Critical analysis of "Sweatshirts from sweatshops" using intellectual standards

¶ … Sweatshirts from Sweatshops contains several violations of the Universal Intellectual Standards. The Universal Intellectual Standards are clarity, accuracy, precisions, relevance, depth, breadth, logic and fairness. The first example is clarity. One of the author's core arguments is that there are children working in the factory, yet the author never delivers clear facts to support this. The author notes that there are many workers under the age of 18, but that the minimum age for someone to do factory work in Honduras is 14. The author is inviting the reader to have outrage, but never provides a hard number for how many children under 14 are working illegally in the factory, and never provides a number for how many hours said children are working.

The second violation is fairness. There are two points of fairness here. One is that the author is using arguments provided by a union group that has a vested interest in the issue -- the union is anti-sweatshop because using factories in Honduras is an end-around on using American labor. This does not explicitly invalidate the argument, but it does call into question its fairness. Further, the author mentions an average hourly wage of $0.68, but this figure needs to be compared with the normal wages in that region and the cost of living, in order to give it some perspective. As a general rule, those are economic figures that exist -- all the author needed to do was research those numbers and present them.

By omitting such critical details, the author is not providing enough depth. The author is ultimately making a moral argument, but fails to provide either breadth or depth enough to make a moral decision.

The essay also contains a number of logical fallacies. One such fallacy right away is confirmation bias. The author titles the articles "sweatshirts from sweatshops," which is a cute headline, but immediately the use of the word sweatshop is a call to emotion, and serves to confirm one's preconceived biases about labor in Honduras. That the article lacked viewpoints from Honduras that would have lent some depth to the discussion only further serves to shift the perspective to a strictly American one, allowing people to confirm their biases about Honduran and about garment factories in the developing world in general.

The use of the union as a source is known as a false authority fallacy. The one source is used, but the one source is biased. The author does not say anything about the bias itself, yet the bias is central to the argument. The author may also be committing the psychologist's fallacy of presupposing his own objectivity.