Is Wal-Mart an evil blood-sucking corporation or a savior to the third world? It's neither and both.

Millions of people work 15-hour days for $2. in inhospitable conditions. Many die of pure exhaustion. Sweatshops are undoubtedly unfair and unethical. But they are also one of the main reasons China and many other Asian nations have had phenomenal growth in the past 30 years. Sweatshop labor has allowed millions to cross the poverty line.

No matter how hard people protest, corporations aren't going to pick up and leave developing nations. The West will still buy their products, and a compromise needs to be found.

The economic arguments for sweatshops can be a little shady, but they are worth understanding. If we understand why people promote sweatshops, we can find a new form of employment that provides fair conditions, corporate profit and economic growth in developing nations.

Mass-produced markets provide economies of scale, cheaper per unit cost due to extensive production and opportunities for employment with few skills. Poor, landless farmers and the masses of the unemployed in developing nations find work in factories and wages higher than their previous occupations.

Although they often choose sweatshops because they have no other options and, in many cases, wages aren't enough to sustain them, these jobs are better than any opportunity they have had previously.

Corporations also provide jobs to women in societies that restrict women's access to the formal labor market. Undoubtedly, there are countless incidents of rape and abuse against women that cannot be justified. But in some cases, women would be working as prostitutes if not in factories.

The economic point is that sweatshops provide jobs to millions of people who would be worse off without such an opportunity. If corporations left developing nations and returned to the West, unemployment would rise and people wouldn't have anything else.

Economic theory claims that these degrading conditions will decline when labor becomes scarce and wages therefore increase. In theory, corporations also provide infrastructure and skills to laborers, which creates potential for the employed to find better-paying jobs later in life. If wages were high enough, parents could even afford to send their children to school, giving them a chance at better jobs.

In China, what began as sweatshop labor has become a highly specialized system where a product is designed and produced in the same city. In very few cases, wages have even risen with skills. China now has hundreds of thousands of engineers and hundreds of businesses producing for foreign markets. Although China's success is an extremely complex scenario, it displays a potential for dramatic change.

None of these successes justify the fact that sweatshops are degrading and unethical, but they do show the value of factories for employment opportunities and economic success.

Corporations like Wal-Mart shouldn't leave developing nations, but they should improve their factories. If corporations guarantee wages that allow parents to send their children to school, the following generation will have better opportunities.

Corporations could also improve conditions to prevent long-term physical damage and guarantee the security of their workers, particularly women. If these significant changes were made, maybe our T-shirt prices would go up $1, but it's hard to believe that people would mind or even notice.

It's ironic that the people who fight sweatshops and those who promote them really want the same thing: better conditions in developing nations. In some ways, both sides are right, and sticking vehemently to any single opinion denies compromise that could actually improve people's lives.

Reach reporter Brooke McKean at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu