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Why would the Pope condemn this “exploitation” of the poor, if by his own admission, people are lining up, hoping to be “exploited” by the rich? If poor people are clamouring to be exploited wouldn’t they be best served if there was more of it happening, not less?

Indeed, in some countries, the poor are desperate for the opportunity to get in on this so-called exploitation. In Cambodia, for example, young children scavenge smoking piles of garbage, earning less than a dollar a day. “Talk to these families in the dump,” wrote Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times in 2009, “and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children.”

The textile sector in Cambodia is often maligned for its sweatshop working conditions. But according to The World Bank’s Cambodia Poverty Assessment report published in 2014, this sector “could represent a laboratory of expanding economic opportunity to women” since more than four in five workers in this sector are female. The report notes that poverty rates in Cambodia plunged from 53.3 per cent in 2004 to 20.5 per cent in 2011.

The rich factory owners are doing the poor no wrong — indeed, they are doing a great deal of good. Of course they could, as the Pope would suggest, pay higher wages to their employees as an act of philanthropy. But inflating wages past the market price for labour only leads to inefficiencies that will end up crowding the neediest workers out of jobs. Setting wages at minimum market prices ensures that there are poorly paid positions for those who need them — those people most desperate for employment.