Don't sweat it

Matthew Yglesias, who for reasons mysterious to me is regarded as a great political analyst, is at it again.

A year ago I was on his case because he bewailed the fact that John Kerry said something to the effect that we were spending too much on prisons and would be better off instead spending that on education. That was "terrible politics" (emphasis in original) he groused, and "no reasonable person's idea of a winning political message." This, even though Yglesias said he agreed with Kerry. But oh no, don't say it! Don't say what you believe! That's not a "winning message."

That this wasn't a single oddity was shown by his post-election musing that overturning Roe v. Wade could well be "good for progressive politics overall." That was, he said, "the emerging conventional wisdom." The return of back-alley abortions as tactical maneuver.

And now, responding to a profile of anti-sweatshop activist Charles Kernaghan, he's telling people not to get too caught up in the effort to fight sweatshop and child labor overseas because, by gosh, the only reason sweatshops exist is because people are willing to work in them because the miserable wages and worse treatment they get there are better than the alternatives. So opposing sweatshops is condemning people to even worse misery, don't you get it, you "rich country liberals."

This is hogwash. First: I don't know of anyone who is advocating shutting down those sweatshops; they're talking about improving conditions and wages in them - improving them enough so that families can make a decent living without being treated like virtual slaves, without having to put their children to work for what are often 12-14 hour days, and without women being abused and subject to sexual harassment and even rape. Putting an end to their existence as sweatshops, yes - but not as factories.

Second: This is the same crap we always hear when someone wants to defend the status quo. "Oh, no, you can't do that! You'll only hurt the poor!" We heard it about the disinvestment campaign against the apartheid regime of South Africa. We heard it about economic sanctions against Haiti in the wake of the murderous coup of September, 1991. We hear it now about efforts to raise the minimum wage. It does not improve with repetition. But in fairness to Yglesias, he does propose an alternative to the "rich country liberal" indulgence of combatting sweatshops: Ending farm subsidies provided to their own by Western nations. This, he says, will improve the lot of farm workers in the developing world - farm labor being the worse alternative to working in a sweatshop - forcing sweatshop owners to improve conditions in order to keep a work force. It's the free market and all the glories of globalization and free trade in action! Okay, this brings up

Third: Say what? Ending subsidies is unlikely to make food, particularly imported food, more expensive; in fact, such subsidies began as a means to keep prices up. Eliminate them (and, as the usual corollary, open domestic markets to imported food) and you encourage farmers to produce more and more in hopes of selling enough to maintain themselves, which will tend to drive the price down, not up. Is there someone who can explain to me just how eliminating subsidies in the developed world will cause an improvement in the income of agricultural workers in the developing world? This is particularly so because

Fourth: Yglesias's argument implies a comparison between sweatshop work and subsistence farming - but that's bogus. You can't properly or at the very least easily compare factory wage income with non-market agriculture; there is no common reference point, at least no one broad enough to make such a comparison. But of course

Fifth: That's not really the comparison he expresses, even as it lurks throughout the argument. He says he's comparing factory labor and farm labor, and arguing that the former is what people are willing to put up with sweatshop conditions to do because it's an improvement on the latter. Significantly, that argument glides right over an important point, which is that

Sixth: Those farm laborers are not working for themselves, they're working for others, often large landowners, often farming for export. The agricultural sector of their nation's economy having been distorted either long ago by economic (and often enough military) dominance or more recently by the ungentle embrace of the World Bank and WTO, they in many cases have been driven off their land and forced into economic servitude and their countries changed from ones that could feed themselves, even if just barely, into net importers of basic foodstuffs. Which means

Seventh: Those workers are every bit as much in thrall to the demands of globalization as their factory-bruised brethren, every bit as much at the mercy of powerful economic forces reaching far beyond their communities, far beyond their borders. Even if a market for imported food in the West could be expanded and the price paid for it increased, the notion that such benefits will "trickle down" to the poor at the bottom of the pile without conscious, focused, outside pressure is bull. A glance at, for example, just how much Nike's expanding business improved the lot of its overseas employees, raising their wages and improving their conditions as business grew, should be proof enough of that. (Yes, Nike did pay more than the prevailing wage in its factories in the developing world. However, for Yglesias's argument to hold, that should have pulled up the wages paid to other factory workers and to farm laborers, whose employers now supposedly have to compete for labor. But it didn't. What's more, as Nike's business expanded, the wages and working conditions of those in its overseas plants should have improved along with it - assuming Yglesias was right. They didn't.)

Eighth: But that, of course, is precisely the point that Yglesias and his ilk can't acknowledge: Globalization has not improved the lot of the poor of the world. What it's done rather is set one nation's poor against another in a zero-sum game where the (touted) benefit to one is played off against the (ignored) cost to another. Who remembers, for example, South Korea's "economic miracle?" And who remembers how that miracle, built on low-wage labor working on goods for export, turned sour when transnational companies turned their attention to Indonesia in search of even lower-wage labor? But the idea of globalization as an inherent good, unquestioned and unquestionable, is so deeply set in the minds of some that they will engage in amazing mental gymnastics to avoid considering it.

Matthew Yglesias, who looks to globalization to solve a problem for which globalization is to a significant extent responsible, is among those people. And, if I may say so, in that sense he is exactly what he presents himself as: a good liberal Democrat.