a persons decision to work in a sweatshop is an indication of her preferences. Therefore, it would be morally objectionable if third parties were to interfere, e.g. through regulating or even prohibiting sweatshop labour: [T]here is a strong moral reason for third parties such as consumers and host and home country governments to refrain from acting in ways which are likely to deprive sweatshop workers of their jobs. (Zwolinski 2007: 690). A persons decision in favour of sweatshops generates such claim to non-interference even if it was not fully autonomous. Moreover, this claim gains additional weight the more this decision influences a persons life (Zwolinski 2007: 691). Since working in a sweatshop is quite often a persons only possibility to survive, this claim to non-interference is correspondingly strong. From this Zwolinski concludes that it would be morally wrong to prohibit sweatshops:

To do so would be to violate the autonomy of the workers who would have otherwise chosen to work in such conditions. [] Laws which have the effect of preventing workers

and sweatshops from freely contracting together [] are thus also morally suspect. (Zwolinski 2007: 693)

Interestingly, Zwolinski concedes that his argument is dependent on empirical facts, and the claim that workers choices are autonomous [] depends on the particular conditions under which the choice to accept sweatshop labor is made (Zwolinski 2007: 696). In the following, I am going a step further and claim that the moral evaluation of the sweatshop issue is not only in some cases, but solely dependent on empirical evidence. As Zwolinski rightly notices: For the complete picture, we need to supplement our moral theorizing with data from (at least) economists, psychologists, and social scientists. (Zwolinski 2007: 696). I argue that taking such empirical evidence into account would provide us with the necessary indications that sweatshops are in fact based on the limited autonomy of their labourers. Their autonomy is restricted because they belong to stigmatized groups (Lieberson 1980, Bender 2003, Hapke 2004). Sub-standard occupations have always drawn their labour force from socially inferior groups. I therefore claim that a persons decision to work in a sweatshop is no indication of her preferences, as Zwolinski states, but, basically, of her social disadvantage. To substantiate my claim, I will now examine to what extent a persons choice is revealing as regards her preferences, and whether the concept of autonomy is applicable to the sweatshop issue.

II. Choice and preference

III. The benefits of sweatshop labour I argue that a sweatshop essentially builds on and enforces existing inequality. This assumption provides us with an explanation of the extremely low wages paid in sweatshops: Some initial disadvantage renders an agent exploitable. To calculate the just price in any given case, we

simply imagine the same transaction without the initial disadvantage. The just price is thus the price which a non-disadvantaged party would accept or pay (Mayer 2007: 145, emphasis added). The significance of stigmatized groups for the success of sweatshop labour is very clear as regards gender: According to several studies, inequality between the sexes is one of the main causes for the extraordinary economic growth of Japan, China, and the Asian tigers (Hunsberger 1964, Andors 1988, Amsden 1989, Smart and Smart 1992, Lee 1998, Rosen 2002). Foreign direct investment correlates with wage differentials between men and women (Seguino 2000). As one sociologist remarks: Asias generally lower wages, the even lower wages paid to women, and the higher percentage of women workers all helped make production in these countries attractive to importers and retailers (Rosen 2002: 53). Social inequality is thus a necessary prerequisite for sweatshops. I will exemplify this thesis by drawing on the Chinese household registration system, the hukou. The additional purpose of the following is to demonstrate that sweatshop workers are harmed by a collaboration between political governments and transnational corporations. This supplies us with a reason for interference which has been identified by Zwolinski himself: He notes that in order to provide such reason, we must compare the welfare of workers living under colluding governments with their expected welfare were collusion disallowed (Zwolinski 2007: 704). In section VI, I will discuss what kind of interference might be appropriate as regards sweatshop labour.

IV. China the construction of a labour force The majority of workers in Chinese sweatshops are internal migrants, i.e. persons who migrate from rural China to towns like Hong Kong and Shenzhen to seek employment. Their exploitation is facilitated by the Chinese household registration system, the hukou. Since its introduction in the 1950s, this system assigned a residence either in town or in the country to every Chinese citizen. To attract workers, urban residents were granted several privileges like subsidised housing, food and medical care (Naughton 2007: 117). For financial reasons, and to

avoid a mass migration of the rural population, the great majority of the Chinese people were assigned a rural hukou. The Chinese council declared in August 1952:

Urban and industrial development and the progress of national construction will absorb the necessary rural labour, but this must be done gradually, and cannot be accomplished all at once. It is therefore necessary to prevail upon the peasants and check their blind desire to flow into the cities (quoted in Cheng and Selden 1994: 650).

This strategy seemed to work: Due to the hukou system, Chinese cities have never been in such catastrophic condition as was, e.g., London during its industrial development. Migration was (and is) being limited by withholding public provisions like medical care, unemployment benefits, free schooling and housing from migrants1: Any rural residents seeking employment in cities were deprived not only of job opportunities but food and other necessities (Xu 2000: 123). The hukou system which some critics compare with South African apartheid (Alexander and Chan 2004) - has been liberalised in the late 1980s and now concedes rural migrants freedom of travel. But still, rural migrants cannot claim public benefits (Wang 2003) and are allowed to stay only temporally in the cities. People with a rural hukou have only few legal (and affordable) options to obtain a permanent residents permit (among these are enlisting as an officer or working in a high-priority industry, like mining, see Xu 2000: 124).2 The insecure status of a person with a rural hukou is mirrored in the Chinese expression for such people: They are called liudong renkou, floating population (Rivoli 2009: 107). Their civil rights are unclear until today: [T]he regulations governing migration to the cities are so byzantine that virtually every visitor is in violation of one rule or another(Rivoli 2009: 108). Even for a temporal stay in the city, rural migrants need several legal documents. The fees for such documents amount to several wages: According to official statistics, each of the 3 or 4 million migrants in the Shenzhen Economic Zone spends on average 600 yuan a year on certificates,
1

This is why dormitories are provided in Chinese sweatshops. Compare Xu (2000) and Pun (2005). In principle, an urban hukou can also be bought. But because of its price of 8.000 RMB (about $ 1.000, more than the average annual wage), it is attainable only for the well-off, Naughton (2007: 124).
2

amounting to almost 10 per cent of their total annual income (Alexander and Chan 2004: 619f).3 Not even the migrants themselves, but also the firms which hire them have to apply to the local authorities:

When rural migrants are hired by enterprises and approved by the Labor Bureau as temporary laborers, after the payment of the Increased City Capacity Fee, the enterprises are to apply to the Public Security Bureau for a certificate of temporary residence registration and then to the local police station for registering a temporary hukou. Finally, the enterprise is to apply to the District Public Security Bureau for a temporary residence certificate so that their workers can become legal temporary workers in Shenzhen. (Pun 2005: 45)

Such a certificate has to be renewed every year. Employers usually apportion the costs for these forms to their employees (Pun 2005: 43f). Apart from that, employers demand their employees to deposit a certain sum as a surety. Therefore, an employee cannot leave an employer otherwise than by being fired if he leaves of his own, he forfeits the deposited sum. Employees are additionally bounded by the habit of employers to confiscate a workers documents: Migrants are legally obligated to carry their papers with them at all times. If they are caught without these by the police, they face being imprisoned or send to labour camps (Zhao and Kipnis 2000, Unger 2002, Alexander and Chan 2004). In numerous regions of China, persons with a rural hukou are not allowed to work in other sectors than in export and heavy industries (Solinger 1999, Roulleau-Berger and Lu 2005, Fan 2008). Due to this decree, rural migrants account for 70 to 80% of all employees in the textile and construction industries (Liang 1999, Lee 2007). Even in these low wage sectors, migrants are paid 40% less than employees with an urban hukou (Wang and Zou 1999). Such discrimination has tremendous effects on Chinas economic development: According to some estimates, migrants contribute around 30 to 31% to the GNPs of Peking and Shanghai (Chan 2010: 362). The share of urban residents with a rural hukou is rising continuously since the
3

The average monthly wage in Shenzhen is about 300 Yuan (roughly $30), see Pun (2005: 96).

1980ies. This underlines the growing importance of this population for Chinas export industry (Chan 2010: 360).4 Several authors consider this pool of cheap labour created by the hukou system to be the main reason for Chinas impressive economic growth (Chan 2000, RoulleauBerger and Lu 2005, Harney 2009, Rivoli 2009, Chan 2010).5 Despite immense international criticism, the Chinese government has little inclination to abolish the hukou system. In 2002, the minister for internal affairs declared: [The hukou] is an important component of our countrys administrative system and will exist for a long time. [] The hukou will not be abolished not now and not in the future.6

V. Consequences of the hukou registration The hukou registration constitutes a systematic disadvantage of a huge part of the Chinese population. It is also an important factor for Chinese economic growth. In the following, I depict the social consequences of this strict separation between workers and peasants. Additionally, I will explain the reasons why persons with a rural hukou continue migrating to the cities despite their dire prospects there. This will help clarifying to what extent these people act as autonomously as Zwolinski claims. First of all, the Chinese household registration is a means of social control: Because people with a rural hukou are only temporarily considered as workers and are sent back to their villages as soon as their employment ends (thus becoming peasants again), they lack a lasting form of identity.7 Due to their ambiguous identity, their exploitation is both disguised and deepened (Andors 1988) because even the migrants themselves are unsure about their rights. And even though their benefits from their migration are poor and temporarily limited, several million

In 2000, 79 million people migrated to the cities, compared to 22 million persons in 1990 (Naughton 2007: 129). 5 Also the American union AFL-CIO maintains that Chinas hukou registration constitutes an unfair competitive advantage. See www.aflcio.org/issuespolitics/globaleconomy/china_petition.cfm. 6 Quoted in South China Morning Post, February 26th, 2002. 7 Their ambiguous situation is mirrored in the term mingong, which can mean both temporary worker as well as peasant worker (Pun 2005: 46, Solinger 1999).

people migrate into the cities annually.8 This is due to the hukou system as well, because it is the main cause of the large disparities between urban and rural standards of living.9 The huge amount of migration can thus be traced back to an urban-biased economic model (Chan and Pun 2010) which allows an ideological and productive process of making new laboring subjects (Hairong 2008: 138). Furthermore, the appeal of urban residence for people with a rural hukou can also be explained by the propaganda of the last three decades which portrays peasant life as the moribund other (Hairong 2008: 42) of modern urban life. This has strengthened peoples desire for urban living additionally: The city, however conceived, has become an object of increasingly intense desire in the era of reform. (Schein 2001: 225). During this era of reform (which began in 1978), the Chinese government invested heavily in the building of those cities whose location was favourable for inland traffic. At the same time, the state reduced its investment into agriculture: From 10,5% in the years from 1976-1980 to 3,3% in the years of 1985-1990 (Chan 2010: 361). In 1994, state capital investment into agriculture accrued to 1,7% (Hairong 2008: 41). Consequently, the rural poverty which causes millions of people to migrate is the result of a short-sighted development-policy and might have been prevented if the state would have distributed its resources more evenly and with a stronger focus on a more sustainable development. Instead, industrial cities like Shenzhen have been built to the debit of rural provinces. Moreover, the usual portrayal of migration as a drift of surplus labour is misleading insofar as most migrants are very young and often even well-educated.10 Left behind are those whom Chinese society refers to with the code 773861: 77 stands for the old (77 years), 38 alludes to
8

In 2011, 158 million migrant workers did not live in the communities they have been assigned to. See http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90785/7738580.html 9 Since, the urban per capita income is 3,2 times higher than the rural one. (Naughton 2007:133). See also Hairong (2008: 276.) Measured by the differences between urban and rural standards of living, China is one of the most unequal countries in the world. In 2000, its Gini-coefficient was 0,458. See World Bank: World Development Report 2002. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002. 10 Most of them failed the entrance examinations for universities or have to earn the school fees for their younger siblings (Xu 2000: 139, Solinger 1999).

the third of March (international womens day), 61 refers to the first of June, childrens day (Hairong 2008: 43). Apart from this grammalogue, also the fact that more and more farmland is lying fallow indicates that there is hardly a surplus of rural labour (Hairong 2008: 43, Day and Hale 2007). Additionally, the rural provinces also carry the social costs of economic development. This is due to the low wages paid to migrants and the fact that they are denied any form of social security (Hairong 2008: 259). Apart from caring for the old and the invalids11, also the reproduction of workers is borne by the provinces: When and where the migrant worker wage cannot sustain reproduction of the next generation in the city, such reproduction is carried out in the countryside (Hairong 2008: 43).12 The Communist Party depicts this home bias as the decisive advantage rural migrants enjoy: According to the Party, rural migrants have a da houfang, a rural basis which allows them a great amount of flexibility and selfcontentedness. Thus, they are said to be superior to the old workers of state-owned enterprises.13 Furthermore, Chinas shift from a planned to a market economy was accompanied by an ideological change as regards labour relations. This is mirrored in the term for manual labourers: In contrast to the Maoist term gongren, which simply denotes protelariat, todays workers are referred to as dagong, which stands for working for the boss14. Chinese workers are no longer regarded as a privileged group (Leung 1988, Sargeson 1999): gongren had prestigious connotations, whereas dagong is a rather derogative term (it can also mean transient worker). Moreover, it is no longer asexual and also denotes a persons family status: the female suffix mei in dagongmei stands for little sister: [M]ei indicates single, unmarried, and younger [] and thus mei often signifies a lower status. Dagongmei therefore implies an inferior working identity inscribed with capitalist labor relations and sexual relations (Pun
11

In 1998, 12.189 workers in Shenzhens EPZs were injured. 90% of them lost fingers or hands and were therefore no longer capable to work in the textile industry. Hairong (2008: 259). 12 Such is the norm since migrants are not allowed to take any family members with them. 13 Hairong quotes a member of a NGO telling migrants: Your position is superior to laid-off urban workers, because they are used to eating state rice and are dependent. You are each a small boat and easy to turn around. (Hairong: 190). 14 Dagongmei denotes female, dagongzai male workers. Moreover, the term dagong also means casual worker. See Pun (2005: 12).

2005: 111). Nevertheless (and despite the well-known working conditions), numerous young women from the countryside yearn to be a dagongmei.15 As mentioned above, this is tied to the propaganda of the Chinese government. Due to this propaganda, it is now a widely shared conviction that in order to develop a personality deserving the name, one has to spend some time in the city. According to the migrants themselves, such a stay makes them ren. Literally, this term means human and is used in the sense that this human quality is not something a person is born with: Rather, one has to strive for it (Hairong 2008: 25). However, migrants become disillusioned about their chances for transformation quite soon after their arrival in the cities (Pun and Huilin 2010).16 According to one sociologist, this is because they realize the inner contradiction of the market economy only then: In the context of post-Mao development the very condition enabling such womens entrance into the city, the center of the new commodity economy, is that they themselves be disposable commodities of migrant labor power (Hairong 2008: 51).

The deeply rooted social conception of the superiority of urban residents is helpful in two ways: First, for recruiting new labour forces, second, in offering means of control of these labourers (Pun and Smith 2007, Peng 2011). The sociologist Ngai Pun relates that the Cantonese term xiangxiangmei, girl from the village or peasant girl, was frequently used by supervisors to rebuke new workers (Pun 2005: 116). These workers reacted in subordinating themselves even more to the rigid factory system: To avoid being discriminated against one had to try hard to change oneself (Pun 2005: 117). Thus, they experienced two ways of displacement: First, the capitalist machine invented the rural beings as incomplete, as lacking. Then the rural beings thought and saw themselves as such (Pun 2005: 131f). This is because peasants are said to be persons with low suzhi. This term can be roughly translated with
15 16

In 2000, 79 million people have migrated into the cities (Naughton 2007: 79). Compare Naughton (2007: 179): In a low-income economy there are few realistic choices. For the worker, work is difficult and exhausting; for business, labor is cheap, and there is little incentive to substitute machine power for human labor.

quality and implies personal attributes like politeness, self-discipline and modernity. Moreover, it is used to point out the insufficiencies of the rural population (Hairong 2008: 113). Rural migrants aim to remedy their alleged deficiencies by migration to the cities. Apart from the peasant identity itself, also attitudes which are seen as typical of peasant lifestyle are discredited to ensure people act in conformity with the demands of factory life. Pun, who has worked in an electronics- factory in Shenzhen in the years of 1995 and 1996, reports that weekly admonition meetings have been held there. During one of these meetings, a person from the clerical staff spoke harshly of a worker who was caught punching a colleagues time card: This is a serious violation and we reserve the right to dismiss her at once. There is no excuse for anybody to clock on for best friends or fellow villagers. The helper will be punished more seriously than the one who asked for help. In the factory one should be responsible for oneself only. If you are so used to helping each other in the village, remember that now you are in the factory (quoted in Pun 2005: 118). Such alleged differences between rural and urban population are an essential part of labour control: Workers are portrayed as being backward and without discipline, which makes them unsuitable for capitalistic production. In the media, rural workers are characterized as mang liu, a blind river which threatens the achievements of economic reform and thus needs to be controlled (Zhang 2001).17 Therefore, workers are seen as being both important for economic development and potentially harmful to the social order. This is due to the supposition that a person is absolved from the social rules of her group as soon as she has left it (Dutton 1992, Malkki 1992, Xu 2000).18 The desire to control migrants is reinforced and legitimated by the post-Maoist discourse on the quality of a population, which is said to be threatened by strangers with low suzhi, like migrants.19
17

The perception of migrants as potentially dangerous subjects threatening the social order is mirrored in the high number of vigilante groups in China: In Sicheng township [], commercial and financial sectors have an economic police force, factories have guards, villages have joint-defence forces and highways are patrolled. The total surveillance force comes close to some 500 people. In addition, urban residents have neighbourhood committees, and villages have defence coordinating groups. These additions bring the total to 3000 people. In other words, as one journalist wrote, one out of 24 local people is involved in policing. Xu (2000: 184f). 18 Take for instance this newspaper article written by a factory manager: Migrant workers are away from their families. They are more easily lured by wrong people to do bad things because their parents are not around to supervise and control them (quoted in Xu 2000: 146). 19 Compare Clarke (1997: 223): The entry of the stranger into spaces of modernity was on the one hand entirely necessary, yet on the other necessarily fraught with anxiety.

Concluding, the autonomy on which Zwolinski builds his argumentation against political measures to alleviate the problems of sweatshops is doubtful, as has been illustrated by the example of China: Apart from the fact that in some cities migrants are only allowed to work in export industries (read, sweatshops), their decision to migrate in the first place is based on both economic necessities and political propaganda which portrays them as inferior and underdeveloped. Moreover, the hukou registration influences not only the labour supply, but also the wages: The great majority of migrants stop working in the EPZs (export processing zones) in their mid-twenties. In that age, they are either fired or leave the factory of their own accord because they can no longer keep up with the work speed. Their residence permit expires as soon as their employment ends; which is why they have to return to their home provinces. Since workers know from the very beginning that their stay in the city will be limited, they see no necessity to organize and strive for better working conditions. Therefore, the poor bargaining position of the exploited party is unlikely to improve, because it is consolidated by market forces and political ones (Chan and Peng 2011): It came into being due to the Chinese government and will remain because it proved to be extremely profitable, making it indispensable for the Chinese economy. Hence, I claim that the situation of this part of the Chinese population is extremely unlikely to improve: The social discrimination of rural migrants is not only a precondition for their willingness to work in sweatshops, but also essential for the continuity of such exploiting working conditions. Granting such a stigmatized group equal rights means forfeiting an important competitive advantage. Given that a huge part of Chinas economy is built on such stigmatization, it can be expected to remain. Therefore, sweatshops constitute no route out of poverty because To break this less-than-virtuous circle, regulation is needed, and is thus justified.

VI. Third-party-interference indispensable or inappropriate?

Zwolinskis argues that a persons decision to work in a sweatshop is an indication of her autonomy. He claims that such a decision can be morally transformative in certain respects even if it is not a fully autonomous one (Zwolinski 2007: 691, emphasis in the original) and thus concludes that third parties should not interfere with this choice. Such inappropriate interferences would be boycotts, legal regulation, and voluntary self-regulation (Zwolinski 2007: 696f). In contrast to Zwolinski, I maintain that the social circumstances under which a person acts are too vital to be ignored in the moral valuation of sweatshop labour: As I have shown above, the status of a person or a group is decisive in determining her employment opportunities. I have argued that an exploited party is also a stigmatized one, because its low social rank allows for allocating it unpopular and/or low-paid work (Moore 1978). As a result, third party interference cannot be as strictly refused as Zwolinski does: When he argues that [l]aws which have the effect of preventing workers and sweatshops from freely contracting together are morally suspect (Zwolinski 2007: 693), he overlooks that workers and employers never contract freely together, because employment structures are dependent on the socio-economic framework provided by the state (Chang 2010). Additionally, I argue that Zwolinski employs a false liberty (Sen): Presupposing a right to freely contract together (regardless of the object of the contract) deflect[s] attention from and even undermine[s] the structural changes that are vital to modernizing an economy (Rothman 2002: 1641). Since sweatshops pose no isolated economic phenomena, but are based on multiple social and political factors, the exploitation occurring in them is mainly a political problem and needs to be addressed accordingly. Consequently, the kind of political interference Zwolinski objects is actually essential because it is also at the root of the sweatshop issue. In the following, I will shortly illustrate to what extent the three policies Zwolinski repudiates are advisable.

1. Boycotts

Zwolinski objects to boycotts on the grounds that they can cause more harm than good: If goods made in sweatshops cannot be sold, then it seems likely that sweatshops will stop producing such goods, and those who were employed in their production will be out of work. (Zwolinski 2007: 697). Although boycotts carry such negative potential, they might eventually cause a corporation to rethink its production strategy: Its primary motives to relocate production were to lower production costs and thus raise profits. In diminishing a corporations profit, successful boycotts turn these motives to relocate in (less-than-)low-wage countries mute. And since a boycotted corporation is under high public scrutiny, it is unlikely that it will relocate its production again (in fear of losing even more customers). Besides, it is important to keep in mind that boycotts are the only measure consumers have in exerting pressure on companies whose policies they find objectionable. Since Zwolinski (2012) rightly notices that the moral responsibility to fight unjust institutions [] is an obligation [corporations, the author] share with everyone else (Zwolinski 2012: 178), such measures need to be taken. However, I consider boycotts only as an ultimate means. This is only partly due to their negative potential. My opinion is that it is foremost the obligation of a company to ameliorate substandard conditions in its supply chain: Its sphere of influence and its knowledge about the market far exceed those of consumers. Moreover, their connection with labour abuses is much stronger because their price policy has tremendous effects on labour conditions:

These [] companies adopt codes of conduct, some of them in very nice language, but then they negotiate deals which make it impossible for their contractors to honor the codes. The companies say to the contractor, Please allow for freedom of association, pay a decent wage, but then they say, Well pay you 87 cents to produce each shirt. This includes the wage, fabric, everything (a supplier quoted in Varley 1998: 95).

Given that corporations like Nike or Apple are subject to few, if any, outward pressures to change their policies, boycotts can be a decisive factor in bringing such change. But since the

moral obligations of consumers are weaker than are those of companies, and because of the negative effects boycotts can have on workers, I will in the following examine whether legal regulation and voluntary self-regulation are more promising approaches to improve working conditions.

2. Legal regulation According to Zwolinski, legal regulation can potentially lead to the same consequence of job loss as can boycott measures (Zwolinski 2007: 697). Regulations on overtime pay or minimum wages would increase production costs, which in turn might cause corporations to relocate their production sites (ibid.). In a footnote, he admits that these are empirical speculations []. If these assumptions turn out to be false, then the consequentialist case against the legal regulation of sweatshops is significantly weakened (Zwolinski 2007: 718). This is the case when we visualize that wages constitute such a small fraction of production costs that even doubling them would not lead to the dire consequences Zwolinski thinks likely: One manufacturer reported that most of his payments is used to buy materials. Wages amount to $1.40 of the production costs of one pair of Reebok shoes (Zuckoff 1994). The economists Pollin, Heintz and Burns (2001) found out that raising wages of Mexican textile workers by 100 percent would add $0.50 (or 1.6%) to the retail price of a shirt sold for $32 in the US. In a recent TVreport, it was calculated that doubling the wages of textile workers in Bangladesh would raise the price of a T-shirt by 0.15- 0.20.20 Nevertheless, in that same footnote Zwolinski points out that even if empirical findings should disprove his negative view of legal regulation, one could still argue that the regulations impermissibly interfere in workers freedom to enter into what they believe to be mutually beneficial contractual arrangements (Zwolinski 2007: 718).

20

http://www.wdr.de/tv/monitor/sendungen/2012/0202/armut.php5.

As regards this hypothesis, I would like to draw back on my argument made above that sweatshops are an outcome and mirror of social injustice. To regard them as purely economic phenomena means to overlook the social framework on which they (or any labour relations) are based (Chang 2010). Sweatshops are an issue of macro fairness (Sample 2003, Snyder 2010). As my example of the Chinese household registration systems has shown, sweatshops are rooted in political inequality, which is reflected in economic and labour market relations. Consequently, legal regulation is needed to balance the unequally distributed market power some large employers undeniably possess. As a result, the freedom of workers is actually enhanced by regulation, because it establishes a level-playing field and increases their bargaining power. Without (enforced)21 legislation, wages can and are being forced down below the actual value of a persons work (Rivoli 2009), which compels her to labour for less than she would get if the market would operate more smoothly.

3. Voluntary self-regulation In contrast to the above measures, Zwolinskis considers voluntary self-regulation to be the best way to accomplish to tackle the sweatshop issue (Zwolinski 2007: 698). Nonetheless, he highlights two possible sources of concern: First, such self-regulation ought not be accomplished by industry-wide standards (ibid.): In that case, this regulation would be voluntary only for a whole industry, whereas an individual corporation would find itself in the same situation as under legal regulation, i.e., compliance is essentially mandatory (ibid.). Moreover, Zwolinski regards industry-wide standards as an impediment to the markets discovery process (ibid.) and a hindrance for individual companies to develop standards of their own. Second, he points out that voluntary self-regulation could eventually end up putting too strong a demand on corporations to carry out social reform (ibid.)

21

China for instance has regulations as regards overtime work and minimum wage, but they are neither enforced nor controlled (Santoro 2009).

As for the first issue of industry wide standards, I think its advantages would outweigh possible disadvantages: If all firms of one industry were compelled to operate under the same standards, the free-rider-problem (and thus also unfair competition) would be minimized, if not abolished (Schoenberger 2000). Given the laws of the market, an individual firm is unlikely to develop its own strategy or standards: It will adhere to its old strategy as long as it is feasible to do so. This is why corporations tend to change their business policies only when criticised or admonished (Duhigg and Barboza 2012). The ease with which Foxconn raised wages by 30 percent after it had been severely criticised for its production policies illustrates that companies are able to ameliorate the sweatshop problem they are simply unwilling to do so (Hille and Mitchell 2010). I argue that Meyers (2004) argumentation that CEOs have both the power to determine company policy and the means to pay for it (Meyers 2004: 625) from which he derives special obligations by employers to address the sweatshop problem can be substantiated by drawing on Millers (2007) distinction between outcome responsibility and remedial responsibility, which I explain below.

VI.a Millers two concepts of responsibility Miller applies the concept of outcome responsibility to the responsibility we bear for our own actions and decisions (Miller 2007: 81), whereas remedial responsibility denotes the responsibility we may have to come to aid of those who need help (ibid.). Such distinction allows us to discern between identifying responsibility and assigning it (ibid.), which Miller regards crucial for the debate on global justice. This is because one has to counterbalance two diverging aspects of our human condition: We are both vulnerable creatures dependent on others and choosing agents able to control [our] actions (Miller 2007: 108). I will now concentrate on the notion of remedial responsibility and whether it applies to Meyers argument of special obligations for CEOs. To establish who might be responsible to ameliorate a situation, and for what reasons, Miller develops a connection theory of remedial

responsibility (Miller 2007: 99, emphasis in the original), the basic idea of which is that person A is remedially responsible for Ps condition (ibid.) when A is connected with P in six possible ways: When A has a moral, outcome, or causal responsibility as regards Ps situation, or if A benefits from Ps situation, is capable to ameliorate it, or if both belong to the same community (Miller 2007: 100-104).

b) Contributing and Profiting As for the second point of demanding too much of employers, Zwolinski refers to the theses of Denis G. Arnold and Norman Bowie (2003) who claim that sweatshop workers have rights to freedom and well-being, due to which corporations have the moral obligation to meet minimum conditions (Arnold and Bowie 2003). Even though [r]especting rights is non-optional (Zwolinski 2007: 699), Zwolinski is of the opinion that rights and obligations are conditional with regard to the sweatshop issue: Corporations have an obligation to provide certain minimum standards only if they employ these workers in their supply chain. But since the latter is optional (nothing requires MNEs22 to do so, Zwolinski 2007: 699), so are apparently the obligations of these enterprises: Workers have a right to adequate wages if MNEs contract with sweatshops to employ them. But MNEs are under no obligation to outsource labor in this way at all (Zwolinski 2007: 699, emphasis in the original). Therefore, he considers it strange to blame enterprises which outsource their production to developing countries whereas enterprises which do no business abroad are not being rebuked: My point is that it would be odd to blame MNEs for helping some when we blame individuals less (or not at all) for helping none (Zwolinski 2007: 708, emphasis in the original). However, companies did outsource labour not to alleviate global poverty, but to reduce their production costs (Rosen 2002) i.e. for quite rational instead of humanitarian reasons. Due to such considerations, corporations prefer to locate their
22

This abbreviation stands for multinational enterprises. I prefer (and use) the term transnational enterprise because corporations do not possess several nationalities, but the one of their home country.

sweatshops in countries with repressive regimes (Longworth 1999), which seem to be a necessity as regards sweatshop labour: It is not the perils of the labor market that block the path for Chinese textile [] workers. [] it is a state-engineered system that limits the ability of workers to participate in the market as full citizens (Rivoli 2009: 109). Without the reliance of numerous companies on this authoritarian system, China would have not evolved into the world biggest sweatshop (source). The voluntariness of companys decision to relocate production does not curtail its corresponding moral duties, on the contrary: companies outsourcing their production are more blameworthy than those who do not because they are benefiting from and contributing to existing injustice (Anwander 2005).23 For that reason, I consider the risk of demanding too much from employers by asking them to adhere to certain minimum standards as negligible and support the argumentation of Arnold and Bowie (2003).

Conclusion In this paper, I questioned Zwolinskis argument of the autonomy of sweatshop labourers and its alleged consequences for third-party interference. Drawing on the Chinese household registration system, I illustrated that a persons decision to work in a sweatshop cannot be called an autonomous one as sweatshop workers are members of stigmatized and/or disadvantaged groups. As such, they have internalized and accepted societys views on their worth and, correspondingly, its attitude on what kind of tasks (and wages) are appropriate for them. That persons are willing to work in sweatshops is no proof of their autonomy, but a sign of their low social status, which causes them to accept such working conditions. In the most basic terms, sweatshops constitute a violation of a social contract because the vulnerability of the weakest members of a group is being made use of. Given that Zwolinskis notion of autonomy is at least questionable as regards the sweatshop issue, so are his objections to third-party interference
23

In a recent article, Zwolinski himself notes that [t]hose that actively cooperate with government to suppress their workers or their competitors, for instance, are guilty of not only benefiting from structural injustice but also perpetuating it for their own gain. This is wrongful exploitation of the clearest sort (Zwolinski 2012: 178, emphasis in the original).

which are build on his argument of moral autonomy: Political interference poses neither a distortion of market outcomes nor does it hinder workers and employers to freely contract together. This is for the reason that the market is (and has been) unavoidably influenced by political measures, as the example of China shows. Taking measures to regulate sweatshop labour would simply mean to replace already existing rules.

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