Offshoring diffuses responsibility for sweatshop harms through proxy producers

Evidence

A large-scale form of proxy agency that is heatedly debated concerns outsourcing, especially the offshoring of manufacturing and customer services abroad to reduce labor costs. The proxies include contract factories, vendors, and freelancers. These business practices have been accelerated by globalization and the Internet. Protectionists and free traders fight vigorous battles over the ethics of offshoring. Protectionists focus on the harm these practices cause, arguing that they put people out of work at home, shrink investment in domestic manufacturing, and foster sweatshop working conditions abroad with little respect for human and labor rights. Moreover, such practices degrade local environments in countries that often lack regulatory safeguards. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 135

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrative of proxy agency: contract factories and vendors let corporations cause labor harm without direct agentic culpability.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 135