6 ms·

I don't believe consumer choice is the only agency we have. Can you imagine any others?

by derrida 11y ago

BillyParadise 11y ago
As long as these "exploited children" have no BETTER options, the cycle will continue.
- fucking_tragedy 11y ago
  Child labor laws in the US put an end to kids losing their childhood, body parts and lives so that they can exploited for a profit. There is no reason such laws cannot be implemented where they currently aren't. We also have the ability to stop US based companies from selling products produced by foreign child labor, but we don't.
  - thirdsun 11y ago
    > There is no reason such laws cannot be implemented where they currently aren't. In countries like Congo there are probably quite a few.
    - fucking_tragedy 11y ago
      If they depend on our trade, we have ways to persuade them to change their behavior. It isn't guaranteed, but > We also have the ability to stop US based companies from selling products produced by foreign child labor
    - bigbugbag 11y ago
      Coltan has been mined in Congo by military operation from neighbouring countries such as Tanzania and Zambia.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - fucking_tragedy 11y ago
      In many of those countries, children are sold by their parents into slavery or are taken by force because the market demands goods produced by child labor. This same argument can be used to justify slave labor and it is, right here. At least they aren't starving. Yet, we've eradicated slavery in much of the world and on paper.
      - mhurron 11y ago
        > we've eradicated slavery in much of the world and on paper. No, we haven't. http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1440-5-things-i-learned-as-sex-slave-in-modern-america.html http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1440-5-things-i-... And we haven't for the same reason that children are sold into slavery, there's money to be made. EDIT: And in case you don't like the first hand account https://www.stopthetraffik.org/the-scale-of-human-traffiking https://www.stopthetraffik.org/the-scale-of-human-traffiking "600,000-800,000 men, women and children are trafficked across international borders each year." "At least 20.9 million people are victims of forced labour worldwide" Eradicated indeed.
    - matt4077 11y ago
      That'S incredibly cynical. It's also just wrong. Children are used as slaves / cheap labor. Without that possibility, they would have to hire adults and pay them more. The additional costs would easily be absorbed by the consumers of rare earths – these make up only a tiny fraction of the cost of the products they are used in. The adults would have better-paying jobs. It's not a 1:1 relationship but considering the positive effects on the local economy this would have, we can simply it as such: these are the parents of those children. They have more money and can feed them And then there's the fact that food is dirt cheap and we could easily feed (cloth, educate, vaccinate) every child on earth given enough political will. I'm usually of the view that the political problems in those countries have to be solved locally and that the "global North" has only limited influence. But verifying that resources are created without child labor, especially if they originate from a limited number of large operations, seems both doable and extremely worthwhile.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    But those laws weren't enacted until those child laborers helped push society to a level where it could afford those laws. That's the annoying part of the problem and a very tough one to get around without vast sums of money moving from first world to third world countries specifically to address this issue. Which is politically not exactly a hot topic.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Hmm... people who can afford to send their children to school and can afford to keep them in school don't need laws to do that. And child labor laws do pretty much squat for low income children which drop out, get into gangs or find them selves on the street. Laws only works when the society can enforce them and it doesn't mean police, social workers and the likes those are supposed to catch outliers not to enact reality. When society can't enforce laws/norms case and point children in low social economic environments laws break down and mean nothing. Child labor laws might look like they prevent mass scale exploitation of children but in reality they don't, we stopped using child labor for the same reason we stopped using slave labor and it wasn't our morality but rather the simply practical truth that not only we afford to do so but they also in many cases are a liability. The US industry has no child labor because it has not place for child labor, children can't be professionals most manufacturing is high end the physical labor is mostly automated and cheap "illegal" labor is available for the few tasks that children might still be able to fill (and if you really look into US textile sweatshops and the agriculture industry you'll still find child labor). If the US had the same industrial landscape as the Congo or any other underdeveloped nation no matter what the so called moral compass of its population would point at, no matter if it would have democracy and all that it would have child labor that's just the reality we live in. We exploit every resource we have in the most efficient way possible, the locomotive and industrial revolutions made slave labor obsolete and the technological revolution made child labor obsolete both of those are fairly closely tied as when you need educated people not only to steer your economy but to drive it on every level they simply aren't compatible.
    - fatbob 11y ago
      Congo GDP per capita (PPP) is about $729 which is hundreds of years behind rich western democracies. Hundreds of years ago those same western democracies had child labor. It's not that surprising that they use child labor. It may improve things for western consumers to insist on certain standards and let Congo workers raise their prices to compensate.
      - dogma1138 11y ago
        Congo won't change, they'll sell you for higher prices and still use child labor as long as the services they provide are suitable to exploit such labor. Better off spending your money on education programs than on pointless processes which will be circumvented.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  They have no better options because we aren't giving them better options. They get paid $0.25 for a job that an adult would have demanded $1.00 for. Had we banned child labor, the adult would've had the job, the child wouldn't have needed the work as badly (as their parent now has a better job), and we would be paying slightly more over hear. Let us not pretend that we are doing them some service by exploiting them. (If you really want to say we are helping them by exploiting them, then how about we consider ways these children can make more money with less risk of dismemberment and only needing a weak internet connection and a cheap phone with a camera...)
calibraxis 11y ago
Faced with 0.1% possiblity to make cash: "Disrupt markets!!1 Work myself to the bone!" Faced with child-slavery they benefit from: "<shrug> Jeez, I just don't know, guess it's inevitable <shrug>, I'm sure they're better off as slaves... <shrug>"
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I can even understand that - real problems are hard. I'd only wish people making overpriced trinkets would stop saying they're changing the world.
  - theseatoms 11y ago
    Pretty safe to say that no one takes those who say that they're changing the world all that seriously. It's just modern business-speak.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      True, but it does make it harder to trust people who are actually changing the world. Not to mention it's annoying. And it messes up with the worldview of people who are not tech-savvy enough to evaluate such claims. Only yesterday I had to explain to someone that the hot startup they just saw getting $shitton in investment actually doesn't make anything particularly useful or insightful. They were genuinely surprised by that.
- meric 11y ago
  I don't know, are we going to pay the children directly to not work in cobalt mines, or are we going to prevent them from accessing the 100% opportunity to make cash? It sounds like they have the same attitude as the people you are chastising. Reading this comment, it appears I'm one of them. What's an action you would suggest to improve things?
  - fucking_tragedy 11y ago
    Stop viewing people that use child laborers as a benevolent force that are keeping children from dying in the streets. These people buy, sell and take children by force employing tactics such as threats, violence and (gang) rape. They then traumatize, abuse, kill and use force to secure their profit. Understand that children and families are not weighing the option as "send my kid to a factory or starve". It is "I just got murdered / will be murdered if these people don't take my kid" or "I simply want to sell my child for cash".
pizza234 11y ago
Consumers are one in the several actors taking part in this. Like many other social problems, other actors are governments putting regulations (both in the consuming and the producing ones), organizations pushing information (both cultural and products-related), and I guess others. Ultimately, changes start from the "lower" level, either in the form of consumer choice, or individuals who turn into organizations, who pushes for regulations/informations/etc. In real-world, of course, there are other facts.
SixSigma 11y ago
make SA 8000 certification mandatory in supply chains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA8000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA8000 or provide tax incentives for such certified companies
VeejayRampay 11y ago
I think there is at least one solution that works: Regulation. But large corporations are generally adverse to government meddling in their business (for reasons that make sense from their point of view). Said corporations usually have some form of investment into the pockets of people drafting those laws and/or have ways to pressure governments into not putting them in place (threats of layoffs, threats of indirect economic disadvantages against similar corporations in other areas of the world). Back to square one for us consumers if we cannot count on elected officials to control the behavior of their biggest manufacturing champions, we either accept that there are children in developing countries working so that we can get fancy toys in conditions that we'd rather not thing about or we stop playing into the game altogether. But then again I am part of that problem and I realize that nothing is that easy and black and white. Those are complicated issues.
- pizza234 11y ago
  In the void, regulation (assuming you talk about the producing countries) simply won't work. If suddenly, a given country would, say, increase minimum wage and mandate safety conditions, it would increase the risk of losing market share. That's just how it works - only a small fraction of the production/consumption chain gives weight to the sources of the goods. Of course, that doesn't imply that regulation doesn't work; I'm saying that by itself, it's not going to work.
  - tw04 11y ago
    It needs to happen at the consumer's country. We should have laws banning import of any goods or services from countries that don't have a decent living wage and mandated safety conditions. Of course the price of goods will increase, and then the rubber will meet the road. Do we care more about our "things", or people half way around the world being *pulled out of squalor?
    - monochromatic 11y ago
      And when you say "pulled out of squalor," you really mean "put out of a job."
cmurf 11y ago
Parecon. Right now the free market idea is there are only two parties, buyer and seller, to set prices. That's totally flawed, and that's why we inject a 3rd party into this process in the form of regulation. But regulation is slow and prone to corruption, and itself rarely accounts for externalities. It's just a guy on a horse asking for his cut, not much different from feudal days. What's needed is an innovation to inject a more reliable 3rd party to deal with externalities, like Amnesty International would be one of many possible such contra parties. Or redistribute 99% of the top 1% wealth, and give it to the bottom x% such that suddenly there's only middle class and better. What that does is poor are no longer so poor that they always have to say yes to getting one more dime, they'd have the option to say no to things like digging in a dangerous mine. That doesn't mean digging in a dangerous mine becomes illegal, it means it becomes expensive, maybe $40 an hour instead of 5 cents a day.
- discreteevent 11y ago
  Plus more middle class would mean more people who can afford to buy the things that are more expensive due to the $40 an hour cost increase. The benefits of sharing.
- soared 11y ago
  >redistribute 99% of the top 1% wealth, and give it to the bottom x% such that suddenly there's only middle class and better. That is in no way how that works.

I don't believe consumer choice is the only agency we have. Can you imagine any others?

by derrida 11y ago

I don't believe consumer choice is the only agency we have. Can you imagine any others?

BillyParadise 11y ago

As long as these "exploited children" have no BETTER options, the cycle will continue.

fucking_tragedy 11y ago
Child labor laws in the US put an end to kids losing their childhood, body parts and lives so that they can exploited for a profit. There is no reason such laws cannot be implemented where they currently aren't. We also have the ability to stop US based companies from selling products produced by foreign child labor, but we don't.
- thirdsun 11y ago
  > There is no reason such laws cannot be implemented where they currently aren't. In countries like Congo there are probably quite a few.
  - fucking_tragedy 11y ago
    If they depend on our trade, we have ways to persuade them to change their behavior. It isn't guaranteed, but > We also have the ability to stop US based companies from selling products produced by foreign child labor
  - bigbugbag 11y ago
    Coltan has been mined in Congo by military operation from neighbouring countries such as Tanzania and Zambia.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - fucking_tragedy 11y ago
    In many of those countries, children are sold by their parents into slavery or are taken by force because the market demands goods produced by child labor. This same argument can be used to justify slave labor and it is, right here. At least they aren't starving. Yet, we've eradicated slavery in much of the world and on paper.
    - mhurron 11y ago
      > we've eradicated slavery in much of the world and on paper. No, we haven't. http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1440-5-things-i-learned-as-sex-slave-in-modern-america.html http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1440-5-things-i-... And we haven't for the same reason that children are sold into slavery, there's money to be made. EDIT: And in case you don't like the first hand account https://www.stopthetraffik.org/the-scale-of-human-traffiking https://www.stopthetraffik.org/the-scale-of-human-traffiking "600,000-800,000 men, women and children are trafficked across international borders each year." "At least 20.9 million people are victims of forced labour worldwide" Eradicated indeed.
  - matt4077 11y ago
    That'S incredibly cynical. It's also just wrong. Children are used as slaves / cheap labor. Without that possibility, they would have to hire adults and pay them more. The additional costs would easily be absorbed by the consumers of rare earths – these make up only a tiny fraction of the cost of the products they are used in. The adults would have better-paying jobs. It's not a 1:1 relationship but considering the positive effects on the local economy this would have, we can simply it as such: these are the parents of those children. They have more money and can feed them And then there's the fact that food is dirt cheap and we could easily feed (cloth, educate, vaccinate) every child on earth given enough political will. I'm usually of the view that the political problems in those countries have to be solved locally and that the "global North" has only limited influence. But verifying that resources are created without child labor, especially if they originate from a limited number of large operations, seems both doable and extremely worthwhile.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  But those laws weren't enacted until those child laborers helped push society to a level where it could afford those laws. That's the annoying part of the problem and a very tough one to get around without vast sums of money moving from first world to third world countries specifically to address this issue. Which is politically not exactly a hot topic.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  Hmm... people who can afford to send their children to school and can afford to keep them in school don't need laws to do that. And child labor laws do pretty much squat for low income children which drop out, get into gangs or find them selves on the street. Laws only works when the society can enforce them and it doesn't mean police, social workers and the likes those are supposed to catch outliers not to enact reality. When society can't enforce laws/norms case and point children in low social economic environments laws break down and mean nothing. Child labor laws might look like they prevent mass scale exploitation of children but in reality they don't, we stopped using child labor for the same reason we stopped using slave labor and it wasn't our morality but rather the simply practical truth that not only we afford to do so but they also in many cases are a liability. The US industry has no child labor because it has not place for child labor, children can't be professionals most manufacturing is high end the physical labor is mostly automated and cheap "illegal" labor is available for the few tasks that children might still be able to fill (and if you really look into US textile sweatshops and the agriculture industry you'll still find child labor). If the US had the same industrial landscape as the Congo or any other underdeveloped nation no matter what the so called moral compass of its population would point at, no matter if it would have democracy and all that it would have child labor that's just the reality we live in. We exploit every resource we have in the most efficient way possible, the locomotive and industrial revolutions made slave labor obsolete and the technological revolution made child labor obsolete both of those are fairly closely tied as when you need educated people not only to steer your economy but to drive it on every level they simply aren't compatible.
  - fatbob 11y ago
    Congo GDP per capita (PPP) is about $729 which is hundreds of years behind rich western democracies. Hundreds of years ago those same western democracies had child labor. It's not that surprising that they use child labor. It may improve things for western consumers to insist on certain standards and let Congo workers raise their prices to compensate.
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      Congo won't change, they'll sell you for higher prices and still use child labor as long as the services they provide are suitable to exploit such labor. Better off spending your money on education programs than on pointless processes which will be circumvented.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
They have no better options because we aren't giving them better options. They get paid $0.25 for a job that an adult would have demanded $1.00 for. Had we banned child labor, the adult would've had the job, the child wouldn't have needed the work as badly (as their parent now has a better job), and we would be paying slightly more over hear. Let us not pretend that we are doing them some service by exploiting them. (If you really want to say we are helping them by exploiting them, then how about we consider ways these children can make more money with less risk of dismemberment and only needing a weak internet connection and a cheap phone with a camera...)

calibraxis 11y ago

Faced with 0.1% possiblity to make cash: "Disrupt markets!!1 Work myself to the bone!" Faced with child-slavery they benefit from: "<shrug> Jeez, I just don't know, guess it's inevitable <shrug>, I'm sure they're better off as slaves... <shrug>"

TeMPOraL 11y ago
I can even understand that - real problems are hard. I'd only wish people making overpriced trinkets would stop saying they're changing the world.
- theseatoms 11y ago
  Pretty safe to say that no one takes those who say that they're changing the world all that seriously. It's just modern business-speak.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    True, but it does make it harder to trust people who are actually changing the world. Not to mention it's annoying. And it messes up with the worldview of people who are not tech-savvy enough to evaluate such claims. Only yesterday I had to explain to someone that the hot startup they just saw getting $shitton in investment actually doesn't make anything particularly useful or insightful. They were genuinely surprised by that.
meric 11y ago
I don't know, are we going to pay the children directly to not work in cobalt mines, or are we going to prevent them from accessing the 100% opportunity to make cash? It sounds like they have the same attitude as the people you are chastising. Reading this comment, it appears I'm one of them. What's an action you would suggest to improve things?
- fucking_tragedy 11y ago
  Stop viewing people that use child laborers as a benevolent force that are keeping children from dying in the streets. These people buy, sell and take children by force employing tactics such as threats, violence and (gang) rape. They then traumatize, abuse, kill and use force to secure their profit. Understand that children and families are not weighing the option as "send my kid to a factory or starve". It is "I just got murdered / will be murdered if these people don't take my kid" or "I simply want to sell my child for cash".

pizza234 11y ago

Consumers are one in the several actors taking part in this. Like many other social problems, other actors are governments putting regulations (both in the consuming and the producing ones), organizations pushing information (both cultural and products-related), and I guess others. Ultimately, changes start from the "lower" level, either in the form of consumer choice, or individuals who turn into organizations, who pushes for regulations/informations/etc. In real-world, of course, there are other facts.

SixSigma 11y ago

make SA 8000 certification mandatory in supply chains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA8000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA8000 or provide tax incentives for such certified companies

VeejayRampay 11y ago

I think there is at least one solution that works: Regulation. But large corporations are generally adverse to government meddling in their business (for reasons that make sense from their point of view). Said corporations usually have some form of investment into the pockets of people drafting those laws and/or have ways to pressure governments into not putting them in place (threats of layoffs, threats of indirect economic disadvantages against similar corporations in other areas of the world). Back to square one for us consumers if we cannot count on elected officials to control the behavior of their biggest manufacturing champions, we either accept that there are children in developing countries working so that we can get fancy toys in conditions that we'd rather not thing about or we stop playing into the game altogether. But then again I am part of that problem and I realize that nothing is that easy and black and white. Those are complicated issues.

pizza234 11y ago
In the void, regulation (assuming you talk about the producing countries) simply won't work. If suddenly, a given country would, say, increase minimum wage and mandate safety conditions, it would increase the risk of losing market share. That's just how it works - only a small fraction of the production/consumption chain gives weight to the sources of the goods. Of course, that doesn't imply that regulation doesn't work; I'm saying that by itself, it's not going to work.
- tw04 11y ago
  It needs to happen at the consumer's country. We should have laws banning import of any goods or services from countries that don't have a decent living wage and mandated safety conditions. Of course the price of goods will increase, and then the rubber will meet the road. Do we care more about our "things", or people half way around the world being *pulled out of squalor?
  - monochromatic 11y ago
    And when you say "pulled out of squalor," you really mean "put out of a job."

cmurf 11y ago

Parecon. Right now the free market idea is there are only two parties, buyer and seller, to set prices. That's totally flawed, and that's why we inject a 3rd party into this process in the form of regulation. But regulation is slow and prone to corruption, and itself rarely accounts for externalities. It's just a guy on a horse asking for his cut, not much different from feudal days. What's needed is an innovation to inject a more reliable 3rd party to deal with externalities, like Amnesty International would be one of many possible such contra parties. Or redistribute 99% of the top 1% wealth, and give it to the bottom x% such that suddenly there's only middle class and better. What that does is poor are no longer so poor that they always have to say yes to getting one more dime, they'd have the option to say no to things like digging in a dangerous mine. That doesn't mean digging in a dangerous mine becomes illegal, it means it becomes expensive, maybe $40 an hour instead of 5 cents a day.

discreteevent 11y ago
Plus more middle class would mean more people who can afford to buy the things that are more expensive due to the $40 an hour cost increase. The benefits of sharing.
soared 11y ago
>redistribute 99% of the top 1% wealth, and give it to the bottom x% such that suddenly there's only middle class and better. That is in no way how that works.