Prime Time 7/8, Writing, Arbeitsheft

8 34 8 The world of work | Globalisation 8.1 Text input Everything we knew about sweatshops was wrong (1)  In the 1990s, Americans learned more about the appalling conditions at the factories where our sneakers and T-shirts were made, and opposition to sweatshops surged. For some economists, however, the wages and conditions in sweatshops might be appalling, but they are an improvement on people’s less visible rural poverty. (2)  Textbook economics offers two reasons why factory jobs can be “an escalator out of poverty”. First, a booming industrial sector should raise wages over time. Second, factory jobs might be better than the alternatives: Unlike agriculture or informal market selling, these factories pay a steady wage, and if workers gained skills valued by the market, they might earn higher wages in the long run. Factories may also have incentives to pay more than agricultural or informal market work to persuade workers to stay and be productive. (3)  Expecting to prove the experts right, we went to Ethiopia and, working with the Innovations for Poverty Action and the Ethiopian Development Research Institute, performed the first randomised trial of industrial employment on workers. Little did we anticipate that everything we believed would turn out to be wrong. We picked Ethiopia because its small export industry was beginning to boom. It offered a chance to see what effect these jobs would have at the earliest stages of industrialisation. In addition to local exporters, many Chinese, Indian and European companies are setting up factories in Ethiopia, producing everything from clothing to flowers. (4)  Since there were more qualified applicants than jobs, we had a perfect opportunity for a randomised trial. Five businesses – a drinks company, a garment factory, a shoemaker and two industrial greenhouse operations – agreed to take part and hire qualified applicants chosen through a lottery. We followed the 947 applicants who were and were not offered the job over a year, surveying them multiple times. (5)  To our surprise, most people who got an industrial job soon changed their minds. A majority quit within the first months. They ended up doing what those who had not gotten the job offers did – going back to the family farm, taking a construction job or selling goods at the market. (6)  Contrary to the expert predictions, quitting was a wise decision for most. The alternatives were not so bad after all: People who worked in agriculture or market selling earned about as much money as they could have at the factory, often with fewer hours and better conditions. By the end of a year only a third of the people who had landed an industrial job were still employed in the industrial sector at all. (7)  It would be easy to see this as the normal trial-and-error of young people starting out careers, but actually the factory jobs carried dangerous risks. Serious injuries and disabilities were nearly double among those who chose to work in factories. This risk rose with every month they stayed. The people we interviewed told us about exposure to chemical fumes and repetitive stress injuries. (8)  Why were people then lining up for hazardous jobs? Partly it was because they did not appreciate the risks, or how hard the work was, until they started. Others anticipated the risks, but used factory work as a safety net when times were tough. The people who stayed longer had few alternatives. (9)  We have to be careful about generalising from five businesses in one country, but this study has shown that industrialisation is not a quick fix. Over time, however, a booming sector tends to improve labour conditions and raise wages as more businesses compete for workers. But the path there isn’t smooth. In the short run workers seem to share few of the benefits but a heavy burden of the risks – a burden borne by the desperate and the uninformed. (C. Blattman and S. Dercon, www.nytimes.com, 27 April 2017) 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv