Have you ever suddenly forgotten something that you’ve known for years or even decades? Like the words to The Star Spangled Banner or the name of an old friend?

Sometimes we forget things that are second nature to us. We take them for granted for so long that one day they simply float out of our consciousness and fall onto the floor without making a sound.

This phenomenon doesn’t only happen with names and song lyrics. It can happen with our most cherished values. If we don’t think about them and re-examine them from time to time, we can forget the reasons why those values are a part of us. And that leaves us wide open to complacency and makes us vulnerable to clever arguments from those whose values are in fact contradictory to our own.

The problem of sweatshops offers a perfect example. There’s always been a somewhat tempting argument out there that we needn’t worry about sweatshops because they are a “natural” and temporary step in the lifecycle of developing nations. The proof of this, the argument goes, is that they are better than the alternative, otherwise people wouldn’t take the jobs.

The appeasement of injustice inherent in this argument is easily seen through when the argument is spoken by people who view success in the free market as a moral good. But a similar argument has also come from more compassionate voices, notably in a recent op-ed in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof.

This piece generated substantial buzz. If you google the term "sweatshops," it now comes up as the sixteenth entry. (Thus, support for sweatshops from the left is now a standing part of the international dialog on this issue.) And—judging by the echoes and plaudits that it received around the web—the piece caused a great deal of second-guessing among progressives about whether or not we need to keep fighting to eradicate sweatshops.

As the popularity of Kristof’s article shows, the anti-sweatshop movement can’t afford to assume that rational people who are proponants of justice have fully internalized the reasons to oppose sweatshops. So, for those who find Kristof’s argument appealing, allow me to offer the following counter point.

Kristof claims that working in a sweatshop is “a cherished dream” for many people in the developing world. This may be the case, but dreams don’t always turn out so well when they come true. Just ask the thousands of young Chinese girls who are sent by their families to work in big-city factories only to become indentured servants without the funds to return home to the countryside, even if they wanted to.

And even in those cases where sweatshop labor is an improvement, how does that excuse us from inaction when so many workers are subjected to forced overtime, criminally low wages, unsafe conditions, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment; all while the executives of the clothing giants who order from these factories are living high on the hog?

The main problem with Kristof’s argument is that he seems to assume that the goal of the anti-sweatshop movement is to shut down factories where sweatshop abuses take place. In fact, it is understood within the movement that shutting down a factory in the face of a campaign by workers to better their condition is in and of itself a sweatshop condition. Sweatshop activists don’t want workers to lose their jobs. We’re saying that those jobs should be dignified ones in which workers earn something approaching their fair share of the profits of their labor.

Some factory workers may indeed prefer sweatshops over the alternatives Kristof presents, which include trying to scratch a living out of the garbage dumps in Phnom Penh. However, most still reside in abject poverty without meaningful hope for upward movement. One of the main goals of the anti-sweatshop movement is to help create a global middle class of blue collar workers. Wherever the movement succeeds, greater democracy and a thriving civil society are likely to follow. And this, as much as direct aid or anything else that sweatshop apologists might propose to do, will help that family living in a garbage dump in Phnom Penh, dreaming of sweatshops.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a diary at Talking Points Memo with more discussion on this same topic.