Quand les sweatshops sont des rêves

[h16]

Le net (ce blog, en l'occurrence) a ceci de pratique de nous faire tomber sur des articles que la presse franchouille se garderait bien de relayer. Un journaliste du Times, double Pulitzer tout de même, a enquêté sur les sweatshops et relate son expérience dans un article en ligne ici : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/opinion/…tml?_r=1&em

La conclusion tient plus du "Militons POUR les sweatshops" que le contraire.

  Citation

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.”

Parlez à ces familles des décharges, et un job dans un sweatshop est un véritable rêve, une ascension hors de la pauvreté, le genre d'ambition vaporeuse et probablement irréaliste que des parents, partout là-bas, ont souvent pour leurs enfants.

«J'aimerais obtenir un emploi dans une usine», a déclaré Pim Srey Rath, un jeune femme de 19 ans récupérant du plastique. «Au mois, le travail y est à l'ombre. Ici, C'est là où il fait chaud. "

[Invité jabial]

Mais euh, la dignité humainneeeeeuh!

Du caviar ou rien.

C'est vrai quoi, si on permet aux pauvres de s'en sortir il n'y aura plus personne pour la révolution

[José]

Le même Nicholas Kristof avait déjà écrit un tel article en 2004 :

  Citation

Put Your Money Where Their Mouths Are

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: April 3, 2004

With Democrats on the warpath over trade, there's pressure for tougher international labor standards that would try to put Abakr Adoud out of work.

Abakr lives with his family in the desert near this oasis in eastern Chad. He has never been to school and roams the desert all day with his brothers, searching for sticks that can be made into doors for mud huts. He is 10 years old.

It's appalling that Abakr, like tens of millions of other children abroad, is working instead of attending school. But prohibiting child labor wouldn't do him any good, for there's no school in the area for him to attend. If child labor hawks manage to keep Abakr from working, without giving him a school to attend, he and his family will simply be poorer than ever.

And that's the problem when Americans get on their high horses about child labor, without understanding the cruel third world economics that cause it. The push by Democrats like John Kerry for international labor standards is well intentioned, but it is also oblivious to third world realities.

Look, I feel like Scrooge when I speak out against bans on sweatshops or on child labor. In the West, it's hard to find anyone outside a university economics department who agrees with me. But the basic Western attitude -- particularly among Democrats and warm-and-fuzzy humanitarians -- sometimes ends up making things worse. Consider the results of two major American efforts to ban imports produced by child labor:

In 1993, when Congress proposed the U.S. Child Labor Deterrence Act, which would have blocked imports made by children (if it had passed), garment factories in Bangladesh fired 50,000 children. Many ended up in worse jobs, like prostitution.

Then there was the hue and cry beginning in 1996 against soccer balls stitched by children in their homes (mostly after school) in Sialkot, Pakistan. As a result, the balls are now stitched by adults, often in factories under international monitoring.

But many women are worse off. Conservative Pakistanis believe that women shouldn't work outside the home, so stitching soccer balls is now off limits for many of them. Moreover, bad publicity about Pakistan led China to grab market share with machine-stitched balls: over the next two years, Pakistan's share of the U.S. soccer ball market dropped to 45 percent from 65 percent.

So poor Pakistani families who depended on earnings from women or children who stitched soccer balls are now further impoverished.

I'm not arguing that child labor is a good thing. It isn't. But as Jagdish Bhagwati, the eminent trade economist, notes in his new book, ''In Defense of Globalization,'' thundering against child labor doesn't address the poverty that causes it.

In the village of Toukoultoukouli in Chad, I visited the 17 girls and 31 boys in the two-room school. Many children, especially girls, never attend school, which ends after the fourth grade.

So a 12-year-old boy working in Toukoultoukouli has gotten all the education he can. Instead of keeping him from working, Westerners should channel their indignation into getting all children into school for at least those four years -- and there is one way that could perhaps be achieved.

It's bribery. The U.N. World Food Program runs a model foreign aid effort called the school feeding program. It offers free meals to children in poor schools (and an extra bribe of grain for girl students to take home to their families). Almost everywhere, providing food raises school attendance, particularly for girls. ''If there were meals here, parents would send their kids,'' said Muhammad Adam, a teacher in Toukoultoukouli.

School feeding costs just 19 cents per day per child.

So here's my challenge to university students: Instead of spending your energy boycotting Nike or pressing for barriers against child labor, why not sponsor school meals in places like Toukoultoukouli?

I spoke with officials at the World Food Program, and they'd be thrilled to have private groups or individuals help sponsor school feedings. (See www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds for details.) Children in Africa will be much better off with a hot meal and an education than with your self-righteous indignation.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html…757C0A9629C8B63

Sinon,

  Citation

The Economics of Child Labor

No, not paper routes or roadside car washes, this is about the tough stuff, like Moroccan children in carpet factories. 186 million children, between the ages of 5 and 14, perform illegal child labor. 111 million of these jobs involve hazardous work. Kaushik Basu offers his analysis and observations in the latest issue of Scientific American.

Obviously wealth is the best cure for hazardous and oppressive child labor. By the latter part of the 19th century, child labor was declining in the richer nations.

Basu notes that many anti-child labor campaigns backfire. A 1990s boycott of Nepalese carpets, made with child labor, led many of those children to become reemployed as prostitutes. Boycotts are ineffective when the available alternatives are worse. Anti-child labor regulations can backfire for another reason as well. Many children work simply to help their families achieve a threshold level of income, such as subsistence. The lower the wage that the children earn (think of the regulations as lowering the net returns from child labor), the more they will need to work to reach that threshold.

We learn also that history matters. Adults who worked as children are more likely to send their children out to work, even after adjusting for income.

Basu is skeptical of many interventions but he does not recommend laissez-faire. He argues that there are "multiple equilibria," and that government can move an economy, in the right stage of development, from one equilibrium to another. The more children that work, the lower the overall level of wages, and the lower the stigma from sending one's child out to work. Basu argues you can "tip" an economy into considerably less child labor. If you can cut out a big chunk of child labor, wages rise, making child labor for many other families less necessary. The stigma attached to child labor rises as well, and fewer people will send their children out to work. Once an economy is moving away from child labor, the process can happen quite rapidly.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginal…nomics_o_1.html

[Invité]

Le jour où les Chegétistes comprendront que les "exploités du tiers monde" considèrent pour la plupart les exploiteurs d'enfants comme des dons de Dieu qui leur permettront de ne pas mourir de faim….

[A.B.]

Le gros probleme pour le socialiste, c'est que s'il admet que le probleme du travail infantile est economique et pas legal, cela implique que l'absence du travail des enfants en occident est le resultat d'une economie prospere et pas d'un progres social acquis par un combat de classe.