This question seems to come up constantly in discussions of outsourcing and the minimum wage (and other wage-related domestic issues, but especially outsourcing), and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it discussed specifically here.
So have at it. Who is better off having no job at all than an exploitative one (defined however you like, but you should be clear about how you personally are defining it; when I myself think of the phrase, I think of extremely low wages — in the objective sense, not in comparison with other local jobs — no benefits, long hours, and little concern for well being or safety)? What changes depending on what circumstance?
Unless someone is putting a literal gun to your head, you always have a choice, albeit perhaps the choice of eking out living on a dirt farm in China or working in a sweat shop factory in some city. Unless you have the good luck to be born in a country where your basic living will be taken care of by the state, it’s always better to work and make a living than to starve, so better to have an exploitative job than no job at all. In addition, to get back to my first point, ‘exploitative’ is a matter of perspective. Someone looking in from the outside might (probably would) say that some guy working at a Chinese sweat shop for 12 hours a day for $.50/hour is being exploited, but to that worker that might (and again, probably is) the best alternative they have.
I turned 55 recently. From high school to today I have never been unemployed. I’ve frequently worked multiple jobs. I would rather work for minimum wage cleaning porta-potties than be unemployed.
Hmm. Now that I think about it, I think a lot of the howling about “exploitation” of other countries’ labor pools is the sense that because these corporations are wealthy and based in the U.S., they could pay a few cents more, or give a damn about conditions and suicide rates and all those neat things, but choose not to because who cares, they’re damn interchangable <insert country here> cogs that can be replaced for a few cents; they hardly count as human beings!
Of course, then the question becomes, what happens to those jobs if they’re paid more and given safe working conditions? But I’m not 100% sure that’s on topic.
Well, in a lot of cases those jobs would have never gone there in the first place. Now that they are established with the capital investment already committed, it’s reasonable to expect labor rates to rise, which, if my memory is correct, is already happening (slowly) in places like China and India. Pretty much the same pattern as everywhere else, including the US…labor rates and working conditions start off low when the labor force is mostly agrarian and has a very low standards of living and few if any choices, and then they rise slowly over time until they reach a maximum of some kind. If you try and jump right to good pay and good, safe working conditions then it’s never going to happen in these 3rd world countries because there is no real benefit for a company to expend the time, effort and capital in building a new factory in, say, South East Asia if the labor costs aren’t going to be substantial.
It depends on how dire your situation is. I’d prefer an exploitative job to being homeless or starving to death. By itself that doesn’t mean much, and doesn’t shed much light on the contextual issues (minimum wage).
Yeah, I guess it’s better to have a job than not. I would rather eke out a living than die homeless and starving. So what? The work being done means little in the long run.
By that logic, you still have a choice if you have a gun pointed at your head; you can always choose to be shot after all. If you insist on being that literal on what “having a choice” means then anyone who isn’t actually chained up and hauled around by brute force has a “choice”.
Unsurprisingly, Der Trihs misses the point. An “exploitative” job is better than no job because the exploitative job is inclusive of the option of no job: all you need to do is quit. Your choice of A or B is better than being stuck with B.
Putting a gun to someone’s head removes the choice of B - that is why it is not comparable.
Nonsense. Death is still a choice. And quite often in many places and times “no job” and “death” have been pretty close to identical anyway.
This argument that the “choice” between an exploitative job and starvation is a valid choice and that “obey or be shot” isn’t is just libertarian rhetoric meant to deny the reality of economic coercion. It’s about validating libertarian neofeudalism by claiming that tyranny enforced with economic methods doesn’t count as tyranny.
Congratulations, you just destroyed your own argument. If “no job” and “death” are close enough to be treated as one and the same, then how is the choice between a bad job and death worse than just death?
It’s not all that different. Lets say I have to choose to work 16 hours a day everyday, or starve. I will probably work 16 hours a day everyday and pray to god something changes and I can get some relief. In the meantime, I will be absolutely miserable and not really living any kind of worthwhile life at all. The will to survive is strong but it should not be used against others as justification for exploitation.
In the real world, things are generally not a simple binary solution set such as what you are saying here. Generally, unless someone has a gun to your head you have choices. In my own example you could stay on the farm and continue to scratch out a living, such as it is. Or you could move to a city and take an ‘exploitative’ job, which would be marginally better and perhaps give a marginally bigger chance of some improvement of your circumstances. Or, you could do nothing, and starve. There are probably some other, admittedly marginal alternatives as well.
If you basically have only two options…starve or work 16 hours a day…well, effectively that’s no choice at all, such as the putting a gun to your head and forcing you to work. It does happen (look up sex slavery for one example), but mostly people have choices…and if you have a choice, even a limited one, it’s better to work even an ‘exploitative job’ than to have no work (options) at all, IMHO. YMMV of course.
You should read “Down and out in Paris and London, by Orwell” he describes working 12 hours a day 6 days a weeks as a dishwasher and how grateful he was to have that job.
What people who are anti-sweatshop don’t realize is that the problem is not sweat shops the problem is poverty. If you take away sweat shops but not poverty you have made people worse off. If you take away poverty the sweat shops will be gone. The experience of China shows what happens when you allow people to improve their lives with their labor. More people have moved out of poverty in a shorter amount of time by working in China in foreign factories than be anything else in the history of the world. Most of those jobs would look exploitative to American eyes but they have been a great boon to actual poor people.
I will here reveal myself as a “bit of a leftie” but to have a job is to have opportunities, you are getting out you are mixing with people you are in a position to maybe organize something better. However the are lines to be drawn,one might be a vegetarian and told to work in a slaughter house, a attractive person told to work in a whorehouse or Jewish and told to make pork sausages…so we all have our lines drawn.
Personally a minimum wage job gets minimum effort and minimum loyalty.
A lack of minimum wage, combined with a labor glut, allows wages to be driven downward by the forces of desperation in a race to the bottom. For every level of wage, there will be someone just a little more desperate who whill take a little less.
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Coming from Orwell, that is definitely something to be taken seriously. I’ll definitely check that out.
I agree we all need to work to improve our lot in life. However, like you said, the answer is clearly to end poverty. This is something I consider a governmental responsibility. Too many people think it’s just work, work, work with no regard to the actual structuring of our society.
Structure is exactly what isn’t being addressed here. A shitty job isn’t the worst thing in the world. But a shitty economic system that relies on too many shitty jobs can create a self-feeding spiral of social problems and personal misery.