Sweatshops are a bad thing which we should work to replace, but just shutting everything down makes the workers worse off, it doesn’t give them 21st Century middle class G7 lifestyles.
The good news is, China has been going through those same growing pains much faster than the British did.
If we really want globalization, we should hold our business partners accountable to the same standards that we hold ourselves to: humane working conditions, environmental practices, etc. If a country wants to do business with us, they can't win our business by artificially lowering their costs. For example, with respect to carbon emissions, this could look like a carbon tax with a border adjustment--Chinese products are taxed at the border in accordance with their pollution.
Businesses want to pay as little as possible, but are in competition with each other for labour who want as much as possible, so it doesn’t feel like it’s merely “at the expense of” workers to me (that said: trade union effectiveness is not a constant).
Also, while freedom of movement for workers is clearly less than freedom of movement for businesses and goods — and the difference favours businesses over workers — I’m not clear how much of that is anti-migrant sentiment rather than globalisation.
Regarding slavery: you’re right, that isn’t what I mean. I am of the opinion that forced labour in USA prisons counts as slavery, and I oppose this unequivocally and do not expect its immediate and permanent termination to cause any problems for the slave-prisoners.
When it comes to “mere” poor working conditions and low pay, that’s when it gets more complicated, because that’s when shutting down the relevant business can have non-zero negative consequences for the workers. And, as you say, even then I would prefer to uplift the conditions rather than shrug and say it’s just how things are. Likewise a carbon tax on imports.
Right, but that labor comes from abroad and is plentiful. The US manager who exports jobs overseas is reward handsomely for saving the company money precisely because it means laying off the more expensive US labor. So rich get richer and poor get poorer, by design.
> Also, while freedom of movement for workers is clearly less than freedom of movement for businesses and goods — and the difference favours businesses over workers — I’m not clear how much of that is anti-migrant sentiment rather than globalisation.
As far as I can tell, we're not talking about migrants, we're talking about outsourcing jobs overseas.
> Regarding slavery: you’re right, that isn’t what I mean. I am of the opinion that forced labour in USA prisons counts as slavery, and I oppose this unequivocally and do not expect its immediate and permanent termination to cause any problems for the slave-prisoners.
Granted (or at least I'm not particularly interested in opening up a debate about whether prisoner labor is meaningfully 'slavery'), but how does foreign slave labor compare with domestic slave labor i.e., pre-abolition American slavery. Why is it wrong for people to say "abolishing slavery [in the US] would be bad for slaves" but not wrong to say "abolishing slavery in China would be bad for [Chinese] slaves"?
> When it comes to “mere” poor working conditions and low pay, that’s when it gets more complicated, because that’s when shutting down the relevant business can have non-zero negative consequences for the workers.
Pro-slavery Americans used to argue that slavery provided slaves with room and board, and that abolishing slavery would deprive them that. That's certainly a "non-zero negative consequence" argument, so how does the globalized slavery case differ?
> And, as you say, even then I would prefer to uplift the conditions rather than shrug and say it’s just how things are. Likewise a carbon tax on imports.
However, you can't do these things (taxing pollution or poor working conditions) without making it harder for e.g. China to compete with other labor, which in practice means moving jobs out of China and the "non-zero negative consequences" for the Chinese worker (it's economically infeasible for China to pay its workers better and keep the west's business--the whole reason so much stuff is "Made In China" is because the prices of Chinese products are artificially low because of slavery and pollution).
I'm a controls engineer who installs industrial automation for manufacturing and testing. Most of my customers have headquarters, R&D, and some manufacturing in the Midwestern US (especially Detroit automotive companies) but many have expanded to add Mexican or Chinese factories. I've worked with, trained, and socialized with a ton of operators, technicians, engineers, and translators (my Spanish is passable, my Mandarin is abysmal) in those countries just as I've worked with their equivalents in the US. My observations have been that when American companies add overseas manufacturing, sure, the American management siphons off what they can, and I'm extremely dubious that this money is legitimately proportional to the value that they add to the stream instead of the wealth that they have power to extract, also, there are some growing pains of exploitation and pollution - but the overwhelmingly more powerful effect is the growth in the foreign town where the new factory is installed.
Time and time again, I've talked to people whose parents or grandparents were practically subsistence farmers, but now they're happy to be English-speaking engineers, members of the global economy, possessing more wealth than many generations of their ancestors could have dreamed of. You're familiar with the American phenomenon of disenfranchised Millenials still living with their parents with (or without) a minimum-wage job and college debt who are unable to afford to live on their own... In Mexico and China, the opposite is true - the parents have no money, and have never had money, instead, whole extended families are living with their children who have foreign money and modern luxuries like medicine, air conditioning, and automobiles. It is true that this unimaginable wealth is initially earned by the children at something on the order of laborers at $5/hr and engineers at $20/hr, which would be criminal in the US, but (1) those salaries grow far more rapidly than American minimum wages as the workforce gains education and experience, and (2) the purchasing power of that amount of money is far higher in those countries.
Their living conditions have gone from that of villages that wouldn't be unfamiliar to someone on the 17th century American frontier, to something more like the 'bad part of town' in a 21st century American city. I agree that it would be better if they were in conditions like the good part of town. I agree it's inhumane to take more than your fair share of the revenue out of the hands of people making $10k/year. I agree that we could do better to ensure this doesn't happen with slavery and pollution taxes. But I also have first-hand communication, albeit in my second language, that the resulting situation is better than erecting barriers to trade and leaving them alone.
I don't think this is the "working class" and certainly not the slavery conditions people are talking about. No doubt globalization affects different people differently, however.
Serfdom effectively ended in the UK and France somewhere around the 1300s, with the Black Death probably being the single biggest impetus towards ending Serfdom. Queen Elizabeth outlawed serfdom for good in England in 1574, well before the Industrial Revolution.
Intriguingly, while serfdom was dying off in Western Europe, it was starting in Central and Eastern Europe, where it was only killed off by the Revolutions of 1848. But, as we all should know, the Industrial Revolution had its birth not in Germany but in Britain.
I'm not an expert on the Early Modern economy in the UK, but I also think that subsistence farming would be an adequate description for the UK rural economy in the 18th century. A lot of people would have been employed in the putting-out system for fabric manufacture. Given that farming itself being mechanized doesn't happen until the late 19th century, well after we see the rise of the industrial factories in concentrated cities, there had to be enough agricultural surplus from the rural areas to sustain large urban centers, so that doesn't seem like it would be subsistence agriculture.
Of particular importance was a combination of increased productivity and decreased labor requirements. Yes, this happened before mechanization thanks to factors such as larger fields from enclosures combined with better plows. The result of the enclosures in particular was a wave of poor people migrating to the cities. Those became the desperate poor who provided a workforce for the Industrial Revolution.
When people fought for societal changes, for instance in France during the Revolution or May 1968, the ruling class did not have a complete control of the means of communication, powerful automated censorship, pervasive facial recognition, a dystopian social credit system, etc...
Otherwise what seems to happen throughout history, is that people gain power and use that to extend their leads indefinitely. Technology seems to make this process even more efficient and with a resulting inequality that is millions of times greater than what could be achieved 1000 years ago.
Now there seems to be no hope for better social conditions, because the powerful can isolate themselves almost completely while retaining their power with automated tools. In addition, we are in the age of constant distraction and stimulation (panem et circenses). The future of the average person doesn't seem very bright.
Yeah, you can get a cheap house. Somewhere were there are no jobs and you couldn't even buy that cheap food, because you wouldn't have any income.
Masses of homeless people are almost as angry as starving people.
I don't think it was the industrial revolution that ended serfdom in a lot of places, at least not per wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Dates_of_emancipation_...
In a lot of those places, it did end because of revolutions, but it was the French and 1848, not the Industrial.
It's actually debated as to whether it was better at first.[1]
It seems for a for the first 60 years or so the standard of living may actually have fallen until the initial shock was over and working conditions etc. improved.
You are right though that modern industrialising nations may be able to leapfrog some of those difficulties allowing for a much more rapid arrival at decent living standards.
[1]https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandt...
We have plenty of examples of modern production that doesn't externalize its harms and still produces a modern lifestyle. Often for not much more than that which does externalize.
For example, take some time to read up on Mondragon - a worker owned and operated behemouth that provides much of the economic output for an entire region of Spain.
Japan has similar industries I believe.
Britain had a safety-netless trickle-down economic model that gave rise to huge economic inequality and combined it with a nearly uninterrupted hard gold standard and a very laissez-faire financial sector. This is the regime that gives a certain kind of right winger wet dreams, but it depended on resource extraction on a vast scale from the colonies for its success and still was hugely unstable, with five major economic crises hitting London in the C19th, with one deeper than the Great Depression.
China's interventionist model has some serious issues, but I think in terms of equity, stability and self-sufficiency its last 40 years compares well to any period of the British Empire.
Its last 40 years has been one of decreasing centralized economic control, and increasingly capitalistic engagement. The wealth gap between the few richest and the many poorest is far greater than the UK's- Britain looks practically egalitarian in comparison.
China has inequality today, but it does not have a rentier class, which dominated C19th British politics.