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Traditionally slavery was an alternative to death for the conquered. I'm morbidly curious what the effects of all Western corporations banning slave labor woul

Traditionally slavery was an alternative to death for the conquered. I'm morbidly curious what the effects of all Western corporations banning slave labor would be. I doubt it would result in liberation. Would working conditions for the slaves worsen when they worked for local, lower-margin factories instead? I can't imagine them improving. I have little faith in legal remedies to liberate slaves. Arming them seems the only long-term effective solution. Otherwise the man with the gun will order the slave back to work the second the man in the wig isn't looking. And the man in the wig will remain silent, to avoid revealing his impotence. Slave labor is inefficient, so perhaps the best way is to topple inefficient slave societies through full-spectrum competition, from military to economic. This pressure incentivizes efficient human resource utilization. One thing's for sure: Individual Westerner guilt over whether to buy the next iPhone will add zero value.

jbm 6y ago
> One thing's for sure: Individual Westerner guilt over whether to buy the next iPhone will add zero value. What, specifically, do you mean by this?
mahrain 6y ago
Having spent several years in Chinese supply chain activities, the factories building iPhones, XBoxes etc. Are some of the nicest ones around. Clean, large campuses with organized activities for workers etc. There are several tiers of factories below that, with worse worker accommodations, Longer working hours, worse working conditions. Some of the smaller, poorer factories will provide little in terms of personal protective equipment, ergonomics, and make stuff for the local, African and South Asian markets where there’s little pressure on companies to have a “clean” supply chain. These workers would go there.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  That sounds to me like "if we don't let our suppliers use child labor, those children's families will starve" argumentation. We in the west are complicit in the use of child and slave labor when we buy products produced in this manner, but because it happens on the other side of the globe and is cheaper that way, we turn a blind eye. The solution is not to ignore the issue. The solution is to draw a line in the sand and say "this is unacceptable, clean up your act or no deal", and for that to be backed by international trade agreements. It is up to us, as the lucrative market they wish to sell to, to make these demands. Full transparency and accountability in all supply lines is a must. It should not be possible to hide behind "a supplier did this, we're not responsible". I hope we'll see a move to more local production, instead of shipping stuff around the globe like crazy. It makes no sense for me in Europe to have my clothes produced in Asia, when we have world-class textile and garment production right here, with better environmental control and worker's rights.
- TeeMassive 6y ago
  > Having spent several years in Chinese supply chain activities, the factories building iPhones, XBoxes etc. Are some of the nicest ones around. Clean, large campuses with organized activities for workers etc. There are also really nice farms that treats cattle very nicely.
- Cyberthal 6y ago
  Nice to have theory confirmed by experience.
thotsBgone 6y ago
Cedant arma togae: the man in the wig is not powerless. The man in the wig simply doesn't care about slaves. The man in the wig does, however, care about the opinions of the electorate (in a democracy), and so Westerner guilt may actually be useful.
dmingod666 6y ago
Doing good starts from home. Arm your prison labor and minimum wage workers. Let us know how that goes..
- Cyberthal 6y ago
  I didn't say arming slaves was good. I said it was the only effective long-term solution to the problem of liberating slaves. The consensus here is anti-slavery, so I accepted that premise. The USA does permit minimum wage workers to purchase cheap pistols, which is probably why its police aren't brave enough to lock them down. Sometimes those workers even upset a predetermined election. I do not support prisons. On average, it is better to be the slave of an individual and work for him than it is to be the slave of a state and live in a cage full of predators. Although of course I would rather be imprisoned for life in modern Scandinavia than serve 10 years of "indentured servitude" in Plantation America. Since doing good starts from home, I suggest you liberate your extended family's children from compulsory labor. Let us know how that goes...
  - noduerme 6y ago
    Doing time in Scandinavia amounts to living for free in a socialist utopia. You call working in the US "indentured servitude"? Really? If so, it's a very nice kind of slavery, where lots of us can buy houses and many idiots have the time to stand in line for a PS5. If you took away the societal whim to buy the latest shoes / rims / playstations (which I think is temporary and only based on cheap credit) then you have a massively productive economy and still one of the highest living standards in the world. In spite of the obvious inequalities. The answer isn't to tear down the system, it's to get better education to more people so they stop trying to tear down the system, and start trying to make the system work better for them.
  - dmingod666 6y ago
    I'm not Chinese.. sorry if I was too rude... Agree that slavery is just hidden now and called by a different name.. it's sad, America with it's literally unlimited resources can do much better for it's own citizens, but it's too divided on class and uses race problems to divert attention from the real problem that the lower classes are screwed over in every possible way.. I think if the politicians there were a little less corrupt it would have been so much more nicer for regular folk..
noduerme 6y ago
Wow. A troglodyte on HN manages to get top votes by vomiting an incredibly incoherent spew of libertarianism, marxism, reactionary nationalism and militant western chauvinism. All of this in reaction to an article about slave labor going into every fanboy's favorite screen. Who woulda thunk it. A lot of things you say are right: If Western civ actually held to its neoliberal values then things would cost more. Slave labor is inefficient (although it's more efficient and apparently more acceptable than executing people like they did during the Cultural Revolution). But on what planet do you live where the only solution is armed violence? First of all, that's just not possible. Even in America, the idea that because we have guns we are able to stand up against oppressive government is nothing more than a wet dream fantasy of the far right. In China? Uighurs are going to arm up and stand to the CCP? Are you out of your mind? If that looked like anything, it would look like Islamic terrorism. You and I in America, and the people in Hong Kong, and the Uighurs, are not in a "slave society", we are in a corporation. And our issues are not going to be cured by taking up small arms against nuclear states that act as part of that corporations, even if millions of us are armed. The only thing going on here is a battle for scarce resources, disguised as a bunch of ideologies. Look, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have trillions of dollars they could spend to build up a Palestinian state rebuild Syria or help the Uighurs, but what do they do? Make arms deals with Israel and America and China. And logically they're doing what they need to do. There is no world in which your fantasy of small arms and liberation of slaves is a remote possibility. The only possibility is people owning their own local resources. And not sharing them as marxists, either. There are very few, if any, levers that we can pull from the West at this point to promulgate that strategy. We can't bomb the railway lines into the Uighur camps, as we should have in WWII, because it would cause a nuclear war. We can cut off trade, and encourage people not to trade with bad actors, that's about it. Everything else is just a wanker fantasy.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mqrs 6y ago
> perhaps the best way is to topple inefficient slave societies through full-spectrum competition, from military to economic. This pressure incentivizes efficient human resource utilization. Isn’t that what’s already happening though? One might even say that this neoliberalist take is precisely what brought about the current situation. For producers in the market to be competitive, they must (over)optimize for profit. One of the best ways to do that is by reducing cost. One of the best ways to reduce cost is by employing cheaper labor (“efficient human resource utilization”, you said), and to do that, tech companies must outsource to manufacturers located in poor countries with weak state institutions where the transacting parties can get away with slavery.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  In short, exploitation is a natural consequence of capitalism and the "infinite growth for shareholders" model.
  - ianai 6y ago
    Wouldn’t a UBI effectively lower costs of labor and undermine the circumstances of forced work? It’d be a UBI in the developed region and not in the foreign country.
- Cyberthal 6y ago
  Humans envy wealth not justified by the generous hunter archetype, who shares his kill's meat with the tribe. Humans also lust to devour chips and candy until their teeth rot and their hearts explode. A three-pound brain comes with legacy firmware. Vulnerabilities should be patched in the next 10,000-year release. Please hold. Tribal politics are mediated by emotion, settled by sex and violence, and recorded in genes. Unfelt but underlying is the telos of life: to accelerate the heat death of the universe and achieve a more perfectly-uniform field of lifeless subatomic dust. Inspiring! If God is the universe, then life is the cancer She dies of. So if you really hate God, become Elon Musk and advance humanity along the Kardashev Scale. Which brings us to what international pressure really is: the race up the Kardashev ladder. Those left behind enjoy a century of humiliation, as China discovered when the European nations forcibly opened her ports for business in classically-rapey colonial fashion. If forcible anachronism is a form of societal slavery, then this was a liberation of the Chinese peasant, who now owns a cell phone and several outfits. Later Mao attempted his Great Leap Forward, but gave up on it before meeting the fate of Pol Pot, whose supreme ideological commitment weakened Cambodia so badly that Vietnam invaded. Thus the threat of invasion checks the degree of enslavement feasible. Of course, it rarely comes to that. Even Communists can be reasonable. > Isn’t that what’s already happening though? China should be enjoying her Asian tiger rise in per capita GDP, and filling the vacuum left by the USA's receding thalassocracy. However, it's always possible to overplay a good hand, and it appears Xi did exactly that. If he's replaced by moderate after Deng's heart, it will be partly due to the pressure Trump put on China, in a reversal of the USA's prior indulgence. Not that Trump is doing much on an absolute scale, but relatively, it's a dramatic shift. Mostly though, it's China's own fault. Burning all her international goodwill to hoard COVID19 PPE will prove very expensive, among other shenanigans. Just because I make a factual historical observation, doesn't make me a neoliberal. Slave societies are an extreme case. I doubt China could be described as one at her current levels of forced labor. > For producers in the market to be competitive, they must (over)optimize for profit. One of the best ways to do that is by reducing cost. One of the best ways to reduce cost is by employing cheaper labor (“efficient human resource utilization”, you said), and to do that, tech companies must outsource to manufacturers located in poor countries with weak state institutions where the transacting parties can get away with slavery. Here's where you're right: Tribal politics represent the genetic feedback system, and they dislike arbitrary wealth because of its damaging distortion of genetic fitness feedback. The market economy makes wealth a much less arbitrary signal of genetic fitness, but it is nowhere near a replacement for tribal politics. Unless you think Bill Gates should get all the California girls... That's why successful societies balance the interests of the rich against the interests of the commoners. However, I wouldn't call China a "poor country with weak state institutions". If their slaves are outcompeting our free skilled tech workers, there's a simple solution for that: Slap a tariff on it. This move will garner enough popularity to guarantee a crowd of adoring iPhone assembly technicians in front of the golden statue of yourself you erect with the proceeds.

jbm 6y ago

> One thing's for sure: Individual Westerner guilt over whether to buy the next iPhone will add zero value. What, specifically, do you mean by this?

mahrain 6y ago

Having spent several years in Chinese supply chain activities, the factories building iPhones, XBoxes etc. Are some of the nicest ones around. Clean, large campuses with organized activities for workers etc. There are several tiers of factories below that, with worse worker accommodations, Longer working hours, worse working conditions. Some of the smaller, poorer factories will provide little in terms of personal protective equipment, ergonomics, and make stuff for the local, African and South Asian markets where there’s little pressure on companies to have a “clean” supply chain. These workers would go there.

KozmoNau7 6y ago
That sounds to me like "if we don't let our suppliers use child labor, those children's families will starve" argumentation. We in the west are complicit in the use of child and slave labor when we buy products produced in this manner, but because it happens on the other side of the globe and is cheaper that way, we turn a blind eye. The solution is not to ignore the issue. The solution is to draw a line in the sand and say "this is unacceptable, clean up your act or no deal", and for that to be backed by international trade agreements. It is up to us, as the lucrative market they wish to sell to, to make these demands. Full transparency and accountability in all supply lines is a must. It should not be possible to hide behind "a supplier did this, we're not responsible". I hope we'll see a move to more local production, instead of shipping stuff around the globe like crazy. It makes no sense for me in Europe to have my clothes produced in Asia, when we have world-class textile and garment production right here, with better environmental control and worker's rights.
TeeMassive 6y ago
> Having spent several years in Chinese supply chain activities, the factories building iPhones, XBoxes etc. Are some of the nicest ones around. Clean, large campuses with organized activities for workers etc. There are also really nice farms that treats cattle very nicely.
Cyberthal 6y ago
Nice to have theory confirmed by experience.

thotsBgone 6y ago

Cedant arma togae: the man in the wig is not powerless. The man in the wig simply doesn't care about slaves. The man in the wig does, however, care about the opinions of the electorate (in a democracy), and so Westerner guilt may actually be useful.

dmingod666 6y ago

Doing good starts from home. Arm your prison labor and minimum wage workers. Let us know how that goes..

Cyberthal 6y ago
I didn't say arming slaves was good. I said it was the only effective long-term solution to the problem of liberating slaves. The consensus here is anti-slavery, so I accepted that premise. The USA does permit minimum wage workers to purchase cheap pistols, which is probably why its police aren't brave enough to lock them down. Sometimes those workers even upset a predetermined election. I do not support prisons. On average, it is better to be the slave of an individual and work for him than it is to be the slave of a state and live in a cage full of predators. Although of course I would rather be imprisoned for life in modern Scandinavia than serve 10 years of "indentured servitude" in Plantation America. Since doing good starts from home, I suggest you liberate your extended family's children from compulsory labor. Let us know how that goes...
- noduerme 6y ago
  Doing time in Scandinavia amounts to living for free in a socialist utopia. You call working in the US "indentured servitude"? Really? If so, it's a very nice kind of slavery, where lots of us can buy houses and many idiots have the time to stand in line for a PS5. If you took away the societal whim to buy the latest shoes / rims / playstations (which I think is temporary and only based on cheap credit) then you have a massively productive economy and still one of the highest living standards in the world. In spite of the obvious inequalities. The answer isn't to tear down the system, it's to get better education to more people so they stop trying to tear down the system, and start trying to make the system work better for them.
- dmingod666 6y ago
  I'm not Chinese.. sorry if I was too rude... Agree that slavery is just hidden now and called by a different name.. it's sad, America with it's literally unlimited resources can do much better for it's own citizens, but it's too divided on class and uses race problems to divert attention from the real problem that the lower classes are screwed over in every possible way.. I think if the politicians there were a little less corrupt it would have been so much more nicer for regular folk..

noduerme 6y ago

Wow. A troglodyte on HN manages to get top votes by vomiting an incredibly incoherent spew of libertarianism, marxism, reactionary nationalism and militant western chauvinism. All of this in reaction to an article about slave labor going into every fanboy's favorite screen. Who woulda thunk it. A lot of things you say are right: If Western civ actually held to its neoliberal values then things would cost more. Slave labor is inefficient (although it's more efficient and apparently more acceptable than executing people like they did during the Cultural Revolution). But on what planet do you live where the only solution is armed violence? First of all, that's just not possible. Even in America, the idea that because we have guns we are able to stand up against oppressive government is nothing more than a wet dream fantasy of the far right. In China? Uighurs are going to arm up and stand to the CCP? Are you out of your mind? If that looked like anything, it would look like Islamic terrorism. You and I in America, and the people in Hong Kong, and the Uighurs, are not in a "slave society", we are in a corporation. And our issues are not going to be cured by taking up small arms against nuclear states that act as part of that corporations, even if millions of us are armed. The only thing going on here is a battle for scarce resources, disguised as a bunch of ideologies. Look, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have trillions of dollars they could spend to build up a Palestinian state rebuild Syria or help the Uighurs, but what do they do? Make arms deals with Israel and America and China. And logically they're doing what they need to do. There is no world in which your fantasy of small arms and liberation of slaves is a remote possibility. The only possibility is people owning their own local resources. And not sharing them as marxists, either. There are very few, if any, levers that we can pull from the West at this point to promulgate that strategy. We can't bomb the railway lines into the Uighur camps, as we should have in WWII, because it would cause a nuclear war. We can cut off trade, and encourage people not to trade with bad actors, that's about it. Everything else is just a wanker fantasy.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mqrs 6y ago

> perhaps the best way is to topple inefficient slave societies through full-spectrum competition, from military to economic. This pressure incentivizes efficient human resource utilization. Isn’t that what’s already happening though? One might even say that this neoliberalist take is precisely what brought about the current situation. For producers in the market to be competitive, they must (over)optimize for profit. One of the best ways to do that is by reducing cost. One of the best ways to reduce cost is by employing cheaper labor (“efficient human resource utilization”, you said), and to do that, tech companies must outsource to manufacturers located in poor countries with weak state institutions where the transacting parties can get away with slavery.

pietrovismara 6y ago
In short, exploitation is a natural consequence of capitalism and the "infinite growth for shareholders" model.
- ianai 6y ago
  Wouldn’t a UBI effectively lower costs of labor and undermine the circumstances of forced work? It’d be a UBI in the developed region and not in the foreign country.
Cyberthal 6y ago
Humans envy wealth not justified by the generous hunter archetype, who shares his kill's meat with the tribe. Humans also lust to devour chips and candy until their teeth rot and their hearts explode. A three-pound brain comes with legacy firmware. Vulnerabilities should be patched in the next 10,000-year release. Please hold. Tribal politics are mediated by emotion, settled by sex and violence, and recorded in genes. Unfelt but underlying is the telos of life: to accelerate the heat death of the universe and achieve a more perfectly-uniform field of lifeless subatomic dust. Inspiring! If God is the universe, then life is the cancer She dies of. So if you really hate God, become Elon Musk and advance humanity along the Kardashev Scale. Which brings us to what international pressure really is: the race up the Kardashev ladder. Those left behind enjoy a century of humiliation, as China discovered when the European nations forcibly opened her ports for business in classically-rapey colonial fashion. If forcible anachronism is a form of societal slavery, then this was a liberation of the Chinese peasant, who now owns a cell phone and several outfits. Later Mao attempted his Great Leap Forward, but gave up on it before meeting the fate of Pol Pot, whose supreme ideological commitment weakened Cambodia so badly that Vietnam invaded. Thus the threat of invasion checks the degree of enslavement feasible. Of course, it rarely comes to that. Even Communists can be reasonable. > Isn’t that what’s already happening though? China should be enjoying her Asian tiger rise in per capita GDP, and filling the vacuum left by the USA's receding thalassocracy. However, it's always possible to overplay a good hand, and it appears Xi did exactly that. If he's replaced by moderate after Deng's heart, it will be partly due to the pressure Trump put on China, in a reversal of the USA's prior indulgence. Not that Trump is doing much on an absolute scale, but relatively, it's a dramatic shift. Mostly though, it's China's own fault. Burning all her international goodwill to hoard COVID19 PPE will prove very expensive, among other shenanigans. Just because I make a factual historical observation, doesn't make me a neoliberal. Slave societies are an extreme case. I doubt China could be described as one at her current levels of forced labor. > For producers in the market to be competitive, they must (over)optimize for profit. One of the best ways to do that is by reducing cost. One of the best ways to reduce cost is by employing cheaper labor (“efficient human resource utilization”, you said), and to do that, tech companies must outsource to manufacturers located in poor countries with weak state institutions where the transacting parties can get away with slavery. Here's where you're right: Tribal politics represent the genetic feedback system, and they dislike arbitrary wealth because of its damaging distortion of genetic fitness feedback. The market economy makes wealth a much less arbitrary signal of genetic fitness, but it is nowhere near a replacement for tribal politics. Unless you think Bill Gates should get all the California girls... That's why successful societies balance the interests of the rich against the interests of the commoners. However, I wouldn't call China a "poor country with weak state institutions". If their slaves are outcompeting our free skilled tech workers, there's a simple solution for that: Slap a tariff on it. This move will garner enough popularity to guarantee a crowd of adoring iPhone assembly technicians in front of the golden statue of yourself you erect with the proceeds.