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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

Compare this to India, where you could be a daily wager working 14-16 hours days, no weekends, no benefits, on something that might be back-breaking, hazardous, and pays just enough to get by. Your employer could abuse you, dock your pay, and would barely spend anything to make your job safe. Work might include cleaning swears without any safety gear, labouring under a sweltering 45C weather, or working in hazardous factories.

I am not espousing the inhuman treatment of these workers. However, for many people in India and around the world, this would be an order of magnitude improvement of their lives. I think China is on the right track. The working conditions would get better as the economy grows. The injustice might seem appalling, but have you wondered what the alternative is?

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You cannot compare work environment at Amazon to that of unorganized sector in India where small organizations or agriculture land-owners in villages and small towns exploit employees. Being a modern technology company, Amazon should be held to better standards. If there is not enough awareness and pushback against Amazon or Apple, you can't expect anything to change in unorganized sector and small-town practices.

Wait a second... Why? I guess I don't get the double standard. You say the double standard is necessary for conditions to improve but can we discuss that a bit, because it isn't obviously the case. If it is an important human rights issue, I'm not sure anyone should get a pass. And if it is just, you think Amazon should be the best bad job in town, I don't see why they need to.

No one is getting a pass. But the methods to tackle workers exploitation at Amazon or a big corporation is very different than tackling the abuse of daily wage workers in India that the OP of the comment talks about. In the former case, corporations and users of their products are solely responsible for the employment conditions and can be tackled by raising your voice. But in the latter case, the source of exploitation is decentralized. The sector is unorganized and it is very difficult to implement the law strictly, even if there is are strong laws to prevent such. So justifying the conditions of the employees in the former case by comparing it to that of latter doesn't make sense.

>The injustice might seem appalling, but have you wondered what the alternative is?

Yeah, wealthy people not living like space-age Caligulas on the backs of disenfranchised poor people. Seems like a pretty good alternative to me.

>Seems like a pretty good alternative to me.

Even when you include the part you conveniently left out about the poor living in even worse conditions that make their current situation a far better option?

Do you really think they were pulled from a cozy office doing 9 to 5 to this?

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Not sure what you got from my comment or if you replied to the wrong person, but I do not support the tariff being discussed.

Sorry must have replied to the wrong comment.

Where do you think wealth comes from? It is the product of knowledge and institutions and economic growth. It is not always off the backs of others. In fact most of it is not. We are about a hundred times wealthier than we were before the industrial revolution. We can’t have stolen this wealth as not the smallest fraction of it existed in all the world before the industrial revolution.

If we deny these people the prospect of working in factories we are doing them no favours. How is removing demand for their labor going to make them wealthier?

It is not the sweatshops fault these people are poor. It is their poverty that makes a job you find unappealing appealing for them. By all means lobby to increase foreign aid. By all means donate cash via Give Directly.

But don’t think for a moment you are enriching these people’s lives by reducing the demand for their labor. Such thoughts are economic insanity.

> It is not the sweatshops fault these people are poor.

Rather it is the sweatshops fault that it is an inhumane sweatshop which treates the people who work there inhumanely.

> It is their poverty that makes a job you find unappealing appealing for them

What? these inhumane working conditions aren't appealing to any human. Nobody is asking to reduce the demand for their labor, maybe the product should be priced accordingly to facilitate good working conditions and pay instead.

>What? these inhumane working conditions aren't appealing to any human.

This is your privilege talking. Billions of people find them far more appealing than a precarious life of backbreaking farm labor.

seems like your privilege talking; nobody is comparing to field farming here.

Most of those people wouldn’t have gone to the city if they could have stayed on their farm. It’s capitalism forcing those people from their land, not some innate desire to be exploited in a factory.

>Where do you think wealth comes from?

From paying labor less than it’s worth and keeping the difference for yourself.

People use sweatshop labor because they can steal even more of the value created by these worker’s labor, knowing there’s not a damn thing they can do about it. And they’ve done so for so long, amassed so much wealth, that they now can pay for boatloads of “intellectuals” to justify their exploitation as good and necessary, leading to us having this conversation now.

I am going to recommend a book to you. Doing Good Better by William MacAskil. It is not a work of right wing “intellectuals”. It is a book I think may cause you to rethink things. In exchange, I will read any book you recommended, Marxist or otherwise.

I’m aware of the rehabilitations of the Effective Altruism movement and find their arguments unconvincing. Not to mention entirely the product of right-wing TINA thinking.

Am I right in assuming you consider communist revolution the only solution? Just so you know it is unlikely you will be the Stalin of that eventuality, just one more of his slaves.

No, not at all. I believe in democracy and its potential for transformation above all, just as a fundamental right in the workplace/economy, in addition to government.

> Where do you think wealth comes from?

In this case it's very clear where wealth comes from: Bezos and the rest of the Amazon shareholders are severely underpaying these workers in violation of China's labor laws. Did you read the article?

> We can’t have stolen this wealth as not the smallest fraction of it existed in all the world before the industrial revolution.

The capacity for self-deception is always a bit surprising. Confronted with a clear and concrete case of labor exploitation and wage theft you insist, never the less, it is not labor exploitation and wage theft. That is economic insanity.

> How is removing demand for their labor going to make them wealthier?

There's no need to appeal to vague self-serving questions. The impact of labor standards on global trade have been studied and their impact can be quantified. Here, in particular, the California Effect [1] has been proven to be very effective in increasing labor and environmental [3] standards around the world. California alone could likely help here a lot by demanding regulatory advertising on these products. The first step would be to educate American consumers so they understand the enormous suffering that goes into these products.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_effect

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/opinion/free-trade-by-its...

[3] https://www.nature.org/magazine/archives/the-california-effe...

Neither Amazon nor Bezos do not py them directly. They pay Foxconn for assembled devices. If they paid more, Foxconn would probably just have better margins.

Not, if they demand better working conditions in their contracts.

Who's wealth are you revering to, those that own the knowledge and institutions, or those that do the work ? In modern democracies we used to try and, what do you know, 'democratise' wealth. In the last year 81% of the wealth created went to 1% of people. This is why capitalism is failing humanity, and why it will be rejected.

The vast bulk of 'wealth' is generated by perpetual rent-seeking by those that maintain artificial scarcity. There are exceptions of course, and most of those are to be found in new technologically driven enterprises.

> We can’t have stolen this wealth as not the smallest fraction of it existed in all the world before the industrial revolution.

Ummmm evidence? Is there an article or study or book which backs this idea up?

This sounds like one interesting idea (the wealth production enabled by ideas, knowledge, systems, etc) coupled with a big dose of denial of reality, namely, the exploitation (of natural resources in Africa, India, and the americas, and of human labor and lives via slavery) which allowed the industrial revolution to come into being.

Plus, the article mentions how other regions in China such as Shenzhen _do_ have better labor practices. It’s not a binary choice between zero opportunity and abusive sweatshops.

In India people sell thier children into slavery because they are so destitute. Sweat shops are an alternative that allow them to not have to do so.

In several generations, they may industrialize to the point where they achieve a western standard of living.

Is it ethical to deny them this chance because it makes you feel bad about thier current condition compared to your own?

What if we could improve their conditions by being willing to pay more for luxury products like tablets, smart speakers, and higher-end smartphones?

Wouldn’t advocating for human rights then also be part of this progression you describe?

Sell child -> Work in sweatshop -> Gain basic labor right of 8-hour -> etc ...

When you say "wealthy people", do you mean super-rich people like Jeff Bezos, or all of us who buy luxury products? Truly curious.

I mean Capital owners, which includes Bezos and a few strata below him. Everyone else is labor, whether they’re an Indian sweatshop worker or a startup employee.

> I am not espousing the inhuman treatment of these workers ... The injustice might seem appalling, but have you wondered what the alternative is?

I’m not certain, but I think it does sound like your statement actually is indeed espousing the inhumane of those workers at that factory.

The way I see it, this is transitory stage and future might be better for these workers. Capitalism is exploitive, and until better opportunities emerge, they will be squeezed for maximum work. However, I can't think of anything better way for 1.3B people to progress.

I hear you. But then wouldn’t advocating for more humane working conditions simply be a part of that progression via capitalism which you allude to?

This sounds like whataboutism.

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