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Comment by open0 | Hacker News Reader

Ever been enslaved on a Thai fishing boat? I know a few people who have, including a neighbor that was missing for 3 years. The US has its own problems, but places like Dubai, Southeast Asia, etc. have a much more severe problem with mistreatment and abuse of workers.

Last year a building collapsed here during construction and killed about 60 people. Stuff like that happens all the time.

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I lived in Gulf countries for 12 years; I'm well aware of the shitty and life-threatening work conditions for migrant labourers.

I've also lived in the US for 9 years; I'm also well aware of the mistreatment of workers here, such as workers who are undocumented migrants, workers who are prisoners, workers who work gig companies, Amazon workers, and many others.

The common theme here is humans are excellent at externalizing costs.

Jeff bezos is not pissing in a bottle. The people who profit the most from these ships are never trapped on them.

Normally I don’t engage in these kind of false comparisons and I do know that south east asia has a problem with off shore industrial slavery unprecedented in the USA. Sometimes things are uniquely bad in other parts of the world and there is no domestic comparison. That is certainly the case with the enslaved fishing vessels (although a case can be made about EU/EFTA operated fishing vessels out of Western Sahara and Mauritania).

But now I’m gonna make an exception and point to the Hard Rock building collapse in New Orleans in 2019 which killed 3 workers and injured dozens more[1]. Things like that happen all the time in the US as well.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1031_Canal#Partial_collapse_du...

That Hard Rock building collapse did not seem to be something that happens all the time in the US. That thing got tons of news coverage because it is rare. It definitely happens, but not on the scale of many of the countries it is being compared to in this thread.

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