http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/images/ngwf.jpgThe media's efforts to promote sweatshops suddenly slowed down after the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, but they seem to be reviving now, just as we approach the third anniversary of the disaster. The occasion for the new pro-sweatshop campaign is Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' opposition to trade pacts like NAFTA and TPP. . . . Sanders' "fair trade" policy would mean "that the poor should remain poor," British writer Tim Worstall announced in a Forbes op-ed. The senator's "anti-trade rhetoric . . . could doom millions to poverty," according to a MarketWatch piece by Kenneth Rogoff (a Harvard economist who may be best known for a notorious data error). "If you're poor in another country, this is the scariest thing Bernie Sanders has said," Zack Beauchamp charged at Vox. The kicker for an article by Slate contributor Jordan Weissmann's article went even further: "Sanders," it proclaimed, "is the developing world's worst nightmare." . . . Both Beauchamp and Weissmann cite "experts" for their positions. Maybe they should listen to a different set of experts -- the people who actually work in the low-wage assembly plants. Far from feeling they need to maintain their "comparable advantage," many of these workers have organized to fight low wages and intolerable conditions, often in the face of government repression.

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