Migrants who made China an industrial giant face a grim retirement
economist.com
economist.com
If she'd chose to close her account, I think she can retrieve about CNY 100-200k one time.
For the second one, House saving fund is a totally different thing. It is not mandatory nationally, for some employees they preferred to pay a minimum so they can negotiate for a higher wage in cash. It is very rare to see a migrate worker choose to pay housing saving funds instead of more cash.
Anyway normally you can try to get some help from government provided legal aid and local media in this situation, but the foreign medias and NGOs is a big no-no.
But that's an aside, the point is that exploitative labour practices come about because of what @netsharc says. You've sidestepped his and my point.
If it was you or your children in a sweatshop you mightn't be so gung-ho.
Capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production. It often goes hand-in-hand with free markets, but they're not the same thing.
Just let these definitional arguments go, they’re not interesting or valuable.
As a general principle agree your definitions before you lock horns and you'll start getting somewhere, if no further than agreeing to disagree.
As an example, interest rate fixing by central banks in DM countries is anathema to free markets and price discovery; yet ownership of production is privatized.
Serfdom was abolished in 1861, so no the USSR did not go from serfdom to the space race.
Slaves are property. For all the many, many awful things that are wrong in China there is no slavery.
Minimum wage laws are not economically binding in less developed countries except sometimes for the professional managerial class. They sure as hell aren’t binding in Communist countries like China or Vietnam. You need a strong and powerful state to enforce minimum wage laws. If you can’t manage to vaccinate all the children in your country the laws may be on the books but they won’t be followed.
For decades Capitalism has pushed manufacturing jobs overseas first and into the arms of robots second, and also robots overseas for double savings. In those same decades, more and more of the wealth has been concentrated in the super-rich, while the middle class has struggled to continue to exist in any meaningful way. Regular people are satiated with cheaper and cheaper products made in overseas markets, but there's still an overwhelming sense of "broke" permeating societies in the developed world.
Eventually the rich are going to have to be willing to let some of the money flow back into larger society, if for no other reason than there will be no more consumers for even their cheapest of goods. This problem goes double as China continues it's rapid industrialization, and begins ascending itself to where it's labor is no longer cheap enough, and capitalism now turns its gaze to even less developed countries for cheap manufacturing. But, this activity itself is what causes industrialization and the rise in cost of labor; and there are a finite number of countries.
As usual though no capitalists are thinking in long term goals. Just get the money now, the most you can now, right now, before the whole thing goes toppling over.
Even the people that could buy ethical don't do. The previous century dilluted some important links between people and created a bit too much of a race to the bottom.
Because it's exhausting, and it's made to be that way on purpose. Brands within brands within brands, shell companies within shell companies, producers selling to distributors selling to distributors selling to distributors.
Forget shopping ethically, I think most people would be hard pressed to tell you where anything they've bought, regardless of prior thought, actually came from.
So they DO have something to complain about; so what's the beef with them complaining about it? Because they're not using your perspective? You're complaining that they're not looking at the issue through the perspective of others, so aren't you doing the same thing?
The life experiences of people on the other side of the planet isn't more tangible than your relatives' life experiences which have borne witness to the suckiness that you acknowledge they've experienced. If a parent loses one child in a car accident, are you going to tell him to "stfu" because another parent somewhere lost two children in a car accident?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonish...
[2]https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-of-dark-humour
These people literally put their life into the modernization of the nation. Some of them died young, mostly from poor safety measures in their work environment. A lot of them suffer chronicle diseases that make their life a living torture. Yet even more of them wait to see the grim prospect of a miserable senior life. We are not even starting mentioning the tragic life of these events on their offsprings!
Worker fates were the same or worse when the Western nations came from the industrial age into the 20th century...
It took until the 1930s with New Deal and unionising to get acceptable working conditions for factory and most service sector workers...
Good luck with this, when the fate of human beings require unified effort.
I'd like to think of it more as the typical:
"Yeah, our country did those things back in the day to develop/get rich, but yours should not do them. History shouldn't repeat itself in your country's case, only my country should be allowed that privilege"
Countries must pass through certain stages to develop.
Countries that were once at stage 0 and now, after centuries , managed to be on stage N, are hypocritical (if not self-serving and used for diplomatic/political reasons) to point fingers at countries earlier in those stages. Especially if those countries are much older and larger (and thus slower to change) and despite that go through those stages much faster...
The argument that human rights abuses, totalitarian thinking, and mass pollution is absolutely necessary to advance is absurd and damaging.
Maybe you forgot what is discussed in this thread? The argument was about workers sacrificing their life for industrialisation, suffering through lack of safety, work dangers, etc, and then tossed aside as seniors. To quote:
"These people literally put their life into the modernization of the nation. Some of them died young, mostly from poor safety measures in their work environment. A lot of them suffer chronicle diseases that make their life a living torture. Yet even more of them wait to see the grim prospect of a miserable senior life. We are not even starting mentioning the tragic life of these events on their offsprings!*"
-- that is, nothing specific to totalitarianism.
Those things happened every time and for every country that developed from from a mostly agrarian society to an advanced industrial one, so there's nothing "absurd" about considering them as typical stages...