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

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

#71

Post by Retric »

Natsu wrote: post #57
beering wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is just your angry knee-jerk reaction so you can feel good about taking the moral high-ground, and you're scrambling to find the negative in every comment. The comment you're replying is a detailed comment that also states that there should be more done to improve working conditions and wages. Your comment is a rant about how we're a bunch of "grown-ass white men" (thanks for assuming things about me) who ba…

Have you ever worked in a factory? I used to. They squeeze you as hard as they can, constantly. Most of the people have no leverage to push back. While having money is better than having none, that doesn't mean everything is ok and you can just ignore the way the workers get abused. In the US, you can push back at things like unsafe conditions with threats of OSHA. I doubt there's any such thing in Bangladesh, but it…

The #1 way to fight back is to quit which increases costs to the factory owner, if you don't then it's better than the alternatives.

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

#72

Post by noonespecial »

anigbrowl wrote: post #66
noonespecial wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what solution you might be proposing but it sounds a little like using foreign power (economic or otherwise) to force the factories to close and send everyone back to subsistence farming at the edge of starvation back at their home village dirt-farms until which time in the indeterminate future we can come up with a better solution for them. It seems like a common refrain in feel good politics. If not pe…

That's a pretty weak straw man argument. Back in the real world, such activists usually would-be trade partners to provide childhood education and regulate working conditions as a condition of market access. As large, wealthy markets, territories like the US and EU have a great deal of leverage in such matters.

On the surface I agree completely. Right down to the level of when I'm standing in the WalMart thinking about whether to buy that fair-trade coffee or not.

In practice, that solution doesn't work so well. Usually the goods wind up simply taking a longer boat ride through a country with looser standards before winding up in the US/EU.

The fundamental problem is Bangladeshi. It requires a Bangladeshi solution. High-minded westerners can help, some, but it might be smaller help than first seems possible.

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

#73

Post by weirdkid »

buro9 wrote: post #15
invalidOrTaken wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

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…

I want to print this on cards to hand out every time I hear some jackass equate poor with lazy.

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

#74

Post by _oa_ »

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.

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

#75

Post by iliis »

lemmsjid wrote: post #60
tptacek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

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 ex…

> Because it will marginally increase the cost of the goods

And this is not even a given. Even in blue-collar industries it can be quite profitable to improve working conditions and thereby raising employee productivity.

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

#76

Post by harichinnan »

L_Rahman wrote: post #16

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 em…

I wish there where campaigns against exploitative child labor in US and western world. So if a given country's minimum wages are low and they seem to be exporting a lot, the campaign could call for Boycott of products from the country until they raise minimum wages. May be there should be a kickstarter of sorts for launching such campaigns (Money to cover for marketing and other expenses).

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

#77

Post by mcgwiz »

RodericDay wrote: post #24
L_Rahman wrote: post #16

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 em…

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 peo…

"local maxima"? The commenter never said that progress was finished, and that nothing more should or could be done. He was merely describing it as better than the prior state, from a utilitarian perspective.

Relative to standards of living in America today, the situation described in the article is abhorrent. But social/cultural progress is not fast, direct, pretty, or easy. America struggled through many stages of oppressive, inhumane periods. Even today's society may be described by future generations as barbaric (e.g. wage slavery, government surveillance, etc etc).

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

#78

Post by jmduke »

Retric wrote: post #71
Natsu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever worked in a factory? I used to. They squeeze you as hard as they can, constantly. Most of the people have no leverage to push back. While having money is better than having none, that doesn't mean everything is ok and you can just ignore the way the workers get abused. In the US, you can push back at things like unsafe conditions with threats of OSHA. I doubt there's any such thing in Bangladesh, but it…

The #1 way to fight back is to quit which increases costs to the factory owner, if you don't then it's better than the alternatives.

I am unexperienced when it comes to such matters, but:

1. Quitting means you are no longer making money, and if that was an acceptable endgame then you likely wouldn't be employed in such conditions in the first place;

2. I find it extremely unlikely that such factory owners would have a dearth of prospective (eager, even) employees.

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

#79

Post by ericd »

crag wrote: post #49
L_Rahman wrote: post #16

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 em…

("... 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…

It's not that simple. If you pay more than the next factory over for the same work, you become uncompetitive with that factory, and you start losing contracts. If that becomes bad enough, that will drive you under. This is why minimum wages are important - to make it so your neighbor also has to pay the better rate as well. This breaks down somewhat when your factory is competing with another factory in another country, unless your factory is much more efficient.

Short of world government with universally strong rule of law, there's not an easy solution that I can see.

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

#80

Post by hepek »

lemmsjid wrote: post #54
corresation wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your position is deeply irrational and unrealistic. It may give you some sense of moral comfort, but it has zero application to the real world, and is the fodder of a million asinine Facebook forwards. People aren't "justifying" anything, they're stating actual realities of the world. 30 years ago South Korea was the sweatshop of the world. Today it is an economic powerhouse with largely first world living conditions…

You're ignoring the fact of globalization. Corporations and their consumers are getting more and more sophisticated at targeting and exploiting the countries with the worst labor laws. Multi national corporations are getting more sophisticated at evading scenarios where particular host countries (i.e. post-industrial nations) attempt to curb their exploitation. This is a real and scary problem. It is not without prec…

I'm getting this feeling that globalization works for everybody but the working man.

If borders were open to labor migration as they are to capital/corporations I bet the situation would be much better.

Borders nowadays exist only for the lowest of classes. In a globalized economy borders seem like a mechanism of opression.

Just my 2c.

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