Alright, but that's an argument why we don't benefit from sweatshop labor, because we just have more and cheaper t-shirts and jeans.
But typically that improvement comes from them working their way up, not them being offered a better deal to start off with.
The point is that the factories in China could have better safety regulations for the workers, less grueling hours, and air conditioning. These are not things that individual employees can work their way up to achieve. These are things that will only change from the top. They aren't done because they cost money. If they were done, Western consumers would have to pay more money for them. But since more material goods don't necessarily make us happier, the money we're saving isn't necessarily translating to increased utility.
Requiring employees to work 13 hour days 7 days a week in miserable conditions DOES, I believe, impact their overall wellbeing in a measurable, negative way. I'm comparing this not to their life before the sweatshop (and even then, I think the overall net gains are debatable), but to what their life COULD be if the sweatshop had better conditions.
The variables are pretty complex, and I don't know for sure what the optimal system is. But I think if consumer pressure was put on companies to treat their employees better, the result would be a world where some people have less money but that overall, actual utility is increased. And this is not something I expect to happen without external pressure forcing companies to do so.
"and even then, I think the overall net gains are debatable" That's not the sort of thing you can assert without explaining. People who work in sweatshops choose to work in sweatshops. People are normally relatively good at choosing what makes them better off. If you think this choice has made them worse off, you have to come up with a reason why so many people choose badly.
Obviously I am assuming they are not forced to work at a sweatshop. Obviously it's bad if they are forced to do so.
Lately I've been thinking about all of the various services and products I consume and how pretty much all of them are bad for the world in one way or another, large or small. Some of the problems associated with them I am less concerned about. Some of them could be construed as good things (i.e. sweat shop labor DOES provide jobs, whatever impact it might or might not have on the overall quality of life).
In general I'd like to live my life having as minimal a negative impact on the world as possible. But "negative impact" is a hugely broad topic and there are a million variables to consider and I just don't have time.
The best solution, I think, would be to have a wikipedia-like website where individual people with knowledge of specific problems can start tagging specific products with the types of negative consequences associated with them, and (somehow) sort those consequences into categories that individuals can decide how much to worry about. Over time it could eventually become a fairly efficient way to track the utility value of things.
I'm sort of hoping something like this already exists, even if in an infant form, and that someone here knows about it. But I doubt it, so the I guess this falls mostly under the post category of "hey someone other than me should devote a bunch of time and energy to this project that I myself am not qualified to do." But maybe a few people here at least have a better idea than I do of the scope of the requirements for it, so the idea can be refined a bit.