Very Preliminary Draft:

Comments Welcome, But Not For Citation

Rethinking International Labor Standards

Michael J. Piore
David W. Skinner Professor of Political Economy
Department of Economics, MIT

For Presentation at:

Conference on Labor and the Globalization of Production

Center for Economic Policy Analysis

New School University

March 8, 2002
 Labor standards are moving to center stage in international trade policy, but the
debate has been conducted largely within the framework of competitive economic theory.
In that framework, working conditions are viewed as the outgrowth of an informed
choice by workers and by firms. To make the labor standards of the advanced, industrial
countries a condition for trade is at best the naïve imposition of the values of rich nations
upon the poor in the developing world who can ill afford them. At worst, it is simply
covert protectionism (Bhagwati, 2002). There is a certain abstract logic to this view, but
it is not grounded in field experience. I have been looking at firms in Mexico over the
last six years as they have tried to adjust, first to the opening of that economy to trade and
then to NAFTA, and in Mexico at least these views seem completely out of touch with
reality (Piore, Dussel-Peters and Ruiz-Duran, 1997; and Kuznetsov et al, 2001).
Particularly telling are the firms in Ciudad Hidalgo, a small city in the mountains
of the Mexican state of Michoacan. The major industry is woodworking, and I went
there to visit furniture-making shops as part of a study we were conducting on the impact
of the opening of the Mexican economy to trade upon traditional industries. The city had
been hard hit by this process: there had once been over 3,000 furniture shops, but their
numbers had declined rapidly in the early 1990’s,y and by the time I was there in 1996
there were less than 1,000 left.
The shops were in many ways typical of production in traditional industries such
as clothing, shoes, ceramics and woodworking in Mexico and elsewhere in the
developing world. They were attached to the living quarters of the proprietor,
overflowing into what in other houses in the neighborhood was the living room or the
dinning room or into outbuildings which would otherwise have served as a garage or to
house farm animals. The work was laid out in a helter-skelter fashion, seemingly without
order. And, of particular relevance to the debate about labor standards, there were
children everywhere and of all ages. The older children helped with the work, fetching
wood pieces on command for their parents, painting and varnishing, occasionally even
cutting wood on electric saws, or at least learning how to do so. The younger children
chased each other around the shops, jumping over open vats of glue and varnish; it was
often hard to tell whether they were actually working or just playing games. In one shop,

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there were two babies sleeping on a pile of rags on the floor next to the table where their
mothers worked sanding wood pieces.
Heath and safety was also a problem in these shops, certainly for the kids and
often for the adults as well. The electrical saws were unguarded. The glue and varnish
emitted toxic fumes; the material was probably poisonous if ingested and prolonged
exposure carcinogenic – or at least I knew that this was the case in similar shops I had
visited in Italy in the 1980’s.
But while the shops in Ciudad Hidalgo violated the rudimentary child labor norms
and health and safety standards of advanced industrial economies right and left, they were
not without a set of norms and standards of their own. Much of what was going on, in
fact, was not child labor at all, but child care. The women who were working were also
watching; they would stop work to nurse a baby when it awoke or mind the children if
the games got out of hand. The line between play and work was fluid. As the children
grew up, they were drawn progressively into the work process – the line between work
and play shifted gradually in a way that one could imagine more or less protected the
health and safety of the kids and respected the limits of their physical and mental
capacities. For the older kids whom we saw being taught to use the electrical equipment,
the work was still something of a game. Imposing international standards upon these
shops would have been in this sense a kind of cultural imperialism.
The shops of Ciudad Hidalgo were not, however, efficient; they were having real
trouble competing in the international marketplace; and the blatant violation of
international standards was not helping matters, indeed quite the contrary. In fact, we
were following in the footsteps of a consultant who had been hired to help upgrade their
operations and part of our mission was to evaluate his impact. The owners explained to
us what was pretty evident to anyone familiar with modern production techniques, that
the layout needed to be altered to smooth the flow of work, and the aisles cleared. They
showed us, as the consultant had showed them, that the open vats of glue and varnish
collected sawdust, which spoiled the finish on the wood. The children were a distraction
which continually threatened the quality and the consistency of the work. Most of the
changes the consultant had recommended to improve efficiency would clearly have
improved health and safety as well. One had to conclude that if the changes had been

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imposed by international labor standards, however imperialistic, they would have
contributed to efficiency. Certainly, covering the barrels to protect them from the
sawdust would have also protected the workers from the noxious fumes and reduced the
chances that the kids would ingest the poisonous material. Clearing passageways through
the shop and isolating the equipment in well-defined work stations would have made it
easy to install guard rails. But an efficient layout would also have repositioned the
mothers into places where they could no longer see their babies or watch the older
children. No amount of reorganization could completely eliminate the distraction of
small children running around the shop. Ultimately, an efficient shop by western
standards would have sent the children home.
None of these reforms were actually introduced in Ciudad Hidalgo. This was
partly because the shops could not afford the continuing help of outside consultants that
was required to upgrade their operations. But, more fundamentally, because the children
were already home; they had nowhere else to go. Indeed, the child labor is basically one
symptom of a more fundamental problem of these shops: the way in which productive
activity is interwoven with, and inseparable from, the household. Thus, business and
household finances were intermingled; the shop which, by common consensus, had the
best designs and the most refined craftsmanship had been driven to the edge of
bankruptcy when the head of the household fell sick and the working capital of the
business was diverted to pay for his surgery. Others families lost their homes or their
transportation when the business went broke. Infrastructure – transport, water, sewage –
was inadequate because most of the shops were located in residential neighborhoods and
interspersed with private dwellings. The shops were, in fact, a perfect illustration of one
of Max Weber’s basic points about industrial capitalism: that its emergence requires the
introduction – indeed in early capitalism it required the invention – of a distinction
between the business and the household realms (Weber, 1958).
In late capitalism, at least in a country like the United States, it actually involves
the creation of a third realm, a realm of education, which frees women from the
responsibilities of childcare to enter the labor market. The conventional wisdom in
development policy is that prohibitions on child labor are only effective when
accompanied by the expansion of the school system (Weiner,1991).

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 Unable to restructure their production process, the furniture shops in Ciudad
Hidalgo were responding the pressures of the international marketplace unleashed by the
opening to trade by cutting costs, reducing employment levels, intensifying the pace of
work, and cutting wages. The result was to compromise prevailing standards and weaken
protective structures. As the pace of work increased, people were distracted from
watching the children; even when they remained committed to coming to their aid in a
crisis, they were less likely to anticipate problems. Children who normally never would
have been allowed to touch dangerous equipment unsupervised began to do so. As the
amount of adult labor in the shop was reduced, children were drawn into production
prematurely or prematurely assigned tasks inappropriate for their age. Thus, if the
production system prior to trade could be said to respect its own set of standards,
however much they might have deviated from those of the industrial world, the impact of
trade was to force them to violate not only international standards but also their own
standards. They may have been better off materially than if they had failed to respond to
the pressures of globalization at all – indeed, if that had happened they would have gone
out of business. But they would have been much more competitive internationally, and
better off materially as well, had they adopted a production system consistent with our
labor standards.
This is no accident: it follows directly from the nature of the global forces to
which the opening to trade is subjecting the Mexican economy. Those forces are coming
from the industrialized world. The problem the traditional industries are having in
Mexico – and in the developing world more broadly – is that they cannot meet industrial
standards of quality and reliability. They are forced therefore to compensate for their
defects by reducing prices. They have to find some way of meeting those standards.
Since the standards are coming from the industrialized world, it is clear that one way of
meeting them is to adopt the production practices of the industrialized world as well. The
labor standards of the industrialized world are consistent with those production practices
because they were developed in combination with them. Indeed, where the production
practices could not be modified to meet those labor standards, the standards were
probably adjusted to the production practices. The “cultural” imperialism – if that is the
right way to think about what is happening – is thus coming from international

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competition, and the developing countries opened themselves up to its dynamics when
they opened their economies to trade.
The real question is not whether the practices the industrial economies are
pursuing are more effective than those which Ciudad Hidalgo is adopting, but rather
whether there is actually a third way, a set of practices that would enable Ciudad Hidalgo
to compete in the international marketplace without simply becoming a carbon copy of,
to put it in the crudest terms, a small town American city.
One such alternative, more compatible with traditional household production and
the labor standards which grew up around it in Ciudad Hidalgo, is to move up-market
into the production of customized items for specialty niche markets. This strategy had
been developed extensively by the industrial districts of central Italy in the 1970’s and
almost a century earlier by the English districts described by Alfred Marshall (Pyke,
Becattini and Sengenberger, 1990; Schmitz and Nadvi, 1999). Marshall maintained that
in the English districts people absorbed the craft skills and sense of the materials from the
very air they breathed, which is surely the experience of children growing up playing in
the shops of Ciudad Hidalgo. This kind of production, of course, has exacting standards
of quality as well, but they are very different from the quality standards of industrial
production. The latter involve an emphasis on reliability and consistency: production to
precise specifications, within a well-defined and limited margin of error. The standards
of niche markets are much closer to the aesthetic of craftsmanship: novelty and an
absolute standard of perfection. These standards are consistent with the leisurely pace of
work and the informal organization of the Ciudad Hidalgo shops. Production for
particular market niches would also require a considerable adjustment on the part of the
producers of Ciudad Hidalgo but one which would in many ways be easier for the true
craftsmen among them to understand and appreciate than the industrial standards, which
focus on consistent production of medium quality goods and are often quite alien to the
craft aesthetic. We actually encountered one furniture-maker in Michoacan (although not
in Ciudad Hidalgo) who had quite successfully adopted a niche strategy of this kind.
Also, the traditional industries of Jalisco have recently begun to systematically pursue an
approach modeled on central Italy.

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The New Garment Industry in Mexico
Most of the “traditional” industries of Mexico today, however, are really new.
While traditional firms are sweating to survive in the face of international competition,
and many are going out of business, a whole new productive structure composed of new
firms and new plants is taking their place, especially in the garment industry. Mexico has
become the largest foreign producer for the U.S. clothing market. The new plants are tied
closely to foreign firms, either owned directly or operating as subcontractors. The plants
are laid out and organized in accordance with the most up-to-date engineering and
management principles. Indeed, they are typically designed by engineers from the parent
company, or in the case of subcontractors the principle client. These engineers also train
the first generation labor force and managerial staff; and a small staff of engineers from
the parent company or client is usually permanently out-stationed in these plants to make
sure that standards are maintained over time. The plants thus look and feel very much
like their counterparts abroad. They have the look and feel of modernity which contrasts
sharply with traditional producers in Mexico and even with smaller garment shops in
urban centers such as those in New York and Los Angeles. There are no small children
in the shop; they are more spacious and have better ventilation; rudimentary health and
safety is better too. But the plants are typically more labor intensive than the U.S. plants
upon which they are modeled; they use less capital equipment and work the equipment
that they do have more intensively, so the pace of work is faster as well. Because of the
pace and because there is less machinery to move bundles around, the work is a good
deal more strenuous than it would be in a typical American shop. The workforce is
composed largely of young women most of whom start working in the industry before
they have children, and children are not tolerated in the plant. The real danger is the
impact of the strenuous and repetitive labor. It would be hard to say that the workers are
rationally choosing to pay for their material well-being in this way, since the cost in terms
of health is only apparent over time, and the factories have not been in place long enough
for the effects to become apparent.
Fairly typical of these new traditional industries are the garment plants in
Tehuacan, which Natasha Iskander studied last summer (Iskander, 2000; Iskander, 2002).
The workforce there is composed largely of migrants:

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 “The vast majority … are young campesinos, in their mid-teens or early
twenties, from surrounding rural hamlets in the mountains. Their
departure represents a death-knell for the dying rural economies that they
abandon, making it much more likely that their move to Tehuacan will be
permanent. The social setting that they confront in Tehuacan has
challenges they were unlikely to face in their home communities. Drug
use among maquilla workers is relatively widespread, with speed being
the drug of choice as it makes it easier to withstand the intense pace of
production lines. High levels of sexual activity among workers are
commonplace, and community health workers are already expressing
concern that maquillas are strong centers of HIV transmission. A more
visible expression of the sexual activity among maquilla workers is the
rate of single motherhood: according to the public health department
(regidor de salud), approximately 80% of all women who work in
maquillas are single mothers, a source of real concern for the municipality
that may ultimately have to provide childcare as mothers have moved far
away from the family structure that would otherwise have provided that
kind of support (Ayudamieto de Tehuacan, 2000).” (Iskander, 2000)

Work standards is too narrow a focus to capture the full impact of the emergent
garment industry which Iskander points out:

“…. misses the impact that maquillas have on workers’ lives outside
factory doors. In Tehuacan, these impacts were at least as damaging and
more enduring that the hardships workers experienced on production lines.
Tehuacan was once famous for its plentiful and pure mineral
waters, said to have curative properties. Now, the water table drops by a
meter and a half annually as factories that stone- and acid-wash the
assembled jeans supplement their extravagant use of water with illegal
wells that tap into rapidly diminishing underground reserves, threatening
this arid and isolated region with permanent drought (OOSAPAT, 2000).
These industrial launderers dump the used water, largely untreated, into
the local rudimentary drainage system and the opaque bright blue waters,
heavy in lead and other chemical content, run through the town in shallow
unlined canals. Children play in and around these waters, and the
contaminants seep through the soil to nearby household wells that are the
only source of supposedly potable water available to many families.
Gastrointestinal problems are already a significant problem in many
neighborhoods, and the longer term health impacts of this pollution are
already beginning to manifest, with the municipality of Tehuacan
displaying an alarming rate of birth defects (Centro de Salud, 2000).
Several branches of the drainage system flow directly into the waters that
local farmers use to irrigate their fields, and in many areas the soil is
stained blue. To address the threat of immediate contamination to crops
posed by the industrial discharge, the municipality has ordered farmers to

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 cultivate only “tall” crops such as maize and has banned altogether the
harvest of “short” crops like tomatoes, cilantro and cabbage from many
fields. Unfortunately, these measures do nothing to deal with the long-
term impact that the contaminants will have on soil fertility, most likely
turning them into inarable and dusty stretches of arid land (Secretaria de
Ecologia 2000).
In addition to ecological damage, the maquillas in Tehuacan are
responsible for significant social dislocation in the town itself and in the
surrounding areas. With production that has doubled every year for the
last five years, the maquillas have set off a landslide of new immigration
that has literally overwhelmed the city. The municipality’s Department of
Urban Planning estimates that about 14,000 new migrants move to
Tehuacan every 6 months. The new arrivals settle in makeshift informal
settlements at the town’s outskirts, quickly erecting houses of sheet metal
and woodscraps. These new shantytowns lack even the most basic
infrastructure, with their absence of potable water significantly
complicating Tehuacan’s perpetual struggle against cholera outbreaks.
(Secreatria de Desarrollo Urbano, 2000).” (Iskander, 2000)

The way in which the new productive structure is wearing away at the human and
physical infrastructure of Tehuacan is particularly troubling because the garment industry
is notoriously fickle. It is easy for virgin industrial territories like Tehuacan to attract the
industry because its location decisions are motivated almost entirely by low wages and
abundant labor. The raw materials and finished product are light and easily transported
in and out, and the capital equipment is minimal. But for these same reasons its roots in
these new areas are shallow. And the growth which the industry creates when it first
moves in has repeatedly proven short-lived. When wages rise and labor becomes scarce,
the industry moves on to other parts. Examples of places that have been used and then
abandoned include Puerto Rico, which grew miraculously in the 1950's and 1960's only
to stagnate in the 1970's and 1980's when the industry moved out to other Caribbean
islands, Asia, and El Paso, Texas, from whence many of the plants now in Mexico came.
A strategy of garment-led industrial development makes sense if the prosperity is used to
build a base which will attract a second generation of more sophisticated industry, but the
uneducated, illegitimate children, overburdened urban infrastructure, and polluted natural
resource base which the industry is producing in Tehuacan are not a legacy that is likely
to have this effect.

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China
Tehuacan, however, is not the only pattern of garment industry development. A
very different model is found in China, one which offers a solution to much of what is
problematic in the way the industry has developed in Mexico. In China, new garment
plants are also staffed by migrants from rural villages, but the women live in dormitories
built by the company adjacent to the plant, in special compounds surrounded by chain
link fences. The women are sheltered from the corrupting influence of drugs and sex, the
company bears the cost of new urban infrastructure required to support the expanding
population and the development of shantytowns is forestalled. The physical damage to
the territory occurs within a contained space. The earnings of the workers are transmitted
directly to their families who remain behind in the villages from which the women came,
and the women themselves return there to reenter village life when their tour of duty in
the factories is complete. But the virtues of China's approach to garment production is
also its defect. The women are virtual prisoners in these factories; they do not have
access to the outside world; nobody really knows what the pace of work is within, nor to
what materials they might be exposed; and the workers are barred access to outsiders who
might encourage them to question the conditions under which they work and to organize
to seek redress. They are under enormous pressures from their families at home to earn
as much as they possibly can. They have no effective voice in their work lives and no
effective opportunity to exit either (Berger and Lester, 1997).

New Industry: Electronics and Software

The dormitory/factory communities in China are not, of course, a new invention.
They are a revival of a pattern of labor recruitment and deployment that was
characteristic of the New England textile industry in the early 19th century, before the
great waves of foreign immigration, when American industry was dependent on drawing
workers out of domestic agriculture. But there are actually patterns of work organization
in developing economies that do not have longstanding historical roots. Virtually every
major company in the global computer industry has located a facility in Guadalajara,
Mexico, and all of them rely almost entirely on a system of contract labor that completely
undermines conventional notions of industrial employment. Over 7,000 people work in

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IBM’s El Salto computer facility for example, but only 612 are permanent IBM
employees. All of the rest, from computer programmers at the top of the occupation
hierarchy to mother board assemblers at the bottom, work either as independent
contractors or as subcontractors who operate production lines inside IBM’s premises.
Twelve thousand others work at adjacent manufacturing facilities (Kuznetsov et al,
2001). The pattern in Guadalajara is extreme, but the tendency toward employment
arrangements of this kind is characteristic of the electronics industry throughout the
world, in the U.S., no less than in Asia and Latin America. It is very hard to know what
to make of these arrangements. They abrogate the tradition notion of the employer and
confuse legal responsibility. They have been used in other industries to evade
conventional labor standards, and in the U.S. at least studies have shown that they lead to
significant increases in industrial accidents (Kochan, Smith, Wells, and Rebitzer, 1994) .
But it has been argued with some cogency that the computer industry is organized around
the concept of a project, which requires a continual shifting of the mix of skills in a
manner comparable to the construction industry, and that the notion of permanent
employment under these circumstances is obsolete.

What can one conclude?

What conclusions can one draw from these several examples for the question
about international labor standards. The examples, it is seems to me, make very dubious
the claim of neoclassical economists that prevailing standards represent the informed
choice of rational agents in the face of the constraints imposed by inherently limited
resources in an underdeveloped economy. There is no particular reason to believe that
the prevailing conditions are the best that these people can do even in the short run, and
certainly no reason to believe that they contribute to long run economic development.
The workers and the communities in which they live may just as well be the victims of
the process of globalization as its beneficiaries.
On the other hand, the specific problems presented in each of the four cases are
very different. The first (Ciudad Hidalgo) presents the question of enforcing a set of
indigenous standards under pressure from international competition. The second
(Tehuacan) involves the enforcement of standards in a system of production imported

10
from abroad, where the source country has a great deal of experience in dealing with the
problems this strategy of production poses for working conditions. In all three cases, but
particularly the contrast between Tehuacan and China, the question is the relationship
between labor standards narrowly conceived and the broader choices which the country
(or the locality) has to confront in the face of the challenge of economic development.
The problems of evaluating labor standards in the electronics industry in Guadalajara are
almost precisely the same as those of evaluating standards in the electronics industry in
the United States, and in both cases regulations have to negotiate territory for which there
is relatively little relevant historical experience. These problems are so different that it is
difficult to imagine a single set of standards that would cover all of them or a single set of
institutions that would address the problems they present, even on a national level, let
alone a set of international institutions.
The contrasting cases do, however, begin to suggest a set of principles which
might guide the search for an institutional structure that would address the problems of
labor standards. Four basic principles seem to arise directly:
• First, one would want a system which respected the existing standards of production
systems that were embedded in an established social order, such as that of the
furniture industry in Ciudad Hidalgo before it came under the pressure of global
competition.
• Second, one would like a system which was flexible enough so that established
systems could adjust to changes in the competitive environment in a reasoned and
informed way. In Ciudad Hidalgo, specifically, one would like the producers there to
be able to choose a different productive system, even if one were willing to accept a
debased version of the system already in place.
• Third, one would like to be able to draw upon the experience of industrialized
countries in coping with the systems which had grown up there and were being
exported to other parts of the world. It is one thing to say that the people of
Tehuacan, or China, are deciding that they cannot afford to respect the health and
safety standards of the United States and quite another for them not to know about the
dangers to health and safety to which those standards are a response.

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• Finally, one would like to encourage informed debate and discussion, particularly
discussion and debate which linked labor standards to the broader issue of economic
development. This last goal is in some ways implicit in the conventional economic
argument that the developing countries whose labor standards we view as debased are
making a calculated choice. But they seem to reinforce the value of informed choice
itself.

A Regulatory Structure
While it is hard to imagine a single set of regulations and institutions that would
handle all of these cases, it is possible to envisage pieces of a regulatory structure that
would address many of them. Seemingly the easiest and most relevant are those
governing traditional industries in the industrialized countries. Here the experience is
extensive and the regulations were put in place at a much earlier moment of history when
their income was low and the workers often lived on the margin of subsistence. The
concern that rich countries are imposing their preferences on the developing world, which
cannot afford the luxury of such labor standards, is minimal.
These regulations could be imposed simply by extending the legal obligations of
companies from the United States, for example, to their foreign direct investments. We
do that already with legislation on bribery and on intellectual property; it is hard to
distinguish these precedents from labor rights. The obligations of companies in the
industrial world could be extended further to their subcontractors. U.S. companies have
been particularly resistant to this obligation, claiming that the monitoring of labor
conditions in subcontracts imposes an intolerable burden upon them. But when one
actually sees the relationship between the contract and subcontractor in Mexico, that
claim is patently absurd. They exercise the most stringent control over anything that
affects the quality and reliability of the product. And, in fact, one of the conditions which
they impose on their suppliers is that the supplier cut off the whole chain of secondary
and tertiary contractors, which is typical of the garment industry in most of the world,
precisely because it is so difficult to control quality and reliability along an extensive
contracting chain (Gereffi, Spener and Bair, 2002). While these regulations have been
slow to develop through law, they are in fact growing out of consumer movements, and

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non-governmental regulatory processes have developed through negotiations with major
brand name producers of clothing and shoes (O’Rourke, 2001; Fung, O'Rourke and
Sabel, 2001).

Sweatshops
The longest-standing labor standards are those controlling the sweatshops in the
garment industry. Sweatshops have their economic roots in a particular type of cost
structure, a cost structure in which labor is the major cost of production and workers are
paid by the piece. Where this is the case, the major cost which is independent of output is
rent for the space in which the work takes place. For this reason, the employer tries to
minimize rent by cramming as many workers and material into the production space as
possible. The crowded conditions and the health hazards associated with them often have
a detrimental effect on worker productivity, but the impact on the employers is
minimized by piece rates, which effectively shift the cost of the sweatshop to the worker
and eliminate any incentive which the employer might have to control working
conditions as all. The ultimate logic of this system of production is industrial homework,
where the worker even pays the rent and all costs are variable. The system also
encourages child labor since the piece rate system compensates for a child’s low
productivity.
The system was finally brought under control by a complex set of regulations,
ranging from health and safety standards which limited the impact of crowded conditions
in the shop, to child labor laws, and a minimum hourly wage which controlled the piece
rate system. In the United States, we actually outlawed industrial homework as well.
The regulations were administered by a variety of different agencies but since they were
all attacking the same basic system of production, the efforts of these agencies reinforced
each other (Piore, 1990).
The laws governing the sweatshop in the garment industry date from the early
twentieth century and were the culmination of efforts which began at least twenty years
before. These efforts were spearheaded by immigrant workers, at a time when their
income was comparable to those in Mexico or China today. It is difficult to argue that

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the regulations constitute a luxury which only the high income workforce of modern
industrial nations would rationally chose.
But the extension of sweatshop regulations would do little to reach the problems
suggested by the cases described above, and in some respects they would foreclose
important alternatives. Their greatest impact would be on the production system that has
developed in Ciudad Hidalgo under the impact of trade. That system is a sweatshop
system, and an extension of the sweatshop regulations to Mexico would foreclose it. The
problem is that the regulations might well foreclose the production system that had
prevailed in Ciudad Hidalgo before the opening to trade and the kinds of adjustment
patterns modeled on the shops of the industrial districts of central Italy. The regulatory
structure might limit the abuses in the large garment factories of Tehuacan and China, but
these production systems are not sweatshops. The fixed capital investment is large
enough to foreclose a true sweatshop. Basic health and safety compares favorably – quite
favorably in fact – to unionized shops in New York City. The major problem in these
shops appears to be the pace of work and the length of the work day; and these
characteristics of the production system are not really reached by the sweatshop
regulations. Clearly a different regulatory system is required here, and to reach the issues
involved in Ciudad Hidalgo, a much more subtle one, one which respects local variation
and accommodates to it.

Respecting Local Differences

Collective Bargaining in the United States

It is possible to design a system of social regulation that respects local differences.
Decentralized collective bargaining in the United States, although it has come under
attack in recent decades for its bureaucratic rigidity, actually functioned in this way. The
underlying theory upon which the system was built is that each shop was in fact a social
system with its own code of behavior, and that the code represented a compromise which
had evolved over time between the technical and the economic exigencies of production
and the social standards of the work place. Pressures from one side or the other operated
to push practice outside the bounds the code permitted. Collective bargaining was a

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means of amending and updating that code, through negotiations to accommodate these
pressures. But it was also a framework for enforcing the code through the systematic
adjudication of disputes. Adjudication, however, required experts skilled in uncovering
and interpreting these local laws (or more precisely customs). A group of specialized
labor arbitrators grew up who cultivated and practiced precisely these skills of local
adjudication. At the apogee of the postwar system of collective bargaining in the United
States, the U.S. courts deferred completely to the judgment of these skilled arbitrators.
As the Supreme Court held up in its 1960 decision:
“The collective bargaining agreement covers the whole employment
relationship. It calls into being a new common law—the common law of a
particular industry or a particular plant . . . [It] is an effort to erect a
system of industrial self-government . . . [T]he grievance procedure is at
the very heart of the system of industrial self-government. Arbitration is
the means of solving of unforeseeable by molding a system of private law.
[It is the end point in the process] by which meaning and content is given
to the collective bargaining agreement.” (United Steelworkers of America
v. Warrior and Gulf Navigation Co, 1960)

Bureaucratic Regulation in France

The U.S. system of labor law is among the most extreme in its decentralization
and its deference to local practice. But the French labor code, while in theory at the very
other end of the spectrum with a nominally uniform code and administered by a corps of
bureaucrats in the Ministry of Labor, operates very much to the same effect. The code is
so complex that the bureaucrats who enforce it, the inspecteurs du travail, cannot
possibly apply it literally. They use it instead as an instrument for maintaining a social
order, the terms of which vary from one region to another, and the industry, the shop, and
each inspector attempts to balance the custom of the workplace against the pressures of
the economic environment (Berger and Piore, 1980; Duprilot, 1975).
Such a system, especially on an international scale, is not without its problems.
First of all, it is difficult to imagine the American system at least without worker
representation. It is, after all, the workers’ participation in collective bargaining which
makes it possible to change the rules to adjust to variation in the business environment.
But employers are at least as resistant to procedural protections for workers rights as they
are to substantive standards. These rights have in fact been severely compromised by the

15
decline in union membership in much of the industrial world over the last twenty years,
most especially in the United States where legal protections have diminished as well.
The French system substitutes a corps of highly trained government officials for union
representation (Duprilot, 1975). But this kind of elite bureaucracy has proven very
difficult for developing countries to create and sustain. The framework of rules which
such a bureaucracy administers, moreover, gathers its legitimacy and much of its
flexibility from the potential for amendment through the political process; and developing
countries, most notably China, have been unwilling to guarantee the most basic rights of
free speech and free press which would make such a process meaningful. These,
however, are political obstacles which have nothing to do with the economists’ case
against labor standards as a luxury of the rich or covert protectionism.

The Inflexibility of Flexible Systems

The more telling problem, however, is economic, albeit not of the kind which has
generally been raised as an objection to standards as a condition for trade: In recent
years, both the French and American systems have proven to be much less flexible in
practice than in earlier periods. This, it appears, is because of the radical changes in the
business environment and productive technology which these countries, no less than
Mexico, have sought to accommodate. The systems governing the workplace evidently
are quite capable of compromise within the framework of a given production system by
amending one rule or discarding another. But what has been at stake since the first oil
crisis in the developed world is the ability to shift from one production system to another.
Indeed, what existed in France and the United States is not perhaps all that different from
what prevailed in Ciudad Hidalgo before the opening to trade. Evidently, it would seem
to be a tendency for all social systems to generate work codes, sometimes embodied in
national law, sometimes left to more local and less formally instituted processes, which
govern work relations. The codes grow out of the interaction between market pressures
and social norms and evolve over time. But the process of gradual evolution can be
overwhelmed by the sudden surge of market pressure, such as those coming out of great
depressions and world wars, or the sudden opening of previously closed economies like
Mexico to trade, or the combined forces of trade, deregulation, and new technology with

16
which American industries tried to cope in 1970’s and 1980’s. The economy cannot
always adjust to these kinds of surges within an existing production system. When the
changes in the environment are permanent, in fact, firms probably need to adopt or invent
totally new systems of production to survive. For such radical adjustments, the moral
code of the old system acts as a major inhibition. People resist new practices as immoral
when, in fact, those practices lie totally outside the range which the moral system was
designed to judge. What is required is not the application of the norms of the old system
to the new, but the development of a moral code appropriate to the new work context.
International experience could presumably facilitate such transition by providing a menu
of alternative systems and moral codes which go with them and hence helping to
distinguish between a shift in “moral compass” so to speak and a kind of moral anarchy.
Ultimately, to accomplish a shift of this kind in a way that is perceived as moral
requires that people recognize that morality exists on at least two levels. One of those
levels is concrete, embodied in the specific code associated with a prevailing production
system. But those concrete codes are embedded in a second, more fundamental set of
abstract moral principles; the concrete codes are basically an interpretation of the abstract
principles in a particular context; and those principles get reinterpreted as one moves
from one such context to another (Piaget, 1965; Bloch, 1961). It is not clear that such
shifts in the level of moral judgment and across different concrete moral systems could be
managed by a system of international jurisprudence. But the international community
might nonetheless play a role. It might be able articulate, and gain adherence to, a
common set of abstract moral principles. The application of those principles to formulate
concrete codes for particular production systems and the decision to move from one such
code to another must grow out of very local discussion and debate. But the international
experience could probably inform these local discussions as well.
Viewed in these terms, one of the problems with the international regulations that
have been discussed historically, particularly those promulgated by the ILO, is that they
are linked to the particular production systems, essentially those associated with large-
scale mass production. As such they are too specific. This is one of the reasons
underlying the split between the formal economy, which in the past at least has been
guided by the organizational principles of mass production and the informal economy,

17
where a variety of other production systems prevail. This was less of a problem when we
had a clear view of what industrial society was all about and where it was headed. The
informal economy then seemed like the vestiges of a system which would eventually
disappear. But in recent years, our vision of what a modern economy looks like and how
it will evolve over time has become much more confused. Many of the production
systems associated with the informal economy seem to be reappearing in the high tech
start-ups.

The Conventional Framework

A framework for thinking about this problem is suggested by the French school of
economic sociology known as the conventionalist school. Their work grows out of
studies by Luc Boltanski of what he calls denunciation: attacks conceived within one
system of moral judgement upon practices conceived in another (Boltanski, Darre
Schiltz, 1984). Boltanski then went on with Laurent Thévenot to develop a typology of
moral systems and a research program which explores the relationship between these
moral types and a parallel typology of production systems (Boltanski and Thévenot,
1987).
This work begs the question of where the alternative moral systems come from in
the first place and how they become linked to particular systems of production. The
conjecture implicit in their work – and indeed in the argument I have been developing
here – is that differences in moral standards governing the workplace reflect differences
in production systems, not in national cultures. Their initial typology was abstracted
from a reading of philosophical texts, guided by Boltanski’s early work on denunciation.
But recently, Boltanski has been studying the emergence of a totally new moral system
associated with the production paradigm growing up around information technology
(Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999). This study suggests the rudiments of a theory of how
new types of morality emerge from the production system itself.
This research does not resolve the labor standards debate. It does, however, help
us to identify a domain of common international standards for situations like those in the
garment industry where there is considerable commonality across nations in the menu of
production system from which they can chose. It also helps us to understand what the

18
limits of commonality are. And it provides a framework for gathering international
experience and for organizing it in a way in which people from different cultures can
make informed, moral choices in situations which lie beyond the range of their own
experience. It can be viewed not so much as an alternative to the conceptual framework
of economics, which has dominated the standards debate, but as a complement, a
framework which explicitly recognizes moral judgment and makes it a central focus. It
might enable us, by comparison among the moral standards of many different production
systems, to identity a set of abstract principles which underlie moral choice more broadly.
If one were to develop the list of abstract principles which underlie the specific moral
codes associated with particular production systems, the debate about labor standards
suggests that one item on the list would be the principle of informed choice, implicit in
the economists’ critique of international standards. Perhaps paradoxically, the research
agenda of the conventionalist school may make it possible to approach the economists’
ideal in a way that the framework in which their critique of labor standards was
conceived does not.

19
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