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> I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited. A lot of America has traded th

> I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited. A lot of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart shopping complex the next town over. Now they're upgrading that to an Amazon distribution center in the next state over. On this board, I expect a lot of people will explain (unsympathetically but not completely unreasonably) that the benefits of these exploitative conditions outweigh the costs (this unfortunate soul's death included). I think you can have reasonably priced quality products and worker well-being, but good luck making your case to shareholders and their apologists.

adamc 8y ago
What would need to rise is a collective consciousness of what a shitty system this is. Most people are too distracted to even pay attention, let alone do something about it.
- asdff 8y ago
  > Most people are too distracted to even pay attention, let alone do something about it. This is by design. As long as it's profitable to exploit labor, nothing will change. It is far far easier to keep people distracted and blind to all of this than it is to make them 'wake up,' or make any changes to their lives.
  - clayg 8y ago
    > This is by design. As long as it's profitable to exploit labor, nothing will change. Do you by chance believe in "Intelligent Design" as an explanation for complex biological systems? It's not obvious to me that inefficient social systems (i.e. not optimized for worker/human happiness) require "design"? If we create an organism who's survival condition is "generate profit" won't it just do that as efficiently as we let it? When I think about exploitative systems as requiring "malice by design" I rarely seem to uncover a solution other than "wait for someone else to be less evil" or occasionally "live with it and treat the worst of the symptoms".
    - ravar 8y ago
      I really like this line of questioning as a response to the gp. hopefully I will be able to use this myself.
    - jancsika 8y ago
      To me the irony is that you seem to narrow Intelligent Design to merely mean a fatuous scientific theory that is unnecessary for explaining the development of complex biological systems. But the very inception of Intelligent Design was in fact "malicious by design."[1] Intelligent Design was the functional equivalent of `s/creationism/intelligent design/g` in a creationist textbook to get around a Supreme Court ban from 1987. That revised textbook was then banned by a district court in 2005. I'm fairly certain that Ken Miller and the many others who fought to keep that book out of classrooms in 2004-05 understood clearly that the "Intelligent Design" side was acting in bad faith. I'm also fairly certain they weren't constrained by their knowledge of the "designed malice" of the other side but instead used that fact to rally more citizens to their cause. [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8498-judge-intelligent-design-is-re-labelled-creationism/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8498-judge-intelligen...
    - profalseidol 8y ago
      Social systems is created by Humans consciously. Complex biological systems are by evidence we have, created by evolutionary process and in fact, not intelligent. Company policy doesn't want you to disclose your salary. I think this is an explicit thought out design. Companies doesn't want worker union, history tells us why. Church policy to stop people from learning how to read. Church want you to keep believing in God and doctrines and has mutual benefit with the monarch via believe in Divine right. The people will work towards less control. Just as in computers, centralized power is simply not scalable. We will eventually move towards something like worker-owned cooperatives.
    - awnfuron 8y ago
      This maybe isn't the place to get super political but I'll give it a shot. The systems of production aren't optimized for worker or human happiness, they are optimized for profit making. That is certainly a design choice, at least on a firm-by-firm level. Maybe nobody sat down and said, "how can I make my workers miserable today?" but they have certainly sat down and said, "how can I profit more today?" And typically, when there is a choice between that profit and workers' happiness, profit wins. Once all or most firms start operating by this logic, the exploitation becomes inescapable. If the firms are smart, they will band together to use some of their profit to influence politics, shaping systems that enable them to make more profits. "Live with it and treat the worst of the systems" would be sort of like the American Democratic party: enact reforms and put restrictions on what firms can do so that they can't exploit so much. This rarely seems to work, first because firms find a way around restrictions, second because the restrictions are often shaped or even written by the firms that are to be regulated. (If you're going to be regulated, you might as well make it happen on your terms.) As you said, it treats the symptoms but not the cause. I don't know about "wait for someone else to be less evil", but I suppose that would be people who can see the problems with the current system but propose no solution. Also, you might have some people in this category who do think that the system could work, if only people were nicer to each other. But again, the problem isn't a lack of niceness, it's that the system is optimized for profit at all costs; given a choice between niceness or profit, profit usually wins. An alternative would be to actually treat the cause of the problem. Have a system where firms are optimized for human needs rather than for profit.
WalterSear 8y ago
> A lot of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart shopping complex the next town over. Now they're upgrading that to an Amazon distribution center in the next state over. Despite their convictions to the contrary, those are a different set of people.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  True. It's more like "ONE half of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart", and "the OTHER half of America is using an Amazon distribution center in the next state over". I'm not sanguine that Americans would pay fair-trade prices for household products. (And to be completely fair, there's certainly a half of America that just couldn't afford to pay the prices even if they wanted.)
Nokinside 8y ago
You would need stronger unions to fix this. China does not allow real unions and US has weird union laws that make their relationship with companies confrontational (really: Unions in Europe and US are very different).
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  Any readings on how European unions work?
  - harrumph 8y ago
    >Any readings on how European unions work? To me, the major and defining difference between US vs. European management/labor relationships is found in Germany's principle of co-determination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-determination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-determination Under these rules, the boards of directors of companies in Germany are required to include a significant portion of their voting membership to be drawn from worker population. As such, governorship of the company is at least partially beholden to the input of the persons who create all its value. This is starkly contrasted by US capitalism, where the workers who create all the company's value have effectively no say (apart from collective bargaining and strike) in any directions the company takes. The idea of workers voting on the board is laughable in the states. Co-determination was enshrined right after WWII, in part because the Germans looked around at the industrialized barbarism of the Third Reich and asked themselves "how can we prevent this from ever happening again"? The answer they came up with, in more ways than just co-determination, was to pointedly not hand the country's capitalists everything they wanted. They decided to place serious checks upon the power of capitalists. It's important to never forget that once in power, the Third Reich's first act was to round up, imprison and murder labor union leadership, socialists and communists. Co-determination is one way to remember.
  - Nokinside 8y ago
    The US has enterprise-level or workplace level bargaining. Most European countries have sector-level bargaining. In the US workplaces are divided into unionized and non-unionized. Unionized firm is in competitive disadvantage against non-unionized firms. This results a situation where firms fight against unionization very aggressively and unions respond in same. It's very confrontational and aggressive. In Europe firms with more union members are not in competitive disadvantage relative to firms with fewer union members, because negotiations happen sector level. For example restaurant workers union(s) meet restaurant business representatives and they make industry-wide agreements.
ryandrake 8y ago
> I think you can have reasonably priced quality products and worker well-being, but good luck making your case to shareholders and their apologists. If the market could bear a higher priced product that’s ethically sourced, why wouldn’t companies simply raise the price to what the market bears, and pocket the profit instead of ethically source it?
- aneutron 8y ago
  Congratz, you have a grasp of Apple's business model

adamc 8y ago

What would need to rise is a collective consciousness of what a shitty system this is. Most people are too distracted to even pay attention, let alone do something about it.

asdff 8y ago
> Most people are too distracted to even pay attention, let alone do something about it. This is by design. As long as it's profitable to exploit labor, nothing will change. It is far far easier to keep people distracted and blind to all of this than it is to make them 'wake up,' or make any changes to their lives.
- clayg 8y ago
  > This is by design. As long as it's profitable to exploit labor, nothing will change. Do you by chance believe in "Intelligent Design" as an explanation for complex biological systems? It's not obvious to me that inefficient social systems (i.e. not optimized for worker/human happiness) require "design"? If we create an organism who's survival condition is "generate profit" won't it just do that as efficiently as we let it? When I think about exploitative systems as requiring "malice by design" I rarely seem to uncover a solution other than "wait for someone else to be less evil" or occasionally "live with it and treat the worst of the symptoms".
  - ravar 8y ago
    I really like this line of questioning as a response to the gp. hopefully I will be able to use this myself.
  - jancsika 8y ago
    To me the irony is that you seem to narrow Intelligent Design to merely mean a fatuous scientific theory that is unnecessary for explaining the development of complex biological systems. But the very inception of Intelligent Design was in fact "malicious by design."[1] Intelligent Design was the functional equivalent of `s/creationism/intelligent design/g` in a creationist textbook to get around a Supreme Court ban from 1987. That revised textbook was then banned by a district court in 2005. I'm fairly certain that Ken Miller and the many others who fought to keep that book out of classrooms in 2004-05 understood clearly that the "Intelligent Design" side was acting in bad faith. I'm also fairly certain they weren't constrained by their knowledge of the "designed malice" of the other side but instead used that fact to rally more citizens to their cause. [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8498-judge-intelligent-design-is-re-labelled-creationism/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8498-judge-intelligen...
  - profalseidol 8y ago
    Social systems is created by Humans consciously. Complex biological systems are by evidence we have, created by evolutionary process and in fact, not intelligent. Company policy doesn't want you to disclose your salary. I think this is an explicit thought out design. Companies doesn't want worker union, history tells us why. Church policy to stop people from learning how to read. Church want you to keep believing in God and doctrines and has mutual benefit with the monarch via believe in Divine right. The people will work towards less control. Just as in computers, centralized power is simply not scalable. We will eventually move towards something like worker-owned cooperatives.
  - awnfuron 8y ago
    This maybe isn't the place to get super political but I'll give it a shot. The systems of production aren't optimized for worker or human happiness, they are optimized for profit making. That is certainly a design choice, at least on a firm-by-firm level. Maybe nobody sat down and said, "how can I make my workers miserable today?" but they have certainly sat down and said, "how can I profit more today?" And typically, when there is a choice between that profit and workers' happiness, profit wins. Once all or most firms start operating by this logic, the exploitation becomes inescapable. If the firms are smart, they will band together to use some of their profit to influence politics, shaping systems that enable them to make more profits. "Live with it and treat the worst of the systems" would be sort of like the American Democratic party: enact reforms and put restrictions on what firms can do so that they can't exploit so much. This rarely seems to work, first because firms find a way around restrictions, second because the restrictions are often shaped or even written by the firms that are to be regulated. (If you're going to be regulated, you might as well make it happen on your terms.) As you said, it treats the symptoms but not the cause. I don't know about "wait for someone else to be less evil", but I suppose that would be people who can see the problems with the current system but propose no solution. Also, you might have some people in this category who do think that the system could work, if only people were nicer to each other. But again, the problem isn't a lack of niceness, it's that the system is optimized for profit at all costs; given a choice between niceness or profit, profit usually wins. An alternative would be to actually treat the cause of the problem. Have a system where firms are optimized for human needs rather than for profit.

WalterSear 8y ago

> A lot of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart shopping complex the next town over. Now they're upgrading that to an Amazon distribution center in the next state over. Despite their convictions to the contrary, those are a different set of people.

bilbo0s 8y ago
True. It's more like "ONE half of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart", and "the OTHER half of America is using an Amazon distribution center in the next state over". I'm not sanguine that Americans would pay fair-trade prices for household products. (And to be completely fair, there's certainly a half of America that just couldn't afford to pay the prices even if they wanted.)

Nokinside 8y ago

You would need stronger unions to fix this. China does not allow real unions and US has weird union laws that make their relationship with companies confrontational (really: Unions in Europe and US are very different).

ghostly_s 8y ago
Any readings on how European unions work?
- harrumph 8y ago
  >Any readings on how European unions work? To me, the major and defining difference between US vs. European management/labor relationships is found in Germany's principle of co-determination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-determination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-determination Under these rules, the boards of directors of companies in Germany are required to include a significant portion of their voting membership to be drawn from worker population. As such, governorship of the company is at least partially beholden to the input of the persons who create all its value. This is starkly contrasted by US capitalism, where the workers who create all the company's value have effectively no say (apart from collective bargaining and strike) in any directions the company takes. The idea of workers voting on the board is laughable in the states. Co-determination was enshrined right after WWII, in part because the Germans looked around at the industrialized barbarism of the Third Reich and asked themselves "how can we prevent this from ever happening again"? The answer they came up with, in more ways than just co-determination, was to pointedly not hand the country's capitalists everything they wanted. They decided to place serious checks upon the power of capitalists. It's important to never forget that once in power, the Third Reich's first act was to round up, imprison and murder labor union leadership, socialists and communists. Co-determination is one way to remember.
- Nokinside 8y ago
  The US has enterprise-level or workplace level bargaining. Most European countries have sector-level bargaining. In the US workplaces are divided into unionized and non-unionized. Unionized firm is in competitive disadvantage against non-unionized firms. This results a situation where firms fight against unionization very aggressively and unions respond in same. It's very confrontational and aggressive. In Europe firms with more union members are not in competitive disadvantage relative to firms with fewer union members, because negotiations happen sector level. For example restaurant workers union(s) meet restaurant business representatives and they make industry-wide agreements.

ryandrake 8y ago

> I think you can have reasonably priced quality products and worker well-being, but good luck making your case to shareholders and their apologists. If the market could bear a higher priced product that’s ethically sourced, why wouldn’t companies simply raise the price to what the market bears, and pocket the profit instead of ethically source it?

aneutron 8y ago
Congratz, you have a grasp of Apple's business model