Where Sweatshops Are a Dream

Stung Meanchey garbage dump (Photo: Rory Byrne, VOA)

January 15, 2009
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Before Barack Obama and his team act on their talk about “labor standards,” I’d like to offer them a tour of the vast garbage dump here in Phnom Penh.

This is a Dante-like vision of hell. It’s a mountain of festering refuse, a half-hour hike across, emitting clouds of smoke from subterranean fires.

The miasma of toxic stink leaves you gasping, breezes batter you with filth, and even the rats look forlorn. Then the smoke parts and you come across a child ambling barefoot, searching for old plastic cups that recyclers will buy for five cents a pound. Many families actually live in shacks on this smoking garbage.

Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.

Talk to these families in the dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children.

“I’d love to get a job in a factory,” said Pim Srey Rath, a 19-year-old woman scavenging for plastic. “At least that work is in the shade. Here is where it’s hot.”

Another woman, Vath Sam Oeun, hopes her 10-year-old boy, scavenging beside her, grows up to get a factory job, partly because she has seen other children run over by garbage trucks. Her boy has never been to a doctor or a dentist, and last bathed when he was 2, so a sweatshop job by comparison would be far more pleasant and less dangerous.

I’m glad that many Americans are repulsed by the idea of importing products made by barely paid, barely legal workers in dangerous factories. Yet sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty. At a time of tremendous economic distress and protectionist pressures, there’s a special danger that tighter labor standards will be used as an excuse to curb trade.

When I defend sweatshops, people always ask me: But would you want to work in a sweatshop? No, of course not. But I would want even less to pull a rickshaw. In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn’t the bottom.

My views on sweatshops are shaped by years living in East Asia, watching as living standards soared — including those in my wife’s ancestral village in southern China — because of sweatshop jobs.

Manufacturing is one sector that can provide millions of jobs. Yet sweatshops usually go not to the poorest nations but to better-off countries with more reliable electricity and ports.

I often hear the argument: Labor standards can improve wages and working conditions, without greatly affecting the eventual retail cost of goods. That’s true. But labor standards and “living wages” have a larger impact on production costs that companies are always trying to pare. The result is to push companies to operate more capital-intensive factories in better-off nations like Malaysia, rather than labor-intensive factories in poorer countries like Ghana or Cambodia.

Cambodia has, in fact, pursued an interesting experiment by working with factories to establish decent labor standards and wages. It’s a worthwhile idea, but one result of paying above-market wages is that those in charge of hiring often demand bribes — sometimes a month’s salary — in exchange for a job. In addition, these standards add to production costs, so some factories have closed because of the global economic crisis and the difficulty of competing internationally.

The best way to help people in the poorest countries isn’t to campaign against sweatshops but to promote manufacturing there. One of the best things America could do for Africa would be to strengthen our program to encourage African imports, called AGOA, and nudge Europe to match it.

Among people who work in development, many strongly believe (but few dare say very loudly) that one of the best hopes for the poorest countries would be to build their manufacturing industries. But global campaigns against sweatshops make that less likely.

Look, I know that Americans have a hard time accepting that sweatshops can help people. But take it from 13-year-old Neuo Chanthou, who earns a bit less than $1 a day scavenging in the dump. She’s wearing a “Playboy” shirt and hat that she found amid the filth, and she worries about her sister, who lost part of her hand when a garbage truck ran over her.

“It’s dirty, hot and smelly here,” she said wistfully. “A factory is better.”

A Heroine From the Brothels

Nicholas D. Kristof (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

September 24, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The New York Times

World leaders are parading through New York this week for a United Nations General Assembly reviewing their (lack of) progress in fighting global poverty. That’s urgent and necessary, but what they aren’t talking enough about is one of the grimmest of all manifestations of poverty — sex trafficking.

This is widely acknowledged to be the 21st-century version of slavery, but governments accept it partly because it seems to defy solution. Prostitution is said to be the oldest profession. It exists in all countries, and if some teenage girls are imprisoned in brothels until they die of AIDS, that is seen as tragic but inevitable.

The perfect counterpoint to that fatalism is Somaly Mam, one of the bravest and boldest of those foreign visitors pouring into New York City this month. Somaly is a Cambodian who as a young teenager was sold to the brothels herself and now runs an organization that extricates girls from forced prostitution.

Now Somaly has published her inspiring memoir, “The Road of Lost Innocence,” in the United States, and it offers some lessons for tackling the broader problem.

In the past when I’ve seen Somaly and her team in Cambodia, I frankly didn’t figure that she would survive this long. Gangsters who run the brothels have held a gun to her head, and seeing that they could not intimidate Somaly with their threats, they found another way to hurt her: They kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter.

Three years ago, I wrote from Cambodia about a raid Somaly organized on the Chai Hour II brothel where more than 200 girls had been imprisoned. Girls rescued from the brothel were taken to Somaly’s shelter, but the next day gangsters raided the shelter, kidnapped the girls and took them right back to the brothel.

Yet Somaly continued her fight, and, with the help of many others, she has registered real progress. Today, she says, the Chai Hour II brothel is shuttered. In large part, so is the Svay Pak brothel area where 12-year-old girls were openly for sale on my first visit.

“If you want to buy a virgin, it’s not easy now,” notes Somaly, speaking in English — her fifth language.

Somaly’s shelters — where the youngest girl rescued is 4 years old — provide an education and job skills. More important, Somaly applies public and international pressure to push the police to crack down on the worst brothels, and takes brothel owners to court. The idea is to undermine the sex-trafficking business model.

In her book, Somaly recounts how she grew up as an orphan and was “adopted” by a man who sold her to a brothel. Once when Somaly ran away, the police gang-raped her. Then her owner, on recovering his “property,” not only beat and humiliated her but tied her down naked and poured live maggots over her skin and in her mouth.

Yet even after that, Somaly occasionally defied him. Once two new girls, about 14 years old, were brought in to the brothel and left tied up. Somaly untied them and let them run away. For that, she was tortured with electric shocks.

As Cambodia opened up, Somaly began to get foreign clients, whom she vastly preferred because they didn’t beat her as well, and she began learning foreign languages. Eventually, a French aid worker named Pierre Legros married her, and together they started Afesip, a small organization to fight sex trafficking. They have since divorced, and Somaly works primarily through the Somaly Mam Foundation, set up by admiring Americans to finance her battle against trafficking in Cambodia. It’s a successful collaboration between American do-gooders with money and a Cambodian do-gooder with local street smarts.

The world’s worst trafficking is in Asia, but teenage runaways in the United States are also routinely brutalized by their pimps. If a white, middle-class blonde goes missing, the authorities issue an Amber Alert and cable TV goes berserk, but neither federal nor local authorities do nearly enough to go after pimps who savagely abuse troubled girls who don’t fit the “missing blonde” narrative. The system is broken.

A bill to strengthen federal anti-trafficking efforts within the U.S. was overwhelmingly passed by the House of Representatives, led by Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York. But crucial provisions to crack down on pimping are being blocked in the Senate in part by Senators Sam Brownback and Joe Biden, who consider the House provisions unnecessary and problematic. (Barack Obama gets it and says the right things about trafficking to the public, but apparently not to his running mate.)

With U.N. leaders this week focused on overcoming poverty, Somaly is a reminder that we needn’t acquiesce in the enslavement of girls, in this country or abroad. If we defeated slavery in the 19th century, we can beat it in the 21st century.

I invite you to visit my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.

Clearing the killing fields

By Lois Goldrich
New Jersey Jewish Standard (New Jersey, USA)

Barnert contingent visits Cambodia, raises funds to build school there

Rabbi Joel Soffin has led outreach projects all over the world — in El Salvador, Argentina, Ukraine, and Ethiopia. But last year, after reading an article by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on human trafficking in Cambodia, he knew that country would be his next destination.

In January, Soffin, social action rabbinical scholar-in-residence at Barnert Temple in Franklin Lakes, went on a fact-finding mission to Cambodia. With him were Sara Losch, Barnert’s director of lifelong learning, and temple member Suzanne Levy. Also on the tour were congregants from Soffin’s previous congregation, Temple Shalom of Succasunna.

Describing his job at Barnert as "coordinating and inspiring social action," Soffin — who served the congregation as sabbatical rabbi from October 2006 to April 2007 — spoke to The Jewish Standard from Maine, where he is serving as sabbatical rabbi at Bet Ha’am synagogue in South Portland.

In "Fighting Brothels with Books," published in December 2006, Kristof states that while "building schools doesn’t solve the immediate problem of girls currently enslaved inside brothels … [l]iterate girls not only are in less danger of being trafficked, but later they have fewer children, care for their children better, and are much better able to earn a living."

Inspired by the article, Soffin — then sitting shiva for his brother, a teacher in Buffalo — realized that not only would building a school in Cambodia help the trafficking problem, but it would also be a fitting memorial for his brother, who worked with Buffalo City Honors, established for "kids who would otherwise be left behind," said Soffin. "I was thinking of him and his legacy."

Still, he noted, "While my initial motivation came from the Kristof article, once we were there, we went to the killing fields and the genocide museum. There was a building with 20 floors of human skulls. Does that sound familiar? Their souls were calling out ‘never again,’ but it happened again."

He said he also learned during the trip that "the people there want to learn how to take care of themselves, they don’t want handouts. They want to create their own future.

"Someone told me that they want their children ‘to use pens, not guns,’ a very Jewish vision. That solidified it for us."

Calling the trip both "exhausting and life-changing," Losch said that "the current reality is that children who do not go to school frequently wind up being trafficked into prostitution. We needed to understand why. Though I knew all about Pol Pot and the killing fields … the horrors of Cambodia were something I learned, watched on TV, but didn’t connect with. So, not to be tourists but to help us understand why we should build a school there, we needed to really understand what had happened."

Soffin, who created the Adult Mitzvah Corps of the Reform movement, said that the first step he took in planning the venture in Cambodia was to meet with former journalist Bernie Krisher, now head of the aid group American Assistance for Cambodia. According to Soffin, Krisher’s group facilitates the creation of schools in Cambodia with the assistance of private donors, the Cambodian government, and the Asian Development Bank. The organization has overseen construction of some 403 schools since it was created in the late 1990s, he said.

"They’re trying to offset some of the losses that resulted from Pol Pot’s policy of genocide in the 1970s," said Soffin. Pol Pot killed some 2 million Khmer people between 1975 and 1979. He noted that Cambodia is trying rebuild without the aid of the educators, artists, and entertainers who were killed during those blood-soaked years. Last year, only one out of every two Cambodian children completed primary school.

"One hundred percent of the schools were closed," said Losch, "relegating the country’s children to work in rice paddies and fields. The brutality was inconceivable. As Jews, we certainly are no strangers to such evil, yet even for us, the [sight] of skulls stacked shelves high, or walking on human bones, was devastating. We said Kaddish while standing with our tour guide, for a brother he never saw again."

Before embarking on the school project, Soffin’s group set out to learn whether building a school would, in fact, be the best way to help. The six participants — including his son Aaron — visited schools and spoke with experts on the issue of human trafficking.

"We wanted to find out if education is the way, or if there is something else that would be more effective," said Soffin. "It was uniformly agreed that education is the answer," he said, noting that what they learned only reinforced the feelings aroused by Kristof’s articles.

From Krisher, Soffin learned that if a certain amount of money could be raised, the Cambodian government would add additional monies, as would the Asian Development Bank. The rabbi is now appealing for funds from within and outside the Barnert community.

His goal is to raise $60,000, which will pay for the education of 500 children. Soffin noted that the money would fund five classes, each serving 50 children, in two shifts. It would also allow for "extras." He explained that while a school can be built for $13,000, with the government ready to step in and provide teachers and a curriculum, private donors can also select things off a "wish list."

Items on that list include some of the features he saw while visiting several schools during his January trip.

"In the schools we visited, the kids were thriving, happy, and learning. There was a well, water filter, vegetable garden, nurse, solar panel, library, and English teacher," he said. His plan is to provide some of those features, funding a generator rather than a solar panel so that a school will be able to support the use of 12 computers. In addition, he said, without ongoing funding, a school cannot continue to operate.

Soffin hopes to finish his fund-raising efforts in June. Besides reaching out to the community, he will make a contribution to this effort from his own foundation, Helping Hands. As part of this effort, he said, his son is uploading a movie of their Cambodia experience on his Website, soffinfilms.com.

For further information, email RabbiSoffin@gmail.com