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> The people working in sweat shops in China are also "consenting" to do that Damn right they are. Stop idyllising the abject poverty of subsistence farming.

• pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Well you stop idolising indentured servitude (well an analogous situation of paying for a job and then having to work in conditions beyond the bounds of human decency often to end with less than you started with) and then perhaps we can get him to think about it. I'm really not sure whether I'd choose being held prisoner in a factory making high-end gadgets or scraping an existence from the soil and rain and having my family around me a little autonomy. Hobson's choice.
  • aianus 12y ago
    They make many times more money in the gadget factory than the subsistence farming. Nobody's forcing them to be there.
    • pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      You mean like this http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/forced-student-labour-china-apple http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/forced-... : >In June 2011, Zhang and his teenage classmates were taken out of their family homes and dispatched to a factory making electronic gadgets. The pupils were away for a six-month internship at a giant Foxconn plant in the southern city of Shenzhen, a 20-hour train ride from their home in central China. He had no say in the matter, he told researchers. "Unless we could present a medical report certified by the city hospital that we were very ill, we had to go immediately." Or this http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/7/5078402/workers-in-apples-supply-chain-forced-into-indentured-servitude http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/7/5078402/workers-in-apples-... : >The report details the push to find workers to produce the iPhone 5’s 8-megapixel camera, and the means by which companies like Flextronics International, one of Apple’s largest suppliers, recruit for positions on factory assembly lines. According to Bloomberg, companies recruit across the poor cities and villages of Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Nepal to staff up the army of workers needed to create components. To accomplish that task, recruiters hire brokers, who charge families high fees — often a year's worth of wages, with interest — for the opportunity to work on the supply side. >Factory workers were reportedly also obliged to surrender their passports to brokers to ensure they paid off their debts. This practice amounts to the very same kind of bonded labor that Apple has tried to combat in its recent supply-chain audits. According to Bloomberg, Flextronics has commissioned an outside group to conduct an investigation into the fees being foisted on recruits. Apple spokesperson Chris Gaither told Bloomberg that the company will ensure that "the right payments have been made." Neither of those is the story I had in mind FWIW. I can find you more such reports from mainstream media if you like. People get charged for a job, shipped out to a location; kept in a virtual confinement (eg passports taken, not allowed off campus), then sometimes the work disappears and they're left high-and-dry with a debt and still no job. Yes I imagine many do make more in factories but that's not at all the whole story, not by a long shot.