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Abstract
Sweatshop labor is often cited as an example of the worst and most pervasive form of exploitation today, yet understanding what is meant by the charge has proven surprisingly difficult for philosophers. Fairness-based theories, looking to hypothetical fair market prices for labor, cannot see a moral wrong in the extraordinarily low wages generated by a competitive global market with a very high labor supply; moral libertarians, focusing on the benefits to the global poor often conferred by the interactions, rest content that sweatshops expand opportunity; and respect-based accounts tend to support constraints on employment conditions so strong that many mutually beneficial interactions would be ruled impermissible. In my dissertation, I argue that fair market prices and the expansion of opportunity cannot alone eliminate worries of exploitation in sweatshop labor, but that morally nonideal conditions can justify wages below the ideal level when progress is made toward a threshold level of well-being for workers.
I develop an account of what I call "Needs Exploitation," grounded in a specification of the duty of beneficence. In the case of sweatshop labor, I argue that employers face a duty to extend to employees a wage sufficient to meet their basic needs. This duty is limited by the degree of the employees' dependence on the employer for basic needs and a reasonability standard where the employer may remain within a range of well-being between deficiency and luxury. I further argue that sweatshop labor often, though not always, represents a demeaning choice for the employee. Deploying recent work from expressivist theories of action, I indicate the ways in which acceptance of an arrangement offering exploitative wages can carry "surface endorsement" of one's own degradation. In these cases, the exploitee's willing participation in the exchange serves as a fig leaf, obscuring the fact that she is left below the level of well-being owed to her.
