By Steve Duin
I am, admittedly, not worthy to carry Nicholas Kristof's laptop. But this week the New York Times' columnist and that globe-trotting laptop generated an oddly reasoned defense of the Third World sweatshop.
I prefer the Roger Clemens' approach. As I'll explain in a moment.
Unless you subscribe to the Times, you may have missed Kristof's dispatch from Namibia, which began, "Africa desperately needs Western help in the form of schools, clinics and sweatshops. Oops, don't spill your coffee. We in the West mostly despise sweatshops as exploiters of the poor, while the poor themselves tend to see sweatshops as opportunities."
Kristof -- who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on genocide in Darfur -- notes, "Well-meaning American university students regularly campaign against sweatshops. But instead, anyone who cares about fighting poverty should campaign in favor of sweatshops, demanding that companies set up factories in Africa. If Africa could establish a clothing export industry, that would fight poverty far more effectively than any foreign aid program."
Those agitated college students aren't campaigning against economic opportunity among the starving in Africa. They're engaged because fat cats companies such as Nike, Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola are -- or were -- profiting by the billions off that misery.
They're enraged by the connection between the $2 daily wage and the $200 athletic shoe.
And I don't have to go very far to find a much more persuasive argument against slave-labor wages in garment and athletic apparel sweatshops. That perspective is the foundation of Kristof's advocacy in Africa and his conviction that America -- or its miserable surrogate, the Bush administration -- could not ignore the slaughter in Darfur:
We're better than that. We are not oblivious or insensitive to the suffering of those who weren't born with a cashmere sweater and a charge card.
Sweatshop proponents just stood up en masse to complain I've introduced my naive, suburban morality into the brutal discussion of economics in the land of the have-nots. This is the crew that argues Nike, Adidas or Champion would ruin those local economies by paying sweatshop workers another dollar per day.
But a moral imperative, not an economic one, is the basis for any incursion into Africa. Kristof admits as much, noting "it already isn't profitable to pay respectable salaries" in Namibia. "It's cheaper to import goods all the way from China than to make them here," a factory owner tells him. That won't change any time soon.
What's needed in the West is a change in perspective. And that brings us back to Roger Clemens.
The Rocket, the winner of seven Cy Young Awards, is making a comeback with Houston at the age of 43. To warm up for his return to the majors, Clemens dropped down to the Astros' Class-A farm team in Louisville, baseball's equivalent of the Third World.
The Louisville clubhouse, he quickly discovered, didn't meet his standards. So Clemens outfitted the place with a 42-inch plasma TV. Bought new furniture. Paid to have the carpet and the showers cleaned.
Mind you, Clemens knew the place was a dump; his son, Kyle, plays for Louisville. But he saw no reason to upgrade the place until the squalor affected him personally.
Devastated by AIDS and poverty, Africa doesn't need sweatshops, where those who still have the strength to work are exploited and ground down by the long hours and meager pay. It needs fresh activists who intervene because they've watched Africa collapse and decided, "We're better than that."
Nicholas Kristof has already done his part. The line forms behind him.
Steve Duin: 503-221-8597; 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201 steveduin [at] news.oregonian.com