As someone who's spent his life roughly equally split across Bangladesh and America, I thought I'd provide some perspective.
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.
The way I answer people that say this is: It's not good enough.
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".
No, this is just your angry knee-jerk reaction so you can feel good about taking the moral high-ground, and you're scrambling to find the negative in every comment.
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.
Have you ever worked in a factory? I used to. They squeeze you as hard as they can, constantly. Most of the people have no leverage to push back. While having money is better than having none, that doesn't mean everything is ok and you can just ignore the way the workers get abused.
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.
Well, the original comment by L_Rahman is saying basically that. Except that it's phrased more like "while not everything is ok and you cannot just ignore the way the workers get abused, you also have to to consider that having money is better than having none".
That's a more reasonable opinion. I believe that the solution is to make sure people in situations like these have real, viable options. For example, places of employment with decent working conditions.
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.
> 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.
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.
> When a US factory burns down and kills all the employees inside because they'd been locked in during their 15 hour shift.
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".
It wasn't a factory, but there was a lawsuit over the Wal-Mart where the employees were locked inside while stocking habitually, only for someone to have a medical emergency.
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 am unexperienced when it comes to such matters, but:
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.
#1 Quitting does not mean you never look for another job or quit on the first day etc. It means when you perceive working for said factory is not worth it you do something else.
#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.
You are begging the question. The reason factory workers in poor rural countries put up with no windows, ventilation, or air conditioning is that the alternative is subsistence farming. Suggesting that they quit in protest is almost cruel.
China has absolutely not moved past the first rung of this ladder. The majority of the Chinese population lives in abject rural poverty.
It's actually about a 50/50 split between rural and urban [0]. This means that the Chinese urban population nowadays is 150% of the total Chinese population in 1950[1]. So now that the facts are on the table, what is your point?
Those Chinese in abject rural poverty seem to be quite content there from what I could gather from friends and relatives that went to rural China (I stayed in the larger cities, so I'm clarifying that I haven't had first hand experiences with rural rural Chinese, only from those that moved to the city).
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
Several states are openly hostile to unions and there are more than a few businesses that would simply close a branch if it were about to unionize. Also, you end up with two sets of bosses, which brings its own issues.
I've seen constant double-digit monthly turnover and that didn't do much that I could discern. Yes, it raised costs but they were relatively insensitive to that.
I think a lot of the emotion here comes not only from empathizing with Meem's plight, but the twin realizations that a) the problem is much wider than Meem, and b) individuals are largely powerless to do anything about the wider issue of poverty.
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.
The thing is, the problem is not powerlessness, but the lack of courage and will. If each and every one of us refused to contribute to evil structures and systems, it would make a huge difference.
I really detest that term. The implication is that if you aren't out there doing something then you should just shut up and not be upset. To me that flies in the face of democracy and public discourse--words and opinions do matter.
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.
if you aren't out there doing something then you should just shut up
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.
> 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.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if the regulations exist but aren't enforced. What these workers need is power to enforce the laws... and in the absence of adequate laws, to marshal enough popular force to create agreements that are better than what laws might exist.
As first-worlders, it's our moral duty to support people who work to help create that power for the factory workers.
While the regulations that do exist are weak, they are an improvement over existing conditions. What's saddening is that there have even been a number of cases where the engineers in regulatory agencies have gone into factories and reported structural failures and fire code violations to their superiors only to have it completely shut down.
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.
I'm going to reply to my own comment since the reply is brief and general:
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?
No one is saying that this is the best of all possible worlds. Without proposing any solutions that work within the framework of reality, though, all you're doing is basking in your moral superiority.
A first, rather easy solution would be to pay decently. What? Capitalists can't do this? Because other capitalists will drive them out of business? My my, isn't the system really fucked! Time for some radical architectural changes.
Capitalism is an ethically bankrupt system which nevertheless manages to produce very good outcomes over the long term. It does this by redirecting human greed, jealousy, ambition, etc towards endeavors which benefit other people. To be clear: there are plenty of problems, and plenty of people being abused. But compare it with feudal economics, where a rent-seeking class had a monopoly on everything and had absolutely no incentive to improve the economic conditions of their subjects. Capitalism is messed up, but it works. It works because it accepts as a fundamental axiom that humans are inherently bad.
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.
> But compare it with feudal economics, where a rent-seeking class had a monopoly on everything and had absolutely no incentive to improve the economic conditions of their subjects.
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).
I don't really have experience with the US (I'm from New Zealand), but from first impressions I agree with you. Capitalism is a system of regulations to restrict the actions of capitalists.
Rather ironically, your post commits the same offense as its grandparents. You just posted yet another angry tirade with no actionable solution bathed in moral righteousness (as a reply to a post which is essentially the same as this one).
Your radicalism is just as useless to that girl as is the opposite opinion you deride.
> Capitalists can't do this? Because other capitalists will drive them out of business? My my, isn't the system really fucked! Time for some radical architectural changes.
Do alot people reading this react in this manner in their professional life as well, or is this just the usual kind of knee-jerk reaction when someone suggest that something needs to be changed, or rethought, on a much lower lever then the usual superficial alterations we're used to see in the political field?
I'm like this professionally too; in fact it's my professional experience that informs this political view (I was a fairly gung-ho socialist before I became a professional developer). Attempting to fundamentally re-architect a software system almost always ends in disaster - I've seen it happen, or http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html is the standard reference.
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.
I think we basically agree, but your reply was a dogmatic one. Discarding the notion of political change without bothering to listen to, or express arguments.
Gradual change do not exclude fundamental change - eventually. Revolution is after all just evolution speeded up. It's just a different approach.
I was flippant and dismissive yes, but I think that comment I originally replied to - "Capitalists can't do this? Because other capitalists will drive them out of business? My my, isn't the system really fucked! Time for some radical architectural changes." - was unlikely to be worth engaging with.
Meh, Communism is like Zero-Point Energy. It sounds good in theory, but it's been disproved time after time, yet it still has adherents saying that the conventional power grid is evil, and that Zero-Point Energy will solve everything.
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.
I'm not sure what solution you might be proposing but it sounds a little like using foreign power (economic or otherwise) to force the factories to close and send everyone back to subsistence farming at the edge of starvation back at their home village dirt-farms until which time in the indeterminate future we can come up with a better solution for them.
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.
On the surface I agree completely. Right down to the level of when I'm standing in the WalMart thinking about whether to buy that fair-trade coffee or not.
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.
I agree. Change has to be organic. You can't simply put in place some ideal thought up in the Bay area in Bangladesh overnight without there being major disruption and unintended consequences. Bangladeshis have to work through the situation, with outside parties providing assistance when it is requested.
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.
It's worth noting that the parent post does say that the government should step in, but doesn't because of corruption. I don't think he/she is defending the corruption.
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.
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.
No offense, but your comment is full of shit! I really doubt the person who you responded to is a "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"
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.
"local maxima"? The commenter never said that progress was finished, and that nothing more should or could be done. He was merely describing it as better than the prior state, from a utilitarian perspective.
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).
It's one thing when we're all going up the ladder together, and another when those higher up the ladder are stepping on the heads of those on lower rungs to get up faster or maintain their position.
I would add a minor footnote, namely the only part of the story that can be concievably considered morally relevant to us: what can be done here? And by "here" I mean the countries to whose jursidiction these multinational giants belong.
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.
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.
It's logical that people would want to defend these things because abusive labor practices are driving almost every aspect of our lives in the Western world. Our food, our clothes, our phones, our computers, our furniture, almost everything that we buy is manufactured and sold though exploitation.
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.
It's not justifying the horrible situation - it's pointing out a fact that the obvious naive solution (prohibition) would bring more harm than good to those poor people.
Regarding the views of techies, this is an overgeneralization. The real situation is more nuanced, and there are a range of views, well- and ill-considered, across the ideological spectrum.
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.
The problem is that anti-sweatshop leftists like you do things like buy clothes made by unionized workers in downtown Los Angeles. That's not pushing Bangladeshi child laborers up a global maximum, it's pulling them down from the local maximum they've already achieved.
You're assuming that's the only option. What about every single one of us making sure we buy from companies that demand more from their suppliers? What about more innovation around social change and activism and less around things like sharing photos and building "free" websites that ride on the evil that is advertising?
I'm definitely open to hearing creative solutions, but if all you have to say is that sweatshops are bad, you're not really contributing. Lots of things are bad. What helps is working towards what would be better.
Yes! People in Bangladesh need money for development desperately. It would be better to just mail them checks, but if you aren't doing that then buying from their (crappy) factories is better than nothing. Even if you are mailing checks the extra that gets contributed from buying clothes made in Bangladesh helps.
I am with you mate, on this one. Only if one develops a sense of revulsion, when reading poor little Meem's story, can one contribute to bring about change.
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)
It's easy to stand on the sidelines and hurl brickbats at a system (global capitalism) which has raised more people out of grinding poverty in a shorter time than everything else we've ever done in all of recorded history combined.
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.
Your arguments are quite flawed as they could be applied in favour of feudalism or plain cattle slavery. Also, "Communist" China has raised quite a lot of people out of povert as well. Should we therefore attribute this to state-communism (or state-capitalism)? Of course not.
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.
> Your arguments are quite flawed as they could be applied in favour of feudalism or plain cattle slavery.
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.
My point is that raising people out of poverty should not be used as a measurement of a systems viability and success. As such, the unfair state-capitalism of China should not be praised as a viable system of the future just because it succeeded to raise so many people out of poverty.
No, it's not good enough. But what are you going to do about it? There are lots of people in Bangladesh whose situation is worse than Meem's because they don't have sweatshop jobs. Poverty in Bangladesh isn't something we should just accept, but consider that that factory is doing more to make Meem's life better than anybody else. If you want to change things don't shit on the things that are helping, work to create better jobs and opportunities for people in Bangladesh so that sweatshops aren't their best options. But trying to take away the meager means that Bangladeshis have is perverse.
Your position is deeply irrational and unrealistic. It may give you some sense of moral comfort, but it has zero application to the real world, and is the fodder of a million asinine Facebook forwards.
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.
You're ignoring the fact of globalization. Corporations and their consumers are getting more and more sophisticated at targeting and exploiting the countries with the worst labor laws. Multi national corporations are getting more sophisticated at evading scenarios where particular host countries (i.e. post-industrial nations) attempt to curb their exploitation.
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.
Agreed. It reminds me of one of the lessons of capitalism--how Henry Ford increased the wages of his workers so that they could buy his cars, thus benefiting them and himself. He did so because he didn't have a sufficiently large body of consumers for his goods. This is seen as an example of how capitalism is ultimately motivated to uplift all people to consumer status.
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.
Ford raised wages so he could hire the best workers and retain them in a competitive hiring environment in a growing industry. The main reason his workers could afford his car wasn't because they were paid so much, but rather because Ford reduced his production costs overall so that the car cost so little. A lot of that probably had to do with being able to demand a lot from his workers because he could hire the best factory workers.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
("... 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.")
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.
It's not that simple. If you pay more than the next factory over for the same work, you become uncompetitive with that factory, and you start losing contracts. If that becomes bad enough, that will drive you under. This is why minimum wages are important - to make it so your neighbor also has to pay the better rate as well. This breaks down somewhat when your factory is competing with another factory in another country, unless your factory is much more efficient.
Short of world government with universally strong rule of law, there's not an easy solution that I can see.
Yeah, I didn't explain very well, but that's what I meant by needing a world government with a strong rule of law - the minimum wage would need to be implemented across the board, or it just ends up screwing people in the country that implemented it.
As to your first point I think it is very, very important to keep in mind that this is the best thing available because of Western influence. Long ago, and up until today, Western power and money priced local populations out of being able to afford to buy a piece of their own country.
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.
I don't automatically feel outrage when I hear about someone aspiring to work a sewing machine. But when I hear about the conditions, and how many hours are worked, then the outrage comes. After all, with that many hours bent over, sitting on the floor, the body is put under a lot of stress it wasn't evolved to handle. That young girl may become crippled by her work and be unable to continue. At that point, will her job support her disability? I think not. And when that happens, will her outcome be better than the outcome of women who didn't have the benefit of her job? Probably not. The fact is that if and when this girl slows down at her work, she will be replaced by someone faster, and tossed to the curb, at which point she may or may not be sufficiently viable to marry a rickshaw operator.
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..."
1. Are the lives of the people who work in these factories better or worse as a result of these jobs existing?
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.
I wish there where campaigns against exploitative child labor in US and western world. So if a given country's minimum wages are low and they seem to be exporting a lot, the campaign could call for Boycott of products from the country until they raise minimum wages. May be there should be a kickstarter of sorts for launching such campaigns (Money to cover for marketing and other expenses).
Woudn't raising the minimum wage mean less factories being built in Bangladesh and there fore more women that need to work the fields and live the old/worse lifestyle?
I know that for instance in China wages have gone up, and now companies are more reluctant to build new factories there.
There there are significant profits to be made as a factory owner, why don't more people start factories? Wouldn't this increase competition for labor, increasing wages?
Sometimes I think westerners just can't wrap their heads around just how poor Bangladesh is.
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.
Your argument assumes that distribution of wealth has no effect on economic growth -- e.g., that distribution changes are zero-sum not only over the immediate term but over the long term as well. I'd expect the propensity to spend money within the domestic economy to be higher at the lower end of the distribution and lower and the higher end, so I'd expect downward redistribution to, ceteris paribus, increase the domestic velocity of money and expand GDP.
You might be taking his point too literally. Another way to look at it is, if the owners of factories in Bangladesh were maximally generous and civic-minded, how much could they improve the lives of garment workers? Is the answer "not very much"?
Just taking the details from the original article, the answer is probably 'quite a bit', and probably without a massive economic impact:
* 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."
> Because it will marginally increase the cost of the goods
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.
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.
I'd argue that heath care for all is a baseline requirement for governments, not businesses. If you run heath care as a business... things happen. However I do agree that in the absence of government action, your solutions are best.
Measuring economic potential in PPP is like measuring software functionality in lines of code. The basic question is does a country produce enough food to feed itself. If that's the case it can grow an industry slowly with respect to human lives, etc. If not IMHO there are still better solutions than building sweatshops.
Most countries don't wish to grow an industry "slowly with respect to human lives" even if they have enough food to feed themselves.
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.
Poverty is a such a large and difficult problem. Someone's knee jerk reaction may be to "ZOMG, shut down the factory!" But the factory is providing a _relatively_ better environment than what may other alternatives may provide, such as prostitution.
The knee jerk reaction should be "make them pay slightly more, and introduce/enforce child labor laws".
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).
It's extra hard because the poor have less information available to them. When Clojure was released, I saw it as my opportunity to become a real-life Lisp ninja, on a platform in wide deployment. How did Meem see it? Oh, that's right, she didn't. Because she was sewing shirts instead of reading "Beating the Averages."
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.
which may be why terrorism is a predominately educated middle class affair.
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.
It isn't nihilistic. It's just really important to understand how poverty feels, and how it is akin to a trauma that never ends, otherwise how can we in the West ever actually use what influence we have to change.
I think we are agreeing - but it's frustrating to have to wait for technical solutions to problems we could solve with pure political will.
(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)
As someone who is currently establishing a software development office in Bangladesh for a western company this is my perspective on child labor
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.
At some point, if the economy continues to grow, poor working conditions and child labor will start catch up with the country and they will be forced to curb them in order to get to the next level of growth. Hopefully corruption will not get in the way of that (something China seems to be dealing with now).
Isn't it a bit dangerous to show Meem's picture all over the internet like that? What if she become a target for retaliation for the story, or she loses her job because of the unwanted attention.
Nobody mentioned family planning. The girl started to work because her mom became pregnant with her 6th (? I counted older brother and 3 younger siblings) child. Was this pregnancy planned? We will not know, but there is some possibility it was not. So, providing girl's parents with contraceptives and educating both mom and dad in their use would have had a real immediate impact on this girl's life.
There's been a huge effort from both NGO's and the government to promote birth control that has actually been quite effective. Birth rates have fallen sharply. [1]
You can sponsor a child's education in Bangladesh through the JAAGO Foundation.
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.
Thanks for that. So, one of the question I have before contributing is to ensure that the money gets to the right people. What sort of assurances does this organization make - what, in general, can an organization do to ensure it's not just spent on Foundation "salaries"?
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.
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.
I probably would have felt the same way as you even a year ago. But then it started to feel like I was always waiting to be "effective" and never actually doing anything. If every human on this planet who could just adopted one other random person on this planet to look out for, wouldn't the world be a much better place?
Possibly, except my point was Meem is hardly random. If everyone took that initiative, Meem would get a ton of support because of the publicity--but no one else would.
And if everyone thought like you did, then Meem wouldn't get any support at all. So, who's position sits better with you?
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.
I was wondering why, to put it bluntly, Bangladesh sucks so much. This may shed some light:
"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
Corruption causes a disproportionate wealth disparity, it's one of the methods used to detect it. Works especially well within a country to identify more or less corrupt states. One argument is corruptions leads to reduced actual investment in infrastructure, roads, schools, things which increase a regions wealth, making corrupt areas show up pretty clearly on a map.
How about a Watsi for children (and their families) that have to work in sweatshops to make ends meet? Anyone interested in exploring this further?
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.
Why should we believe that these kids would be better served sitting idly in school for several years? Isn't it better to get actual on the job training, learning an actual trade, making money to put food on the table?
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.
Remember, 5 months ago over 1,100 people confirmed dead when a garment factory collapsed in Savar district of Dhaka, Bangladesh with over 3,000 people inside. People's survival rights should not have to wait on an economic miracle, new elections, Western people's blessings, Adam Smith's invisible hand, God, or reincarnation. Waiting for such a crisis where things go beyond the pale to punish a couple of corrupt owners is not enough. When Third World people have enough and demand change we should not sit idle and support the Western countries who then start pumping in money for weapons to suppress the people on pretext that it is economic aid or to fight terrorism. The West cannot stay so rich and have conditions improve for the World's toiling poor. Freedom to get rich and monopolize resources is not freedom or fairness for everyone.
When companies outsource to countries like Bangladesh because of their cheap labor, it also provides jobs to millions of people there. They are not good jobs by our (western) standards, but they are better jobs than they could've had otherwise. Getting the kids out of the factories wouldn't do much unless their families had the means to sustain themselves.
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?)
I understand the situation with providing jobs to people who may otherwise have to turn to much more terrible means of providing for themselves, but this is where there is exploitation of their situation by companies and as the end user of much of the products, us as westerners (although we may do little to change it).
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.
All companies, in every nation, pay the minimum they can get away with. In nations with no social structure, very little wealth, and no jobs the choice is not government hand out vs minimum wage, but a very low paying job or starvation. It would appear you would rather these children starve then to allow them to work for enough money to feed themsleves, possibly working up and out of poverty over generations.
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.
The thing about sweatshops is that they could make the same clothes, retailing in the West at the same prices, if they hired adults on a 45 hour weeks with genuinely optional overtime and didn't treat their staff abusively. There would actually be higher employment rather than lower employment in the local economy as a result. In many cases the only people that lose out would be middlemen that earn very well by developing world standards reallocating outsourcing contracts to cheaper factories offering worse conditions. Sure, the fact that economic globalization allows people in poorer countries to earn an income doing work for richer countries benefits them, and it's very difficult for factories and even local governments to unilaterally enforce better working conditions, but that doesn't mean that the people whose best option is working in the garment industry wouldn't on average be better off if retailers actually knew where their clothes were made and regulation was so pervasive internationally and effectively enforced that buyers didn't have the option of getting T-shirts for a cent less from the factory that employed actual slaves.
The evidence so far doesn't support outsourced garment manufacture as being a route to developed country status either.
Your hypothesis in the first sentence is testable - would a Bangladeshi factory owner who chose to do as you say be more competitive than others, getting higher productivity while being able to sell for the same prices? Are the most successful manufacturers there doing it right now, and if not, why not?
> America did not just magically start out as a wealthy nation,
[...]
> 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.
You seem to be okay with children being crushed to death or burning up in fires from substandard building construction. Construction that is known to be unsafe. It's accepted because it is convenient, not because it's necessary. These factories aren't turning out bare essential materials that are sold for small profit margins. They create luxury items that often have the markings of vapid pop culture and are sold with huge margins. First world countries know these conditions are abhorrent, because we do not allow them, but first would countries do allow the thirst for high profit margins to come at the cost of human lives overseas.
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
libertarians first and foremost believe in non-aggression, voluntary trade. so slavery, in so far as it was forced upon someone via violence or the threat of violence would not be justified.
If you are coming from the point of view that there is no problem with sweatshops and things don't need to change
None of the video's I linked to, nor it is my position that things do not need to change, your emotional response is the problem, you lack the ability to react with logic, to understand how the world actually works, instead you lash out with emotion about how the world "should" work in your opinion
How long have China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Malaysia had sweatshops?
They are in reality, why do you think in recent year companies have been flocking back to the US, telecom and tech industries are the most widely known, but many business are coming back. It is the increased in wages in those nations brought about by economic development via sweatshops coupled with the reducing wages in the US brought about by the failed economic policies of the US government
A simple question - would ms. Meem from the article be happy if you went there and got the owner to fire her and other kids mentioned? That would be a small step towards eliminating child labor there, would you be proud and count it as a small victory?
I'm OK with children working in factories if that is the reality of their situation
At no point here have I said we should shut the places down, in fact I've acknowledged the opposite. I'm not saying we need to transform third world nations into first world, that is just absurd. What I am saying is that they should be paid enough to afford proper housing and real futures, not the slim possibility of working themselves out of poverty over generations.
bottom of the pyramid has many problems which westerners dont get it, banning and sanction hurt poor people more than the governments of these poor nations
search for "poverty porn" so many people have made careers out of it
Are these monthly salaries quite typical across the board for the majority of people in Bangladesh? I employ a JS developer in Dhaka as a contractor who's hourly rate is $22.00 USD. I would have crossed his palm with about $4000 in the past month alone. Yet he still tells me he's only on the slightly higher side of 'average' when it comes to lifestyle/income over there. Earning 90% of a sweat shop workers monthly salary per hour kinda makes me second guess this. Anyone here have any direct experience of what the cost of living in Bangladesh really is?
Thanks a lot for the replies guys. I had a feeling I might be paying too much. As since I hired my contractor he's suddenly been able to afford to set up and office and hire other developers that are charged at the same rate. Don't get me wrong, he's a really skilled developer and puts my JS skills to shame. But I'm feeling like the price per project seems to be creeping up exponentially. I'll try giving some smaller jobs to other devs in Bangladesh & India to see what the quality of work is like in comparison. Cheers.
Average salary for a software developer in India is ~10k US. You're paying him 4.4x that. You should shop around. Contract out some small pieces of work to other developers in the $5-$10/hr range and see what quality of work they deliver. I suspect you'll find you're overpaying. (I pay my contractors $5/hr)
I suspect that wages and wage expectations are always relative to a cohort of one's peers. I'm doubt that any developer, anywhere in the world, takes into account the average income of textile workers in their expectations of what they should be making. They compare their earnings to those of other developers.
If you define a 3D printer as either something approaching a Star Trek replicator, or alternatively as a machine with a ton of different tools for specific tasks, then yes, why not.
In the foreseeable future, you really would need a sewing machine as part of it.
Not 3D printers, but there are advances in sewing robots; it's a nontrivial problem of mainly computer vision and manipulators, but it's progressing well.
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.
There's a big difference from western history - in western history, the machines were right next to them; however, if for example a Bangladesh worker is replaced by a sewing robot located in Taiwan, then there's nothing the working class can do about that, and there's no chance that any benefits will trickle down to them as the new profits and rich class are located elsewhere and won't even hire them as servants.
The future will not be evenly distributed, that's for sure.
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.
Don't worry, we're on well on our way to a society with haves an don't have. Surprisingly enough, the wealth is much more evenly spread in Bangladesh now compared to before. Mainly thanks to the garments industry.
When I first heard the principles of, lower taxes and fuck the poor by removing safety nets(aka "entitlements"), I thought to myself, sounds like Bangladesh. Taxes are unheard of there, as long as you can put out a little bribe to the tax collector.
Over the years, America is starting to look more and more like Bangladesh (yes, I know, it's a bit hyperbolic). If you don't believe me, you should see some of the homeless families that I've come across.
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.
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.