A recent paper from Skarbek, Skarbek, Skarbek, and Skarbek (that’s right) interview 31 sweatshop workers in El Salvador to find out how they perceive they job and their next best opportunities. Here are their results:

Field interviews reveal that subjects perceive their alternatives, including agricultural work and street vending, as less desirable when compared to sweatshop labor. Non-monetary benefits are an important part of this appraisal. The interviews provide information about the margins along which subjects’ compensation improves and identifies factory employment as one means of improving intergenerational mobility, educational attainment, and improved economic opportunities for women.

This is, of course, a very small sample. But the study does echo  a similar sentiment expressed by  Paul Krugmen in an excellent piece from Slate days:

 You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be helped with foreign aid? Maybe–although the historical record of regions like southern Italy suggests that such aid has a tendency to promote perpetual dependence. Anyway, there isn’t the slightest prospect of significant aid materializing. Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of course–but they won’t, or at least not because we tell them to. And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard–that is, the fact that you don’t like the idea of workers being paid a pittance to supply rich Westerners with fashion items.

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