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Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

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Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#101

Post by chrisco255 »

vkou wrote: post #97
gruez wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages. Sounds good, until you realize that doesn't do much for the starving family with kids to feed. Even though there might be some knock on effect to increase the adults' earnings, there's no way that it'll match the lost income from the kids n…

Why are the families starving? Is the only option in that area growing cocoa for export to the West? Why can't those people work for themselves, to grow their own food, to feed themselves? Is it because some wealthy landlord owns all the land? Is it because we dump subsidized food on the global markets, making local agriculture non-competitive? Could either of those have anything to do with it? There seems to be a ve…

Without knowing too much about Ghana specifically, I have been to third world countries and seen some of the conditions that prevent an economy from flourishing. It is usually a lack of property rights altogether (autocratic governments that take from individuals at will, which you can only avoid by being too small to cut down), deep corruption in the government that basically runs on bribes (whereby the highest bidders thrive), endless violence or war preventing an area from being able to benefit from long-term investment (either public or private), a broken currency system, a broken or nonexistent legal system to settle property disputes. A lack of skilled labor in the country itself, due to brain drain, war, and nonexistent infrastructure.

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#102

Post by KPGv2 »

goldenshale wrote: post #56

Wait, you mean kids in developing countries work in order to help their families survive poverty. Oh my word, we should stop buying chocolate. Or wait, then nobody is making any money. Seriously, haven't we learned from the "Chinese sweatshop" hysteria throughout the 2000s that if people want to work they are often digging themselves out of a whole rather than being forced into one?

The response here isn't to give money to child enslavers because the alternative is more poverty.

The response here is to demand legislation from your own country that makes it unprofitable to companies that employ child labor to continue to do so. Then they will fold up shop or (way more likely) pay adults more. It's not like Nestle barely makes a profit.

It's funny you cite China as evidence supporting your position, when in fact there /was/ a problem with child labor, American companies stopped doing business with those subs, and now wages are higher, the Chinese economy is stronger, and there's a lot less child labor.

Your argument also implies open borders so factory owners can hire low-wage undocumented immigrants under the table is a good thing.

For every child who earns a low wage, that's an adult not earning a wage at all.

And, to be quite honest, it's not great for your reputation to enshrine in writing your opinion that concern over children getting fingers chopped off in factories is "hysteria."

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#104

Post by KPGv2 »

bell-cot wrote: post #39
janice1999 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me a bleeding heart but child labor is an 'actual' problem. You can keep destructing societal issues until you reinvent the universe from scratch. It may be difficult to solve global poverty but it's not a lot to ask extremely profitable companies to enforce the supply chain checks they've committed to.

If (as the article states) the total value of the cocoa that Murina's entire family managed to harvest, in an entire year, was $115 - that sounds like destitute, desperate poverty to me. If actually living in such circumstances, ~all humans put their kids to work, and lie as needed to survive. And if the "child labor certification" inspectors you send are anything resembling decent human beings, then they will send b…

So if child labor was banned, it is your contention that chocolatiers would just shutter their doors because they can't find labor anymore?

You can't conceive of the possibility that they'd hire adults at a higher wage? Or raise prices for consumers in the developed world?

You're basically saying it's OK for American companies to hire undocumented workers because the alternative is everyone starves.

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#105

Post by KPGv2 »

abracadaniel wrote: post #46
mopsi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe and the US, it wasn't too long ago either when families could only afford to send some of their children to school. Others had to work from a very early age to support the family. If you ban child labor without offering anything to supplement the lost income, then you're just harming them more. I think it would be better to frame the issue as why so little of the profit made from their work reaches them. It…

If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages. Either way, the product is profitable and in high demand so the same or more money will be spent producing it. Child labor is one of the reasons why so little of the profit from their work reaches them. They're subsidizing the industry by sa…

This. You can literally read the history of China since the 1990s and witness this exact phenomenon! Child labor goes down, wages go up, adult employment goes up, poverty goes down...

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#106

Post by KPGv2 »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #59
abracadaniel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages. Either way, the product is profitable and in high demand so the same or more money will be spent producing it. Child labor is one of the reasons why so little of the profit from their work reaches them. They're subsidizing the industry by sa…

Yes thank you good lord. IDK if it's the ritual contrarianism or what but HN consensus is extremely tolerant of or even flat out pro- child labor. Unreal.

Small-l "libertarianism" has convinced many otherwise reasonable people that if you raise wages, giant corporations with huge profit margins will elect to shut down.

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#107

Post by chrisco255 »

KPGv2 wrote: post #105
abracadaniel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages. Either way, the product is profitable and in high demand so the same or more money will be spent producing it. Child labor is one of the reasons why so little of the profit from their work reaches them. They're subsidizing the industry by sa…

This. You can literally read the history of China since the 1990s and witness this exact phenomenon! Child labor goes down, wages go up, adult employment goes up, poverty goes down...

No, it's the other way around: wages go up, then child labor goes down. Also, China is not a great example as it had a One Child policy for most of the last 50 years. In Ghana, for example, there is an average of 4 children per woman.

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#108

Post by chrisco255 »

NumberWangMan wrote: post #50
abracadaniel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages. Either way, the product is profitable and in high demand so the same or more money will be spent producing it. Child labor is one of the reasons why so little of the profit from their work reaches them. They're subsidizing the industry by sa…

Everyone is better off if children don’t work, but if everyone else has their children work and you don’t, you lose. Sounds like moloch! (I’m ignoring corporate profits and consumer prices for simplicity-but I think most of us would be happy if child labor was banned even if it meant higher prices)

They're only "better off" if there's better things for those children to be doing. If schools are not available, then what? If there's no adults available to supervise the children (because they're doing labor themselves), then what?

For most of human history, child labor was common practice. It's purely a first world, modern thing that you can truly dial back child labor.

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#109

Post by teachrdan »

zizee wrote: post #51
teachrdan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who don't get OP's reference, in the original version of the book, Oompa-Loompas were literal slaves form Africa. The publisher made Roald Dahl change them to mythical creatures.

> Oompa-Loompas were literal slaves form Africa I can find a lot of stuff written online about this, but none of it quotes the original text. The original oompa-loompas were pygmies from Africa, written in a pretty racist way, and with wonka being a type of white-messiah-savior for them. I can definitely see an argument that wonka was a shitty employer, violating all sorts of legal and moral rules. But we're they act…

We might both be right. It appears the original version was a fantasy where the Oompa-Loompa's were happy to be taken from their homeland to an underground factory to work for free. This is from "Jeremy Treglown’s Roald Dahl: A Biography"

"In the version first published, [the Oompa-Loompas were] a tribe of 3,000 amiable black pygmies who have been imported by Mr. Willy Wonka from ‘the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.’ Mr. Wonka keeps them in the factory, where they have replaced the sacked white workers. Wonka’s little slaves are delighted with their new circumstances, and particularly with their diet of chocolate. Before they lived on green caterpillars, beetles, eucalyptus leaves, ‘and the bark of the bong-bong tree.'"

Is this technically slavery? Maybe not, by the fairy tale logic of the book. But this is a troublesome, to say the least, trope of oppressed people who are perversely grateful to be exploited by (invariably) white men. To each their own bong-bong tree.

https://groovyhistory.com/oompa-loompas-the-original-ones/4

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#110

Post by KPGv2 »

colechristensen wrote: post #55
janice1999 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me a bleeding heart but child labor is an 'actual' problem. You can keep destructing societal issues until you reinvent the universe from scratch. It may be difficult to solve global poverty but it's not a lot to ask extremely profitable companies to enforce the supply chain checks they've committed to.

From the ages from about 5 to 18 American children are forced to do office work for 7 hours a day five days a week in conditions that approximate a minimum security prison followed by often several hours of more work to do at home. Is the only reason you think that isn't "child labor" because no one is directly paying them for their work or that the work is "good for them"? Plenty of kids would argue picking fruit wa…

It's utterly wild that you would equate back-breaking manual labor with doing multiplication tables. It speaks to how very little back-breaking manual labor you've done in your life.
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