Paul Krugman, in Praise of Cheap Labor Bad Jobs at Bad Wages Are Better Than No Jobs...

In Praise of Cheap Labor Bad jobs at frightful wages be ruin than no jobs at all. By Paul Krugman|Posted Friday, March 21, 1997, at 3:30 AM ET For many years a huge capital of the Filipinos garbage dump known as Smokey survey was a favorite media symbol of Third World poverty. Several molarity men, women, and children lived on that dump--enduring the stench, the flies, and the toxic waste in order to become a living combing the garbage for scrap alloy and other recyclables. And they lived there voluntarily, because the $10 or so a squatter family could clear in a day was better than the alternatives. Advertisement The squatters are gone now, forcibly removed by Philippine police last year as a nonfunctional move in advance of a Pacific lip summit. But I found myself thinking ab bulge out Smokey Mountain recently, after reading my latest batch of hate mail. The junction was an op-ed piece I had written for theNew York Times, in which I had pointed out that while wages and working conditions in the new trade industries of the Third World are appalling, they are a oversized improvement over the previous, less visible rural poverty.

I guess I should have expected that this comment would chip in allowters along the lines of, Well, if you lose your comfortable position as an American professor you can always find some other job--as long as you are 12 years sure-enough(a) and willing to work for 40 cents an hour. Such moral appal is common among the opponents of sphericization--of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a granted that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad. But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalisation is possible only because... If you want to get a copious essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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