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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]

#81

Post by hepek »

ewzimm wrote: post #52
calibraxis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for enduring the indignant replies! Yes, this place is dominated by strata of society driven to justify organized child labor, even after seeing the face of one such 9 year old. Throughout history, such people justified all sorts of things. I know many like them in person, and am constantly weirded out. (One reason I dislike hanging out with programmers, managers and investors.) The banally evil things stum…

It's logical that people would want to defend these things because abusive labor practices are driving almost every aspect of our lives in the Western world. Our food, our clothes, our phones, our computers, our furniture, almost everything that we buy is manufactured and sold though exploitation. People have a tendency to fight problems when they seem manageable, but labor exploitation is so out of control, the only…

(bow)

Couldn't have put it better.

Sometimes I wonder who is producing the real STUFF, since we are all working in the non-productive tertiary sector.

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

#82

Post by Retric »

jmduke wrote: post #78
Retric wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

#1 Quitting does not mean you never look for another job or quit on the first day etc. It means when you perceive working for said factory is not worth it you do something else.

#2 Having a large labor supply suggests the job is competitive. However, even if that's the case having people constantly quit increases training costs.

The point of all of this is industrialization tends to follow a path where people move from terrible low wage jobs to more well paid work. Even China has moved past the first rung of the ladder with market forces forcing factory's to increase pay and or improve conditions. Presumably where going to run out of 3rd world countries at some point, though there is some concern robots / AI is going to end up filling that nitch possibly stranding a few countries.

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

#83

Post by L_Rahman »

_oa_ wrote: post #74

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.

There's been a huge effort from both NGO's and the government to promote birth control that has actually been quite effective. Birth rates have fallen sharply. [1]

1. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/172372?uid=3739704&uid...

I apologize for the JSTOR link.

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

#84

Post by alexeisadeski3 »

hepek wrote: post #80
lemmsjid wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Borders nowadays exist only for the lowest of classes.

If only that were true. It would be an incredible improvement.

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

#85

Post by corresation »

calibraxis wrote: post #36
RodericDay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for enduring the indignant replies! Yes, this place is dominated by strata of society driven to justify organized child labor, even after seeing the face of one such 9 year old. Throughout history, such people justified all sorts of things. I know many like them in person, and am constantly weirded out. (One reason I dislike hanging out with programmers, managers and investors.) The banally evil things stum…

even after seeing the face of one such 9 year old

What is the alternative for this 9 year old (in a country with a GDP per capita of $744, and a population density of 2,850 per square mile. Norway, as a contrast, has a GDP of $99,500 per capita, and a density of 39 per square mile)? Please describe the utopia salvation because I would just love to hear it.

Of course, given the rest of your comment I hardly think you're looking for any intrusion of reality. The sexism bit to auger your ridiculous point about "these people" is outrageous nonsense.

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

#86

Post by buro9 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #69
buro9 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

which may be why terrorism is a predominately educated middle class affair. But accepting your argument, I cannot give in to nihilism. Take the children out of the factories, put them in school, build libraries, train teachers, and wait twenty years to see a vast difference. If you are a military dictatorship that uses your twenty years to educate the country and drag it by the bootstraps into the global upwards past…

It isn't nihilistic. It's just really important to understand how poverty feels, and how it is akin to a trauma that never ends, otherwise how can we in the West ever actually use what influence we have to change.

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

#87

Post by hepek »

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…

This sounds like a quote from Down and Out in Paris and London

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

#88

Post by alexeisadeski3 »

alive-or-not wrote: post #58
jvm wrote: post #35

Sometimes I think westerners just can't wrap their heads around just how poor Bangladesh is. Their GDP per capita: $2000, adjusted for living costs (PPP). Please, everyone, try to wrap your head around that number. That means a totally equal distribution of resources would give everyone $2000 a year. GDP counts all money spent on everything, so factory safety compliance costs would come out of that $2000. Consider Me…

Measuring economic potential in PPP is like measuring software functionality in lines of code. The basic question is does a country produce enough food to feed itself. If that's the case it can grow an industry slowly with respect to human lives, etc. If not IMHO there are still better solutions than building sweatshops.

Did New York State grow enough food to feed itself during its' own sweatshop phase?

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

#89

Post by alexeisadeski3 »

tinco wrote: post #55
brador wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corruption causes a disproportionate wealth disparity, it's one of the methods used to detect it. Works especially well within a country to identify more or less corrupt states. One argument is corruptions leads to reduced actual investment in infrastructure, roads, schools, things which increase a regions wealth, making corrupt areas show up pretty clearly on a map.

Why would someone downvote this comment?

Because people are tired of the 'everything is about wealth disparity' claptrap?

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

#90

Post by alexeisadeski3 »

Why should we believe that these kids would be better served sitting idly in school for several years? Isn't it better to get actual on the job training, learning an actual trade, making money to put food on the table?

Think about opportunity costs: An American child has chance XX% of becoming a white collar professional if they go to XX years of school. A Bangladeshi child has a significantly smaller .X% chance of becoming a white collar pro with X years of school (XX not generally available, presumably?). Thus is quite likely that it is simply irrational, a poverty increasing equation, to send these children to school for too many years.

Increasing the minimum wage actually harms the poorest and most vulnerable workers, by disqualifying them from gainful employment. Ditto child labor laws in extremely poor areas. All of this stuff about "educating your way out of poverty" is just magical thinking. It's as if the first world brain sees the obviousness of a situation, simply enters a "MUST NOT SEE" feedback loop, and then spits out "RAISE MINIMUM WAGE, INCREASE SCHOOLING, SEND IN THE NGOs" nonsense.

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