Slavery is de-facto legal in China and their justice system is rotten to the core. Is this really news to anyone?
I would be surprised if this had ended differently.
I would be surprised if this had ended differently.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-vio...
Agreed on the fact that both seem like a corporate hellhole one way or the other.
It doesn't make sense to outlaw poor people. And paradoxically, at least under context of international trade, the only sustainable way to get poor countries out of poverty is for richer countries to trade with them.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
So it makes little sense to compare prison labour programs to "any other workplace".
Either it's force labour, or it's not. You can't get away with things just by slapping a different label on them.
> The US constitution actually allows slavery
If a Chinese person posted here "actually all the human rights abuses in China are perfectly legal and in accordance with Chinese law" you would not be impressed.
We wouldn't be like "alright, nothing to see here". In fact, we would probably be horrified that the inhumane system was codified officially, and is here to stay, as opposed to being a temporary result of oversight and corruption.
So forgive the international reader like myself for being extremely unimpressed with this state of affairs.
This is almost precisely what a legal system is, and does.
In my native Latvia, a member of the EU, it’s the most commonly handed out criminal punishment. x hours of unpaid public work. Typically on a strict schedule. Or you can go to the can if you’re opposed to such “slavery”.
Oh and yes, there are also labour programs in our prisons that are probably comparable to the ones in the US. An easy sell actually, because you can either
1. fill your day by doing some work in horrible conditions for basically no pay, but you get to do something
2. rot in your cell all day long
I’m pretty sure that most people pick option 1. After all, you need a way to buy cigarettes.
Nobody calls this slavery.
We also have mandatory military service that started this year. I’m happy to call this slavery, because it’s imposed on people that haven’t done anything wrong.
But you seriously can’t compare forced labour as a punishment for a crime vs any other workplace. It’s disingenious for very obvious reasons. Why not go a step further? Why not claim that it’s a human rights violation to incarcerate people in the first place? After all, the universal declaration of human rights says that EVERYONE has the right to leave their country, re-enter it, and freely move about in their own country, and this is a “universal human right” that’s so clearly being denied to prisoners.
So forgive the international reader like myself for seeing nothing morally wrong with this state of affairs.
I can sort of accept, reluctantly, that the Chinese have a different way to thinking than I do and that I can't necessarily apply my moral code to China. What I cannot accept or understand is that the owners and managers of Western companies, who supposedly share my moral ideals, continues to do business with China, solely to increase profit. It's absolutely disgusting. The mental gymnastics these people have to do to justify or just ignore the problems is beyond what I can even imagine.
"Amazon is squeezing employees for maximum profit!" "Yes, they have to maximize profit by law" right, but there are also laws against union-busting, about workplace safety, etc, etc however _for some reason_ these other laws are second tier to a corporation's legal profit mandate.
They do care about profit margins, which is why they outsource slavery.
Are you really sure that these people share your own moral ideals? ;-)
I think when you go full B2B, you are destined to be a soulless corporate automaton.
There is certainly a niche catering to the handful of customers who do care, have the money to care, have enough information to care and get the opportunity to show they care by selecting the right vendor. But very often I think the consumer is just unable to care because of lacking money, lacking information or outright deception by the vendors and lacking offers from ethical vendors.
And the market unfortunately favors the non-ethical ones. Which doesn't make ethical ones impossible or non-existent, just less likely to succeed and therefore rare.
"The market favors" is just an corporate speak for "The customers favor", i.e. in this case "The customers unfortunately favor the non-ethical ones".
The resolution should be on the western governments to tax or fine the ever-loving crap out of companies and their products that utilize systems like this. Then the products' end prices will reflect the true cost to the consumer because any ethically-produced product of equivalent quality should be cheaper.
Therefore it is not really an informed decision of the customer that makes them successful. It rather is the lack of transparency of the market, due to the non-ethical sellers lying and regulation being too lax.
i buy the cheaper of most products because i can't tell the difference. for all i know it could be the more expensive one that is lying to me. only if i actually know that the more expensive one is genuinely better, not fake and not based on exploited labor, then i'll buy that.
That's your example of a company with a conscience?
Of course, a conscience, in and of itself, is only as good as what is aligned to.
If company cares about paying workers enough, your item would be more expensive, but you are still "noname" for the buyer on amazon. And now amazon would push your listing away, because it is expensive. Besides, the client will buy the cheapest option in a lot of cases.
There are exceptions though, when you more or less know what you wanna buy and from which exact company. But if you shopping for something like "massage gun" an have nooooo idea which ones are good or bad, sustanable or not - here you probably get something from the first search page with 5 star review and reasonable price. Not something from a company which cares about longevity of the product or about their workers.
And amazon workers are not living the happiest of their lives to begin with, so probably people would not shop their if the care about sustainability. People care about cheap prices and fast delivery though.
Chick-Fil-A has a lot of control about their operation. Sellers on Amazon have minimum control. It used to be that good price and good reviews would make your item easy to find, but now you also have to pay for it in more and more cases.
I want to inject some nuance here. Competition in the labor market, which drives business to low- or middle-income countries like China, is really really good for the typical low-middle income person in China. If wealthy countries pulled out entirely, then China's GDP per capita will probably drop from $12,000 back to sub-$5,000 and you will be causing more suffering for the people you're concerned about. By all means, advocate for better pay and conditions and regulations, but don't advocate for pulling out of poor or middle income countries with lax labor protections entirely. It wasn't clear to me which avenue you're arguing for but I feel it's an important point worth stressing.
Why do the poor rice farmers line up to apply for factory jobs?
"I can sort of accept, reluctantly, that the Chinese have a different way to thinking than I do and that I can't necessarily apply my moral code to China."
so, give them a pass with what they are doing and then criticize others that are giving them the same pass, and also choose to profit from it.
What about people who buy stuff made in China? do they get a pass too? So the only party at fault is the middle-man? slave owners get a pass, consumers that enable the slave owners get a pass and the only party at fault is the evil middle-man corporations?
If its wrong, its wrong for all parties, if its OK, its OK for all parties.
Western Consumers don't care either
(same with countries where we get energy resources from - they don't have ideal reputation for human rights, but they are cheap).
It is kinda simple: you can buy a tshirt from Italy produced in Italy and having price tag 3 times more. Or you can buy from China... Now think you are a company with thin margins and have to do the same... And your items are after getting sold on Amazon, which algorithms would force you to sell as cheap as possible, otherwise your item would not be seen in the search results.
And it will still have been made by a slave.
You can't expect companies to fix this, this needs to come through politics and government. Unfortunately, these days governments who try to address it will be considered enemies of capitalism, considered leftish or communist. As prices will have to rise and consumers won't allow for that.
There's nothing western politicians can do to fix working conditions in China.
Embargo them? The working conditions in China won't get any better, and you'll simply put a lot of Chinese out of work by doing that.
Higher tariffs? That's just a tax on importing goods for China. While it helps the domestic manufacturing sector, it still does nothing to fix the working conditions in China.
Consumers suddenly start caring? The same as the "higher tariffs" scenario.
Any other ideas?
You’d just shift the manufacturing to a less hostile environment, where the government doesn’t intentionally make it hard to do auditing on modern slavery. Like India.
I just don’t see how it would help the Chinese labour situation at all.
I'd hope most people are familiar with the fact that the west, and specifically the CIA, later the NED and many different gov-backed orgs have been hard at work making sure the working conditions of those countries are either kept as exploitative as they are, or if possible made worse. Of course China is a fairly specific case, and while there obviously have been numerous cases of interventionism (like in the Tian'anmen square riots or Taiwan as a whole) stopping the endless anti-Chinese propaganda couldn't hurt (which I'm not accusing this article of being). It's absolutely obvious to everyone that the US and allies would jump at the first opportunity to meaningfully destabilize China's economy so, no, I certainly don't expect anything positive to be done for Chinese workers by western countries, and especially not by a country like the US that should very much look inwards when it comes to working conditions.
SUPPOSEDLY - just like Big Tobacco has always wanted everyone to know the scientific truth about the health effects of smoking tobacco, right?
Capitalism optimizes for profit. If some profits need to be foregone or spent on pretending to share the moral ideals of the consumers - that also gets optimized, to minimize performative idealism and its costs.
China is not alone in this, just more present in the HN-relevant IT/tech sector. But clothing in southeast asia, mining in africa and south america, logistics/trucking in eastern europe are relevant examples from other regions and industries.
I don't intend to disperse responsibility here or distract, quite the opposite: One of the main reasons the aforementioned abuses can continue is that "the civilized west" systematically ignores those problems on all levels. There are some EU regulations coming up to improve this situation, but we'll have to wait and see on those...
Government is also kinda "happy" in the short run. It is easier to hide the real inflation. Before I could clothe in EU produced stuff, and now I can only clothe in asia produced. But I still get the "same" thing as a consumer, even if my real salary lost some power.
Here's what it is: in law corporations are essentially given a weird kind of personhood. It's that way so corporations can get things done.
Unfortunately, corporations aren't people: they don't care, they don't have ethics, they don't have morals, they don't have values, they don't have family, they don't have a conscience.
It's not an original observation, but due to this, the type of person a company most resembles is one of posessing profound psychopathological traits.
Corporations aren't people but they are run and managed by people. I'd like to think that they have ethics, morals and a conscience.
They do, they hired killers to murder Union leaders in Columbia
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/24/marketingandpr...
Do you really believe that Chinese are different from US in this regard? I.e. that most Chinese people believe that it's perfectly ok to exploit people to the bone, because they have alternatives? No, they, just like us, believe it's a rotten thing to do, and agree to it only because well, they have no alternatives. No different than the extremely exploited workers in hellish factories in XIX century US or England.