The simple fact is that for big corporations, profit comes first. Sometimes clothing, shoes or other products can be produced most cheaply in a sweatshop in a Third World country, where there are lower (or no) health and safety standards, low minimum wages and restrictions on the workers' rights to free speech and association. This has been the case for decades in Indonesia, where Nike and other Western capitalists operate.
Nike employs around 120,000 Indonesian workers, and pays them about $2.50 a day. Indonesian unions and labour groups have estimated that $4.25 is a basic liveable wage in Indonesia, but Nike and other corporations continue to find it very profitable to sell shoes for $100 or even $200 when they were produced for five dollars.
Corporations choose carefully which Third World country they will invade — whoops, invest in — next. Repressive governments can be more profitable than democratic ones, because repressive governments and their militaries keep unions and radical workers in line.
But sometimes corporations want to produce “locally”. When companies want to proclaim that something is “Australian-made”, they have no qualms about setting up sweatshops or employing outworkers and paying the worker who make the product as little as 2% of what it is sold for.
The point is, wherever a sweatshop is in the world, it remains a sweatshop, and workers are exploited whatever their nationality, unions are sidelined or repressed whatever the country and it's up to us to support the struggles of the workers who are fighting for their rights.
The anti-corporate movement that has stretched from the “Battle of Seattle” to S11 to M1 has taken up the issues of sweatshop labour as part of its struggle for global justice. As long as it is profitable to exploit people in sweatshops, corporations will do it because under this system, profit always comes before people and the environment.
