Look for the Kiwi Label

The "anti-sweatshop" movement has an elastic agenda.

Walter Olson from the July 2000 issue

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One reason moderates keep attending the anti-sweatshop rallies is that there really are, after all, some sleazy employers who defraud workers of wages or coerce them in other ways. (Keeping immigrants' passports under lock and key to discourage them from running away is one favorite.) But the effort to distinguish between such practices and "normal" employment in low-wage contexts isn't easy given the anti-sweatshop crusade's insistence that the determination of what constitutes intolerable working conditions must never be left up to the local workers themselves, nor to the governments of the countries in which they work, democratically elected or otherwise.

In place of any serious effort to distinguish between good and bad, we now wind up with absurdities like the Notre Dame standards, which depart to an almost delirious extent from any rational tally of worker oppression. Joining New Zealand, Thailand, and the others on the college's blacklist are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, wealthy oil countries not likely to bother with the business of exporting college-logo sports gear and sun visors. Other countries on the list, mostly very poor and obscure, include Eritrea, Laos, Somalia, the Solomon Islands, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Oman. Five more, including Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea, and Qatar, have been placed on a "suspect" but not yet banned list for a distinctively hapless reason: "Their laws have not been translated into English." That would have pleased Dickens' Mrs. Jellyby, for whom the exotic remoteness of a moral concern was always a sign of its urgency.

And it gets worse when you consider the countries that didn't make the proscribed list, which as it happens include most of those whose labor or human rights policies have come under activist scrutiny in recent years, such as Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma), and Haiti. After all, it's not that hard for countries to inscribe on their law books a few dubiously enforceable laws or U.N. conventions. Even Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Libya, and the Sudan (a country in which actual, no-kidding human chattel slavery is said to persist) can continue as acceptable venues for the production of key chains and caps imprinted with the Fighting Irish mascot. What a moral inspiration to us all!

A year and a half ago I had a chance to visit New Zealand, an exceptionally pleasant, spacious, and egalitarian corner of the world known for flightless birds and America's Cup boat racing, whose most pressing social problem of late has been convincing the rest of the world that it's not actually part of Australia. I spent some of my time discussing with professors and practicing lawyers the country's somewhat distinctive labor laws, introduced by a Thatcherite administration some years back (and now under reconsideration by its more left-leaning successor government). It would be misleading to characterize these laws as either to the "left" or the "right" of ours. Kiwi employers are less constrained than American ones in some respects, more so in many others. For example, official tribunals can order New Zealand employers to reinstate fired workers, a system without exact parallel here. One of the novelties introduced in the Employment Contract of 1991, however, was a new right of individual workers to bypass union representation and reach individualized contracts with their employers if they wish. Many workers have taken advantage of this new right, weakening unions' power; by coincidence or not, the years that followed have seen the New Zealand economy enter an export-led boom impressive even by today's world standards.

So impressive has the boom been, in fact, that the island country has become a magnet for Asian immigrants hoping to make their fortune. Last year authorities raided an Auckland sewing shop whose Thai owner was found to be overworking and mistreating eight of her compatriots. She was promptly arrested and brought to trial, where she was made to pay fines and compensation totaling NZ $370,000 under the country's wage and hour laws, which--who will tell Notre Dame?--remain in force as ever. The case caused a sensation in the Kiwi press in part because it fed into ongoing anguish about the country's perceived Americanization: You think this sort of thing goes on only in Los Angeles, and now it has come here! And indeed, The American Prospect tells us that L.A. alone has more than 160,000 sweatshop workers.

Memo to my faraway friends in Wellington, Christchurch, and Rotorua: Thanks for not boycotting us.