Rhetorical Analysis

Many agree that exploiting impoverished people as a source for cheap labor and consequentially cheap products is a morally unacceptable practice. However, the problem of sweatshops remains prominent in our globalized world. Tara J. Radin and Martin Calkins explore this problem in “The Struggle Against Sweatshops: Moving Toward Responsible Global Business” by breaking down their essay into two primary sections. The first describes the difficulties of both external and internal forces in permanently discarding sweatshops while the second division highlights the complexity behind any plausible solution. While the content of this article is of elevated interest, more important for our purpose is the success behind their rhetoric. They utilize the emotions of an audience on an already sensitive topic while simultaneously providing evidence from a variety of environments and sources to point out that their conclusive recommendations are of great value when the urge to change the manner in which we get products finally sets in. In their essay “The Struggle Against Sweatshops: Moving Toward Responsible Global Business”, Radin and Calkins both inform and persuade their audience at an effective level through their credibility, emotion, and logic—ethos, pathos, and logos, respectively—to conclusively come about at more fully understanding the need for reform in global labor markets. I will first define ethos followed by an analysis and illustration of the rhetoric as it is used in the essay. That will then be followed by pathos and logos, both sharing a similar format of define, analyze, and illustrate. Rhetoric is, of course, a powerful tool and a necessary component in communication. The first of the three pillars of persuasion that make up rhetoric is ethos. Julia T. Wood (2011) defines ethos as “proof based on a speaker’s credibility” (p. 26).