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These arguments come up a lot when discussing this topic and there's some points that don't really hold, usually because the apologist either doesn't know the w
by olewhalehunter 9y ago
These arguments come up a lot when discussing this topic and there's some points that don't really hold, usually because the apologist either doesn't know the world of sweatshops or doesn't want to bring it up.
The people working in sweatshops start as young children, often sold by their parents to pay debts. Often pay is withheld and they just become slaves or they are fed just enough to keep their fingers moving and their brains starved. The sweatshop may provide enough income for that child to grow up to produce more children, who then become sweatshop workers themselves, child prostitutes, or slaves, or they may just die on the job.
Nutrition deficiencies and stress get baked into their genetics: congratulations you now have a permanent underclass living worse than some animals, and similar to livestock, crowded populations, poor medical administration, and hellish living conditions result in festering and evolving pathogens that you and Paul Krugman may soon be more interested in. The result of providing just enough for them to survive to make children is not "less poverty", it's more poverty, more death, more child slavery or prostitution, and if emotional arguments don't register with you, exotic pandemics coupled with antibiotic misuse just might.
Secondly, America does not have a clothes shortage. The unfathomable amount of (often expensive) clothing thrown away by both consumers and suppliers in disgusting. Shrewd families from the lower income to the middle class buy used or keep hand-me-downs. Once or twice during move out season on campus my partner and I raid the rich dormitories and find upwards of thousands of dollars worth of designer clothing among other things. Many stores throw their out of season clothing straight into the dump.
The defense of a situation where hundreds of millions live in hell to produce mountains of goods that end in landfills, on an economic argument, is absurd.
- mixedCase 9y ago> The result of providing just enough for them to survive to make children is not "less poverty", it's more poverty, more death, more child slavery or prostitution. Yet, they keep on doing it. It sounds like the alternative is worse.
- olewhalehunter 9y agoDeath is a better alternative for many, who are then prevented from committing suicide without resorting to gruesome means. Improvised abortions are common. Recognizing this shouldn't be controversial.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- posterboy 9y ago> Death I'm sure that came off wrong. I guess, you meant the abortions, which is, to me, slightly less controversial than suicide or worse. Death by abortion might be a conflation of terms, in some value system, so the comment is confusing. I guess it's provocative on purpose. I agree, there must be better alternatives to sweatshops.
- vkou 9y agoPrior to industrialization, most people made their living by sustenance farming, and trading their surplus for goods they needed to survive. Plows, pitchforks, pots and pans. Landowners needed armies of peasants to till their land, because argiculture was very inefficient, and you needed the labour of five farm workers to grow enough food to feed 7 people. Now that even a third-world farmer can produce enough food to feed many, many people, those farm workers have been pushed to try to find work in the cities - hence, factories and sweatshops. You are looking at the tail end of the problem, as opposed to the root of it. The core of it is that the vast majority of people in the world need to work for someone else (Who reaps the majority of the economic windfall) in order to survive. This used to happen because a small minority of people owned most of the land - it now happens because a small minority of people own most of the capital needed to run a business. Employee-owned co-operatives are a solution to the problem of both jobs, and working conditions. Since co-ops don't pay dividends to non-working shareholders, this is generally unpalatable to capitalists.
- rjsw 9y agoI think you are mixing up multiple things here. Improved agriculture required fewer people to generate the same amount of food. We were lucky that industrialization happened at around the same time and could provide work for the displaced farm workers. There isn't any guarantee that some new type of labour-intensive job will be invented just at the point that AI becomes widespread. I don't see how co-operatives help if there isn't any demand for their output.
- saint_fiasco 9y agoSome of the unwanted American clothes end up being shipped to my country, and I assume many others. It's one of the cheapest clothing in the market and poor people buy lots of those. The system that moves clothes from rich Americans to third world stores could be more efficient, but it does exist. Hopefully robots will eventually become cheaper than feeding slaves.
- s73ver 9y agoAnd because those clothes are so cheap, your country isn't able to get it's own textile industry going. Thus killing jobs.
- saint_fiasco 9y agoWe do have a textile industry. It mostly caters to hipsters who crave authenticity. We also used to have a huge industry of exporting cotton to countries with sweatshops, but nowadays soy and meat are more profitable.
- Kiro 9y agoA lot of points but you're not really adressing the argument you're replying to - that they would be even worse off not working in a sweatshop (e.g. farms).
- olewhalehunter 9y agoReread my statement about disease proliferation and my response to mixedCase.
- Kiro 9y agoI can't take you seriously when you say they are better off dead and living worse than animals. You're drawing things to an absurd extreme which is definitely not true for most sweatshops. I'm not saying that sweatshops are good but they are better than working on a farm.
- olewhalehunter 9y agoI said some, not all, and you don't need to take me seriously when you can go research the suicide or abortion stories among these communities. And again, if my moral outrage triggers your moral outrage we can just go with a purely disease control argument.
- reality_czech 9y agoAnd yet, the countries which had sweatshops, like China, India, Vietnam, etc. have had huge success in bringing their population out of poverty. The countries which didn't, like most of Africa, did not. Population growth also tends to go down with industrialization, not up. So you are basically completely wrong when you say that sweatshops trap people in poverty. Speaking of wrong... Suicide rates per capita are also higher in many rich countries than in many poor ones. It's the "per capita" part that people don't understand. Foxconn literally has 1,300,000 employees. At the standard US rate of 13 suicides per 100,000 people per year, we should expect 169 suicides at Foxconn per year. But people see a headline about a dozen suicides at Foxconn and think it's a crisis, because math is hard. Despite your disgust with the poor, no major pathogen of the last few decades has been traced back to sweatshops. AIDS and Ebola came from people interacting with apes, not from factory workers. Bird Flu came from birds. So I call bullshit on your claims that the poor are breeding super-diseases. We can all agree that capitalism has some bad aspects and maybe the governments in these countries should be doing more to help. Spreading a lot of ridiculous nonsense about how these people are worse than animals is just that, ridiculous.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fellellor 9y agoYou may need to revisit reading comprehension, friend.
- obscolescence 9y agoHow is this not the adequate response to "Spreading a lot of ridiculous nonsense about how these people are worse than animals"? What in the fuck?
- obscolescence 9y agoMay the fingers of click monkeys rot off.
- muninn_ 9y agoWhat is your process for grabbing clothes that people are throwing out? Do you just go grab it out of dumpsters?
- olewhalehunter 9y agoOften the dumpsters are packed to the brim with other items during move-in/out seasons, and clothes (and expensive perfume, furniture, books, and computers and xboxes?!?) are put in boxes sometimes in the dumpsters and sometimes out. Hunt down the "rich frat kid" dorms/apartments.
- roenxi 9y agoSo I hope we all agree that meaningless work is bad, and that if the clothing is going to end up in a dump anyway then the workers should be given their pay and then left to put their feet up. That situation is indefensible. But the argument about sweatshops is pretty settled: * These people are not stupid, they would not work in sweatshops if sweatshops weren't the best alternative available. * The existence of sweatshops doesn't, in any fundamental way, prevent the development of more advanced and dignified industry. Many industrial countries have a history of slavery (eg, America) and poor working conditions (eg, England) that they levered themselves out of. * Bootstrapping an economy starting with cheap, unpleasant labouring appears to have worked stupendously well for the Chinese.
- closeparen 9y agoDo you think their lives will get better or worse if American companies disengage? What did pre-sweatshop life look like for the families who now send their children to sweatshops in these countries? >hundreds of millions live in hell to produce mountains of goods that end in landfills Is it better to have hundreds of millions live in hell doing subsistence agriculture? Or is that life actually less hellish?
- dang 9y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14524311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14524311 and marked it off-topic.