by Colleen Morton

Created on: October 03, 2009   Last Updated: October 06, 2009

The question of who bears responsibility for unsafe working conditions in factories that produce goods for sale outside national boundaries, closely parallels similar questions that have been raised over the years relating to apartheid, maquiladoras, slave labor, factory pollution, product safety and quality standards, and in general, anything that is produced under one set of conditions (laws, enforcement systems, cultural practices) and consumed under a different set.

The two heroic assumptions being made here are that consumers, and the policies of consuming nations, (1) can credibly influence policies and practices internal to other countries; and (2) that it is appropriate or morally right to do so. Both are highly questionable for fairly obvious reasons.

As the United States has discovered over and over again, trying to be the world's policeman, much less its ethical and moral arbiter, is a thankless business involving us in internal civil wars, battles between fascists and communists, between terrorists and freedom fighters, and between our own economic, political and strategic interests, and the dictates of species morality or human rights.

More to the point, when have we ever succeeded? US leverage over foreign labor policies is extremely limited, particularly since the US has signed far fewer International Labor Organization commitments, and has much weaker labor laws on the books than many developing nations. Targets of our moralistic pressure need only point to labor protests, safety violations and exploitation in the United States to upend our righteous stance by calling us hypocrites, or worse.

Moreover, what tools would we bring to bear were we to decide that we needed to proactively influence the internal practices of other countries? And how would we expect them to respond or retaliate? In China's case, our leverage is exactly zero, not only due to the massive debt the US owes the Chinese, but also because many of the investors in these Chinese plants are actually US investors looking to escape from high labor costs elsewhere.

Why would the Chinese consider changing their labor standards in such a way that costs might rise, making their products less competitive globally just because the United States would like them to?

And what about individual US consumers, or groups of consumers? Would boycotting Chinese goods have an effect? Perhaps, but only until the Chinese were able to address the issue in the media, and consumers returned to purchasing

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