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How we love the Daily Mail. Today’s shock news is that the must-have high-street frock that the Duchess of Cambridge wore this week to meet that nice American couple Mr and Mrs Obama was made “in a Romanian ‘sweatshop’ by women on just 99p an hour.”

That’s terrible! The royals are exploiting the poorest of the poor in a grim Eastern European ghetto. Something must be done!

Hmm. Just notice the quotes around that ‘sweatshop’. Why are they there? Because this story is opportunistic nonsense, and I suspect that, secretly, the Mail knows it.

Like most economically illiterate stories in the popular press, it is based on a lack of reason and false assumptions. Worse, the facts in the story don’t support the headline and the story’s attempted slant. Let’s look at them:

1. Workers in the ‘sweatshop’ get paid more than the Romanian minimum wage
   So, really, it’s not a sweatshop. Unless you think the Romanian minimum wage should be more. In which case lobby the Romanian government. But how do you think the Mail would take to, say, the Americans or the Swiss lobbying the UK government to raise the minimum wage here? Not well, probably. The Mail doesn’t even like the minimum wage. Typical headline: ‘Industry warns on minimum wage’, repeated in various forms here, here and here.
2. Romania is in the EU
   So, you know, it falls under EU regulations. Of which there are loads, and of which the Mail heartily disapproves, as demonstrated here. So the EU is not protecting Romanians from business, but it is strangling business in the UK. Go figure.
3. Workers in the ‘sweatshop’ actually don’t complain about it
   Typical quotes: conditions are “good”, “this is normal for me, I’m used to it”, “It’s really nice that a small thing that I do here gets into a ballroom somewhere in the world.” Employee Juliana Haita did say the factory got hot in the summer, but then they get an extra half hour break. It sounds really awful.
4. Factories are not holiday camps
   Apparently, Mrs Haita has “repeated the same menial tasks on garment after garment each day for the past 15 years.” Yes – it’s a factory. We used to have those factories over here. The Mail is quite nostalgic about them when it suits it. But this factory “resembles an industrial compound”. What on earth is it supposed to resemble? Centre Parcs? Look, you don’t want to work in a factory, I don’t want to work in a factory. But the people who work at Rimcor Ex probably do want to work in a factory – this factory.

The whole thing is nonsense. The only way Romania is going to drag itself out of the poverty bequeathed it by the Ceausescu regime is by trading with richer EU nations and developing its economy.

The solution? The story quotes Greg Muttitt from War on Want (not a typical friend of the Daily Mail), who said: “The Government must introduce regulation to stop UK retailers exploiting workers abroad.”

So, what happens then? Do we help get rid of Romanian factories because we don’t fancy working in them ourselves? Where would Mrs Haita work then? In a nice office? Or would she end up begging or selling her body in the Bucharest slum next door?

And where do we actually buy things from then? If we made our clothes in nice, sunny factories in the UK, where the workers earned £20 an hour, we wouldn’t be able to afford them. And Juliana would have no work at all.

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