Should we boycott cheap clothes?

No: with "sweatshops" of prosperity begins, said Michael Miersch

Who is now over 40, can not believe how cheap you can buy fashionable clothes. The days were filled as socks knit themselves and younger siblings Our mission was worth the clothes of the elderly are over - provided you live in one of the rich industrial countries. In the poor developing countries for millions of women are working for starvation wages, to the fashion appetite of the local consumers to breastfeed. The outrage is completely justified. Strikes like the one who fought the textile workers in Bangladesh deserve solidarity. Who buys Billigkleidung should think about donating a portion of the saved money for trade unions in low-wage countries. It is also appropriate to draw up placards in front of the trendy textile chain and make the buyers attention to the origins of what they bargain.

But the sweeping of the sweatshop takes a little too short, because it acts as if the status of low-wage country something static. Something that it was, then and remains so. This is strange school historians. Even a cursory glance at economic history shows that every day was once a prosperous country of low-wage country. In South Korea and Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong people a few years ago toiled in sweatshops. South Korea's per capita annual income in 1960 was $ 500, now at $ 20,000. Taiwanese companies today pursue low-wage factories in Nicaragua and the Philippines. And behave just as exploitative as Europeans and North Americans, even though it their own sweatshop still have good memories. The generation that lived to see Japan as a low-wage country is not so old. In Germany you have to go back for more, but here sweatshops were once the bedrock of the economy. Gerhard Hauptmann's drama "The Walker" depicts the famous uprising in Silesia, which is similar in many respects to the strike of textile workers in Bangladesh today.

Each country had its prosperous phase, was produced in mass production with simple semi-skilled workers. No one can jump from an agrarian society to a knowledge society. It takes a couple of stops. The first is called industrialization. She has an ugly face. But for many people, it opens a way to escape the rural poor. The mothers of the exploited workers of Bangladesh waded her life behind a water buffalo through rice fields. The work on the sewing machine is stupid, exhaustive and underpaid, but also an opportunity.

Two journalists from the "Sueddeutsche Zeitung" were a few years ago in the factories in the Philippines, which has visited the Canadian Naomi Klein for her book "No Logo", an indictment against sweatshops, which became a bestseller. What the reporters were told by the young women there in line, so not the Naomi Klein cliché. They gave the record that they would no longer work with their parents on the field, that they live better now and even that they would find the work quite okay.

"Okay," the sewing certainly is not. But it is - and this is not unimportant - a relative improvement over the hardships of poor smallholder families. Since the early 90s in the world 800 million jobs have been created, many of them in sweat shops. In Europe, it took 40 years until the average income doubled. The countries of Southeast Asia took 10-15 years for it.
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Naomi Wolf is recommended as a way out of poverty to buy Fair Trade products. This is well meant, whether it's economic development in poor countries helps sustainable is questionable. Fair Trade means keep fixed purchase guarantees higher prices for producers, the social and environmental standards. Sounds good, but has the disadvantage that the information given by the market, are switched off. Who has a good fair-trade contract in the bag, it must pay no more on it, what the customer wants. As once the factories in the GDR, which got rid of everything that they produced - until the people had a choice. Fair Trade is an economic safe environment. However, it is honorable to buy such products.

But a better life for the vast majority of textile workers in Bangladesh and elsewhere will not develop in niches such as Fair Trade. But from the economic growth of Southeast Asia, which is well above the European ones. Every single cent more, the women of Bangladesh strike for, will improve the starting conditions of their daughters. The future belongs to those daughters. It will come sooner than many believe.

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