I recently stumbled upon this article while reading up on Canadian Business. It basically pushes the old debate of whether sweat shops being shut down are a good thing or a bad thing. It mentions that while cheap labour in sub par conditions compared to what is acceptable in western society is not a pretty site, especially for a PR campaign, it does however employ many local workers. These workers otherwise would not have the means to support their family, which in many of these areas are quite large.
The reason why it has been brough back into the limelight is because of the new Nike shoes that will be available f9or this Christmas season. They are created using a vacuum technology, which begs the question: are these shoes built by machines rather than people? if this is the case we will see a lot of unemployment in areas Nike has set up manufacturing plants.
This is a good topic to explore because for a company starting out, especially in clothing, they need to ask themselves if they would like to pay the high costs for machines that will eventually pay for themselves or to hire low cost labour abroad and have their product made by hand. This debate will continue until the day manufacturing can happen automatically without any human interaction, and so until then we have to pick a side.
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blog/business_ethics/50576--a-high-tech-replacement-for-sweatshop-labour-um-yay
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