Abigail Martinez earned only 55 cents per hour stitching clothing in an El Salvadoran garment factory. She worked as long as eighteen hours a day in an unventilated room; the company provided undrinkable water. If she upset her bosses they would deny her bathroom breaks or demand that she do cleaning work outside under the hot sun. Abigail’s job sounds horrible. However, many economists defend the existence of sweatshop jobs such as hers.

“In Praise of Cheap Labor: Bad Jobs at Bad Wages Are Better Than No Jobs at All.” Only a right-wing free-market apologist for global capitalism could ever write an article with such an appalling title, right? Wrong. Those are the words of a darling of the left, New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman. Krugman argues that critics have not found a viable alternative to these Third World sweatshops and that the sweatshops are superior to the rural poverty the citizens of these countries would otherwise endure.

Krugman is not alone. After Haiti’s devastating earthquake, Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, prepared a report for the United Nations outlining a reconstruction plan for the country. The development of a Haitian garment industry was central in his plan. He argued that Haiti had good access to key markets and that “due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labour market, Haiti has labour costs that are fully competitive with China.” Collier essentially outlined a sweatshop model of economic development for Haiti.