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That Kenyan workers don't have more favorable counterfactuals for employment doesn't place companies' behavior beyond critique, because the (collective) behavio

That Kenyan workers don't have more favorable counterfactuals for employment doesn't place companies' behavior beyond critique, because the (collective) behavior of companies that employ workers in Kenya is partially determinative of what the counterfactuals themselves are. If you fall off a bridge into a river and are drowning, and I'm the only person around, it's still exploitation if I try to make you promise to pay me $10k before I'll throw you the life buoy. It doesn't matter that, counterfactually, the alternative is death. It doesn't matter that you'd be far worse off if I wasn't around to offer you my help (at the maximum price I can extract). Likewise, the fact that many Kenyans have no strong employment prospects doesn't mean that companies moving their labor to Kenya aren't wrongfully exploiting the situation. And that's leaving aside the fact that centuries of exploitation have created the economic conditions in Kenya. Benefiting from that is something akin to making money off the guy in the river, and it turns out your dad is the one who pushed him in to begin with.

bschne 3y ago
My perspective on this is more like "the locals will work x amount of time to get by either way, and you are offering them to work x amount of time and get a better living, or maintain their standard of living at lower x." (replace "time" with "time x enjoyment lost from missed leisure time", i.e. opportunity cost of time, if you will). You win because you get the work done cheaper or get to get more work done than you would "back home", the worker wins because they have a better alternative they didn't have before. This hinges on the fact that I assume that if you take a job for OpenAI over, say, working at the local market, or your local family business, or doing subsistence farming, ... (I don't know the employment history of Kenyans doing this) you do so because you consider the job at OpenAI, in your own judgment, the better alternative. This assumes some amount of agency in the decision, yes — I would not argue the same if you e.g. forced prisoners to do the work for below minimum wage or whatever and then went and said "hey at least they get two dollars a day more than zero" (I exaggerate). Also, again, this assumes you don't mislead them about the mental toll and then hold them "captive" with sketchy contracts or whatever. It also seems to me that you have an underlying assumption that companies in the global north could collectively decide to outsource as much labor as they are currently outsourcing, at wage levels matching their "home countries", which I don't think is economically true. As for your analogy, I think I see the equivalence you draw, but I'm not sure I agree with it. For me the most natural read would be that the "payment" here is the workers' time, the ring you throw is the pay for the job. In that case, the payment (time spent doing some kind of work) happens either way (weird world where you always have to pay for getting saved by some strange law of the universe, I guess), and you're just offering a better ring, or the same ring for less time.
memefrog 3y ago
This is incoherent. If Kenyans don't have strong employment prospects then offering them jobs isn't "wrongfully exploiting the situation". It's the exact opposite: it is providing them employment prospects they'd otherwise lack. The economic conditions in Kenya were not caused by 'centuries of exploitation' but by millennia of non-development.

bschne 3y ago

My perspective on this is more like "the locals will work x amount of time to get by either way, and you are offering them to work x amount of time and get a better living, or maintain their standard of living at lower x." (replace "time" with "time x enjoyment lost from missed leisure time", i.e. opportunity cost of time, if you will). You win because you get the work done cheaper or get to get more work done than you would "back home", the worker wins because they have a better alternative they didn't have before. This hinges on the fact that I assume that if you take a job for OpenAI over, say, working at the local market, or your local family business, or doing subsistence farming, ... (I don't know the employment history of Kenyans doing this) you do so because you consider the job at OpenAI, in your own judgment, the better alternative. This assumes some amount of agency in the decision, yes — I would not argue the same if you e.g. forced prisoners to do the work for below minimum wage or whatever and then went and said "hey at least they get two dollars a day more than zero" (I exaggerate). Also, again, this assumes you don't mislead them about the mental toll and then hold them "captive" with sketchy contracts or whatever. It also seems to me that you have an underlying assumption that companies in the global north could collectively decide to outsource as much labor as they are currently outsourcing, at wage levels matching their "home countries", which I don't think is economically true. As for your analogy, I think I see the equivalence you draw, but I'm not sure I agree with it. For me the most natural read would be that the "payment" here is the workers' time, the ring you throw is the pay for the job. In that case, the payment (time spent doing some kind of work) happens either way (weird world where you always have to pay for getting saved by some strange law of the universe, I guess), and you're just offering a better ring, or the same ring for less time.

memefrog 3y ago

This is incoherent. If Kenyans don't have strong employment prospects then offering them jobs isn't "wrongfully exploiting the situation". It's the exact opposite: it is providing them employment prospects they'd otherwise lack. The economic conditions in Kenya were not caused by 'centuries of exploitation' but by millennia of non-development.