As corporate executives wine and dine in expensive restaurants before returning to their palatial estates, women, children and others in foreign countries work in their offshore factories in deplorable conditions for subminimum wages known as ôsweatshops.ö As Landauro (2003) maintains, ôA sweatshop is any business that uses child labor, pays substandard wages, or creates an unsafe workplaceö (8). Globalization has provided big corporations with the opportunity to take advantage of inexpensive labor in such sweatshops, where workers often toil 50-80 hours per week, in unsafe conditions, with many among them women and children.
Such sweatshops are highly unethical and immoral according to utilitarian philosophy. Utilitarianism argues that the ôessential principle of utility is to maximize pleasure and to minimize painö (Ferm 1950, 269). Unfortunately, sweatshops maximize the pleasure for corporate executives and shareholders but maximize pain for those who must try to earn a living in them. Such corporations often take advantage of poverty-ridden individuals in countries like Latin America and Asia by offering work in deplorable and unsafe conditions that pay less than minimum wage. Nike is notorious for maximizing its profitability at the expense of such individuals, ôIts closely controlled contractors pay subminimum wages, prefer countries with regimes that suppress labor organizing, expose workers to hazardous conditions, demand long working hours and even physically abuse employeesö (Moberg 1999, 15).
From a utility perspective, such actions are immoral and unethical because they place one life in a position of greater value than another. None of the executive of Nike would dream of tolerating such conditions nor would they find it moral or ethical to allow their teenage children to labor under such conditions. Take the example of Erica, an 18-year-old Mexican who was fired from her job for complaining
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