Greedy Inhumanity vs Naive Troublemakers

The irony, of course, is that the suffocating labor practices in textile and apparel production, the curfews and locked dormitories, the timed bathroom visits and the production quotas, the forced church attendance and the high fences—all of the factors throughout industrial history designed to control young women—were at the same time part of the women’s economic liberation and autonomy.

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But of all the rallying cries of the anti-globalization movement, the call to “stop the race to the bottom” is both the scariest and the most nonsensical, especially when it comes from rich-country activists who owe their own prosperity to the very race they wish to halt for others.

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In a larger sense, however, global capitalism and labor activism are not enemies but are instead cooperators, however unwitting, in improving the human condition. As much as the CEOs would like to silence the activists and activists would like to silence the corporations, the fact is that the two sides need each other, and, most important, the workers at Shanghai Brightness Garment Factory and the Shanghai Number 36 textile mill need them both.

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The business community in turn scornfully dismisses the skeptics and the activists as a lunatic fringe, a ragtag bunch of ill-informed obstructionists who are blocking the only path available out of poverty. The battle has been put in these terms—greedy inhumanity versus naive and reckless troublemakers—since the first textile factories emerged.

~ Pietra Rivoli