8 ms·

Well not quite spot on. It did mention that these people were willing to do what ever to get away from the hellish alternative they were born into. But if you b

Well not quite spot on. It did mention that these people were willing to do what ever to get away from the hellish alternative they were born into. But if you blinked you missed it, you missed the most important point: People are doing this voluntarily. Rumors of forced labor are greatly exaggerated. Perhaps somewhere in Burma but in China and India and other places, people do this hard work because the alternative is harder. This is how you work your way up from a very low starting point. England wasn't always a workers' paradise either. Wages in China will rise.

garply 17y ago
Thank you for making this point. This happens to be the position on the economic ladder where these people are. A few people are higher, most people are at a level equal or lower to this. In some ways I feel like the tone pieces like this take when discussing Chinese life is condescending. For some people this is just 'work.' Consider using this kind of pity to talk about American blue collar workers - does it seem appropriate?
- neilk 17y ago
  It kind of does, when you consider that we're forcing local workers to compete with people who are just desperate to get out of the same crappy apartment with 12 other relatives. Do I owe the local worker a living? Of course not. But we both pay taxes to the same government, and he is getting shafted due to China's MFN status, and I as a professional who can afford iPhones am getting an awesome deal.
  - biohacker42 17y ago
    Do you owe anything to the people who are just desperate to get out of the same crappy apartment with 12 other relatives? The local vs remote worker argument works when there's something inherently preferable about the local worker, like you and him are cousins or form the same tribe, or something like that. But nationalism aside, isn't everybody entitled to the same opportunities?
    - neilk 17y ago
      Uh, what? We are in the same tribe. That's what being a citizen of a country is supposed to be about. We're all paying into the same government, through sales or income taxes they tend to take a similar bite whatever the income level. Even if you regard local solidarity as mere sentimentalism, there are very pragmatic reasons for me to be concerned about the welfare of my neighbors -- crime, public health, and so on. I live in San Francisco. When the big earthquake hits and someone has to pull me out of the rubble, they won't be outsourcing that job to the Philippines. It'll be some guy who lives near me, probably the kind of guy with a broad back and an unironic mustache, who has to make do with underemployment since all the local jobs seem to be for douchebags with iPhones.
    - neilk 17y ago
      Also: it sounds like you are advocating a sort of internationalism. That would be fine with me, as long as we had similar rules for global labor as we do for global capital. Free trade agreements are negotiated painstakingly to make the treatment of investments uniform across countries. In the process, they usually accord some special treatment to professional classes. I myself am a beneficiary of such rules -- as a Canadian professional, I can skip across the border to the USA with just a little bit of documentation. We don't have anything equivalent for labor. This seems to me to be a great omission, if not an outright scam. Even after free trade between the US and Canada and Mexico, we don't allow workers to cross borders. Nor do we have uniform standards for the treatment of labor like we do for capital, either. It seems to me to be deliberate -- they want the workers to be stuck with the local situation, and they want local governments to compete on lowering benefits and labor standards.
  - reedlaw 17y ago
    Competition is driving down prices. Tariffs and minimum wage laws are just ways of redistributing wealth. If there were no tariffs or minimum wage laws, there would be more healthy competition which would raise the world's standard of living, not just local workers.
    - AlisdairO 17y ago
      ...or it would simply intensify the race to the bottom.
  - Tichy 17y ago
    How do you mean "we are forcing"? I don't think "we" create the economic realities. We don't live in paradise where we just have to lie in the shadow of a tree all day and only occasionally have to reach up to grab an apple. Life isn't easy.
neilk 17y ago
If you saw a drowning person, would you ask them to be your slave forever in exchange for throwing them a life preserver? That's a voluntary exchange too, but you're still a dick for doing it. Yes, most of these jobs are better than the alternative, namely, starvation in the countryside where there are no jobs. In the worst cases, (not all) these jobs pay so little that the workers can't accumulate capital, can't send their kids to school, etc. And due to the magic of subcontracting, the large Western employers have no long term investment in the country -- they'll pick up and leave when the next country over offers them a slightly better deal. In Thailand I met a woman who was working for a private museum. She had figured out that her boss had basically made his fortune through selling slaves. Voluntary indentured servitude for several years, sold out of villages. And this isn't just some backwater, Thailand is where a lot of manufacturing is happening lately.
- biohacker42 17y ago
  If you saw a drowning person, would you ask them to be your slave forever in exchange for throwing them a life preserver? How do you suggest we remedy this? The OECD gets together and forces a minimum wage on the developing world? That might work, but I think the shortest, fastest and simplest way out hell is let their economies grow as fast as they can.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- potatolicious 17y ago
  Modern, first-world standards cannot be applied to the third world - I am a prime example of this. I owe my life to child labor and sweatshop labor, allow me to explain. My family is originally from Taiwan, and both of my folks grew up when Taiwan was still an inconsequential tropical island consisted mostly of fishing villages and a hodgepodge government-in-exile. Both of them are beneficiaries of the "abusive" practices of foreign businesses. My father worked in a plastics plant, and once had to outrace a cloud of deadly chlorine gas, and survived by the grace of a low wall surrounding the factory (chlorine crawls along the ground). Safety practices were almost non-existent - my mother is still missing a small chunk of her right index finger (and she was lucky). My mother's family was desperately poor - my grandfather eventually succumbed to years of breathing in coal dust with no protective equipment, and all of his children worked from as young as 10 years-old to put themselves through school. But here's the thing: people in that country could not afford to educate themselves, and if it were not for the willingness of employers to hire child labor and form sweatshops, they would never have had the opportunity to climb out of that hole. If you had insisted on no child labor, minimum pay standards, and rigorous safety adherence, there would have been no reason to set up shop in a backwater island like Taiwan, and then where would we be? My family would likely still be living in the jungles up on some mountain somewhere, starving.

garply 17y ago

Thank you for making this point. This happens to be the position on the economic ladder where these people are. A few people are higher, most people are at a level equal or lower to this. In some ways I feel like the tone pieces like this take when discussing Chinese life is condescending. For some people this is just 'work.' Consider using this kind of pity to talk about American blue collar workers - does it seem appropriate?

neilk 17y ago
It kind of does, when you consider that we're forcing local workers to compete with people who are just desperate to get out of the same crappy apartment with 12 other relatives. Do I owe the local worker a living? Of course not. But we both pay taxes to the same government, and he is getting shafted due to China's MFN status, and I as a professional who can afford iPhones am getting an awesome deal.
- biohacker42 17y ago
  Do you owe anything to the people who are just desperate to get out of the same crappy apartment with 12 other relatives? The local vs remote worker argument works when there's something inherently preferable about the local worker, like you and him are cousins or form the same tribe, or something like that. But nationalism aside, isn't everybody entitled to the same opportunities?
  - neilk 17y ago
    Uh, what? We are in the same tribe. That's what being a citizen of a country is supposed to be about. We're all paying into the same government, through sales or income taxes they tend to take a similar bite whatever the income level. Even if you regard local solidarity as mere sentimentalism, there are very pragmatic reasons for me to be concerned about the welfare of my neighbors -- crime, public health, and so on. I live in San Francisco. When the big earthquake hits and someone has to pull me out of the rubble, they won't be outsourcing that job to the Philippines. It'll be some guy who lives near me, probably the kind of guy with a broad back and an unironic mustache, who has to make do with underemployment since all the local jobs seem to be for douchebags with iPhones.
  - neilk 17y ago
    Also: it sounds like you are advocating a sort of internationalism. That would be fine with me, as long as we had similar rules for global labor as we do for global capital. Free trade agreements are negotiated painstakingly to make the treatment of investments uniform across countries. In the process, they usually accord some special treatment to professional classes. I myself am a beneficiary of such rules -- as a Canadian professional, I can skip across the border to the USA with just a little bit of documentation. We don't have anything equivalent for labor. This seems to me to be a great omission, if not an outright scam. Even after free trade between the US and Canada and Mexico, we don't allow workers to cross borders. Nor do we have uniform standards for the treatment of labor like we do for capital, either. It seems to me to be deliberate -- they want the workers to be stuck with the local situation, and they want local governments to compete on lowering benefits and labor standards.
- reedlaw 17y ago
  Competition is driving down prices. Tariffs and minimum wage laws are just ways of redistributing wealth. If there were no tariffs or minimum wage laws, there would be more healthy competition which would raise the world's standard of living, not just local workers.
  - AlisdairO 17y ago
    ...or it would simply intensify the race to the bottom.
- Tichy 17y ago
  How do you mean "we are forcing"? I don't think "we" create the economic realities. We don't live in paradise where we just have to lie in the shadow of a tree all day and only occasionally have to reach up to grab an apple. Life isn't easy.

neilk 17y ago

If you saw a drowning person, would you ask them to be your slave forever in exchange for throwing them a life preserver? That's a voluntary exchange too, but you're still a dick for doing it. Yes, most of these jobs are better than the alternative, namely, starvation in the countryside where there are no jobs. In the worst cases, (not all) these jobs pay so little that the workers can't accumulate capital, can't send their kids to school, etc. And due to the magic of subcontracting, the large Western employers have no long term investment in the country -- they'll pick up and leave when the next country over offers them a slightly better deal. In Thailand I met a woman who was working for a private museum. She had figured out that her boss had basically made his fortune through selling slaves. Voluntary indentured servitude for several years, sold out of villages. And this isn't just some backwater, Thailand is where a lot of manufacturing is happening lately.

biohacker42 17y ago
If you saw a drowning person, would you ask them to be your slave forever in exchange for throwing them a life preserver? How do you suggest we remedy this? The OECD gets together and forces a minimum wage on the developing world? That might work, but I think the shortest, fastest and simplest way out hell is let their economies grow as fast as they can.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
potatolicious 17y ago
Modern, first-world standards cannot be applied to the third world - I am a prime example of this. I owe my life to child labor and sweatshop labor, allow me to explain. My family is originally from Taiwan, and both of my folks grew up when Taiwan was still an inconsequential tropical island consisted mostly of fishing villages and a hodgepodge government-in-exile. Both of them are beneficiaries of the "abusive" practices of foreign businesses. My father worked in a plastics plant, and once had to outrace a cloud of deadly chlorine gas, and survived by the grace of a low wall surrounding the factory (chlorine crawls along the ground). Safety practices were almost non-existent - my mother is still missing a small chunk of her right index finger (and she was lucky). My mother's family was desperately poor - my grandfather eventually succumbed to years of breathing in coal dust with no protective equipment, and all of his children worked from as young as 10 years-old to put themselves through school. But here's the thing: people in that country could not afford to educate themselves, and if it were not for the willingness of employers to hire child labor and form sweatshops, they would never have had the opportunity to climb out of that hole. If you had insisted on no child labor, minimum pay standards, and rigorous safety adherence, there would have been no reason to set up shop in a backwater island like Taiwan, and then where would we be? My family would likely still be living in the jungles up on some mountain somewhere, starving.