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Comment by almosthere | Hacker News Reader

Cost of labor is the issue: china is enslaving people to work.

Doesn't that feel like a massive overstatement? They have worse working conditions for sure. "Enslavement" is absurd if we are speaking about the macro level.

Those nets tho...

Overstatement? China is going fully facist on the Uyghurs for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...

The other side of this coin is cost of living. If housing costs more in the US, so does everything else. If everything costs more, people have to be paid more in order to make a living, and that makes the US less competitive in the global labor market.

The US specifically outlawed slavery except among prisoners. The US also operates prison labor at very low rates.

I'm not sure this is a meaningful point of differentiation.

US corporations benefit today from slave labor by people housed in for-profit prisons where there are incentives to over-prosecute brown and poor people. These include, but aren't limited to:

- Aramark

- Avis

- IBM

- JCPenney

- Kmart

- McDonald's

- Nintendo

- Sprint

- Starbucks

- Verizon

- Walmart

- Wendy's

- Whole Foods/Amazon

Seems pretty much like gig economy works in US.

Source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps

Literally forced labor camps. Of course, the PRC denies these allegations, but it certainly seems like there's some forced labor due to the numerous reports across many years of a variety of forced labor operations from these camps.

The US has forced prison labor. We can talk about how bad the Chinese government is, but their economy is not built on forced labor anymore than the US is built on prison labor.

I also think any form of forced work in the US prison system is pretty awful, but don’t try to equivocate Chinese “reeducation” camps with regular prison. Not anywhere close to the same thing.

Have you asked any of the inmates at the Angola "working farm" in Louisiana?

Apparently 63% are serving life terms, 27% more than 20 years.

Doesn't seem worse than China's attempt to iron out a seditious, violent sub-culture that was actually detonating bombs amongst civilians? Most seem to have closed, so the maximum term < 10 years.

Neither are good ideas IMHO - but one way worse than the other? Come now.

> Neither are good ideas IMHO - but one way worse than the other? Come now.

Inmates in any prison in the US ostensibly have gone through due process and were convicted of their crimes. You can argue about whether the US justice system is truly fair, but it's (at least in historic years) certainly more fair than rounding up large portions of a specific ethnic minority for 'reeducation'.

I would argue that in the 21st century being convicted of a crime does not make your labour essentially free to the state for the rest of your life.

Exactly, a notion of free prison labor incentivizes discrimination and as we see it that is often how it plays out in reality.

Simple google search, first result:

https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie...

This doesn’t entirely prove that China is much worse off than the US here, since we appear to be comparing. It’s pretty clear that US has a lot of room for improvement at 3.3/thousand people compared to China’s 4.

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