I got hired at a Bangladesh sweatshop. Meet my 9-year-old boss [video]
thestar.com
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The questions I ask myself about this situation are:
1. Are the lives of the people who work in these factories better or worse as a result of these jobs existing?
The answer I end up arriving at repeatedly is that it is a resounding improvement in the lives of almost everyone. RMG factories empower women to provide for themselves in a way that nothing else in the country can. There simply aren't any other jobs for women in low-income brackets in Bangladesh and I personally know individuals who found the courage to break themselves out of abusive marriages and the ability to say no to marriages they didn't want because of the income they have from these jobs.
2. Could the factories be better?
Yes, absolutely. Most of the owners could obviously afford to pay employees better given the incredible amounts of wealth that the factory owners have accumulated and having gone to school with some of their children, I know quite a few factory owners personally. The reason they don't pay more comes down to simply business principles. The objective of a labor intensive business is to drive costs down the lowest possible amount legally. That is what they do.
3. What is the government's role?
This is pretty simple. They should raise the minimum wage for factory workers, create more stringent regulation and make great effort to ensure those regulations are followed. This is where invalidOrTaken's point about corruption comes in. Many of the factory owners are themselves members of parliament, or have spent a great deal of money getting one of their lackeys elected. On top of that, virtually everyone in a regulatory agency will take massive bribes to look the other way.
When the article talks about that girl's dream being a sewing operator, and you cringe because that sounds so depressing, realize that 10 years ago this girls only option would have been to get married to a rickshaw puller or shopkeeper and hope he wasn't abusive. Today, she can dream of a job, of moving up a ladder and maybe even becoming a manager some day. That's progress even if it comes with a whole host of issues.
Yes, you can come up with all the explanation whatsoever you want to how this is a ~local maxima~ of happiness, but the fact is that we live on a much higher one with tons of disposable income and benefit from their work... so it s not a ~global maxima~ (not even close) so we should do better.
What can I say? I'm definitely more to the left than most people in this website but any quietly upvoted defense of child labor sounds like "the slaves had it better than in _x_" or "women were spared _y_" jobs to me when it comes to defending poor social policy. Grown-ass white men getting paid to develop digital toys justifying to themselves why the situation for 9 year old sweatshop workers is good enough. JFC.
edit: in fact, every single reply amongst the first 20 in some ways works to justify the completely bubbled-in mentality of the startup crowd. just running down the topic I see (caricaturized for effect) "social justice types don't understand how rough it is out there, this is good for her!", "ugh, this journalist is endangering the girl!", and "this really puts in perspective all those pesky cultural issues that women, gay people, and minorities keep complaining about".
what the hell is wrong with you all, seriously.
Fine, you pay for their food, clothes and schooling and we'll close the shops. What do you think of 80 year olds forced to work as Walmart greeters to make ends meet, right in the good ol' USA? The world has problems, sometimes you gotta pick the lesser evil since problems can't be solved by a HN comment or with a finger snap.
The comment you're replying is a detailed comment that also states that there should be more done to improve working conditions and wages. Your comment is a rant about how we're a bunch of "grown-ass white men" (thanks for assuming things about me) who bask in our privilege and wealth.
Meta: Is there a label for this kind of derailing, angry comment? I feel like it could be a variant of concern trolling, where the writer pretends to care about the issue at hand but actually tries to redirect the conversation towards ad hominem attacks.
Moral superiority, I suppose.
If someone who is outraged but doesn't do anything is a 'slacktivist', then what is someone who is both not outraged and not doing anything about it? The implication of 'slacktivist' is that the second person is somehow better--that in order to avoid being a 'slacktivist' you should school yourself into being an always-detached philosopher of suffering, always reasonable, always balanced.
You've said it yourself. Golden words.
What kind of democracy do you expect to get in HN comments? After that half-cocked "outrage" and "being upset" the slacktivist is going to click another cat video startup and forget this topic altogether. I can see dêmos, but κράτος - not at all.
It can be difficult to accept your own powerlessness in the face of large scale social problems. Our instinct is to want to confer the same quality of life we have on those who, through no fault or failing of their own, live in a much poorer society with much poorer prospects for virtually everyone born there. Clearly "society" is to blame, but how do you change a society, from top to bottom? Does Bangaldesh need a Lee Kuan Yew[1]?
So no, it's not tourism. It's a howl of pain when confronted with newly realized powerlessness. And personally, I prefer it to cool indifference.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/From-Third-World-First-Singapore/dp/00...
The Banality of Systemic Evil is a great read: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality...
And you're right about the indifference. Add ambivalence to lack of courage and will.
In the US, you can push back at things like unsafe conditions with threats of OSHA. I doubt there's any such thing in Bangladesh, but it would be a good start.
Having a job is great, but they should be required to provide reasonable working conditions. And even in the USA, they will do the absolute minimum unless pushed.
Source: I have worked 16-hour shifts in a US factory that was over 100F, sometimes unable to get lunch or bathroom breaks. I now work a normal office job and laugh at the very notion of comparing even a 100-hour week doing this to a 70-hour week doing that.
1. Quitting means you are no longer making money, and if that was an acceptable endgame then you likely wouldn't be employed in such conditions in the first place;
2. I find it extremely unlikely that such factory owners would have a dearth of prospective (eager, even) employees.
#2 Having a large labor supply suggests the job is competitive. However, even if that's the case having people constantly quit increases training costs.
The point of all of this is industrialization tends to follow a path where people move from terrible low wage jobs to more well paid work. Even China has moved past the first rung of the ladder with market forces forcing factory's to increase pay and or improve conditions. Presumably where going to run out of 3rd world countries at some point, though there is some concern robots / AI is going to end up filling that nitch possibly stranding a few countries.
China has absolutely not moved past the first rung of this ladder. The majority of the Chinese population lives in abject rural poverty.
[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-17/china-urban-populat...
Most Chinese in the city (some which you may judge as living in abject poverty), are actually pretty happy with their situation. Even the homeless people seem more content than over here in Germany (I've talked to quite some of them over some baijiu at the corner of the street).
Please stop painting China a some kind of post-communist hellhole where people are starving on the streets whilst toiling away in backstreet sweatshops. You're not doing the country any justice, and you should really visit it someday.s
Incidentally, many of the complaints against Chinese/Bangladesh/etc. factories could also be leveled against US factories per my experience. Other than the child labor bit, I've seen just about everything here, too, though I expect some of the problems are simply more widespread and occur more frequently.
Factory managers know that their employees don't have a lot of options and tend to squeeze them hard. (Then collect bonuses for cost savings...) It was always amusing to hear them tell the crew how great it was that labor expenses were down. And yes, I did point out afterwards to the people that "labor expenses" === "your paychecks." For whatever reason, this was not obvious to some.
When a US factory burns down and kills all the employees inside because they'd been locked in during their 15 hour shift - which has happened more than once in Bangladesh - you can say that US factories are similar to Bangladeshi factories.
I agree that conditions for many workers suck, but let's not pretend there's much similarity.
I give you the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, killing 146 garment workers. Same general gist, even: doors were locked by management from the outside "to prevent pilferage and unauthorized breaks".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
Lots of things have happened in the US since 1911.
Factory fires killing employees still happen in Bangladesh.
You're right that there are better protections in the USA. But day-to-day conditions are not so great--there's nothing particularly abnormal about 15-hour shifts, or people who would lose their jobs for refusing them.
I'm with you on the "it's not good enough," but at the same time, you can't just close down the sweatshops if that would make their lives worse. I would say that this is a classic case of needing government to step in, because the problem is not one that the market can solve: As the parent points out, it's in the interest of each sweatshop owner to minimize labor costs. Only at the point where labor becomes scares is the market value of labor going to rise, and a lot of abuse can happen waiting for that eventuality. If it ever happens.
People aren't "justifying" anything, they're stating actual realities of the world. 30 years ago South Korea was the sweatshop of the world. Today it is an economic powerhouse with largely first world living conditions. The same is increasingly true of China. Countries don't just skip that stage in their evolution, short of some mythical utopia project, however much we might like to think they can.
However, countries cannot simply follow other countries' recipes for "success". Unbridled optimism hurts. Economic development (not to be confused with economic growth) is not an inevitable process. There are many pitfalls and it is a constant effort to stay on the path towards economic development to reach a point where you become a developed nation and can look forward to growth.
There is no simple blue print for guaranteed success. What worked for South Korea might not work for Bangladesh.
This is a real and scary problem. It is not without precedent--the horrors perpetuated by the unfettered corporation-states during the colonial era are an example of the results of 'self policing', which is too often society's answer to how corporations should be regulated.
This makes for a situation that is worse than that faced by the first rounds of Industrial Revolution countries, for labor movements have little power when economic benefits actively bypass countries with more regulations and flow to the most corrupt and exploitation-friendly countries.
Perhaps we cannot (yet) create a utopia where every human who is born has a healthy and labor-light life. But we can refuse to accept the 'actual realities' and try to prevent scenarios where wealth is distributed to the exploiters and not the exploitees.
If borders were open to labor migration as they are to capital/corporations I bet the situation would be much better.
Borders nowadays exist only for the lowest of classes. In a globalized economy borders seem like a mechanism of opression.
Just my 2c.
If only that were true. It would be an incredible improvement.
The problem is when the chain of supply and demand grows longer and longer (i.e. covers more distance in terms of culture, national borders, multinational markets, etc), as it does today. In the modern era, what if Henry Ford's factory was in a third world country? There would be no shortage of first world consumers of Ford's products, so in that scenario there is no capitalist incentive to raise the workers' wages. Especially since the first world consumers are buying the products for the very reason that Ford is paying wages impossibly below first world pay scales.
This scenario is also not without precedent, for what it is is the isolation and exploitation of one population in favor of another population, which is a colonialist scenario (as opposed to a Marxist scenario where classes are stratified in a single society). In such a scenario, nothing capitalistically motivated will come to the aid of the exploited population until a very long chain of supply and demand has been unwound.
Paying your workers enough to buy your own products is mathematically impossible to profit from--they're just paying you back money you paid them in the first place, and they can't pay you more than 100% of their salary, so you always pay them more than they pay you.
Yes, this place is dominated by strata of society driven to justify organized child labor, even after seeing the face of one such 9 year old. Throughout history, such people justified all sorts of things.
I know many like them in person, and am constantly weirded out. (One reason I dislike hanging out with programmers, managers and investors.) The banally evil things stumbling from their mouths... For example, when something vaguely feminist comes up, someone often tells me that women are mentally inferior to men, apparently expecting me to smirk with them. (As opposed to wonder what planet these creatures come from, and why they thought they could randomly splutter that in civilized society.) Fortunately, I have the freedom to tell them what I think, and am grateful for the reminder that they're nothing like the person I want to be.
People have a tendency to fight problems when they seem manageable, but labor exploitation is so out of control, the only options seem like flight into some kind of back-to-the-land movement or justification. It's too bad that this kind of mentality is so prevalent among people who think of themselves as problem solvers.
Couldn't have put it better.
Sometimes I wonder who is producing the real STUFF, since we are all working in the non-productive tertiary sector.
What is the alternative for this 9 year old (in a country with a GDP per capita of $744, and a population density of 2,850 per square mile. Norway, as a contrast, has a GDP of $99,500 per capita, and a density of 39 per square mile)? Please describe the utopia salvation because I would just love to hear it.
Of course, given the rest of your comment I hardly think you're looking for any intrusion of reality. The sexism bit to auger your ridiculous point about "these people" is outrageous nonsense.
What the hell is wrong with you is that you dont understand economics(supply and demand). The world is the way it is and as long as there is a vast supply of workers competing for few jobs the situation is not going to change. No amount of pipe dreaming is going to change that.
I can hear you say minimum wage and regulations. Guess what, while this might improve the situation of those who have a job, it will only make it harder for people who a looking for jobs.
There are no simple solutions but in a world where tens of thousands die of hunger each day having a job and being able to feed yourself is better than nothing.
You sound to me like fashionista looking at a bum and lamenting that he doesn't have an Armani suit (oh My!). Sure things aren't good enough around the world. It's easy to appear morally "superior", but quite frankly, it's a lot worse in other places. (Last I check, things were looking that great in Somalia either)
Bangladesh was part of Pakistan, and looking at the situation objectively they're in a much better position than Pakistan is. I'd rather have a corrupt government where people are outraged and talking about minimum wage than having to focus merely on survival. The place has one of the fastest growing economies in the world and while there are filthy rich people there and filthy poor too, the gap between the too has narrowed significantly over the last 20 years.
Believe it or not, it's the "start up" crowd who made a good bit of the difference in the third world. India has been transformed by the IT industry, and Bangladesh is well on it's way. There are those who bitch and moan and there are those who do something. And if one took their head out of their ass long enough to see reality for what it is, they would notice how much of this is article is sensationalism and how much is really about actually helping the poor and doing something. And yes, I do get to say something about it b/c I do spend a significant amount of time DOING something about it rather than just bitching.
Good luck getting all the bums Armani suits, those with some sense will hopefully continue to help in getting them food and shelter first.
There's little wrong with Rahman's post in general. There's plenty wrong with the psychological mechanics that led it to quietly bubble to the top. Many people rightly see it as an "authentic" shield or cover for their own apathy. Hurl "slacktivism" my way, I'll call you a Randroid or something (I'm not feeling very inspired). Ultimately via this message board all we can do is expose the kernel of our philosophies. Mine is that all wealthy people that react to a story of strife by seeking a reassuring explanation to carry on about their business (ie: the silent upvoters) are probably bad people in the only meaningful sense of the word: selfish and reactionary.
Keep explaining to me how this is the best of all feasible worlds and how your privileged position in it isn't clouding your objective economical understanding of things. Keep telling me about political correctness and "outrage tourism" as obstacles to Bangladesh's rational child labor economic success story in the making- they could be as happy and equal as South Koreans and Americans one day!
I'm just a young cloudy-headed incipient leftist, what do I know?
Compare this with communism, anarchism, etc. They assume that humans are basically good. Let's just increase everyone's income! Except that isn't sustainable unless it makes economic sense. Negative externalities and all that. There's always going to be people that want power and money and prestige. If you get rid of money, they'll seek those things by turning Russia into a dictatorship. Why should they care about the people starving in the holodomor famine? It's an externality.
Note, of course, that capitalism only works well if you have strong human rights and the rule of law. If either of those fail, you get corruption and slavery. But strong human rights and the rule of law aren't going to change the fact that some (many) people will still be working for $2 a day, simply because they've got no better option. The world sucks, but idealism alone can't fix it.
I don't think I'm explaining my point very well, so let me just state it plainly: it's easy to complain about our f^@!$d up system, but much harder to find a solution that works any better. Before you advocate radical architectural changes, you better be able to prove that your revolution won't eat it's young.
This doesn't mean that we get to sit back and enjoy our lives without guilt. I think every person in the first world has a moral imperative to help people in developing countries. However, we need to be realistic about what works. One great way to improve lives is to provide education, or employment for people who complete higher education. Technology provides a good opportunity in this regard (not the best opportunity, but it's something that we can do, without excuse). There's no reason why a Rwandan in Kigali can't earn first-world wages for doing software development.
This sounds a little like the US today. In order for capitalism to deliver what promise it holds, it must be saved from the capitalists. That means intelligent regulation (as opposed to mere red tape).
Your radicalism is just as useless to that girl as is the opposite opinion you deride.
Been tried. Didn't work out very well.
I'm waiting for someone to tell me that Communism works, but that people are broken, the most marvelous rationalization that history ever spit forth.
It's just sad and juvenile.
What works? Incremental changes that you can make while keeping the current system running. It's ok if you have some grand masterplan behind your changes, but try and make sure those small changes will be valuable even if you have to abandon the grand plan, or change its direction. So I now approach politics this way, and it feels like this is a more mature position, not less.
Gradual change do not exclude fundamental change - eventually. Revolution is after all just evolution speeded up. It's just a different approach.
Not as much as you would if you wrote a bit less and read a bit more.
It seems like a common refrain in feel good politics. If not perfect, then none at all. It scales terrifyingly well from closing homeless shelters because they don't have approved handicap bathrooms all the way up to chocking off the economic output of entire countries.
Back in the real world, such activists usually would-be trade partners to provide childhood education and regulate working conditions as a condition of market access. As large, wealthy markets, territories like the US and EU have a great deal of leverage in such matters.
In practice, that solution doesn't work so well. Usually the goods wind up simply taking a longer boat ride through a country with looser standards before winding up in the US/EU.
The fundamental problem is Bangladeshi. It requires a Bangladeshi solution. High-minded westerners can help, some, but it might be smaller help than first seems possible.
This really does make a difference you know. You're looking at considering a couple of dollars overhead, yet it provides genuine support to the growers who made a commitment to pay their workers fairly.
The economic realities of Fairtrade seem different IF the Guardian can be trusted on this.
I'm not defending this situation at all. It is unforgivable that factory owners sock away millions of dollars while literally paying their employees pennies. This is not okay. Unfortunately, this is what profit making entities do when they don't have regulations forcing them to do otherwise, hence my argument that any serious improvement in working conditions will require legislation and enforcement from the government.
As for being a "grown-ass white man getting paid to develop digital toys", well let's just say that my dad grew up in an impoverished fishing village in southern Bangladesh and somehow made it to America and raised me a solidly working class family in NY. I'm currently in school thanks to need based financial aid that covers my expenses.
So no, my perspective doesn't come from a background of privilege trying to justify oppression. Things are what they are and I don't think being angry about it solves anything.
As first-worlders, it's our moral duty to support people who work to help create that power for the factory workers.
In most cases in Bangladesh corruption occurs at the inspection level with relatively low-level individuals. That the factory owners have been able to buy out the higher level officials that the inspecting teams report to is troubling and has me worried.
Relative to standards of living in America today, the situation described in the article is abhorrent. But social/cultural progress is not fast, direct, pretty, or easy. America struggled through many stages of oppressive, inhumane periods. Even today's society may be described by future generations as barbaric (e.g. wage slavery, government surveillance, etc etc).
Just take the recent Supreme Court ruling [1] that made it even harder than it already was to sue corporations for human right abuses overseas. The ruling is already being used as precedent [2] to dismiss overseas abuse charges.
[1] "Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co." http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/10-1491_l6gn.pdf
[2] "Al Shimari v. CACI et al." http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/al-shimari-v-ca...
It's harder to offer real suggestions to actually improve the lives of the poor. And I see you don't.
Your outrage may make you feel good, but it helps no one but you. And that makes it selfish.
For me, this is fundamentally an ethical question. Is this wrong and should one work to change it? I think that when a wage labourer barely, if at all, earns enough for food and shelter it is not much different than slavery. As such, I think it's wrong and that it should be changed.
Furthermore, I can't accept the notion that one has to have a thoughout solution to a complex problem to be able to express ones views. A good start to achieving change is to express when one thinks something is wrong and to build from there. The process of achieving change is naturally much more complex than simply expressing ones view and as such it would be irrational to have that as a requirement to speak.
Fundamental change, which may or may not be needed in this case, is often deeply political and such solutions, even if detailed and serious - albeit subjective, is too often just discarded without any thought or arguments.
Not at all. I could make some solid suggestions for proven ways of improving on feudalism or slavery. But I don't know of any likely ideas to help Bangladesh beyond what they're already doing. More to the point, RodericDay apparently didn't have any either.
If I say Apple knows a few things about global supply chain management, and thus it might be a good idea not to criticise them as clowns who couldn't run a lemonade stand, it does not follow that I disagree with all criticism of every business everywhere just because my arguments could, in theory, have been made about other companies. Because that particular argument would be wrong applied to almost any other company.
> Also, "Communist" China has raised quite a lot of people out of povert as well.
That was the precise process I was referring to, and as I"m sure you're aware (hence your scare quotes), it was via the operations of modern global capitalism, very similar to what is even now beginning to take place in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the Asian periphery.
> I can't accept the notion that one has to have a thoughout solution to a complex problem to be able to express ones views.
To be sure. But RodericDay went far further than that. First, he didn't have the faintest suggestion of a solution; he didn't even suggest an avenue to explore. And second, he wasn't just "expressing his views"; he was condemning the system and its supporters in the harshest possible language. There is a difference between suggesting that it would be nice if Bangladesh could improve even faster, and saying that people who are pleased with their progress are pro-slavery.
I have no words.
Others like your parent mean well. But that kind of thinking leads to quiet apathy, in my opinion. So what if Meem and other women are better off, than previous generation. Clearly this is not enough. Come on man! A 9 year old (or whatever age) not knowing there are other things that are possible, working 9 to 9 and just getting half a day off on Fridays. Is this the best life, she can have? Seriously people, there is something wrong with your thinking on this. You are not being ambitious enough, and settling for very low level of results. Again the last few sentences are not for you, RodericDay, but for all those who are countering you with their pragmatism and level-headedness.
Lincoln, when he fought for abolishing slavery, also would have faced such reactions. (And to all others, my intent is not to directly put this commenter alongside Lincoln. Its just to make a point, to recognize this as a valid sentiment)
Out of the dumb luck of currency exchange and local corruption that happened a couple centuries ago the most ancient investment vehicle is no longer available to poor 3rd world populations anymore. Blithely pointing out that this is the best situation available to them without acknowledging that we are the ones who made it the best available situation is excusable, but needs to be corrected.
This is only true if you take the "corporations are psychopaths" view. Getting away with everything you can under the law and adhering to a fairly obvious social morality are not nearly the same thing. Famously, Oscar Schindler ended up running labor intensive businesses so that he could save the lives of his employees. There are many fair trade businesses that operate in developing economies under similar principles - profit matters, but so do the employees.
That was my only real objection, the rest of what you wrote is great, thanks for the perspective.
That's a fancy way of saying that they are greedy. Which is what "business practice" really is. Pay your workers crap and reap the rewards. Meanwhile the society as a whole hasn't benefited at all (except more low-wage work struggling to live life). But the owners have. Bully for them.
Short of world government with universally strong rule of law, there's not an easy solution that I can see.
So I would add:
4. What are the 'first world' governments' roles?
To encourage international trade for goods that are generated from countries with healthy labor laws. The first round of countries that went through the Industrial Revolution didn't have the (potential) benefit of other, post-industrial countries that could at least provide outside pressure to prevent corporations from exploiting people.
Unfortunately that potential benefit is a drawback more often than not, because there isn't strong international pressure to enact good labor laws. When such an environment doesn't exist, it is difficult for a country to bootstrap its own laws, because such laws may raise the price of goods relative to other countries.
There should be an environment where a country without labor protections finds that it can't trade with other countries.
Of course such an international environment alone won't guarantee improvements. But it's a start. In this age of multinational corporations, its an enormous form of leverage for a company to say, "Oh, you're forcing me to pay $10 an hour? I'll just take my factory and go over here..." Such leverage can be reversed: "Oh, your labor laws don't meet U.N. standards? We'll move our money over here..."
I know that for instance in China wages have gone up, and now companies are more reluctant to build new factories there.
Are the benefits short-term or long-term? Foreign demand for the products and short-term uplifting in quality of life is artificial, and could in fact serve to hurt the development of the country in the long-term. For example, high availability of low-paying jobs could distract the country from focusing on education. People might start optimizing for the current situation, by preparing kids to work in the factory as young as possible, instead of realizing that education and investment in human capital is the only way to long-term lift oneself out of poverty.
Their GDP per capita: $2000, adjusted for living costs (PPP). Please, everyone, try to wrap your head around that number.
That means a totally equal distribution of resources would give everyone $2000 a year. GDP counts all money spent on everything, so factory safety compliance costs would come out of that $2000. Consider Mexican migrant workers in the states scraping by on $10k are earning 5x as much as that number, and no, it is not made up for by cost of living, this is taking that into account.
Yeah the stuff that goes on is really messed up. And no, nobody deserves to live like that. But unlike in America, where GDP is at $50k/capita PPP, redistribution actually cannot solve the problem. $2k/year is unacceptably close to subsistence. It's just as important in this case to grow the economy larger as it is to redistribute more fairly.
* Windows
* Air conditioning
* Chairs (!!)
* Fewer hours and more breaks
* Disability and health benefits
That's a baseline of civilized-ness.
In fact, the act of purchasing the labor to install those things would also stimulate the economy.
The real answer to why the above don't exist is not economics, it's, "Because we don't have to do that." And worse (and this is on the conscience of 'first world' peoples), "Because it will marginally increase the cost of the goods, thus causing corporations to purchase from other countries without such protections."
And this is not even a given. Even in blue-collar industries it can be quite profitable to improve working conditions and thereby raising employee productivity.
* Fewer hours and more breaks
* Disability and health benefits
are definitely major issues with a massive economic impact. Unless 'fewer hours' is forced on all your competitors as well by effective labor legislation, anyone offering hour less for the same pay would quickly go out of business while the exploiters would grow - the effect of anything an employer can decide wouldn't cause any change to 'marginal cost of goods' - the price would stay the same as determined by the majority of competitors, and only loss would be to that owner.
As it shows in practice all over the world, if people are given the chance to go from subsistence agriculture to sweatshops, they do so eagerly, intentionally migrating a thousand miles away from their families if needed so. You'd need to apply a lot of force and bloodshed to move them back away from those jobs to the farming; and when given a fair vote, those workers press for many things but not on slowing down industry growth, rather the opposite.
The poor struggle. Daily.
In that struggle a truth emerges: Struggle is all you've known, it's what you knew yesterday and it is what you will know tomorrow.
For the poor struggle, hardship and despair dull the senses and the reality of the present stretches out before them. There is no future, there is just more of the present forever and ever.
What I feel those with privilege cannot comprehend is that words like aspiration, phrases like social mobility, are so alien that they are meaningless. If you're aware enough to have been angry, you're probably also aware enough to realise the stupidity of throwing yourself against the tide of the world. And so you accept and endure.
You can provide information but without hope and belief that change is possible to their lives, and that the struggle can be overcome, information is worthless. Food and shelter for a day are the only things you can offer of value.
But accepting your argument, I cannot give in to nihilism. Take the children out of the factories, put them in school, build libraries, train teachers, and wait twenty years to see a vast difference.
If you are a military dictatorship that uses your twenty years to educate the country and drag it by the bootstraps into the global upwards pastures, you may retire with your ill gotten gains on a beach somewhere with our thanks. Get rich and change nothing I want you hunted down with dogs.
(For example I see the biofabrication of meat as a technical solution to the awful statistic that cows in Europe recieve a daily subsidy of two dollars while around 1 billion humans globally live on 1 dollar a day)
Part of the problem is that these kids do not need to work; if you look at unemployment levels, it is not like Bangladesh is so poor that kids have to work. According to the CIA world Facebook (iOS spelling correction strikes again): "about 40% of the population is underemployed; many participants in the labor force work only a few hours a week, at low wages" (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...)
Poor grown-ups could do this work, but factories do not want to employ them because they work slower (possibly because they are somewhat disabled after years working as kids; at 80 hours a week without holidays, these kids will have worked more hours by the time they are 25 than a blue collar worker in the rich parts of the world does in his career) and because they are harder to control (and that would get harder once a generation sends its kids to school)
Also, it is not like Bangladesh is full of opportunities for educated people. Whatever you do, it remains a very densely populated river delta with few natural resources (they have oil and gas, but are net importers already).
Child labor is a long term problem for any country as it keeps kids out of school and locks them in low wage jobs for the rest of their live, meaning less tax revenue for the country. Educating the young generation is an investment in the future that brings more sophisticated work and higher wage jobs. Very Simple.
In Bangladesh underemployment among healthy adults is so widespread that child labor can only be ascribed to bad governance. Clearly the government, if it cared about future growth and wealth in the country, should create a scheme allowing children to learn and healthy adults to work.
Simply banning child labor is not enough as this story so clearly explains. The family needs the money, and doesn't have idle healthy adults who could could replace meem's income. Some fairly sophisticated scheme is required for this to work. Call it wealth distribution, social security or whatever.
Currently the government is not able to provide such a scheme and as a result the country will develop much slower than it could otherwise.
1. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/172372?uid=3739704&uid...
I apologize for the JSTOR link.
On the one hand, I love the initiative you're taking here and the drive you have. Reading the article, my immediate thought was "that's terrible"--whereas yours was "What can I personally do about this right now?"
On the other hand, I remain unconvinced that directing resources simply to the people and charities that come my way through the media is the best way to distribute these resources. Yes, Meem will greatly benefit from this money. But is it good that Meem gets it simply because she happened to be written up in the paper? What about those who are never written up--and does that simply incentivize people in need to seek publicity rather than promote more sustainable macro-level solutions?
I don't have a real answer here, it's just that actions like these make me feel strongly ambivalent, if you'll forgive my oxymoron.
Look, the best we can do is take care of the actionable problems in front of us. I don't consider "get vast numbers of people out of poverty" to be an actionable problem. I don't study poverty, I don't know what statistically significant levers to pull (or try to pull). I just know that when I see a situation like Meem's, I know I can help so I can at least make the effort.
And who knows? Maybe in trying to help one person I'll have some insight (currently lacking) into the larger problems. But I find it hard to take that someone can sit back in their armchair, never having helped a single person out of poverty in their life, criticizing someone for taking concrete action because it doesn't address the larger issues.
The simple fact is that unless you have vast wealth, or you have a tremendous amount of influence on those with wealth, then you have about as much ability to address larger issues as I do, that is, nil. So if you want to let your contradictory beliefs paralyze you into inaction, that's your problem. Meanwhile, let me do what I can in peace.
The "effective altruism" movement attempts to compare all of the altruistic interventions available to maximize the amount of good done per dollar of your donation, and GiveWell is a part of this movement (although there are others you can explore). Currently GiveWell's top-rated charity is one providing malaria nets in Africa, and their second rated is one that provides direct wealth transfers to Kenyans. They have ridiculously high epistemic standards which are detailed in their published articles and on their blog.
SPONSORSHIP PARTICULARS:
Your contribution of BDT 1500 (USD 20/GBP 13) per month, per child, will cover all necessary education costs for the sponsored child(ren), i.e., tuition, books, uniforms, stationery, school bags, shoes, monthly health check-ups, and weekly nutritious food.
Link to sponsorship form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1MbOD26uhxoHvcvMVHw4-m1LPMXG...
"Corruption in Bangladesh has been a continuing problem with the country being ranked as the most corrupt country for the year 2005 in the list published by Transparency International." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Bangladesh
Some challenges:
- Verifying the children that you support through the Watsi-type program already work in this environment (or will soon have to) as a necessity to economically support their families.
- Ensuring that, once you donate money, the children are no longer working in this environment and instead are enrolled in school.
- Other potential pitfalls?
Why not do what the entire world should be doing in the first place? Pay children to go to school.
This way you remove the overhead of a campaign for every single child, and make sure they are going to school at the same time.
Think about opportunity costs: An American child has chance XX% of becoming a white collar professional if they go to XX years of school. A Bangladeshi child has a significantly smaller .X% chance of becoming a white collar pro with X years of school (XX not generally available, presumably?). Thus is quite likely that it is simply irrational, a poverty increasing equation, to send these children to school for too many years.
Increasing the minimum wage actually harms the poorest and most vulnerable workers, by disqualifying them from gainful employment. Ditto child labor laws in extremely poor areas. All of this stuff about "educating your way out of poverty" is just magical thinking. It's as if the first world brain sees the obviousness of a situation, simply enters a "MUST NOT SEE" feedback loop, and then spits out "RAISE MINIMUM WAGE, INCREASE SCHOOLING, SEND IN THE NGOs" nonsense.
the kid must be in school, I get it
Kid is working reason would be either she needs to contribute for the family to make ends meet or schooling is not accessible
lets assume she is taken out of her work by this undercover sting operation, who would take care of her
just pointing out the problem is not enough, giving a sustainable solution and follow through to get it implemented is needed as well
search for "poverty porn" so many people have made careers out of it
Bringing such stories in the public eye is a good thing though because it might help bring about better oversight of these operations, and an improvement in working conditions. The companies that outsource to Bangladesh might now have an incentive to keep an eye on the working conditions (surely it's possible to have decent working conditions while still having a relatively cheap operation?)
Factory workers are paid the minimum that the company can get away with, even though we could afford to pay them much more, they could get an education for their children or move their family out of the slums. I'm OK with children working in factories if that is the reality of their situation but we can afford and should pay them more than the paltry amount that just keeps them ticking over.
America did not just magically start out as a wealthy nation, for generations children labored on family farms, in business, and even in sweatshops. Generations ago a person had to work form dawn to dusk just to feed themselves, Today in America "poverty" is not having and iPhone or Broadband internet.
The idea that we can magically transform these 3rd world nation into 1st world nations is naive at best, The same path America took, is the same path these nations must take. Over time wages will increase, conditions will improve, etc, this is a natural order of things. The good news is, this will happen MUCH MUST faster than it did in America.
Check out these Videos
http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/top-3-ways-sweatshops-hel...
http://www.learnliberty.org/content/unbelievable-truth-about...
http://www.learnliberty.org/content/sweatshop-wages-and-thir...
I'm OK with children working in factories if that is the reality of their situation
Your inability to understand the depth with which poverty strikes those in the U.S. is astounding. Poverty in the U.S. means that you don't have clothes to wear to school, that the school you go to is underperforming, that you live in a neighborhood where you could get shot, abducted, propositioned for drugs. It means going hungry on a day-to-day basis. It means the power being shutoff. It means probably not having a parent in the home because they are either absent or working two or three jobs. It often means the environment you grow up in is likely to be rife with psychological, physical or substance abuse. It means taking two hour bus rides both ways to get to a minimum wage job. It means no or substandard healthcare. It could mean living in a car, on the street or being under threat of such outcomes.
The videos linked are pretty disgusting and make libertarians sound like horrible people. Maybe you should also put some videos up about how libertarians justify slavery or indentured servitude because the slave or servant would have died if they weren't being exploited. Maybe an article could be written about the exploited workers in Dubai, and how it's still mutually beneficial to have their rights stripped of them, pay held for months, because the alternative is possible starvation in their home country.
Raising awareness and demanding better standards can improve conditions. If you are coming from the point of view that there is no problem with sweatshops and things don't need to change, then it's likely workers will continue to be exploited. How long have China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Malaysia had sweatshops? Why haven't sweatshops brought supposed prosperity to these countries yet? How many generations more will have to endure sweatshops and possible death? No one should have to put up with a sudden and horrible death so "Keep Calm Carry On" shirts can make it on to Target store shelves.
libertarians justify slavery or indentured servitude
If you are coming from the point of view that there is no problem with sweatshops and things don't need to change
How long have China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Malaysia had sweatshops?
The evidence so far doesn't support outsourced garment manufacture as being a route to developed country status either.
[...]
> The idea that we can magically transform these 3rd world nation into 1st world nations is naive at best, The same path America took, is the same path these nations must take.
America isn't a good example. It stomped on so many people to get where it is today. And even right now America only continues to function because of the exploitation & corruption of other countries. Nobody can/should follow America's footsteps.
I don't claim to have any answers, but looking at western history you start to see some similarities.
The future will not be evenly distributed, that's for sure.
As far as I know they already are able to make okay clothes, but currently they are more expensive than humans at sewing machines - the moment they become cheaper than workers like Meem, all those millions will be out of work.
In the foreseeable future, you really would need a sewing machine as part of it.
It is some fucked up shit though, millions of the really really poor will lose their jobs and contrary to many of the lefts opinions these workers won't be able to then go to school and eat cake they will just get even poorer.
We are heading for an awesome future or a horrific one. Not sure which yet.
I recall watching people starve to death in Bangladesh when I was very young. Those memories haunt me till this day. It is a form of despair that this 4-day journalist knows nothing about. Aspirations go out the window when faced with hunger. The alternative view is that it's pretty freekin' awesome that this little girl has aspirations at all, beyond being fed (as was the case not very long ago in Bangladesh) Our "first world problems" aren't lame. We have more and more people falling into poverty and a society where social mobility is fast disappearing. Well worth paying attention to if we indeed are a beacon for the world to aspire to.