Sweatshop Chic - The know-nothings find a cause.(how sweatshops eventually lead to improved economic conditions)

The lefty ideal used to be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." But with the end of the Cold War, pragmatism has conquered, and the goal is now slightly less ambitious: to make labor "sweat-free." Work's okay, but sweaty work-forget it.

The anti-sweatshop movement has a lot riding on it. Everyone from Noam Chomsky to John Sweeney thinks it could form the basis for a new Left- progressive united front. Currently the coalition is driven by students, funded by unions, and cheered on by a very broad assortment of liberals.

And once you start reading the anti-sweatshop "literature," it's easy to see why the cause is so fashionable. Sweatshops are seen as spores of capitalism and Western imperialism, floating on the international trade winds, setting roots in virgin territories, and mushrooming into everything Mother Jones readers deplore: the oppression of women and minorities, exploitation of the poor, and destruction of the environment. What could be more useful for recharging the batteries of dour feminists and moth-balled Marxists?

In the U.S., it all got started in earnest in 1997, when a bunch of kids at Duke University were determined to make sure that no Blue Devil sweatshirts or beer cozies were made by poor people or the children of poor people. So they had a sit-in. The school administration (surprise!) caved, agreeing to require that school licensees sign a "code of conduct" permitting only "sweat-free" sweatshirts.

Since then, the movement has grown to more than 100 campuses and is already of a scale comparable to the South African "divestiture" movement on campuses in the 1980s. Indeed, "sweatshop" has replaced "children" as the new Swiss Army all-purpose word for the Left. In the past, any cause-gun control, welfare, Head Start, the designated-hitter rule- became immediately sacrosanct if you just rubbed it with a kid. Now "sweatshop" has a similar elastic utility. "Sweatshops are more than just labor abuse," explains Sweatshops.org, a web clearinghouse for the sweat-free movement. "When you find a sweatshop you'll also find social injustice, poverty, discrimination, abuse of women and environmental damage." In other words, everyone in the coalition of the oppressed can get a treat by whacking this pinata.

As Walter Olson of the of the Manhattan Institute has catalogued, just about anything can be called a sweatshop now. In 1999, AFL-CIO executive vice-president Linda Chavez-Thompson received raucous applause from marchers when she declared that Yale University was a "sweatshop"-because it refused to permit its "exploited" grad students to unionize. (They get paid close to $40,000 at an annualized rate, plus free tuition and health insurance.) Time magazine called the dot- com companies a "a piecework-industry sweatshop." Dan Stein, head of the anti-immigration group FAIR, declared that a bill granting more U.S. visas to high-skilled computer programmers and engineers "should rightly be called the Silicon Valley Sweatshop Act." (In 1998, salaries for software engineers started at $50,000 a year; hardly something for Upton Sinclair to break his pencil about.)

The real villains, of course, are the Third World enterprises where poor people work long hours in unpleasant circumstances for less than a dollar an hour. No one should defend the horrors-factories with locked doors during fires, employers who confiscate passports and harass workers, etc.-but the fact remains that, on the whole, what most opponents call "sweatshops" are actually a good thing.