Sweatshops

In Jagdish Bhagwati’s piece, “Defense of Sweatshops,” he commits the fallacy of equivocation when he talks about corporate social responsibility, or CSR, as he calls it.  He argues that by asking corporations to pay sweatshop workers a living wage, they are asking them to be altruistic because this is more than “what the market pays.”  He says that this is asking them to have corporate social responsibility, but that corporations should be able to choose how they want to apply this responsibility, for example by building playgrounds.  However, the CSR of building playgrounds is not the same as the CSR that people are asking for.  Building playgrounds helps people, but the people in favor of CSR are not saying “you have a responsibility to be a positive influence in society in general.”  They are saying “you have a responsibility to care for the people who are a part of your company, or at least not to exploit them.”  These are two very different takes on CSR, and the author pretends that people are asking for the first definition.

Bhagwati might respond that these two things really are the same, because they both go above and beyond what is really required, and that corporations are not exploiting people because they are merely paying “what the market pays.”  This is unreasonable because he says himself that these sweatshops are often the only option people have, and that many would otherwise turn to child prostitution.  He is essentially arguing here that it is perfectly ethical to pay people a pittance for incredibly hard work because it is better than sex slavery.