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SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

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Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#221

Post by pluma »

retr0grad3 wrote: post #151
tomp wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should probably be going on more than just AFAIK. The Atlantic Slave Trade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa#Atlantic_slav... was a complex issue that evolved economically as a consequence of agriculture demands.

It was also partially a race/tribe issue. White people like to forget that "blacks" actually aren't simply one big homogeneous group, especially not in Africa -- neither ethnically nor culturally. Just look at the Rwandan massacre for an example of ethnic clashes.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#222

Post by pluma »

danielweber wrote: post #107
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…

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.

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.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#223

Post by pluma »

foobar2020 wrote: post #147
mixedbit wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#224

Post by pluma »

cllns wrote: post #122
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…

"If you're poor, stop being poor." from http://bit.ly/1AnVNuh about 5:30

I want one of those foam fingers with "We're #37!" on it.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#225

Post by pluma »

dragonwriter wrote: post #148
guac wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 ne…

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.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#226

Post by pluma »

macarthy12 wrote: post #124

Honestly I would imagine those 3 Millennials having an issue with most hard work. I live in Asia, I look though a different lens, - Imagine being loaded on to a truck and brought to factory everyday -- You mean a free ride to work? - Imagine your kids roaming the factory floor -- No child care costs? - Imagine having to working 12 hours a day -- I can pay for my kids to go to school ? - Imagine being stuck in a facto…

The caveat is that the health and safety conditions are atrocious and the income barely pays for the cost of living so it's unlikely your children will have any better status than you (i.e. they'll likely have to drop out of school early to help sustain the family just like yourself).

But I agree about the perspective. Doing the same task every working hour for years isn't inherently a bad thing. That describes a lot of jobs and some would actually find that kind of job perfectly acceptable.

The problem is only when this is the only job available to you and the money it makes is so low you're effectively locked into it and the working conditions are so bad you have a good chance of death or injury and there's really no hope you can improve your situation (or that of your children) of your own accord.

Like Sisyphus, it's not the job itself, it's the hopelessness of ever succeeding. You're locked into perpetuating your status quo.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#227

Post by pluma »

xorcist wrote: post #91
savanaly wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my all time favorite pop economics essays is by Paul Krugman, addressing this topic: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19... His argument is summed up thus: "And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to…

"No realistic alternative" -- that's a bit of a dishonest either/or argument. Of course there are alternatives. It's not like it hasn't happened before. In the Western world this gave rise to the biggest social movement in a century, with demands to assure workers all kind of rights. Krugman needs to motivate why we should deny third world children the same rights we demanded for our own a hundred and forty years ago…

I'd argue that Europe in the Industrialisation was in a slightly different situation because the world economy wasn't as globalized yet.

If Cambodian labourers unionize and become more expensive, the business could easily move to the next third-world country, leaving them economically worse off than before.

The problem is that the suppliers they work for are as dependent on the international companies paying them as their workers are dependent on them.

Basically, either the international companies have to act against their immediate economical interests and invest money in improving the working conditions and pay at their suppliers, or the suppliers in different countries would have to "unionize", too.

Alternatively, all labourers in all countries would have to unionize in the same timeframe (so the business can't just keep country-hopping) or the businesses would have to be forced to act against their own interests.

I think the most realistic sequence of events is that as the national economy in each country improves their workers begin to unionize and within a few decades the conditions may have improved universally. But that won't be an easy process and will likely result in a lot more protests and violence than the alternatives.

The naive ideal would be that customers force the businesses to pressure the suppliers to improve the situation, but outside a few marketing stunts I don't think that is very likely. All previous calls for boycotts have been unsuccessful and the average citizen doesn't care enough about these issues to do anything politically (aside from the obvious difficulty of out-lobbying the established lobbies).

We'll see.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#228

Post by pluma »

mcv wrote: post #82
lukasm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, it is true. If you increase min wage in one country, the business will move to another. You would need to increase it everywhere. Assuming that's possible you would still need to deal with corruption. What makes things worse (at least short term) it's automation. In 10 years robots will do this kind of job. Historically, all nations developed with this brutal process. Many without minimum wage.

> What makes things worse (at least short term) it's automation. In 10 years robots will do this kind of job. The problem isn't automation, it's that our economy is designed to make automation a bad thing. In a better system, automation would give us higher productivity and more free time. But we designed our system so that free time is a bad thing unless you're rich. People need jobs to eat, so there has to be enoug…

I can't express how much I agree with this sentiment.

Automation reduces the requirement of human labour. It increases our productivity. That should be a good thing. I'm in the business of putting people out of their job[0] -- that should be something we strive for. A few decades ago we believed that technology would create a utopia by doing this because we would barely ever have to work yet be as productive as ever.

Sadly our culture has this perverse fetish for needless work. You must have a job to make money because you need to make money to survive. And if your job becomes easier and you have to work less to achieve the same levels of productivity, either your work must expand to fill the gap or your pay gets reduced to reflect the reduction in work.

If we paid by productivity, even unskilled labour would guarantee ample pay.

[0]: Anyone working in the tech industry is, ultimately. Although many products result in the creation of "non-jobs" (essentially, the commercial equivalent of bureaucracy), that's merely a stepping stone and at least partially a byproduct of the mentality that more jobs are a good thing.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#229

Post by pluma »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #58
lukasm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, it is true. If you increase min wage in one country, the business will move to another. You would need to increase it everywhere. Assuming that's possible you would still need to deal with corruption. What makes things worse (at least short term) it's automation. In 10 years robots will do this kind of job. Historically, all nations developed with this brutal process. Many without minimum wage.

>What makes things worse (at least short term) it's automation. Automation isn't the boogey man, we are. >In 10 years robots will do this kind of job. That may not be true if there is a willing supply of practically free labor.

I'm reminded of the story about how the ancient Greek practically invented the steam engine but only used it as a toy because the wide availability of practically free labour (via slaves) meant the development of automation wouldn't have been economically viable.

The more jobs we automate, the more we devalue unskilled labour. I wished we would live in a world where this could universally be agreed upon to be a good thing.

Re: SWEATSHOP – I can´t take any more

#230

Post by pluma »

jmccree wrote: post #203
ersii wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought their convention for arbitrary project names was always using two words with no intentional revelance to the actual scope of the project (with projects like Prism being the exception).

Then again, some of their names are so blatantly fitting (and offensive) that that claim doesn't seem very believable in the first place.

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