I approached TA Frank's piece on life as a sweatshop inspector with interest because the continuum of workers, trade and, at bottom, forced labor or effective slavery is part of our work as evaluation partner for the Action Group on Human Trafficking and Modern-Day Slavery.

Among many other things, this group debates the impact of trade and the dilemma it presents for anti-slavery advocates. Instantly, most people react with horror at the thought that goods they purchase may be made by forced or sweatshop labor. This response is not a guarantee that people avoid such goods. They avoid the knowledge of such goods.

Groups debate this question because a natural response to this situation may be to boycott goods from a company or country that allows these terrible conditions to persist. And such a boycott could potentially punish or harm the people suffering the terrible conditions. A very bad job is better than no job, and in some cases working in indentured servitude in one country is better than being forcible repatriated to another where the oppression is worse.

There are value judgments to be made here, and I am not the one to make them. But Frank's piece articulates these questions thoughtfully and a few more to boot. Read the whole thing, but start here, at the end, for one more reason why engaging on labor standards, versus ducking the issue, is critical:

I don't pretend that everything monitoring brings about is for the best. An example: Mattel's factories in China are superb, but workers there often earn less than their peers in shadier factories because their employers confine them to shorter workweeks to avoid paying overtime. Another: You may rightly hate the idea of child labor, but firing a fourteen-year-old in Indonesia from a factory job because she is fourteen does nothing but deprive her of income she is understandably desperate to keep. (She'll find worse work elsewhere, most likely, or simply go hungry.) A third: Small village factories may break the rules, but they often operate in a humane and basically sensible way, and I didn't enjoy lecturing their owners about the necessity of American-style time cards and fifteen-minute breaks. But labor standards anywhere have a tendency to create such problems. They're enacted in the hope that the good outweighs the bad.

One final thought: If you're like me, part of you feels that Peru's labor standards are basically Peru's business. It's our job to worry about standards here at home. But that sort of thinking doesn't work well in an era of globalization. We are, like it or not, profoundly affected by the labor standards of our trading partners. If their standards are low, they exert a downward pressure on our own. That's why monitoring and enforcement have such an important role to play. We don't expect developing nations to match us in what their workers earn. (A few dollars a day is a fortune in many nations.) But when a Chinese factory saves money by making its employees breathe hazardous fumes and, by doing so, closes down a U.S. factory that spends money on proper ventilation and masks, that's wrong. It's wrong by any measure. And that's what we can do something about if we try. It's the challenge we face as the walls come down, the dolls, pajamas, and televisions come in, and, increasingly, the future of our workers here is tied to that of workers who are oceans away.