Question

a) Why is the statement: “Chinese take jobs from Americans because they have low wages” wrong?

b)What is an argument that not all sweatshops are not necessarily as bad as they are made out to be?

c)Explain why banning horsemeat can lead to horses to be treated worse, not better, towards the end of their life.

Answer 1

(b). Sweatshops are awful places to work. But they are often less awful than other jobs sweatshop workers could take. And this is the basic argument in defence of sweatshops. When people argue against them most evidence suggests that sweatshops pay better than the alternatives. It’s hard to collect reliable data in many poor countries, but Ben Powell and David Skarbek’s 2006 paper “Sweatshops and Third World Living Standards” uses wage data given by anti-sweatshop campaigners­ to estimate wages for sweatshop workers in ten countries compared to average National Income. This, if anything, should underestimate sweatshop workers’ earnings.

Again, it’s difficult to know how many hours the average sweatshop worker does every week, but most anti-sweatshop campaigners suggest that it is more than 70 hours per week. The results should be taken with a pinch of salt, but Powell and Skarbek found that sweatshop wages exceed average income in between eight and ten out of ten countries surveyed, depending on how many hours were worked.

In nine out of ten countries, “working ten-hour days in the apparel industry lifts employees above (and often far above) the $2 per day threshold.” And “in half of the countries it results in earning more than three times the national average”!

In the villages close to sweatshops, girls were substantially less likely to get pregnant or be married off and girls’ school enrolment rates were 38.6% higher. The authors say that these effects were likely due to a combination of wealth effects (richer families need to marry off their daughters less early, and can afford to send their daughters to school for longer) and the fact that garment factory jobs reward skills, increasing the value of education. Using field interviews with thirty-one sweatshop workers in El Salvador, David, Emily, Brian and Erin Skarbek found that “workers perceive factory employment to provide more desirable compensation along several margins.”

Sweatshops don't cause harm. They provide better job options than the average job in these third-world countries . They are also voluntary contracts between the employer and the employee. Nobody is forcing them to take these jobs. Now, the source mentions a possiblity of the Chinese government forcing people to work in sweatshops. If this is true, then these are not the core idea of sweatshops, and that would have more to do with communism.

(c). While animal advocates argue against horse slaughter, some horse breeders and owners say that horse slaughter is a necessary evil. According to The Morning News, “a recent national poll found that almost 70 percent of Americans support a federal ban on horse slaughter for human consumption.” As of May 2009, there are no slaughterhouses killing horses for human consumption in the United States. There is now a federal bill pending that would prohibit horse slaughter in the US and would prohibit the transport of live horses for slaughter. While this federal bill is pending, several individual states are considering horse slaughterhouses. A Montana bill allowing horse slaughter and protecting potential slaughterhouse owners became law in April 2009. A bill modeled on the Montana law is now pending in Tennessee.

Although horses are no longer slaughtered for human consumption in the US, live horses are still shipped to foreign slaughterhouses. According to Keith Dane, Director of Equine Protection for the Humane Society of the US, about 100,000 live horses are shipped to Canadian and Mexican slaughterhouses each year, and the meat is sold in Belgium, France, and other countries.

A lesser-known issue is that of horse slaughter for pet food and for zoos to feed to carnivores. According to Dane, these facilities are not required to be inspected by the USDA, so statistics are not available. The existence of such facilities usually goes unnoticed until there are a cruelty allegation and investigation. The International Society for the Protection of Exotic Animal Kind and Livestock, Inc. alleges that one such slaughterhouse in New Jersey kills the horses in an inhumane manner, and the case is still under investigation. According to Dane, most major pet food companies do not use horse meat, so there’s little chance of buying cat or dog food that supports horse slaughter. The earliest horses evolved on the North American continent, and by about 12,000 BC, they had migrated to other parts of the world, becoming extinct in the Americas.The now-extinct Hagerman horse of Idaho, about the size of a modern-day large pony, is one example of an indigenous New World horse species. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Spaniards, followed by other European settlers, reintroduced horses to the Americas. Some horses became feral, and began to be hunted by the indigenous Pehuenche people of what is now Chile and Argentina. Initially, early humans hunted horses as they did other game; later, they began to raise them for meat, milk and transport. The meat was, and still is, preserved by being sun-dried in the high Andes into a product known as charqui.

The United States horse slaughter industry is on its deathbed. The demise of the industry follows various animal welfare groups' increased activism in recent years to eliminate domestic equine slaughter.  These proponents' arguments are emotionally charged, at the cost of foresight. For example, they claim that horses are “a rich part of American culture,” but they fail to address what will really happen to “rescued” horses that would otherwise be destined for slaughter. While horses have played an important role in this nation's history, romanticizing the horse's place in our society while ignoring the consequences that are likely to follow a slaughter ban does little, if anything, for equine welfare.