Should we boycott child labour ?

In high income countries, there is nearly universal popular support for boycotts against products using child labor or punitive sanctions against countries with high levels of child labor. This essay assumes that the reason for this popular support is a concern for the well- being of these child laborers. Consumer boycotts or sanctions should then be viewed by advocates as successful if they make children in low-income countries better off. This essay argues that much of the popular debate on boycotts and sanctions suffers from a failure to consider what children will do if they are not working. To answer this question, the responsible activist or policymaker must understand why children work. While some circumstances of child laborers are so insidious that policies even more aggressive than boycotts may be justified, most of the work performed by children in low income countries reflects the desperateness of their family's poverty. For these cases, if consumer boycotts diminish the earnings power of children, then the incidence of the boycott can be on the poorest of the poor. In this sense, a consumer boycott of products made with child labor can be equivalent to a consumer boycott of poverty relief for both child laborers and their families.

Top trading with fixed tie-breaking in markets with indivisible goods

We study markets with indivisible goods where monetary compensations are not possible. Each individual is endowed with an object and a preference relation over all objects. When preferences are strict, Gale's top trading cycle algorithm finds the unique core allocation. When preferences are not necessarily strict, we use an exogenous profile of tie-breakers to resolve any ties in individuals' preferences and apply Gale's top trading cycle algorithm for the resulting profile of strict preferences. We provide a foundation of these simple extensions of Gale's top trading cycle algorithm from strict preferences to weak preferences. We show that Gale's top trading cycle algorithm with fixed tie-breaking is characterized by individual rationality, strategy-proofness, weak efficiency, non-bossiness, and consistency. Our result supports the common practice in applications to break ties in weak preferences using some fixed exogenous criteria and then to use a 'good and simple' rule for the resulting strict preferences. This reinforces the market-based approach even in the presence of indifferences because always competitive allocations are chosen.

Exploitation as a Path to Development: Sweatshop Labour, Micro-Unfairness, and the Non-Worseness Claim

Sweatshop labour is sometimes defended from critics by arguments that stress the voluntariness of the worker’s choice, and the fact that sweatshops provide a source of income where no other similar source exists. The idea is if it is exploitation—as their opponents charge—it is mutually beneficial and consensual exploitation. This defence appeals to the non-worseness claim (NWC), which says that if exploitation is better for the exploited party than neglect, it cannot be seriously wrong. The NWC renders otherwise exploitative—and therefore morally wrong—transactions permissible, making the exploitation of the global poor a justifiable path to development. In this paper, I argue that the use of NWC for the case of sweatshops is misleading. After reviewing and strengthening the exploitation claims made concerning sweatshops, most importantly by refuting certain allegations that a micro-unfairness account of exploitation cannot evaluate sweatshop labour as exploitative, I then argue that even if this practice may seem permissible due to benefits otherwise unavailable to the global poor, there remains a duty to address the background conditions that make this form of wrong-doing possible, which the NWC cannot accommodate. I argue that the NWC denies this by unreasonably limiting its scope and is therefore incomplete, and ultimately unconvincing.