Resolved: The American Consumer exploits third-world workers.

Great Debates
21

Hypothetical question for you:

Let’s say we made contact with an alien race tomorrow. Over time, we decide to trade with them. The aliens are much wealthier than we are, so they see an opportunity for cheap labor. Americans only make $45,000 per year on average, so the aliens open up alien factories with better conditions than American factories, and they pay $90,000 per year for jobs that are easier than the jobs you can get elsewhere.

Now how would you feel if some doo-gooder aliens tried to shut those factories down? It seems that aliens at home have even nicer factories, and make like half a million bucks a year in them. So the aliens are exploiting cheap American labor.

Should it stop? Or should the aliens be forced to give Americans the same conditions and half a million bucks a year as well? Bear in mind that this will never happen - since the aliens have to ship the products all the way back to Xenobarb, there’s no way they can pay Americans the same amount. Plus, Americans don’t even have fusion or hovertrucks, so it costs more to make the products in America and ship them around.

See, Americans wouldn’t get these jobs at all except for one big advantage: They make 1/10 of what aliens make, so they can work cheaper to compensate for their other liabilities and still leave room for a little alien profit. Take that away, and you turn a win-win situation into one in which the flow of trade stops and Americans never get to learn the cool Alien manufacturing tricks and figure out how to make a half million bucks a year themselves.

Oh, and if you scratch behind the surface of the doo-gooder aliens, who may be sincere, I’ve got 20 bucks that says you’ll find an alien labor boss, trying to keep the jobs at home for the aliens so they can make more money. Screw the Americans.

22

I just wanted to chime in and say I also don’t agree that 3rd world workers are being exploited…whatever ‘exploited’ means. I find it fairly ironic that most of the people most fervent about the outsourcing bugaboo are also those most fervent about how we are exploiting the poor brown folks in other countries…ironic because what they are REALLY saying is that A) brown folks is too stupid to take care of themselves or know what’s best for themselves, and need good white folks to takes good care of them, ayup! and B) that what these poor brown folks REALLY need is for someone to step in and force better wages and conditions on the companies there exploiting them (which will, wonder of wonder, mean that you will artificially level to field and bring jobs back to the nations ‘suffering’ from the dreaded ‘outsourcing’ ‘problem’). So, it’s a double wammy…folks advocating this concept of exploitation get to feel good because they know best what these poor dumb bastards need, and they also get to stop the supposed flood of outsourcing from taking away good, high paying jobs from deserving <insert 1st or 2nd world country of choice, though on this board it will probably be Americans>. Win/win!

ETA: Or, what Sam said. Sheesh…

-XT

23

Assume the aliens make $500,000 a year in per capita income, and the Americans make $90,000 a year at the factory. In fact the Americans make so much money that individuals leave their families to work in their factories and send most of the wages home to support their kids, spouses and parents. The kids get educated, the parents have money for retirement, and the parent feels like a good provider, even if they don’t get to see their kids as often as they’d like. All well and good.

But assume that the Aliens are doing hundreds of billions in environmental damage which is driving up health care costs, driving down productivity, and damaging quality of life. For a fraction of the wealth the aliens have and for a 1-5% higher cost on end products, the aliens could upgrade the factories to not cause hundreds of billions in environmental damage, lost natural resources and higher health care costs for us on earth (China has skyrocketing levels of cancer and lung diseases, among other illnesses, due to all the pollution from being the world’s factory).

Also assume that some (but not all) aliens are either indifferent to or actively participate in other earthlings denying the rest of us basic civil, labor or human rights on earth. Imagine laws come up for votes in the Alien congress on planet Xenon (they live on planet Xenon) prohibiting the purchasing of goods from America made with slave labor, child labor, etc. and these businesses lobby to prevent that bill from passing.

You can have outsourcing while still having basic labor/human/civil rights, and while trying to avoid destroying the health and atmosphere of the home country.

24

And what if they had this book entitled To Serve Mankind?

25

Labor and environmental unrest is growing dramatically in China. We aren’t saving the savages from themselves when the locals are themselves protesting the same thing those of us in the US protest.

You and Sam act like people are upset due to xenophobia or ignorance. I don’t agree with that. People just want workers in foreign countries to have clean environments, not contribute to global environmental damage (Chinese pollution also affects other countries) and to have reasonable civil/human/labor rights while still producing goods that can pass quality control tests. Since these things tend to drive up costs, it is a slow process to develop them. But they are going to be developed nonetheless.

26

First point: The Americans want the jobs. The American government wants the jobs. Americans are lining up for the jobs. If there’s any environmental damage, they’ve decided that it’s worth the tradeoff.

It’s overwhelmingly the case that in countries where there are ‘sweat shops’, the sweat shops are actively lobbied for by those governments. The people line up to get jobs in them. Hell, even after the disaster in Bhopal India, the people of the region said that their greatest fear was that the disaster would cause the factory to shut down.

In most of these countries, the ‘sweatshop’ jobs are the best to be had anywhere for the average worker. They pay the most and have the best conditions. Not as good as American pay and conditions, but better than the alternatives.

What you need to understand is that being poor sucks. And I’m not talking about American poor, I’m talking about living in old shipping containers in refuse heaps and making a living either selling your body if you’re female or scraping the parched ground 16 hours a day in the sun to attempt to grow enough to keep you alive until the next day. We’re talking about countries where the average annual income is a few hundred bucks.

These people are poor, unhealthy, uneducated, and have little infrastructure to offer the world. About all they’ve got is their own labor. But it’s not worth very much, for the previous reasons. So they get paid 50 cents an hour, which represents a doubling of their standard of living. But it’s a start. It’s their comparative advantage. It’s the first rung on the ladder that brings foreign investment, which helps build the infrastructure, which ultimately raises productivity and along with it, wages.

The process of rising up by starting from sweatshops is not mysterious or hypothetical. Japan was once a nation of sweatshops. When it became too wealthy for that, the sweatshops moved to South Korea. Then Korea became to wealthy for them. Then they moved to Malaysia and Singapore. Now those countries are pricing themselves out of the market for low-cost labor, so their moving to Vietnam, Honduras, and other places where labor is still cheap.

The alternative? Demand first-world worker protections and minimum wages, and you’ll cut that rung of the ladder out from under them. Then they’ll get to be like Africa or North Korea - perpetually cut off from trade, and perpetually poor.

But hey, those American union workers will thank you. After all, they’re the ones who are funding the protests and bribing the government to enact trade barriers, so why shouldn’t they get the rewards, hmm?

27

Sweatshops can raise standards of living. Even liberal economists like Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs have said the problem with sweatshops is that there aren’t enough of them.

However when you start polluting the environment and dramatically increasing the rates of cancer and lung disease in China, increasing the death and disability rate, how is that helping China become a developed economy when endless millions of people who could be productive workers are dead or disabled? How is not allowing workers to form independent trade unions to bargain for better treatment helping them? How is passing a law prohibiting the importation of goods made with slave labor in any way related to what you are talking about?

Why wouldn’t laws in the consuming country not allowing the importation of goods that do not meet basic labor and environmental standards get around the issue of countries pricing themselves out of the market? If every country that produced goods for the EU & US had to meet basic environmental/labor laws, then no country would be at a disadvantage.

28

The problem with this example is that we try to make the assumption that exploitation is a sliding and continuous scale.

I made the unpopular comment in the other thread about Canadian companies setting up shop in the US so they don’t have to deal with longer maternity leave, etc. There are lots of surveys and stats to show “the country with the best working conditions in the world.” Which would mean that everyone else is being exploited by comparison.

Essentially, what you’re trying to say is
An Indonesian child making 10cents a day – is to – an American making $45,000, as
An American making $45,000 – is to – some Marklar making a billion

I disagree.

You know, a lot of this is starting to remind me of the classic prostitution debate. Ordinarily, one could say that it is a woman’s choice offer sex in exchange for money. Except, what tends to happen in reality is that there is a level of desperation, below which a woman isn’t making a choice. Or some poor towel is so addicted to meth that they’ll do anything for a hit. Are you really doing him/her a favour by letting them suck your dick so they can get high? Or would we consider that exploitation?

It seems a bit self serving to suggest that by going into an economically depressed area and offering just slightly better than death we are doing someone a favour. Essentially, we’ve figured out how to make working in a factory just slightly better than rotting in a gutter, and are content with that.

29

A lot of this is true, but comes with a giiiiant caveat that it’s extremely easy for us, who by an accident of birth were raised in a western first-world economy, to say all this.

30

Can you see now why people like this would risk their life to sneak into the US? On one side of a line, their labour is worth 50cents an hour. Swim across a river and now you get $5.50 an hour to do the same thing. If you continue to live on 50cents you end up with $5 each hour you can send back to your family, which represents not doubling, but a 20 fold increase in their standard of living.

And we have a re-emergence of the caste system.

31

Yeah…that’s pretty much the point. It’s being INTERNALLY driven, as Chinese standards of living increase.

You ARE trying to save them from themselves…instead of letting them figure out what they will or won’t tolerate. And you are doing it because you think you know what’s best for them, and you don’t think that they will ever be able to progress to the point where they can figure this shit out on their own. Don’t you see the irony in trying to use this information to make your point, when it actually makes mine?

Not at all. I think in these kinds of threads are mainly liberals who have the whole Liberal Saves the World thingy going for them. Couple that with folks like gonzo who are knee jerk opposed to globalization and who think that outsourcing is a huge problem that must be combated, and combated by imposing our standards on other countries in the name of saving them while simultaneously ensuring we keep those kinds of jobs here in the good old USA, and…well, there you have it. Certainly there is ignorance, but not the kind I think you meant. And I don’t think it’s xenophobia so much as ingrained cultural superiority.

Look…it took Europe hundreds if not thousands of years to learn these lessons and to raise their standards of living to current levels. It took American decades if not a century or so to follow the same paths. Folks in these threads seem to want 3rd world countries to follow the same trajectories that we did, and to do so RIGHT THIS MINUTE! It doesn’t work that way. Such reform must come from within, not be imposed from an external source.

No…people in these emerging economic countries just want to WORK…period. They don’t give a shit about the global community, except in so far as it gives them a job where they can put food on the table. They don’t care about the environment…at least they don’t care enough to want to protect the environment at the costs of their jobs. They don’t really care about any of the stuff you are going on about here, not if it costs them the jobs they want. As their standards of living increases, THEN they start to care about all those external issues. THEN they start to care about work place safety and the environment. Until then, what they care about is…does this put food on my table? Is it going to give me and my children a better life than subsistence farming or not working at all?

They won’t slow development…they will stop it completely. If you tried to impose western style benefits, laws and wages on many emerging 3rd world nations you would kill their economies overnight. You would drive away the companies who have moved there, and you’d sink those countries back to where they were before their economies started to emerge. In the end, if you make it less attractive for a company to invest the capital and expense into moving to your country by trying to artificially impose the things you are talking about, what will happen is that the companies will pull out and go somewhere else. If the folk in this thread got their dream of preventing evil American’s from exploiting 3rd world workers across the board, then the jobs would move back here (and to Europe, Japan, Korea, and all the other 1st and 2nd world nations who have exported their low end jobs), because logistically it makes more sense to make the stuff here if you can’t save on labor. Of course, that will mean that all the cheap products we current get won’t be cheap anymore, prices will go up, and many products we currently enjoy won’t be available because many companies who manufacture them have fairly thin margins, which will be blown away by higher labor costs. Bummer.

Certainly they will. Look at Japan and South Korea for examples. As their standards of living improved, so did all those other things you listed. People had the leisure and means to care about stuff other than simply putting food on the table or clothes on their kids backs. But such movements need to come from within, when a countries citizens demand them. They can’t be imposed by the 1st or 2nd world nations. Even if a country never progresses to the point where their citizens demand the exact same things we take for granted, that’s fine too…they need to find their own paths. As more companies and countries outsource to a nation, the overall standard of living for the citizens will rise…it has to, since capital is being injected into their system that wasn’t there before. As those standards rise then people will want more…more things, more benefits, more safety, more protection for their wilderness. More.

-XT

32

Does this have any implications for the argument? Or are we not talking about economics and standards of living at all, but rather what groups we like to affiliate with and the relative status within the group (“Rich bleeding hearts are allowed to talk; rich economists aren’t”?)

33

Right. It’s the same thing (less the brown people aspect). Canadian company moves production to the US, where the potential workers are willing to work without a benefit that a Canadian worker would not be willing to do without (well…in theory). The American worker isn’t being exploited there…they are being offered a job at a certain rate and a certain benefits package, and they are free to take it or not. Given the standard rates and benefits in a given area, this job (even sans maternity leave a la Canada) might look very attractive, and be in demand, with many people actually competing fiercely for that job.

Should Canada then impose their concept of what maternity leave should be on the US? Or, perhaps, they should make their own companies less competitive by forcing them to impose the same maternity leave standards on their companies in the US as those in Canada? Who would this benefit? Certainly not the workers in the US who will now not get a job at all from a potential Canadian company opening up shop in the US. No, it will only help the Canadian workers involved, since they will keep their jobs, even if that means that the cost for whatever good or service they were making will cost more than it could have.

-XT

34

Interesting. And this was my point in the world vs Marklar scenario that Sam Stone described.

You also seem to make a pretty convincing case that increasing minimum wage would increase unemployment.

35

What’s fair? Give me a number. Explain how you came up with it. I’m serious; let’s see you explain it.

Beating someone up is common assault and can hardly be blamed on the American consumer. That’s like saying that if there’s an assault one day at Best Buy, it’s your fault because you once bought a wireless router there.

As to externalities like pollution, I don’t see how that’s any more or less a problem in Indonesia than it would be in Indiana. Of course those are bad things. It’s the government’s job to impose rules concerning such things. That’s why we have governments. I assure you the governments of Third World countries aren’t going to be MORE likely to enforce rules against abusing people and destroying the environment if you close the factory down. How will that help anyone?

Nobody but a lottery winner gets wealthy all at once. You get wealthy one hour of work at a time. That is, like it or not, how the Third World is going to get richer. Exporting jobs to poor countries is immensely valuable to the people there; it causes them to become much wealthier, develops their economies, and creates the human and physical capital for development of their own industries. It happened in South Korea, and it can happen elsewhere.

Of course we should object to things like the use of slave labour; there are some valid moral lines that should not be crossed. Indeed, some major corporations have already voluntarily put auditing systems in place to do site audits of overseas suppliers to ensure such things aren’t happening, and they do that because of pressure from their customers (or, more likely, proactively avoiding a PR disaster.) This process takes time, but it will happen if allowed to.

36

It seems to me that the problem isn’t that they get paid much less than their US counterparts, but the conditions they have to work in. Show me a sweat shop where workers don’t get fired for missing a day through illness, or where they can go on maternity leave and still have a job when they come back, or where they have a western world accident rate and I’m fine with that.

37

Rand Rover, either post an argument or hang out in another thread. This is threadshitting.

38

If I did, you would - quite logically - claim it wasn’t a “sweat shop.” Since the term “sweat shop” is used to describe a place that abuses workers, by definition you cannot be shown a sweat shop that doesn’t abuse workers. You’re engaging in circular argumentation. No true Scotsman, right?

Do you want ALL third world factories to have first world pay rates, employment conditions, and such? What’s your proposed method for getting them there?

39

Wish I lived in that world. When stress is brought to bear on companies for using wage bondage and child labor, they say all the right things while moving their work to another unregulated place. Wash ,rinse ,repeat. We have to revoke corporate charters of companies that are unethical. That won’t happen.

40

Let’s just close down all these factories that don’t meet the American standards and see who benefits from doing so—mmmmkay?