Mark Perry is all over a post by Vikas Bajaja on the New York Times Economic Blog titled Garment Factories, Changing Women’s Roles in Poor Countries. Not surprisingly, Vikas doesn’t mention Walmart.

He writes:

What struck me, however, was how their journeys had changed them and their views about life. Take Maasuda Akthar, who moved to Gazipur, a town 30 miles outside Dhaka, when she was 16 with her sister. (I wrote about her in this article about how the Bangladesh garment industry was benefiting from increased labor costs in China.) She married a man whom she met at the factory. As an experienced seamstress, she now makes more money than him. Ms. Akthar, 21, told me that her husband had offered to become the sole breadwinner in the home so that she could stay at home and “be comfortable,” but she refused because she enjoys working. Not only that, she told me she did not plan to have children for a few years.

That young women given access to an independent income would seek additional education and delay childbearing is on surprise. To give Walmart’s rapacious exploitation credit for this phenomenon, however, is disingenuous. Vikas earlier story of how rising labor costs in China was sending capitalists into even less developed nations in search of the lowest cost labor possible is instructive in this case.

There was a time when young women in rural America came to the cities to weave cloth and make clothing. How many garment workers are there left in the United States today. Not many, for the sole reason that they did become better educated, realized that their labor was being stolen from them and they demanded that the bosses pay them for what they were really worth.

Young women in China today are feeling that shift and there will come a time when the young women of Bangladesh may feel it as well, although corporations are running out of undeveloped countries to exploit.

Jeff Hess: Have Coffee Will Write.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 1049 by Jeff Hess and is filed under Economics, India, Low-Wage Capitalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.