Tow #22 - "Uncle Sam's Sweatshops"

 In today’s economy, the "best" way to manufacture a product is to find cheapest way to do it.  Outsourcing manufacturing has sky rocketed for many large retailers, as the labor is much cheaper.  However, because the job is being outsourced to developing nations, the conditions that workers labor under are often pitiful and unfair.  While the US government has called on retailers to improve these conditions, it seems that the government itself has not been following their own orders.  In the New York Times editorial, “Uncle Sam’s Sweatshops,” the editorial board at the New York Times uses examples and possible solutions to address the poor conditions of those who work to manufacture governmental merchandise and calls on the government to make a change.

In the second paragraph, the author immediately draws the reader to occurrences that happened in several different instances.  The author states that, “A factory in Bangladesh that makes uniforms for the General Services Administration beats workers to keep them in line.”  The use of these horrible instances help to perfectly exemplify the injustices that are occurring, and how the government is going against their own ideas.  By using these examples, the author is tugging at the emotions of the audience as they feel sympathetic for the laborers, thus more inclined to agree with the author and agree that the government must make a change. 

In the closing paragraph, the author directly calls on the government to “do better.”  The author then lists an array of possible solutions that the government can use to correct their wrongdoings.  In addition to providing the audience with solutions, the author shows that there are definite solutions that the government could have created to make the working conditions better, but they did not act upon it.  This helps to display the government more as the villain that has the abilities to change, but decides not to.  Because there are a plethora of solutions the government can take, the audience is inclined to feel that the audience must make a change. 

 Through real world occurrences of unfair treatment of laborers and possible solutions, the editorial board of the New York Times is able to effectively call the government to make a change in their outsourcing jobs, because the conditions these workers must labor over are unjust and unfair.