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SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

aftenposten.no

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Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#201

Post by johnchristopher »

xorcist wrote: post #188
CmonDev wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: higher quality and a feel-good brand factor "we don't use child labor anymore".

That has been tried and didn't work. Neither did cheaper machines. Remember that textile machines pretty much gave birth to industrial automation, so the technology is as tried and cheap as it gets. Still not enough.

What about an `artisan revival` where people sewing clothes would have a decent life and we would get high-quality clothes (let's face it, $5 t-shirts don't last long) ?

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#202

Post by JoeAltmaier »

danielweber wrote: post #197
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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_appleja...

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…

Nobody's suggesting solutions. Just what they would look like if they existed. And they wouldn't look like a shift in poverty-stricken populations to a different point under the poverty line.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#203

Post by jmccree »

ersii wrote: post #106
auganov wrote: post #81

Am I a bad person for thinking it was going to be a post about a techie fed up with working at a software consultancy?

Well, I certainly don't think you're a bad person for that - considering this forum is generally focused towards the technical angle of things. For some reason, I thought I was clicking through to another Five Eyes/NSA, GCHQ, CSE programme. I guess it's since it was a single word in all capital letters and aftenposten.no previously reported on the "Oslo mobile/GSM surveillance" thing.

Glad I wasn't the only one to think this was going to be about an NSA program and outrage they would name something SWEATSHOP.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#204

Post by danielweber »

Sakes wrote: post #145

This is emotionally confusing for me. It seems like the general consensus on HN is that this is a necessary evil. I can get on board with that, but it still feels wrong. I guess the only way to think about it is progress is progress, so if sweatshops are an improvement for these people, then there is good in it for them... for now... We have seen China over a few decades transition from textiles, to tech manufacturin…

Why, then, the outrage of my correspondents? Why does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for 60 cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of 30 cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land--or of a Filipino scavenging on a garbage heap?

The main answer, I think, is a sort of fastidiousness. Unlike the starving subsistence farmer, the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our benefit--and this makes us feel unclean. --Paul Krugman

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#205

Post by ptaipale »

arethuza wrote: post #191
ptaipale wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you don't hear that too often from right wing people, either. (Except caricatures, perhaps built by left wing people). (Yes, there are similar or mirror caricatures built by right wing people about left wing people. However, even as a right wing person, I might admit that not everyone in the left wing is Pol Pot).

To show how silly the "right wing" vs "left wing" split can be, the UK under the government of Mrs Thatcher ("right wing") gave military assistance to the Khmer Rouge ("left wing") - presumably as the latter were the enemies of the Vietnamese ("left wing").

Well, not necessary silly, but it is not the only dimension on which people and nations might align themselves. Being left-wing or right-wing are not enough to define any person or movement thoroughly. The supposition that a right-wing government could never support a left-wing movement in another country is refusing to understand any orthogonal things exist.

For instance, I consider myself right-wing by local standards, but when looking at how things go in Turkey, if I must choose a party to support, I would pick the one that's a member of Socialist International. Still, I think that does not make right-left split totally silly.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#206

Post by xorcist »

johnchristopher wrote: post #201
xorcist wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has been tried and didn't work. Neither did cheaper machines. Remember that textile machines pretty much gave birth to industrial automation, so the technology is as tried and cheap as it gets. Still not enough.

What about an `artisan revival` where people sewing clothes would have a decent life and we would get high-quality clothes (let's face it, $5 t-shirts don't last long) ?

That could be it. It's certainly what a lot of people are trying right now.

One big problem with it is that it's such a cheap target for PR. It's cheaper to build an "artisan trademark" that people associate with quality in other ways than to actually sell high quality products. And even if you do manage it the hard way, your trademark would become a very valuable acquisition target, with obvious consequences.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#207

Post by bruna597 »

mcv wrote: post #77
bruna597 wrote: post #44

Something that bothers me is the fact that even though they have cried on the show and said that they were going to do something to help, if you search for them on the internet, its clear that they aren't doing anything about it! Even the girl who has a fashion blog, she is still writing about the trademarks that use this kind of abusive job to make their clothes...

Honestly, I don't think we should leave it to the occasional individual to do something about it. If we want to stop this, we should ban the import of products that do not meet our own labour standards. We have reasonable work weeks and healthy working conditions because we fought against that exploitation. But instead of stopping it, we ended up merely exporting it; we don't make our stuff here anymore, but it's mad…

I agree with you. I just think that those guys should take advantage of the voice that was given to them to fight for this cause. I don't see this happening.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#208

Post by bruna597 »

waps wrote: post #141
INTPenis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never expected them to do anything either. I started watching this show and didn't make it past the second episode before both me and my spouse had enough of their attitudes.

Why should the people on this show be held to any higher standard than anybody else ? I don't feel any more ill will towards these people than I feel to myself, for the same reason : I wear clothes like these. Do you ?

I just think that they could take advantage of the voice that was given to them through the show.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#209

Post by pluma »

dublinben wrote: post #92
mcv wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I don't think we should leave it to the occasional individual to do something about it. If we want to stop this, we should ban the import of products that do not meet our own labour standards. We have reasonable work weeks and healthy working conditions because we fought against that exploitation. But instead of stopping it, we ended up merely exporting it; we don't make our stuff here anymore, but it's mad…

>we should ban the import of products that do not meet our own labour standards This is against the kind of international "free-trade" agreements and laws that every major country is a party to. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/23/business/company-news-us-b...

The EU and the US are currently working on one such "free-trade" agreement. It will make importing goods from the US easier, but it will also allow American companies to circumvent the stricter consumer protection laws in Europe (e.g. privacy laws and food regulations).

Free-trade agreements are a double-edged sword. Pretending they're universally and unambiguously beneficial by default is absurd. Especially with the amount of lobbying (including domestic companies lobbying abroad via their local subsidiaries) that influences their terms.

BTW, many Europeans don't think of these regulations (privacy laws, etc) in the EU as regulations, they think of them as rights. Facebook & co have to jump to ridiculous hoops[0] to use their business model in Europe -- for the users, that's a feature, not a bug.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#210

Post by SnacksOnAPlane »

foobar2020 wrote: post #98

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 for western companies. Actually most of them would die being children as a result of their poverty: malnutrition, accidents, preventable diseases such as polio or measles. Go now and check what was China's annual GDP per capita in Mao Zedong times. Just see i…

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.

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