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Out of Poverty provides a comprehensive defence of Third World sweatshops that does not put economic efficiency over people, but instead explores methods of improving the welfare of those in Third World countries. The author explains how sweatshops provide the best opportunity for workers; and how they play an important role in development, leading to better wages and working conditions. Using economic theory, empirical evidence, and historical investigation, Powell argues that the anti-sweatshop movement would harm the very workers it intends to help by creating less-desirable alternatives and undermining development. Including a new chapter on the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, this revised and expanded second edition also explores how sweatshop wages have changed and how poverty alleviation has progressed in countries with sweatshops in the late 1990s and early 2000s and how boycotting Uyghur forced labor in China differs other sweatshop boycotts.
List of contents
1. Introduction; 2. The anti-sweatshop movement; 3. The economics of sweatshop wage determination; 4. Don't cry for me Kathie Lee: how sweatshop wages compare to alternatives; 5. Health, safety, and working conditions laws; 6. The Rana Plaza disaster and its aftermath; 7. Save the children?; 8. Is it ethical to buy sweatshop products?; 9. A history of sweatshops, 1780-2019; 10. The process of economic development; 11. What good can activists do?; 12. Conclusion.
About the author
Benjamin Powell is a Professor of Economics at Rawls College of Business Administration and the Executive Director at the Free Market Institute, Texas Tech University and a Senior Fellow with the Independent Institute He is the co-author of Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions (Cambridge University Press 2020) and the Amazon best-selling Socialism Sucks: Two Economist Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World (2019). His research on sweatshops has been reported in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Summary
This book is for scholars, public policy analysts, and concerned citizens, who would like to improve the welfare of sweatshop workers in the Third World. It uses rigorous economic reasoning in accessible language to explain the role sweatshops play in alleviating poverty and contributing to the process of long-run development.
Foreword
This book explains how sweatshops lift workers out of poverty and contribute to the process of development.
