If the recycling center closes, the people will lose their income in the same way that Kristof feared closed sweatshops would put people out of work. The pitiful thing about this situation is that keeping the recycling center and the sweatshops going is presumed to be the most humanitarian thing that can be done for these poor, poor people.
Kristof’s contention is that it’s better for the people to work in a sweatshop than to live in these dumps. Even the people, themselves, say they prefer a sweatshop to the hot, filthy, stinky dump.
However, these choices are specious. Mae Sot already has 250 sweatshops with many more on the drawing board. It is unlikely that the people living on the dump will get these jobs. They have no skills or legal papers.
What we need to understand from impoverished areas like Mae Sot or Phnom Penh is that our free market structures are bringing ALL the world’s people down into what human rights activist Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee (http://www.nlcnet.org) against sweatshops calls a “race to the bottom.” Those who produce the products, those who buy the products and those who live off of the products once they have been discarded are all pathetically bound together. And unless this system changes, there is no exit from it for anyone.
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