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I got hired at a Bangladesh sweatshop. Meet my 9-year-old boss [video]

249 points by brk 13y ago

dimadima 13y ago
If they work so hard, how do they not burn out?
senthilnayagam 13y ago
poverty is bad, poverty breeds poverty , the kid must be in school, I get it Kid is working reason would be either she needs to contribute for the family to make ends meet or schooling is not accessible lets assume she is taken out of her work by this undercover sting operation, who would take care of her just pointing out the problem is not enough, giving a sustainable solution and follow through to get it implemented is needed as well
- dbond 13y ago
  And the exploitation of poverty sustains it.
  - senthilnayagam 13y ago
    bottom of the pyramid has many problems which westerners dont get it, banning and sanction hurt poor people more than the governments of these poor nations search for "poverty porn" so many people have made careers out of it
  - alphakappa 13y ago
    When companies outsource to countries like Bangladesh because of their cheap labor, it also provides jobs to millions of people there. They are not good jobs by our (western) standards, but they are better jobs than they could've had otherwise. Getting the kids out of the factories wouldn't do much unless their families had the means to sustain themselves. Bringing such stories in the public eye is a good thing though because it might help bring about better oversight of these operations, and an improvement in working conditions. The companies that outsource to Bangladesh might now have an incentive to keep an eye on the working conditions (surely it's possible to have decent working conditions while still having a relatively cheap operation?)
    - dbond 13y ago
      I understand the situation with providing jobs to people who may otherwise have to turn to much more terrible means of providing for themselves, but this is where there is exploitation of their situation by companies and as the end user of much of the products, us as westerners (although we may do little to change it). Factory workers are paid the minimum that the company can get away with, even though we could afford to pay them much more, they could get an education for their children or move their family out of the slums. I'm OK with children working in factories if that is the reality of their situation but we can afford and should pay them more than the paltry amount that just keeps them ticking over.
      - thecodeore 13y ago
        All companies, in every nation, pay the minimum they can get away with. In nations with no social structure, very little wealth, and no jobs the choice is not government hand out vs minimum wage, but a very low paying job or starvation. It would appear you would rather these children starve then to allow them to work for enough money to feed themsleves, possibly working up and out of poverty over generations. America did not just magically start out as a wealthy nation, for generations children labored on family farms, in business, and even in sweatshops. Generations ago a person had to work form dawn to dusk just to feed themselves, Today in America "poverty" is not having and iPhone or Broadband internet. The idea that we can magically transform these 3rd world nation into 1st world nations is naive at best, The same path America took, is the same path these nations must take. Over time wages will increase, conditions will improve, etc, this is a natural order of things. The good news is, this will happen MUCH MUST faster than it did in America. Check out these Videos http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/top-3-ways-sweatshops-help-poor-escape-poverty http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/top-3-ways-sweatshops-hel... http://www.learnliberty.org/content/unbelievable-truth-about-sweatshops http://www.learnliberty.org/content/unbelievable-truth-about... http://www.learnliberty.org/content/sweatshop-wages-and-third-world-workers-are-wages-worth-sweat http://www.learnliberty.org/content/sweatshop-wages-and-thir...
        senthilnayagam 13y ago
FrankenPC 13y ago
Gee, sure makes America's lame first world problems look, well, lame.
- Killah911 13y ago
  Don't worry, we're on well on our way to a society with haves an don't have. Surprisingly enough, the wealth is much more evenly spread in Bangladesh now compared to before. Mainly thanks to the garments industry. When I first heard the principles of, lower taxes and fuck the poor by removing safety nets(aka "entitlements"), I thought to myself, sounds like Bangladesh. Taxes are unheard of there, as long as you can put out a little bribe to the tax collector. Over the years, America is starting to look more and more like Bangladesh (yes, I know, it's a bit hyperbolic). If you don't believe me, you should see some of the homeless families that I've come across. I recall watching people starve to death in Bangladesh when I was very young. Those memories haunt me till this day. It is a form of despair that this 4-day journalist knows nothing about. Aspirations go out the window when faced with hunger. The alternative view is that it's pretty freekin' awesome that this little girl has aspirations at all, beyond being fed (as was the case not very long ago in Bangladesh) Our "first world problems" aren't lame. We have more and more people falling into poverty and a society where social mobility is fast disappearing. Well worth paying attention to if we indeed are a beacon for the world to aspire to.
sethammons 13y ago
Poverty is a such a large and difficult problem. Someone's knee jerk reaction may be to "ZOMG, shut down the factory!" But the factory is providing a _relatively_ better environment than what may other alternatives may provide, such as prostitution.
- invalidOrTaken 13y ago
  It's extra hard because the poor have less information available to them. When Clojure was released, I saw it as my opportunity to become a real-life Lisp ninja, on a platform in wide deployment. How did Meem see it? Oh, that's right, she didn't. Because she was sewing shirts instead of reading "Beating the Averages."
  - buro9 13y ago
    It's not just information that inhibits the poor. The poor struggle. Daily. In that struggle a truth emerges: Struggle is all you've known, it's what you knew yesterday and it is what you will know tomorrow. For the poor struggle, hardship and despair dull the senses and the reality of the present stretches out before them. There is no future, there is just more of the present forever and ever. What I feel those with privilege cannot comprehend is that words like aspiration, phrases like social mobility, are so alien that they are meaningless. If you're aware enough to have been angry, you're probably also aware enough to realise the stupidity of throwing yourself against the tide of the world. And so you accept and endure. You can provide information but without hope and belief that change is possible to their lives, and that the struggle can be overcome, information is worthless. Food and shelter for a day are the only things you can offer of value.
    - tucaz 13y ago
      I Think this the best comment I read here at HN. Thank you
    - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
      which may be why terrorism is a predominately educated middle class affair. But accepting your argument, I cannot give in to nihilism. Take the children out of the factories, put them in school, build libraries, train teachers, and wait twenty years to see a vast difference. If you are a military dictatorship that uses your twenty years to educate the country and drag it by the bootstraps into the global upwards pastures, you may retire with your ill gotten gains on a beach somewhere with our thanks. Get rich and change nothing I want you hunted down with dogs.
feefie 13y ago
Will 3D printers be able to make nice clothes some day?
- lotsofcows 13y ago
  Probably. Then what will happen to these workers?
  - sebcat 13y ago
    They will throw their sabots into the machine and cry 'liberté, egalité, fraternité!' I don't claim to have any answers, but looking at western history you start to see some similarities.
    - PeterisP 13y ago
      There's a big difference from western history - in western history, the machines were right next to them; however, if for example a Bangladesh worker is replaced by a sewing robot located in Taiwan, then there's nothing the working class can do about that, and there's no chance that any benefits will trickle down to them as the new profits and rich class are located elsewhere and won't even hire them as servants. The future will not be evenly distributed, that's for sure.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Not 3D printers, but there are advances in sewing robots; it's a nontrivial problem of mainly computer vision and manipulators, but it's progressing well. As far as I know they already are able to make okay clothes, but currently they are more expensive than humans at sewing machines - the moment they become cheaper than workers like Meem, all those millions will be out of work.
- TillE 13y ago
  If you define a 3D printer as either something approaching a Star Trek replicator, or alternatively as a machine with a ton of different tools for specific tasks, then yes, why not. In the foreseeable future, you really would need a sewing machine as part of it.
invalidOrTaken 13y ago
I was wondering why, to put it bluntly, Bangladesh sucks so much. This may shed some light: "Corruption in Bangladesh has been a continuing problem with the country being ranked as the most corrupt country for the year 2005 in the list published by Transparency International." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Bangladesh http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Bangladesh
- brador 13y ago
  Corruption causes a disproportionate wealth disparity, it's one of the methods used to detect it. Works especially well within a country to identify more or less corrupt states. One argument is corruptions leads to reduced actual investment in infrastructure, roads, schools, things which increase a regions wealth, making corrupt areas show up pretty clearly on a map.
  - tinco 13y ago
    Why would someone downvote this comment?
    - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
      Because people are tired of the 'everything is about wealth disparity' claptrap?
      - factorizer 13y ago
        Especially here in Nerdghanistan. It really is a nice collection of Fachidioten.
      - factorizer 13y ago
        Especially here in Nerdghanistan. It really is a nice collection of Fachidioten.
L_Rahman 13y ago
As someone who's spent his life roughly equally split across Bangladesh and America, I thought I'd provide some perspective. The questions I ask myself about this situation are: 1. Are the lives of the people who work in these factories better or worse as a result of these jobs existing? The answer I end up arriving at repeatedly is that it is a resounding improvement in the lives of almost everyone. RMG factories empower women to provide for themselves in a way that nothing else in the country can. There simply aren't any other jobs for women in low-income brackets in Bangladesh and I personally know individuals who found the courage to break themselves out of abusive marriages and the ability to say no to marriages they didn't want because of the income they have from these jobs. 2. Could the factories be better? Yes, absolutely. Most of the owners could obviously afford to pay employees better given the incredible amounts of wealth that the factory owners have accumulated and having gone to school with some of their children, I know quite a few factory owners personally. The reason they don't pay more comes down to simply business principles. The objective of a labor intensive business is to drive costs down the lowest possible amount legally. That is what they do. 3. What is the government's role? This is pretty simple. They should raise the minimum wage for factory workers, create more stringent regulation and make great effort to ensure those regulations are followed. This is where invalidOrTaken's point about corruption comes in. Many of the factory owners are themselves members of parliament, or have spent a great deal of money getting one of their lackeys elected. On top of that, virtually everyone in a regulatory agency will take massive bribes to look the other way. When the article talks about that girl's dream being a sewing operator, and you cringe because that sounds so depressing, realize that 10 years ago this girls only option would have been to get married to a rickshaw puller or shopkeeper and hope he wasn't abusive. Today, she can dream of a job, of moving up a ladder and maybe even becoming a manager some day. That's progress even if it comes with a whole host of issues.
- RodericDay 13y ago
  The way I answer people that say this is: It's not good enough. Yes, you can come up with all the explanation whatsoever you want to how this is a ~local maxima~ of happiness, but the fact is that we live on a much higher one with tons of disposable income and benefit from their work... so it s not a ~global maxima~ (not even close) so we should do better. What can I say? I'm definitely more to the left than most people in this website but any quietly upvoted defense of child labor sounds like "the slaves had it better than in _x_" or "women were spared _y_" jobs to me when it comes to defending poor social policy. Grown-ass white men getting paid to develop digital toys justifying to themselves why the situation for 9 year old sweatshop workers is good enough. JFC. edit: in fact, every single reply amongst the first 20 in some ways works to justify the completely bubbled-in mentality of the startup crowd. just running down the topic I see (caricaturized for effect) "social justice types don't understand how rough it is out there, this is good for her!", "ugh, this journalist is endangering the girl!", and "this really puts in perspective all those pesky cultural issues that women, gay people, and minorities keep complaining about". what the hell is wrong with you all, seriously.
vinhboy 13y ago
Isn't it a bit dangerous to show Meem's picture all over the internet like that? What if she become a target for retaliation for the story, or she loses her job because of the unwanted attention.
mjfern 13y ago
How about a Watsi for children (and their families) that have to work in sweatshops to make ends meet? Anyone interested in exploring this further? Some challenges: - Verifying the children that you support through the Watsi-type program already work in this environment (or will soon have to) as a necessity to economically support their families. - Ensuring that, once you donate money, the children are no longer working in this environment and instead are enrolled in school. - Other potential pitfalls?
- tinco 13y ago
  Watsi has too much overhead per child to make a difference on this level I think. Why not do what the entire world should be doing in the first place? Pay children to go to school. This way you remove the overhead of a campaign for every single child, and make sure they are going to school at the same time.
jvm 13y ago
Sometimes I think westerners just can't wrap their heads around just how poor Bangladesh is. Their GDP per capita: $2000, adjusted for living costs (PPP). Please, everyone, try to wrap your head around that number. That means a totally equal distribution of resources would give everyone $2000 a year. GDP counts all money spent on everything, so factory safety compliance costs would come out of that $2000. Consider Mexican migrant workers in the states scraping by on $10k are earning 5x as much as that number, and no, it is not made up for by cost of living, this is taking that into account. Yeah the stuff that goes on is really messed up. And no, nobody deserves to live like that. But unlike in America, where GDP is at $50k/capita PPP, redistribution actually cannot solve the problem. $2k/year is unacceptably close to subsistence. It's just as important in this case to grow the economy larger as it is to redistribute more fairly.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Your argument assumes that distribution of wealth has no effect on economic growth -- e.g., that distribution changes are zero-sum not only over the immediate term but over the long term as well. I'd expect the propensity to spend money within the domestic economy to be higher at the lower end of the distribution and lower and the higher end, so I'd expect downward redistribution to, ceteris paribus, increase the domestic velocity of money and expand GDP.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    You might be taking his point too literally. Another way to look at it is, if the owners of factories in Bangladesh were maximally generous and civic-minded, how much could they improve the lives of garment workers? Is the answer "not very much"?
    - lemmsjid 13y ago
      Just taking the details from the original article, the answer is probably 'quite a bit', and probably without a massive economic impact: * Windows * Air conditioning * Chairs (!!) * Fewer hours and more breaks * Disability and health benefits That's a baseline of civilized-ness. In fact, the act of purchasing the labor to install those things would also stimulate the economy. The real answer to why the above don't exist is not economics, it's, "Because we don't have to do that." And worse (and this is on the conscience of 'first world' peoples), "Because it will marginally increase the cost of the goods, thus causing corporations to purchase from other countries without such protections."
RegEx 13y ago
These comments...they are completely awful. I don't want to be associated with this place anymore. How do I delete my account?
- cerebrum 13y ago
  Farewell... we wont miss you or notice that you are no longer here :)
_oa_ 13y ago
Nobody mentioned family planning. The girl started to work because her mom became pregnant with her 6th (? I counted older brother and 3 younger siblings) child. Was this pregnancy planned? We will not know, but there is some possibility it was not. So, providing girl's parents with contraceptives and educating both mom and dad in their use would have had a real immediate impact on this girl's life.
- L_Rahman 13y ago
  There's been a huge effort from both NGO's and the government to promote birth control that has actually been quite effective. Birth rates have fallen sharply. [1] 1. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/172372?uid=3739704&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102741388561 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/172372?uid=3739704&uid... I apologize for the JSTOR link.
alexeisadeski3 13y ago
Why should we believe that these kids would be better served sitting idly in school for several years? Isn't it better to get actual on the job training, learning an actual trade, making money to put food on the table? Think about opportunity costs: An American child has chance XX% of becoming a white collar professional if they go to XX years of school. A Bangladeshi child has a significantly smaller .X% chance of becoming a white collar pro with X years of school (XX not generally available, presumably?). Thus is quite likely that it is simply irrational, a poverty increasing equation, to send these children to school for too many years. Increasing the minimum wage actually harms the poorest and most vulnerable workers, by disqualifying them from gainful employment. Ditto child labor laws in extremely poor areas. All of this stuff about "educating your way out of poverty" is just magical thinking. It's as if the first world brain sees the obviousness of a situation, simply enters a "MUST NOT SEE" feedback loop, and then spits out "RAISE MINIMUM WAGE, INCREASE SCHOOLING, SEND IN THE NGOs" nonsense.
sorenbs 13y ago
As someone who is currently establishing a software development office in Bangladesh for a western company this is my perspective on child labor Child labor is a long term problem for any country as it keeps kids out of school and locks them in low wage jobs for the rest of their live, meaning less tax revenue for the country. Educating the young generation is an investment in the future that brings more sophisticated work and higher wage jobs. Very Simple. In Bangladesh underemployment among healthy adults is so widespread that child labor can only be ascribed to bad governance. Clearly the government, if it cared about future growth and wealth in the country, should create a scheme allowing children to learn and healthy adults to work. Simply banning child labor is not enough as this story so clearly explains. The family needs the money, and doesn't have idle healthy adults who could could replace meem's income. Some fairly sophisticated scheme is required for this to work. Call it wealth distribution, social security or whatever. Currently the government is not able to provide such a scheme and as a result the country will develop much slower than it could otherwise.
- danielrhodes 13y ago
  At some point, if the economy continues to grow, poor working conditions and child labor will start catch up with the country and they will be forced to curb them in order to get to the next level of growth. Hopefully corruption will not get in the way of that (something China seems to be dealing with now).
moo 13y ago
Remember, 5 months ago over 1,100 people confirmed dead when a garment factory collapsed in Savar district of Dhaka, Bangladesh with over 3,000 people inside. People's survival rights should not have to wait on an economic miracle, new elections, Western people's blessings, Adam Smith's invisible hand, God, or reincarnation. Waiting for such a crisis where things go beyond the pale to punish a couple of corrupt owners is not enough. When Third World people have enough and demand change we should not sit idle and support the Western countries who then start pumping in money for weapons to suppress the people on pretext that it is economic aid or to fight terrorism. The West cannot stay so rich and have conditions improve for the World's toiling poor. Freedom to get rich and monopolize resources is not freedom or fairness for everyone.
javajosh 13y ago
I've emailed the author asking how I can pay Meem to go to school. I think I can outbid the sweatshop. I'll let you know how it turns out.
- jdotjdot 13y ago
  I can't decide how I feel about this. On the one hand, I love the initiative you're taking here and the drive you have. Reading the article, my immediate thought was "that's terrible"--whereas yours was "What can I personally do about this right now?" On the other hand, I remain unconvinced that directing resources simply to the people and charities that come my way through the media is the best way to distribute these resources. Yes, Meem will greatly benefit from this money. But is it good that Meem gets it simply because she happened to be written up in the paper? What about those who are never written up--and does that simply incentivize people in need to seek publicity rather than promote more sustainable macro-level solutions? I don't have a real answer here, it's just that actions like these make me feel strongly ambivalent, if you'll forgive my oxymoron.
  - javajosh 13y ago
    I probably would have felt the same way as you even a year ago. But then it started to feel like I was always waiting to be "effective" and never actually doing anything. If every human on this planet who could just adopted one other random person on this planet to look out for, wouldn't the world be a much better place?
    - jdotjdot 13y ago
      Possibly, except my point was Meem is hardly random. If everyone took that initiative, Meem would get a ton of support because of the publicity--but no one else would.
      - javajosh 13y ago
        And if everyone thought like you did, then Meem wouldn't get any support at all. So, who's position sits better with you? Look, the best we can do is take care of the actionable problems in front of us. I don't consider "get vast numbers of people out of poverty" to be an actionable problem. I don't study poverty, I don't know what statistically significant levers to pull (or try to pull). I just know that when I see a situation like Meem's, I know I can help so I can at least make the effort. And who knows? Maybe in trying to help one person I'll have some insight (currently lacking) into the larger problems. But I find it hard to take that someone can sit back in their armchair, never having helped a single person out of poverty in their life, criticizing someone for taking concrete action because it doesn't address the larger issues. The simple fact is that unless you have vast wealth, or you have a tremendous amount of influence on those with wealth, then you have about as much ability to address larger issues as I do, that is, nil. So if you want to let your contradictory beliefs paralyze you into inaction, that's your problem. Meanwhile, let me do what I can in peace.
deleted 13y ago
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Dogamondo 13y ago
Are these monthly salaries quite typical across the board for the majority of people in Bangladesh? I employ a JS developer in Dhaka as a contractor who's hourly rate is $22.00 USD. I would have crossed his palm with about $4000 in the past month alone. Yet he still tells me he's only on the slightly higher side of 'average' when it comes to lifestyle/income over there. Earning 90% of a sweat shop workers monthly salary per hour kinda makes me second guess this. Anyone here have any direct experience of what the cost of living in Bangladesh really is?
- allochthon 13y ago
  I suspect that wages and wage expectations are always relative to a cohort of one's peers. I'm doubt that any developer, anywhere in the world, takes into account the average income of textile workers in their expectations of what they should be making. They compare their earnings to those of other developers.
- al1x 13y ago
  Average salary for a software developer in India is ~10k US. You're paying him 4.4x that. You should shop around. Contract out some small pieces of work to other developers in the $5-$10/hr range and see what quality of work they deliver. I suspect you'll find you're overpaying. (I pay my contractors $5/hr)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Dogamondo 13y ago
  Thanks a lot for the replies guys. I had a feeling I might be paying too much. As since I hired my contractor he's suddenly been able to afford to set up and office and hire other developers that are charged at the same rate. Don't get me wrong, he's a really skilled developer and puts my JS skills to shame. But I'm feeling like the price per project seems to be creeping up exponentially. I'll try giving some smaller jobs to other devs in Bangladesh & India to see what the quality of work is like in comparison. Cheers.
wickerdog 13y ago
We spend more time talking about these issues than doing something about it. Just STOP buying anything that says 'Made in China/Bangladesh/Pakistan, etc. But you might say, 'then those workers will not even get the few dollars they get now.' NO. Throw money out of the equation. Everything will set itself right.
wickerdog 13y ago
test

249 points by brk 13y ago

If they work so hard, how do they not burn out?

poverty is bad, poverty breeds poverty , the kid must be in school, I get it Kid is working reason would be either she needs to contribute for the family to make ends meet or schooling is not accessible lets assume she is taken out of her work by this undercover sting operation, who would take care of her just pointing out the problem is not enough, giving a sustainable solution and follow through to get it implemented is needed as well

dbond 13y ago
And the exploitation of poverty sustains it.
- senthilnayagam 13y ago
  bottom of the pyramid has many problems which westerners dont get it, banning and sanction hurt poor people more than the governments of these poor nations search for "poverty porn" so many people have made careers out of it
- alphakappa 13y ago
  When companies outsource to countries like Bangladesh because of their cheap labor, it also provides jobs to millions of people there. They are not good jobs by our (western) standards, but they are better jobs than they could've had otherwise. Getting the kids out of the factories wouldn't do much unless their families had the means to sustain themselves. Bringing such stories in the public eye is a good thing though because it might help bring about better oversight of these operations, and an improvement in working conditions. The companies that outsource to Bangladesh might now have an incentive to keep an eye on the working conditions (surely it's possible to have decent working conditions while still having a relatively cheap operation?)
  - dbond 13y ago
    I understand the situation with providing jobs to people who may otherwise have to turn to much more terrible means of providing for themselves, but this is where there is exploitation of their situation by companies and as the end user of much of the products, us as westerners (although we may do little to change it). Factory workers are paid the minimum that the company can get away with, even though we could afford to pay them much more, they could get an education for their children or move their family out of the slums. I'm OK with children working in factories if that is the reality of their situation but we can afford and should pay them more than the paltry amount that just keeps them ticking over.
    - thecodeore 13y ago
      All companies, in every nation, pay the minimum they can get away with. In nations with no social structure, very little wealth, and no jobs the choice is not government hand out vs minimum wage, but a very low paying job or starvation. It would appear you would rather these children starve then to allow them to work for enough money to feed themsleves, possibly working up and out of poverty over generations. America did not just magically start out as a wealthy nation, for generations children labored on family farms, in business, and even in sweatshops. Generations ago a person had to work form dawn to dusk just to feed themselves, Today in America "poverty" is not having and iPhone or Broadband internet. The idea that we can magically transform these 3rd world nation into 1st world nations is naive at best, The same path America took, is the same path these nations must take. Over time wages will increase, conditions will improve, etc, this is a natural order of things. The good news is, this will happen MUCH MUST faster than it did in America. Check out these Videos http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/top-3-ways-sweatshops-help-poor-escape-poverty http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/top-3-ways-sweatshops-hel... http://www.learnliberty.org/content/unbelievable-truth-about-sweatshops http://www.learnliberty.org/content/unbelievable-truth-about... http://www.learnliberty.org/content/sweatshop-wages-and-third-world-workers-are-wages-worth-sweat http://www.learnliberty.org/content/sweatshop-wages-and-thir...
      - senthilnayagam 13y ago

FrankenPC 13y ago

Gee, sure makes America's lame first world problems look, well, lame.

Killah911 13y ago
Don't worry, we're on well on our way to a society with haves an don't have. Surprisingly enough, the wealth is much more evenly spread in Bangladesh now compared to before. Mainly thanks to the garments industry. When I first heard the principles of, lower taxes and fuck the poor by removing safety nets(aka "entitlements"), I thought to myself, sounds like Bangladesh. Taxes are unheard of there, as long as you can put out a little bribe to the tax collector. Over the years, America is starting to look more and more like Bangladesh (yes, I know, it's a bit hyperbolic). If you don't believe me, you should see some of the homeless families that I've come across. I recall watching people starve to death in Bangladesh when I was very young. Those memories haunt me till this day. It is a form of despair that this 4-day journalist knows nothing about. Aspirations go out the window when faced with hunger. The alternative view is that it's pretty freekin' awesome that this little girl has aspirations at all, beyond being fed (as was the case not very long ago in Bangladesh) Our "first world problems" aren't lame. We have more and more people falling into poverty and a society where social mobility is fast disappearing. Well worth paying attention to if we indeed are a beacon for the world to aspire to.

sethammons 13y ago

Poverty is a such a large and difficult problem. Someone's knee jerk reaction may be to "ZOMG, shut down the factory!" But the factory is providing a _relatively_ better environment than what may other alternatives may provide, such as prostitution.

invalidOrTaken 13y ago
It's extra hard because the poor have less information available to them. When Clojure was released, I saw it as my opportunity to become a real-life Lisp ninja, on a platform in wide deployment. How did Meem see it? Oh, that's right, she didn't. Because she was sewing shirts instead of reading "Beating the Averages."
- buro9 13y ago
  It's not just information that inhibits the poor. The poor struggle. Daily. In that struggle a truth emerges: Struggle is all you've known, it's what you knew yesterday and it is what you will know tomorrow. For the poor struggle, hardship and despair dull the senses and the reality of the present stretches out before them. There is no future, there is just more of the present forever and ever. What I feel those with privilege cannot comprehend is that words like aspiration, phrases like social mobility, are so alien that they are meaningless. If you're aware enough to have been angry, you're probably also aware enough to realise the stupidity of throwing yourself against the tide of the world. And so you accept and endure. You can provide information but without hope and belief that change is possible to their lives, and that the struggle can be overcome, information is worthless. Food and shelter for a day are the only things you can offer of value.
  - tucaz 13y ago
    I Think this the best comment I read here at HN. Thank you
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    which may be why terrorism is a predominately educated middle class affair. But accepting your argument, I cannot give in to nihilism. Take the children out of the factories, put them in school, build libraries, train teachers, and wait twenty years to see a vast difference. If you are a military dictatorship that uses your twenty years to educate the country and drag it by the bootstraps into the global upwards pastures, you may retire with your ill gotten gains on a beach somewhere with our thanks. Get rich and change nothing I want you hunted down with dogs.

feefie 13y ago

Will 3D printers be able to make nice clothes some day?

lotsofcows 13y ago
Probably. Then what will happen to these workers?
- sebcat 13y ago
  They will throw their sabots into the machine and cry 'liberté, egalité, fraternité!' I don't claim to have any answers, but looking at western history you start to see some similarities.
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    There's a big difference from western history - in western history, the machines were right next to them; however, if for example a Bangladesh worker is replaced by a sewing robot located in Taiwan, then there's nothing the working class can do about that, and there's no chance that any benefits will trickle down to them as the new profits and rich class are located elsewhere and won't even hire them as servants. The future will not be evenly distributed, that's for sure.
PeterisP 13y ago
Not 3D printers, but there are advances in sewing robots; it's a nontrivial problem of mainly computer vision and manipulators, but it's progressing well. As far as I know they already are able to make okay clothes, but currently they are more expensive than humans at sewing machines - the moment they become cheaper than workers like Meem, all those millions will be out of work.
TillE 13y ago
If you define a 3D printer as either something approaching a Star Trek replicator, or alternatively as a machine with a ton of different tools for specific tasks, then yes, why not. In the foreseeable future, you really would need a sewing machine as part of it.

invalidOrTaken 13y ago

I was wondering why, to put it bluntly, Bangladesh sucks so much. This may shed some light: "Corruption in Bangladesh has been a continuing problem with the country being ranked as the most corrupt country for the year 2005 in the list published by Transparency International." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Bangladesh http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Bangladesh

brador 13y ago
Corruption causes a disproportionate wealth disparity, it's one of the methods used to detect it. Works especially well within a country to identify more or less corrupt states. One argument is corruptions leads to reduced actual investment in infrastructure, roads, schools, things which increase a regions wealth, making corrupt areas show up pretty clearly on a map.
- tinco 13y ago
  Why would someone downvote this comment?
  - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
    Because people are tired of the 'everything is about wealth disparity' claptrap?
    - factorizer 13y ago
      Especially here in Nerdghanistan. It really is a nice collection of Fachidioten.
    - factorizer 13y ago
      Especially here in Nerdghanistan. It really is a nice collection of Fachidioten.

L_Rahman 13y ago

As someone who's spent his life roughly equally split across Bangladesh and America, I thought I'd provide some perspective. The questions I ask myself about this situation are: 1. Are the lives of the people who work in these factories better or worse as a result of these jobs existing? The answer I end up arriving at repeatedly is that it is a resounding improvement in the lives of almost everyone. RMG factories empower women to provide for themselves in a way that nothing else in the country can. There simply aren't any other jobs for women in low-income brackets in Bangladesh and I personally know individuals who found the courage to break themselves out of abusive marriages and the ability to say no to marriages they didn't want because of the income they have from these jobs. 2. Could the factories be better? Yes, absolutely. Most of the owners could obviously afford to pay employees better given the incredible amounts of wealth that the factory owners have accumulated and having gone to school with some of their children, I know quite a few factory owners personally. The reason they don't pay more comes down to simply business principles. The objective of a labor intensive business is to drive costs down the lowest possible amount legally. That is what they do. 3. What is the government's role? This is pretty simple. They should raise the minimum wage for factory workers, create more stringent regulation and make great effort to ensure those regulations are followed. This is where invalidOrTaken's point about corruption comes in. Many of the factory owners are themselves members of parliament, or have spent a great deal of money getting one of their lackeys elected. On top of that, virtually everyone in a regulatory agency will take massive bribes to look the other way. When the article talks about that girl's dream being a sewing operator, and you cringe because that sounds so depressing, realize that 10 years ago this girls only option would have been to get married to a rickshaw puller or shopkeeper and hope he wasn't abusive. Today, she can dream of a job, of moving up a ladder and maybe even becoming a manager some day. That's progress even if it comes with a whole host of issues.

RodericDay 13y ago
The way I answer people that say this is: It's not good enough. Yes, you can come up with all the explanation whatsoever you want to how this is a ~local maxima~ of happiness, but the fact is that we live on a much higher one with tons of disposable income and benefit from their work... so it s not a ~global maxima~ (not even close) so we should do better. What can I say? I'm definitely more to the left than most people in this website but any quietly upvoted defense of child labor sounds like "the slaves had it better than in _x_" or "women were spared _y_" jobs to me when it comes to defending poor social policy. Grown-ass white men getting paid to develop digital toys justifying to themselves why the situation for 9 year old sweatshop workers is good enough. JFC. edit: in fact, every single reply amongst the first 20 in some ways works to justify the completely bubbled-in mentality of the startup crowd. just running down the topic I see (caricaturized for effect) "social justice types don't understand how rough it is out there, this is good for her!", "ugh, this journalist is endangering the girl!", and "this really puts in perspective all those pesky cultural issues that women, gay people, and minorities keep complaining about". what the hell is wrong with you all, seriously.

vinhboy 13y ago

Isn't it a bit dangerous to show Meem's picture all over the internet like that? What if she become a target for retaliation for the story, or she loses her job because of the unwanted attention.

mjfern 13y ago

How about a Watsi for children (and their families) that have to work in sweatshops to make ends meet? Anyone interested in exploring this further? Some challenges: - Verifying the children that you support through the Watsi-type program already work in this environment (or will soon have to) as a necessity to economically support their families. - Ensuring that, once you donate money, the children are no longer working in this environment and instead are enrolled in school. - Other potential pitfalls?

tinco 13y ago
Watsi has too much overhead per child to make a difference on this level I think. Why not do what the entire world should be doing in the first place? Pay children to go to school. This way you remove the overhead of a campaign for every single child, and make sure they are going to school at the same time.

jvm 13y ago

Sometimes I think westerners just can't wrap their heads around just how poor Bangladesh is. Their GDP per capita: $2000, adjusted for living costs (PPP). Please, everyone, try to wrap your head around that number. That means a totally equal distribution of resources would give everyone $2000 a year. GDP counts all money spent on everything, so factory safety compliance costs would come out of that $2000. Consider Mexican migrant workers in the states scraping by on $10k are earning 5x as much as that number, and no, it is not made up for by cost of living, this is taking that into account. Yeah the stuff that goes on is really messed up. And no, nobody deserves to live like that. But unlike in America, where GDP is at $50k/capita PPP, redistribution actually cannot solve the problem. $2k/year is unacceptably close to subsistence. It's just as important in this case to grow the economy larger as it is to redistribute more fairly.

dragonwriter 13y ago
Your argument assumes that distribution of wealth has no effect on economic growth -- e.g., that distribution changes are zero-sum not only over the immediate term but over the long term as well. I'd expect the propensity to spend money within the domestic economy to be higher at the lower end of the distribution and lower and the higher end, so I'd expect downward redistribution to, ceteris paribus, increase the domestic velocity of money and expand GDP.
- tptacek 13y ago
  You might be taking his point too literally. Another way to look at it is, if the owners of factories in Bangladesh were maximally generous and civic-minded, how much could they improve the lives of garment workers? Is the answer "not very much"?
  - lemmsjid 13y ago
    Just taking the details from the original article, the answer is probably 'quite a bit', and probably without a massive economic impact: * Windows * Air conditioning * Chairs (!!) * Fewer hours and more breaks * Disability and health benefits That's a baseline of civilized-ness. In fact, the act of purchasing the labor to install those things would also stimulate the economy. The real answer to why the above don't exist is not economics, it's, "Because we don't have to do that." And worse (and this is on the conscience of 'first world' peoples), "Because it will marginally increase the cost of the goods, thus causing corporations to purchase from other countries without such protections."

RegEx 13y ago

These comments...they are completely awful. I don't want to be associated with this place anymore. How do I delete my account?

cerebrum 13y ago
Farewell... we wont miss you or notice that you are no longer here :)

_oa_ 13y ago

Nobody mentioned family planning. The girl started to work because her mom became pregnant with her 6th (? I counted older brother and 3 younger siblings) child. Was this pregnancy planned? We will not know, but there is some possibility it was not. So, providing girl's parents with contraceptives and educating both mom and dad in their use would have had a real immediate impact on this girl's life.

L_Rahman 13y ago
There's been a huge effort from both NGO's and the government to promote birth control that has actually been quite effective. Birth rates have fallen sharply. [1] 1. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/172372?uid=3739704&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102741388561 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/172372?uid=3739704&uid... I apologize for the JSTOR link.

alexeisadeski3 13y ago

Why should we believe that these kids would be better served sitting idly in school for several years? Isn't it better to get actual on the job training, learning an actual trade, making money to put food on the table? Think about opportunity costs: An American child has chance XX% of becoming a white collar professional if they go to XX years of school. A Bangladeshi child has a significantly smaller .X% chance of becoming a white collar pro with X years of school (XX not generally available, presumably?). Thus is quite likely that it is simply irrational, a poverty increasing equation, to send these children to school for too many years. Increasing the minimum wage actually harms the poorest and most vulnerable workers, by disqualifying them from gainful employment. Ditto child labor laws in extremely poor areas. All of this stuff about "educating your way out of poverty" is just magical thinking. It's as if the first world brain sees the obviousness of a situation, simply enters a "MUST NOT SEE" feedback loop, and then spits out "RAISE MINIMUM WAGE, INCREASE SCHOOLING, SEND IN THE NGOs" nonsense.

sorenbs 13y ago

As someone who is currently establishing a software development office in Bangladesh for a western company this is my perspective on child labor Child labor is a long term problem for any country as it keeps kids out of school and locks them in low wage jobs for the rest of their live, meaning less tax revenue for the country. Educating the young generation is an investment in the future that brings more sophisticated work and higher wage jobs. Very Simple. In Bangladesh underemployment among healthy adults is so widespread that child labor can only be ascribed to bad governance. Clearly the government, if it cared about future growth and wealth in the country, should create a scheme allowing children to learn and healthy adults to work. Simply banning child labor is not enough as this story so clearly explains. The family needs the money, and doesn't have idle healthy adults who could could replace meem's income. Some fairly sophisticated scheme is required for this to work. Call it wealth distribution, social security or whatever. Currently the government is not able to provide such a scheme and as a result the country will develop much slower than it could otherwise.

danielrhodes 13y ago
At some point, if the economy continues to grow, poor working conditions and child labor will start catch up with the country and they will be forced to curb them in order to get to the next level of growth. Hopefully corruption will not get in the way of that (something China seems to be dealing with now).

moo 13y ago

Remember, 5 months ago over 1,100 people confirmed dead when a garment factory collapsed in Savar district of Dhaka, Bangladesh with over 3,000 people inside. People's survival rights should not have to wait on an economic miracle, new elections, Western people's blessings, Adam Smith's invisible hand, God, or reincarnation. Waiting for such a crisis where things go beyond the pale to punish a couple of corrupt owners is not enough. When Third World people have enough and demand change we should not sit idle and support the Western countries who then start pumping in money for weapons to suppress the people on pretext that it is economic aid or to fight terrorism. The West cannot stay so rich and have conditions improve for the World's toiling poor. Freedom to get rich and monopolize resources is not freedom or fairness for everyone.

javajosh 13y ago

I've emailed the author asking how I can pay Meem to go to school. I think I can outbid the sweatshop. I'll let you know how it turns out.

jdotjdot 13y ago
I can't decide how I feel about this. On the one hand, I love the initiative you're taking here and the drive you have. Reading the article, my immediate thought was "that's terrible"--whereas yours was "What can I personally do about this right now?" On the other hand, I remain unconvinced that directing resources simply to the people and charities that come my way through the media is the best way to distribute these resources. Yes, Meem will greatly benefit from this money. But is it good that Meem gets it simply because she happened to be written up in the paper? What about those who are never written up--and does that simply incentivize people in need to seek publicity rather than promote more sustainable macro-level solutions? I don't have a real answer here, it's just that actions like these make me feel strongly ambivalent, if you'll forgive my oxymoron.
- javajosh 13y ago
  I probably would have felt the same way as you even a year ago. But then it started to feel like I was always waiting to be "effective" and never actually doing anything. If every human on this planet who could just adopted one other random person on this planet to look out for, wouldn't the world be a much better place?
  - jdotjdot 13y ago
    Possibly, except my point was Meem is hardly random. If everyone took that initiative, Meem would get a ton of support because of the publicity--but no one else would.
    - javajosh 13y ago
      And if everyone thought like you did, then Meem wouldn't get any support at all. So, who's position sits better with you? Look, the best we can do is take care of the actionable problems in front of us. I don't consider "get vast numbers of people out of poverty" to be an actionable problem. I don't study poverty, I don't know what statistically significant levers to pull (or try to pull). I just know that when I see a situation like Meem's, I know I can help so I can at least make the effort. And who knows? Maybe in trying to help one person I'll have some insight (currently lacking) into the larger problems. But I find it hard to take that someone can sit back in their armchair, never having helped a single person out of poverty in their life, criticizing someone for taking concrete action because it doesn't address the larger issues. The simple fact is that unless you have vast wealth, or you have a tremendous amount of influence on those with wealth, then you have about as much ability to address larger issues as I do, that is, nil. So if you want to let your contradictory beliefs paralyze you into inaction, that's your problem. Meanwhile, let me do what I can in peace.

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Dogamondo 13y ago

Are these monthly salaries quite typical across the board for the majority of people in Bangladesh? I employ a JS developer in Dhaka as a contractor who's hourly rate is $22.00 USD. I would have crossed his palm with about $4000 in the past month alone. Yet he still tells me he's only on the slightly higher side of 'average' when it comes to lifestyle/income over there. Earning 90% of a sweat shop workers monthly salary per hour kinda makes me second guess this. Anyone here have any direct experience of what the cost of living in Bangladesh really is?

allochthon 13y ago
I suspect that wages and wage expectations are always relative to a cohort of one's peers. I'm doubt that any developer, anywhere in the world, takes into account the average income of textile workers in their expectations of what they should be making. They compare their earnings to those of other developers.
al1x 13y ago
Average salary for a software developer in India is ~10k US. You're paying him 4.4x that. You should shop around. Contract out some small pieces of work to other developers in the $5-$10/hr range and see what quality of work they deliver. I suspect you'll find you're overpaying. (I pay my contractors $5/hr)
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Dogamondo 13y ago
Thanks a lot for the replies guys. I had a feeling I might be paying too much. As since I hired my contractor he's suddenly been able to afford to set up and office and hire other developers that are charged at the same rate. Don't get me wrong, he's a really skilled developer and puts my JS skills to shame. But I'm feeling like the price per project seems to be creeping up exponentially. I'll try giving some smaller jobs to other devs in Bangladesh & India to see what the quality of work is like in comparison. Cheers.

wickerdog 13y ago

We spend more time talking about these issues than doing something about it. Just STOP buying anything that says 'Made in China/Bangladesh/Pakistan, etc. But you might say, 'then those workers will not even get the few dollars they get now.' NO. Throw money out of the equation. Everything will set itself right.

wickerdog 13y ago

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