Where Am I Wearing Summary

Sweat shops in other countries are most of the time looked on as bad from our point of view and not the locals. In the Book Where am I Wearing, by Kelsey Timmerman the narrator explains through his stories that life in poor countries is hard. The narrator also explains that the sweat shops and low paying factory jobs may not help the individual citizen but it does help the country as a whole. Kelsey Timmerman had discussed in his books on how sweatshops can be bad but they also bring good to the people that work for them. For example long hours with little pay in china and cambodia but it brought the country’s economy and exports up significantly.
In the countries China and Bangladesh low wages and long hours plague the working class in these countries. In china the narrator Kelsey Timmerman was traveling around looking to see if he could find the company that made his flip flops. During this encounter he met a couple that showed him around their daily life in China. They told him at first that they didn’t mind

working 16 hour day and sometimes not even getting paid for overtime or otherwise they would lose their job. This couple also had to sacrifice their preferred life of living in the country side with their son and parents. In Bangladesh the narrator met a man name Dalton who was a very refined man but had come from a very poor lifestyle. Dalton took Kelsey to his home village to see what life was like for him when he was younger. Kelsey found out that an average monthly salary for someone that lives in Bangladesh in 67$ a month. Kelsey spent that much treating the children of the village to an amusement park and pizza.

In Cambodia children and teenagers have very little education because they start to work at a very young age. The narrator when in Cambodia saw many children that in America would be in school but since they lived in Cambodia they worked. Kelsey saw children at the age of four and five by themselves begging on street corners for money. Cambodia is not just bad because of four year olds by themselves begging it is the memory of war that is still around. Cambodia was at war for a long time so farmers have to watch their step a lot of the time because they may be stepping on a land mine. This is not isolated either it is spread across the entire country. These old military dangers can affect development, farming and progress for a country that’s trying to expand and grow. In Levi factories in cambodia there are machines called sandblasters that take perfectly good jeans and tear holes in them because that’s what the westerners want. These machines give off an intense amount of heat and since there is poor ventilation in the factories it creates a dangerous temperature of heat that can cuase the works to fait and pass out. These are one of the ways factories in others countries were dubbed the name sweat shop.

Globalization has its good sides and its bad sides.

Kelsey Timmerman tries to explain to us that even thought the work conditions are bad the people in these countries do not seem to mind because they enjoy getting paid to provide for their families. By europe and north america putting factories in very poor countries the labor is cheaper so it is cheaper to make jeans so it is cheaper for us to buy jeans. Outsourcing the product to other countries also help the other countries economy. The Cambodian economy exports 90% clothing all over the world. This enormous amount of exports helps this country grow out of a poverty state and into a modern and well structured country. The problem with having a country exports 90% clothing they do not have any diversity to their economy. This can be very dangerous because then if the clothing demand goes down or a cheaper country is found to make products then the countrys whole infrastructure could

collapse.
Kelsey Timmerman did a very good job explaining the good and bad parts of globalization. He explained that there are such places as sweat shops but this doesnt mean that they are bad. The people there are getting enough money to feed and clothe themselves and their families. He also showed that their can be dangerous condition in factories if they are not attended to but most of the factories he visited were not that bad bosses to their employes. Kelsey Timmerman did a good job providing the pros and cons of globalization and he let us decide if it still was a really bad thing.