Column: End world poverty? Shop Wal-Mart?
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How can this be, given the vast and growing literature documenting Wal-Mart's faults? We have seen workers in the factories of Wal-Mart's suppliers complain on tape about being forced to work long hours under terrible conditions. Certainly no one should be forced at any workplace. And yet even articles documenting Wal-Mart's faults often mention other facts that ought to be considered before coming to too quick a judgment concerning the overall impact of the corporation. In a Washington Post story titled "Chinese Workers Pay for Wal-Mart's Low Prices," documenting abuses of workers at Wal-Mart suppliers in China, the authors point out that:
"China is the most populous country, with 1.3 billion people, most still poor enough to willingly move hundreds of miles from home for jobs that would be shunned by anyone with better prospects."
If we care about alleviating global poverty we need to take this fact seriously. Without Wal-Mart, about half a million of these people each year would be stuck in rural poverty that is, for most of them, far worse than sweatshop labor.
D. Gale Johnson, an economist who studied regional inequality within China, described the enormous disparity between urban and rural workers as "the great injustice." Urban workers earn about 2.5 times as much as rural workers. Even after counting the higher cost of living in urban areas, urban workers make about twice as much. Not surprisingly, massive numbers of people are moving to the city to work in factories. In 1990, 71 percent of China's labor force was in agriculture, whereas by 2000 that percentage had dropped to 63 percent: This great migration represents roughly 100 million people leaving rural areas to earn, on average, twice as much as they had on the farm.
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