One needs to consider the harmful effects on other workers—allowing goods to come into your market that were produced with abysmal safety standards puts pressure on other employers and their regulators to cut corners on safety. Pro-sweatshop logic is stronger at establishing that the sweatshop is not worse than the alternatives for the workers than at establishing its superiority to those alternatives. So the harms to non-sweatshop workers could outweigh any possible minor gains to the sweatshop workers.
I suspect most people are more sympathetic to developed-country workers who object to being undercut by unsafe labor than by inexpensive labor. There’s an understanding that there are certain things you shouldn’t be expected to do to keep your job—agreeing to work in unsafe conditions, sleeping with the boss, voting a specific way—and that society is going to enforce those boundaries. The right to safe working conditions may not mean very much in practice if you can get run out of business by factories outcompeting your employer because they use unsafe labor.
One needs to consider the harmful effects on other workers—allowing goods to come into your market that were produced with abysmal safety standards puts pressure on other employers and their regulators to cut corners on safety. Pro-sweatshop logic is stronger at establishing that the sweatshop is not worse than the alternatives for the workers than at establishing its superiority to those alternatives. So the harms to non-sweatshop workers could outweigh any possible minor gains to the sweatshop workers.
I suspect most people are more sympathetic to developed-country workers who object to being undercut by unsafe labor than by inexpensive labor. There’s an understanding that there are certain things you shouldn’t be expected to do to keep your job—agreeing to work in unsafe conditions, sleeping with the boss, voting a specific way—and that society is going to enforce those boundaries. The right to safe working conditions may not mean very much in practice if you can get run out of business by factories outcompeting your employer because they use unsafe labor.