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Short Speech On Sweatshops

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We began with the resource curse, which is one of the most controversial issues in globalization. But now we move to perhaps even more controversial issue having to do with sweatshops.

Sweatshops occur when foreign companies invest in low-wage factories that produce garments, footwear, toys, and the like. Or, they buy products from subcontractors who have factories producing garments, toys, and footwear.

And these kinds of operations are often subject to abuses. Now here on the Georgetown campus, what I do is, I ask my students to consider what kinds of standards in the treatment of workers are absolute. That is to say, these standards should be observed everywhere, in every country, and never deviated from.

And what kind of standards …show more content…

It usually performs quite well on all the democracy metrics and all the rest across the board about-- internationally, South Africa is very highly regarded. I think that's largely deserved, but if you peel back the onion a little bit and you look in South Africa itself, you see so many entrenched problems that are quite worrying in terms of looking forward about what South Africa's future looks like.

The one that you mentioned of youth unemployment, or unemployment broadly, is a tremendous challenge for this country. And it's one that, quite frankly, they have not been able to deal very well with. If you look at the official unemployment in South Africa, it's somewhere around 25%, which is an enormous number. But unofficially, if you count those who've stopped looking for work, and a more expansive definition of unemployment, it's in the mid-30's or even higher. It's been as high as 44% in recent …show more content…

Business expansion is one possibility, but we haven't seen a significant expansion in the South African private sector, again, to absorb all these people. Many of the private sector companies complain that the education system is insufficient, and that South Africans coming, even with high school graduates and those graduating from South Africa's technical universities, technikons, and even some university graduates are insufficiently qualified for some of the positions that these companies are seeking. Hence, they fill them with educated Zimbabweans and others in many cases.

So it's a multi-layered problem-- one of education, of poverty, of lack of political attention. And it's not necessarily easily fixed. It certainly isn't easily fixed. The strains in South Africa's mining sector, which has historically been the engine of much of the economy, they've had some contraction in various sub-sectors of the mining

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