Activism to stop sweatshop labor, on the surface, seems like it would be uncontroversial. Who in their right mind would argue in favor of allowing exploited people to work grueling 18-hour days for insultingly low pay?

As it turns out, factory jobs are a hot commodity in some parts of the world. And more and more sweatshop workers are speaking out to say “please don’t take away my job.”

Nicolas D. Kristof, the columnist for The New York Times, wrote a controversial op-ed in January regarding poor families in Cambodia who, in order to survive, degrade themselves to picking through garbage dumps for valuables. Allowing sweatshops to operate, Mr. Kristof writes, would at least get these families out of the trash heap and into relatively cushy factory conditions.

Granted, cushy is all relative. What serves for a covetable job and decent pay in Vietnam would be unacceptable for most Westerners — the predominant reason that manufacturing jobs have moved overseas.

But Mr. Kristof would find an ally in Leslie T. Chang, author of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China.

For her book, Ms. Chang spent three years interviewing female factory workers who, in many cases, left home at age 16 or 17 to try to make a better life in one of China’s big cities.

“A young woman’s prospects completely change after she moves to the city,” she writes. “She can earn and save cash for the first time, and with some initiative and luck, she can move up into a better job. Almost all of the midlevel executives, clerks, and salespeople I met started out as assembly-line workers. The view from the outside is that these women are victims, but they have big plans, schemes, and goals. They see themselves as actors in their own dramas.”

It’s a side heard less commonly than those who work to end sweatshop abuses. Their voices are the dominant ones.

Kalpona Akter is a 33-year-old former garment worker, now turned activist. In a profile on NewsBlaze.com, she describes how she began working in a Bangladeshi factory at the age of 12, soon logging 17-hour work days in unsafe conditions for only $8 per month — a sad sum even in her native land.

She now works on behalf of the 85 percent of Bangladesh’s 2.2 million garment workers who are women between 18 and 25 years of age — meaning they tend to be uneducated and easily exploited. They go without health care, vacation, and maternity leave. Ms. Akter says Bangladeshi sweatshop employees are among the lowest-paid workers in the entire world.

It’s hard to argue that anyone would ask to be treated poorly or denied even the most basic benefits. And indeed, if a compromise between the two sides is possible, it seems that working toward ending abuses is a worthy goal.

But if it’s what the people want, who are we to say they shouldn’t have the opportunity to make a better life for themselves?