>Okay, my mother worked as a child sweatshop laborer in Taiwan in the 60s, before the country bootstrapped itself out of abject, agrarian poverty, and I take issue with this. It's a straw man; her family was extremely poor, but not in danger of starvation. Without sweatshop labor she wouldn't have starved to death, but she also wouldn't have been able to go to school, get educated, get employed in a white collar job, and eventually move abroad. Anecdotes do not data make, but knee-jerk emotional reactions and weasel words don't help anyone.

Well thats leaps and bounds from what the article is portraying, in China university costs are around 15000 RMB / year minimum, a person working in such a factory would have to work for a whole year and save everything just to be able to afford one year in university. Furthermore, you would have to pass the national university entrance exam, which is very competitive. Finding jobs a white collar job as a university grad is now hard, as grads are a dime a dozen. And to go abroad you will have to be a top notch student, or have substantial capital - an even more preposterous proposition.