Comment by nkoren | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nkoren | Hacker News Reader

I'm an American with a left-wing upbringing and still broadly left-wing politics. When I graduated from architecture school in 2001, I wanted some international experience, so I moved to India. What I saw there utterly transformed my preconceptions of sweatshops -- because I saw it before the sweatshops began opening.

One of the projects I was helping to design was a "science city" tech campus. The workers lived in an encampment next to the construction site. They worked from dawn until dusk for 6.5 days per week -- half a day off on Sunday -- every day of the month except for the new moon. Children as young as 6 were working -- moving and sorting materials, but quite dangerous inasmuch as it was on a live construction site. The standard wage was roughly $3 per MONTH (although food and very nominal shelter -- really more like "camping space" -- were provided for free). These were not outrageously abusive labour practices -- they were absolutely bog-standard practice of local industry, preferable to many of the alternatives for these people.

Seeing this situation with my own eyes, I realised that if these people had the option to work in one of those $1/day sweatshops I'd heard anti-globalisation activists go on about -- in line with my own sympathies -- it would be an absolute DREAM. Since then, I've been rabidly pro-globalisation. These days, I get incensed when I see people going on about the horrors of globalisation, with absolutely ZERO understanding of the counter-factual. Utter ignorance of how bad it would be otherwise.

The one case where I'll allow that sweatshops are problematic is when their owners become so powerful that they corrupt the local politics and take steps to ensure that that the population cannot develop its economy any further. This has happened in some places, creating locked-in populations for whom the sweatshop is not the bottom rung of the ladder, but the top. That's an actual problem, where it has happened -- but in most of the world (eg. India, China, most of the rest of East Asia), that's NOT the story that's played out, and sweatshops have been a vital (but temporary) step in economic development.

Just because conditions are substantially better for certain people doesn't mean they're acceptable.

I mean, take a country that hasn't been "globalized" yet, and people still live in small fishing villages, basically living at subsistence levels but not overcrowded and basically self-sufficient.

Then industry comes in, and cities coalesce, and people go to the city for its economic promises. They work in these horrible construction jobs, and send money home.

Then they're offered a job in a $1/day sweatshop, and they jump at it, because it's better than what they were doing.

Aren't they still much, much worse off than before they moved to the city in the first place?

I don't know, maybe I have an idealized view of the pre-globalized world. But it seems like we're treating the move from one horrible situation to another slightly-less-horrible situation as a big win, when it's still way behind how people lived pre-globalization.

I'm an American with a Bill Buckley-type of conservative upbringing which made an interesting combination considering both my parents were born and raised Californians. I mention this because one of the phrases I heard long ago was, I guess, a selfish perspective about globalisation: "It's not about bringing the rest of the world up, it's about bringing down our wages and standard of living here in the USA."

Frankly, as I've grown up and worked in several industries, one of which was at a Wall Street firm, I see that outlook to still be valid. In the USA, productivity is at its highest levels. Wages have stagnated. The tax system has been calibrated to serve those with the most to protect and it chokes capitalistic market forces because hoarding and paying 15% on carried interest is not a practical or sustainable model to have a diverse society of low-middle-top class members. Statistics show that the largest population of jobs in the US following the 2008 recession have gone to workers age 55 and over. They have no savings, they have to work, and because they work, they take up low-level jobs young people could occupy to get started becoming earners and taxpayers. Could but right now, to me, can't even if they wanted that leg up.

Many people in the US can afford large TVs, advanced mobile phones, or "buy" a car on a 60 month loan plan; however, many of these items are built in places where wages are extremely low and quality of life is, well, not something I'd really wish on anybody. My quality of life is amazing by comparison, and yet I can see how hard it has been for me to achieve upward mobility in the current and foreseeable market conditions.

To put it another frame, the internet and poor regulation allows numerous firms in China to make IP infringing "Chibson Guitars" - they are, frankly, not very good but allow the buyer to feel special. There is an emotional and economic dynamic that is hard to quantify, but is definitely present. Should every guitarist be able to afford a genuine Gibson? I'm not sure. Should economic sniping, exploiting developing nations for simple economic benefit, and disrespect of natural preservation be tolerated? I certainly don't think so.

These are just counter-points to contextualize the phrase I heard long ago, and one I think has played out with eerie prescience.

To me, the big problem with globalization is not the conditions of the sweatshops in India. $1 a day and the chance of burning alive in a garment factory (happened just the other day in Bangladesh) is better than subsistence farming, probably.[1] My problem with it is that of the $50 a day that comes out of an American pocket by exporting that work overseas, $1 goes to the Bengali garment worker, and $49 goes into the pocket of some shareholder. And when conditions become "too good" in India and Bangladesh, as is already happening, they'll just move over to Vietnam or Laos.

[1] There's also the issue that the negative externalities of industry make the other alternatives worse. My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh. Before run-off from industrial farming killed them all, the rivers were teaming with hundreds of different kinds of fish. The existence of industry makes the lives of farmers harder.

Taxes + tariffs can solve that issue.

The main issue is if you push too hard, then the $49 to US shareholders suddenly becomes $49 to Irish Shareholders instead, as companies have the ability to move themselves to other countries to take advantage of tax codes.

So the tax / tariff systems need to be written in a way to account for that. Or we can get a quicker Congress so that we can keep up with (legal) tax evaders.

Its a similar story to the industrial revolution in America, a countries people will go through hardship to reach prosperity. Hardships and a revolution or two...

They were already in hardship, just the hardship of the impoverished villager or laborer is romanticized or ignored.

That doesn't really explain the working conditions so much as justify them. What strikes you when working in emerging markets is just how, well, emerging they are. A lot of things are just inefficient. There needs to be more pressure to live up to universal human rights. Not only because it's the right thing to do, but because it puts pressure on these markets to get more sophisticated.

>The standard wage was roughly $3 per MONTH.....

I am from India and I dont see $3 per Month wage anywhere! You can find atleast 2$ per day as minimum wage since years.

Either I have misunderstood what you said or you have written something wrong.

No, we're both right. I was writing about the situation in semi-rural Gujarat in 2001. The wages on the construction sites I went to were indeed rs.150/month. Today the labour situation is very dramatically improved -- largely because of India opening its markets to the world.

Still I cant believe it. 150 rs/Month wage is history of 2-3 decades ago. Since 95-98 wages have been increased a lot. Atleast 100rs per day.

Well, believe it or not, but that's the wage that built Gandhinagar. (Note that due to inflation, that would be the equivalent of about rs.250/month today). Perhaps on paper the workers were making quite a bit more, but this was then "deducted" for their nominal food, housing, etc. In any case rs.150/month was their actual take-home pay. I couldn't believe it either, and triple-checked to be sure.

India has come a long ways since then. Although the working conditions on construction sites are still far from good enough, I don't see children on them anymore, and those same workers would probably be taking home rs.5000/month today -- maybe rs.3000/month in places where contractors are more brazen about skirting the law. In any case: much better.

Clearly, this picture is vastly different from the original picture you painted. I feel let down by the fact that you did not mention how outdated your original description was.

I live in a newer area of Bangalore and my apartment is surrounded by construction sites. There's a settlement of construction workers right across the road. What we see is small temporary one-room houses with satellite TV, and families that dress up and go out every Sunday. We even see them buying basic cosmetics in the local stores. Kids are not visible in the day time either in the settlement or on the construction sites, and I like to hope that they are actually in school.

Yeah, yeah, the alternative is much worse, end of argument. Or is it? Perhaps these kind of movies are not about just banning sweatshops but rather about something more general, like for example why the alternative exists in the first place?

This.

I'll just throw in a family anecdote from the northern corner of Europe. About 107 years ago, my grandfather was a twelve-year-old boy and as all boys at that time and his social class did, he went to work in the forest, logging trees with his father and brothers. They were not the poorest, but had to work hard to make a living, and that meant also children.

A pile of logs came loose and rolled on his knee, crushing it. My folks were so well-off people in a well-off area that they actually took the boy to a doctor, who said that his knee might never recover and he couldn't work in the forest.

"What use do I have for such a boy?" was my great-grandfather's reaction, in a tone of agitation and disbelief.

No tears for the boy, no expression of sympathy for the immense pain. It was simply the grief of losing labour, a pair of hands and feet that could work for the family, a family which had for generations made a living in subsistence farming but now could work the forests for the emerging paper and sawmill industries. He had no use for a boy that couldn't work.

That might sound totally heartless today, but those days, it was the natural reaction. A kid who couldn't contribute, e.g. in logging trees, was just a useless mouth to feed. My grandfather's knee mended eventually well enough for him to work, and he died of tuberculosis at the age of 56, ten years before I was born.

And our family was not at all the poorest of families; they lived in a nation that was at that time ahead in poverty reduction of where much of India is now: there was even a new, universal school system! And there were those industries that were exploiting child labour.

How the world has changed. My own father still worked the forest with a horse; in between he went to a world war and then again worked the forest with a leg that was shot to pieces and did not mend well. His hands were rough with calluses. But mine are soft. Beside school I got a job at cemetery digging graves, earned money to buy a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, became a software engineer.

Even if logging and debugging MySQL slow queries is a bit tedious, it's so vastly more pleasant and less dangerous work than logging trees and debugging lice from your bedclothes at a lumber cabin, which is what our previous generations did, that it's worth leaning back and thinking of. Still, the development to this status required that people like my folks did this work and eventually built a nation that could produce someone who could produce MySQL.

Parts of the world are still the same. Those sweatshops are a step in between miserable subsistence farming and modern welfare. Yes, make them safer so that no one is burned alive because the doors are locked. Count me in as "rabidly pro-globalization".

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