‘Sweatshop labour’ - the production of goods under poor working conditions, including health and safety hazards, arbitrary discipline and restrictions of unions, for extremely low wages - is often criticised for being exploitative. In my paper I take this critique as a starting point and revisit Marxist accounts of exploitation in order to analyse in how far they support the claim that sweatshop labour is exploitative.
My argument runs in two parts. First, I will work out the central features of Marxist accounts of exploitation and defend the most plausible version of a Marxist account, namely Nicholas Vrousalis’ domination based account. I will then show why this particular Marxist account is better able to make sense of sweatshop labour than other (in particular liberal) accounts of exploitation. By including the structural background conditions against which sweatshops are set up and the way in which these bring workers in a position of vulnerability, Vrousalis’ account provides a better explanation for sweatshop labour exploitation and captures intuitions surplus to liberal accounts. In the second step of the argument I will point out one significant limitation of Vrousalis’ account. By focusing on the economic vulnerability of the workers, his account overlooks the way in which gender and race operate in sweatshop labour to facilitate specific forms of exploitation. I will close this paper by outlining the challenge that Vrousalis’ account faces to be better able to accommodate these forms of exploitation.
