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I really don't understand this problem. Why does everybody think people in Asia are forced to do this kind of work? These people would be incredibly poor if not

• mixedbit 12y ago
  These people are exploited by being paid a minimal wage, because they have no other way to survive, but to take sweatshop jobs. The Grapes of Wrath illustrates this mechanism well.
  • foobar2020 12y ago
    That is right, and what is the alternative? Suppose China had never opened their borders to foreign investments. What would these people do? I think I know the answer, just look at the following life expectancy graph: http://www.china-profile.com/data/fig_WPP2008_L0_M.htm http://www.china-profile.com/data/fig_WPP2008_L0_M.htm
    • mixedbit 12y ago
      The alternative is to fairly share profits with the people that make goods. This could be enforced by the legal system, as it was successfully done when slavery was banned.
      • danielweber 12y ago
        Average wages in China have tripled over 8 years. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/wages http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/wages Whatever they are doing, they should keep it up.
        • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
          Wait - average wages a decade ago were like a dollar a day. So tripling that sounds like something I guess. I'd like to see something like parity for wages doing the same work anywhere on the planet. That would be progress.
          • danielweber 12y ago
            > I'd like to see something like parity for wages doing the same work anywhere on the planet I'd like a pony. Saying, in the year 2015, that wages should be the same anywhere on the planet is telling poor countries with no infrastructure "fuck you, got mine." Because the only reason someone opens a factory in Cambodia or China instead of South Carolina is because of the low wages. That is those countries' competitive advantage. If a worker in Cambodia costs $10 an hour and a worker in America costs $10 an hour, there is no reason to build a factory in Cambodia. They have poorer infrastructure, little to no respect for IP, and the stuff is now a world away from its customers.
            • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
              That's pretty mean, putting abusive words in my mouth to make a tangential point. How about, just mention that low wages have an upside to balancing economic growth, and leave me out of it?
            • eli_gottlieb 12y ago
              >I'd like a pony. All right, have an over-worked pony and stop pretending not to know about marginal costs and prices. As long as the worker in Cambodia remains cheaper by anything over the exact cost of shipping than the one in South Carolina, rather than by orders of magnitude, his country has a comparative advantage. http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/196/0/f/tired_applejack_by_fabulouspony-d3ry6zp.png http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/196/0/f/tired_appleja...
              • danielweber 12y ago
                Thanks for the pony! It's not just shipping costs. It's also the fact that doing business in a well-functioning first-world country is much easier than doing business in a third-world country. Also, just declaring that Cambodian workers will get $7 an hour wouldn't just magically spill money into the workers. If the market wage is $1 an hour, a bulk of that difference is going to go into pockets of the people handing out the jobs via kickbacks. An awesome solution that doesn't work in the real world isn't an awesome solution.
      • foobar2020 12y ago
        I believe that the free market decides what kind of profit sharing is fair. You are always welcome to raise money for poor people, as well as help them in any other way. Even Bill Gates does that, with quite a success.
        • mixedbit 12y ago
          The free market wouldn't outlaw slavery.
        • ashark 12y ago
          > I believe that the free market decides what kind of profit sharing is fair. Oh, this is too bold a statement to be tossed out so casually! What sort of fairness does this concern?
        • pluma 12y ago
          Implying a free market is interested in fairness. The two things are entirely orthogonal. Fairness is a moral judgement. Free markets are inherently amoral (not immoral) and tend to optimize for profits (with a bias towards short-term profits). That's not good or bad, it merely is. Raising money for poor people, except for the tax and marketing benefits, is a bad economical decision -- the benefits are at best ultra-long-term and very unpredictable. No matter what you think about the Gates Foundation, they're not doing good things for economical reasons. If its only purpose was financially benefiting Bill Gates, he should fire his financial advisors. The free market didn't get Europe out of the Industrialisation, civil rights (and labour laws) did. Regardless of what you think about modern unions[0], they played a huge part in empowering labourers enough that they could negotiate to improve their working conditions. Without organizing in unions, striking would have been economical suicide for any individual labourer. [0]: I personally think that unions are antiquated in most industries in Europe and North America today, especially when most of the strikes seem to involve middle-class jobs and those who are worst off often don't have any means to unionize or strike (e.g. people who work at temp agencies that are treated as free contractors legally even if they are not financially independent). But that's a different topic altogether.
  • Dirlewanger 12y ago
    They're being exploited, and their governments are doing nothing to stop it. You want change? It starts with those who are allowing it. Modern muckraking only goes so far.
• danielweber 12y ago
  http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1997/03/in_praise_of_cheap_labor.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19... Bad jobs at bad wages beat no jobs at no wages. This doesn't mean the western world shouldn't push back at all. There are things very cheap for the employer that can provide a lot of safety benefits to the worker. But imposing Western-style labor standards and wages today would put these places out of business, harming the laborers.
  • pluma 12y ago
    The problem isn't that people have no jobs, the problem is that people have no money. This is a fundamental difference some people seem to find hard to understand. It's not vital to reduce unemployment, it's vital to reduce poverty. Reducing unemployment is merely an attempt to achieve that end. Yes, a job presents a way to modify your income and a good job is a job that provides you with a way to influence your income via your performance (i.e. if you become better at it, you get more money or can switch to a job that pays more), but the problem poor people have isn't that they don't have jobs, it's that they don't have money -- whether they don't have money because they don't have an income or don't have money because their income is consumed by their essential expenses doesn't make any difference, other than that if they already have a job they don't have the option of simply getting a job to make more money. In that regard having a job that barely covers your expenses and doesn't provide any financial mobility is almost worse than not having a job: if you don't have a job, at least you have the theoretical possibility of improving your situation by getting one.
• holri 12y ago
  With boycotting these goods and reporting this issues we can actively improve the situation for those people now. In Mao Zedong times we could do nothing.
  • guac 12y ago
    We could and did do something. We opened up trade. That improved and continues to improve their situation immensely. You're advocating we now do the opposite.
    • pas 12y ago
      No, he advocates for a selective pressure of sorts, but of course the problem is, you don't really know when something is made in a fair-shop or in a sweat-shop. The certification and transparency NGOs and their programs are helpful, but not as cost effective and thus a friction on capital transfer. (However, as others have hinted at the important things, such as increasing equality and promoting internal redistribution - better domestic markets, which are things that should be practically forced out of the situation, because that's not really a natural outcome of the blind capital accumulation race.)
    • dragonwriter 12y ago
      > We could and did do something. We opened up trade. That improved and continues to improve their situation immensely. One problem I see here is that people like to analyze things in terms of absolute conditions, but there is plenty of research that the subjective experience of suffering is more driven by relative conditions within an environment than absolute conditions. This is important in this context, because neoliberal trade definitely has improved aggregate economic measures in many LDCs, has in many cases improved the absolute condition of even the worst off, but has pretty much everywhere vastly increased the gulf between the rich and the poor, and in many cases done so in a way which reinforces pre-existing ethnic and class divides.
      • pluma 12y ago
        In other words, being poor is (subjectively) worse when everyone is rubbing in your face what you can't (and never will be able to) afford.
• tootie 12y ago
  That's not wrong, but it does kinda miss the point. The argument isn't we should stop buying and let them go back to living off the land. The argument is they should be paid a living wage to do work that has value. If the work came back to first-world factories, they'd have to pay at least 10X the wages, so just agreeing to 1.5X or 2X is still a bargain.
  • mlrtime 12y ago
    "If the work came back to first-world factories, they'd have to pay at least 10X the wages" And they might have 100x the living expenses.
  • tomp 12y ago
    The "living wage" is an ill-defined term, because the majority of the population will always be earning just at or above the living wage - and when the general wages rise, so will the costs (of food, rent, transport, ...). The only way of breaking this cycle is by creating a society of abundance, but even the West isn't there yet, yet alone India/China. The only other thing you can do is earn more, but that only counts if you're earning more than other people, so that you can outbid them (e.g. when buying/renting a flat) while still having enough money to spend/save.
  • imron 12y ago
    This is a really tricky problem though, because what happens when factory jobs bring in more money than those that require further education and training? What you get is people dropping out of school to go and work in those factories, which then only goes on to perpetuate the poverty cycle. I don't have any good solutions, but I do know the answer isn't as simple as just doubling factory workers' wages.
    • tootie 12y ago
      Nah. That Flappy Bird guy made a small fortune even by first world standards. It drove him insane too.
      • 12y ago
• cllns 12y ago
  "If you're poor, stop being poor." from http://bit.ly/1AnVNuh http://bit.ly/1AnVNuh about 5:30
  • pluma 12y ago
    I want one of those foam fingers with "We're #37!" on it.
• wahsd 12y ago
  And black people benefited from the privilege of being slaves to white, civilized people. amirite? WARNING: The following is going to cause cognitive dissonance in many people, even among the rather intelligent people here. Don't fool yourselves, the conditions in Asia under which people make "stuff" for you, which you don't even value, for $0.50 per hour is nothing more or less than slavery. It is the same kind of slavery that you all supposedly despise in American history, the legacy and ripple effects of which are still rather present today. Just because the "company" pays a nominal amount that serves more for accounting purposes than anything else, doesn't make it less than slavery. Just because slavery changed location and a couple of its business processes and clients and logistical systems, does not mean that it is not slavery. Would it not have been slavery in the south if "workers" had been paid $0.000001 per hour, which is about what $0.50 per hour amounts to in 1855 value? Realize this, you are supporting and benefiting from slavery, for the same reasons that the south looooooved slavery; because it meant they didn't have to earn their income, benefits, and advantages of a privileged life built on exploitation.
  • tomp 12y ago
    Given that most black Africans (AFAIK) were sold into slavery by other Africans, it's not a given that their lives were better in Africa than they were later in America.
    • rmxt 12y ago
      Even if that is true, that does not make the forced migration and continued subjugation of slaves in the American South through the 19th century any less deplorable. Slavery is slavery. Your implicit acceptance of the "lesser of two evils" for something as serious as slavery is disturbing. We aren't even talking about the "hidden" conditions of working poor in foreign countries, we are talking about institutions that have visible cultural, economic, and social ramifications in present day America. EDIT: I hate to use Wikipedia [0] as a substitute for substantive discussion, but your point seems to toe the line of being a false dilemma. The power/money elite in both the 19th century and the 21st century clearly have more options then just: leaving slaves in Africa/having very bad working conditions in Asian fields and farms on one hand, and bringing slaves to America/having marginally better working conditions in Asian factories, on the other hand. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
• mrottenkolber 12y ago
  Ouch... this is, uhm, Cambodia not China. Industrial revolution is a term coined by developments in Europe, based on the ability to industrialize domestic production. Living in a third world country in today's globalized world is not the same thing as living during European-style industrialization. The wealth difference between first and third world citizens is kind of like the wealth difference between a farmer and a prince in the 17th century. I have to strongly disagree with this Yaron guy, between breeding efficiency and survivability there is still a need for a species-appropriate life. Yup that's right, you don't keep a tiger in a cement floor cage and you're not supposed to keep humans in factories either. Consider Greece's state motto: "Freedom or Death". E.g. the anti-thesis to this Yaron guy, implying that survival by itself is not freedom. As a counterpoint, Brazil's state motto: "Order and Progress". That one could suit Yaron I guess. So, without wanting to debate if history as it is was yielding benefits or heading in the wrong direction, I have to express that there is a humanitarian baseline that a modern human being might want to keep in mind. And it's not about GDP or child survival rate. There is no point in breeding children who will become shallow hulls, so depraved from their rightful habitat that they can not be recognized as actual humans. A human sings songs, dances, paints, crafts, thinks, dreams and loves.
  • xxxyy 12y ago
    China is just an example of a somehow comparable country that has risen pretty high. And regarding being a human: it is kind of hard when you have not eaten for three days, and your parents worry more about your baby brother that has just contracted measles. Maybe he will live. Maybe not. Maybe the rest of the family catches the disease.
• yabatopia 12y ago
  It's not only about the low wage they getting, or GDP per capita, there's also the working and living conditions you have to consider. They don't have holidays, can't take a vacation, don't have insurance at work, no sliding hours, no personal input whatsoever. Their whole life is determined by work, with virtually zero change of improvement within their generation. Maybe, just maybe, they can save a little for the education of one child. The next kids are toast. Low wages are one thing, but it's even worse if you have to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year for it.
• SnacksOnAPlane 12y ago
  Measuring how much good we've done by how much GDP has increased is so incredibly flawed. Most days I feel like I'd rather be living in a small village, hunting and growing my own food and not participating in any kind of a global economy. Even if I might die from a preventable disease or an accident. Do you really think these sweatshop workers are actually happy? They certainly aren't getting to the higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This "they should be happy for what they have" meme is revolting to me. People are not cogs in a machine and they shouldn't be treated that way, and we shouldn't gloss over this dehumanization by saying that if GDP is increasing then life is getting better.