Pistof To Third World Children: Get Your Worthless Asses Back To Work

I doubt Nick "Pistof" Kristof sends his own children to work in sweatshops, but he's okay with having kids who don't look like his slave away producing consumer goods for the West. He tries to justify his position based on economics, but fails to make the case.

Pistof writes:

In 1993, when Congress proposed the U.S. Child Labor Deterrence Act, which would have blocked imports made by children (if it had passed), garment factories in Bangladesh fired 50,000 children. Many ended up in worse jobs, like prostitution.

Then there was the hue and cry beginning in 1996 against soccer balls stitched by children in their homes (mostly after school) in Sialkot, Pakistan. As a result, the balls are now stitched by adults, often in factories under international monitoring.

But many women are worse off. Conservative Pakistanis believe that women shouldn't work outside the home, so stitching soccer balls is now off limits for many of them. Moreover, bad publicity about Pakistan led China to grab market share with machine-stitched balls: over the next two years, Pakistan's share of the U.S. soccer ball market dropped to 45 percent from 65 percent.

These examples don't make Kristof's point. When ball-stitching switched from children to adults, the jobs still went to job seeking Pakistanis. And if some jobs went to China, they went to job seeking Chinese citizens. If the Bangladesh factories fired children, they either hired adults or shut down, in which case the jobs went to other factories. In neither case does Pistof claim there was a net loss of jobs or a net increase in poverty when children were no longer employed.

So here's my challenge to self-righteous Pistof: Instead of spending your energy justifying the exploitation of children, why not put your brats to work and have them send their earnings to places like Toukoultoukouli?

Update (4/4): Nathan Newman has a similar response to Kristof's column.