http://www1.american.edu/TED/nike.htm Our corporations are pathological by design and evolution. They don’t give a crap about any workers. They are forced to take treat American workers with some grudging respect. They don’t like it
In India and Pakistan they use child labor and debt bondage to cut costs. They close their eyes and pretend they don’t know what is happening at the contractors. But, they know. They just don’t care.
I worked at a place that designed and built testing equipment for auto manufacturers. The machines were dangerous to operate. We included all kinds of safety equipment on them. It was typical for the 3rd world and Asian countries to strip all the safety equipment immediately. Workers were cheap.
Offshoring will result in ending environmental and worker protection. Not only are wages being suppressed around the globe ,but environmental and safety regulation will be eroded. It is not pretty.
The 3rd world countries are where we were before unions and laws were created to protect the workers. Eventually the workers will organize. It is already happening in China.
But - we in the west apply a double standard when it comes to third world countries. We see them working in what we would consider awful conditions, and justify it by saying that the guys in the factory in the next town have it even worse. By our standards, they ARE being exploited. But instead of admitting that, we compare them to other factories in the same country, when these countries often have terrible human rights records.
What you are saying could very well be true, but the accusations you are making are so vague that I have no way of determining that for myself.
Is there exploitation going on the third world? No doubt. The question is, what specifically amounts to “exploitation” and is “exploitation” always bad? Seems to me the folks yell EXPLOITATION! are the ones who need to lay out the case with specifics.
Even by this very generous definition, some American corporations are exploiting their overseas workers. One example is the chocolate industry. Many cocoa bean plantations in west Africa have a workforce of child slaves, often kidnapped and trafficked across national borders to do the dangerous work of harvesting cocoa beans. The cocoa beans grown on those plantations makes its way into chocolate used by Hersheys, Nestle, and other big candy companies. While it’s true that the companies don’t own the plantations where this happens, they are aware of the situation and they work to prevent it from being stopped. In 2001 a bill was introduced in Congress that would ban imports of chocolate produced with slave labor. It passed the House but lobbyists for the candy industry stopped it before it became law. (http://www1.american.edu/ted/chocolate-slave.htm)
Even those companies that do not benefit from outright slavery, however, can’t necessarily use the excuse that their employees choose freely. In China, for instance, workers are legally divided into two classes. Those in the poorer, rural class are banned from competing for jobs in urban areas and often not allow to move freely from the district of their birth. In many cases leaves them restricted to only the most miserable factory jobs. (There’s an article about this in this week’s Economist.)
Further, employees who make stuff for companies such as WalMart are often subject to beatings and other forms of physical punishment. (cite) That’s a human rights abuse, plain and simple. The USA has punished members of our military for doing the same things that the capitalist system does to millions of workers around the world.
But in this scenario, I wouldn’t say that American companies are exploiting third-world workers. I would say American companies are exploiting a corrupt/archaic system. To enact the Free Parking Fallacy, these companies are simply playing but the rules of globalization. Some countries allow for shitty working conditions. And some companies exploit that to roll back prices™.
To use the cocoa slaves example: the country allows it (ie it is legal), a local company then exploits child slaves, and an American company exploits the system to buy cheaper cocoa.
When an American company owns a mine in Sierra Leon that uses child slaves, they are exploiting workers. When an American company buys from a local mine, they are exploiting a shitty system.
The reason I can say this, is because the next step in the process is you* the consumer. When you* buy diamonds, chocolate, or crap from Wal-mart, then YOU* are the one exploiting the third-world-workers.
Domestic consumption of Nike sneakers is causing the exploitation in Malaysia. All of the crap that Der Trihs spewed starts and ends with the American consumer. So the American company is just as much a pawn as the local sweat shop owner or the corrupt politician/warlord. Starting and ending the chain of responsibility with the American Company just shows lazy thinking.
*(general you)
That’s ridiculous. By that logic, the Old South slaveowners weren’t exploiting their slaves because the “system” allowed it.
And in the process exploits those slaves. And as far I’m concerned everyone responsible should be tossed in prison for life or killed.
And how many people know the provenance of what they are buying? Unlike a company, the average consumer doesn’t have practical means of tracking down where everything he buys comes from or how it was produced.
And even in cases where the consumer DOES know, so what? What makes you think that companies and consumers can’t both exploit people? You are just trying to come up with some excuse to get the sacred corporation off the hook and blame anything or anyone else.
Letting slaves choose which slaveowner to work for still doesn’t fix the analogy, since they’re still forced to be slaves for someone. What you really need is a situation where the people are free to choose for Company A or Company B, or to attempt to set up their own business, or even to just do nothing and starve.
The other side of this coin is, even if it is exploitation, what should we do about it? The usual solution proposed is to shut down the sweatshops entirely, or (on the consumer level) to buy from companies that don’t use third-world labor at all. But if Nike, say, shut down all of its factories in the third world and made all their shoes in the USA, would that really be any better for the people of those third-world countries? Presumably, they’d all go back to subsistence farming, but if that were actually better than working in the factory, they’d be doing it already. They’re working in the sweatshops because that’s a better option than the farms.
Now, of course, situations where the workers really aren’t given a choice (literal slavery, for example, or spraying the farms with herbicides so they can’t choose to go back to the farm), that’s a problem, and we should do whatever we can to stop that. But let’s stay focused on the real issue, and not crack down on the companies that genuinely are making life a little better for the people.
Sure–and slaves can choose to try to escape, or they can choose to do nothing and be beaten to death. Hooray for free choice!
Yes, John, we do need to look at specifics, and I certainly agree that employment of people in third-world countries isn’t ipso facto exploitation. What I object to is the idea that, if the employed people are choosing shitty factory conditions over even shittier non-factory conditions, it’s ipso facto not exploitation. That’s all my slavery analogy is intended to rebut. Do you agree with that?
Kids are sewing soccer rballs through their childhood. They should thank the sporting goods company for the opportunity to better themselves. How much is a childhood worth? I guarantee the employer is paying almost nothing. The kid has no power. They can do whatever they want to them and they will. The cheat them and abuse them. thanks for the job.
Okay, I have a new thought experiment for you to try, based on this quote in the sister thread:
I asked if that is then the definition of exploitation, leading to:
When he said this I chuckled a little because my sister in law in Canada just had twins and went on maternity. Meanwhile a good friend living in the US just had a baby and went on maternity. Why did I laugh? In Canada it’s a year, in the US it’s about 6 weeks.
Now, you don’t need to argue the specifics of those numbers, I’m sure everyone knows someone with a different schedule. What I find funny is that we in the developed world have tried to give workers rights in such a way that they are no longer exploited the way workers in the third world are.
So consider two first world countries, one with reasonable working conditions, and one that goes a step further: capping the work week at 38 hours, mandating a min 3 weeks vacation, over time rules, 2 years maternity, safety standards, etc etc.
Shouldn’t we thus conclude that a company hiring employees in the “lesser country” is exploiting those workers? Of the few dozen industrialized countries, some are going to have the best working conditions, some the worst.
I think working conditions in Canada are better than in the US. So a case could be made that:
" American workers working for a Canadian company are being exploited. "
Who is buying those soccer balls? The company only does that because consumers demand cheaper soccer balls. The same thing made in the US could cost 10 times as much. Why should the company have to be the ones to decide how much a kid should get paid? If that country thinks it’s exploitation they should stop the practice.
Or maybe it would be better if that kid was in the streets begging for change, or being sold as sex slaves to tourists.
And I would goddamn agree with you, and frankly the condescending chuckle is a little ridiculous in my opinion. If a Canadian company moves all its operations to the US because they can get away with providing US workers with a more miserable life, and the US workers will put up with it because of a lack of viable alternatives, then hell yes that’s exploitation.
I don’t begrudge anyone getting more money for their labor if they can, but who will pay more for that labor, in that country, if a company can move to the next country and get labor cheaper there?
What is the cutoff between exploitation to actually paying someone fairly for a days work? Wouldn’t a comparison between what the typical wages of the area are and what you are paying be a good start? If you pay more than the average are you really exploiting someone? Assuming they are not slaves, etc.
American troops? Or is it local troops controlled by local thugs again doing it to their own people?
So, in order to do business with America, the local government has to be brutal and tyrannical. Or, could it be, that the governments America does business with happen to be brutal and tyrannical and would be even if America didn’t do business with them? Some of these countries are quite capable of creating their own brutal dictators without out outside help at all.
That wasn’t for you as I can’t imagine who you’d think would be a good president, nor do I really want to as I’ve had a good laugh already today.
But I did notice that you dodged the question which was that the vast majority of brutality that goes on in the third world does so at the hands to people who live in the third world. And while you can blame America, the Green Goblin, or whoever, it doesn’t change that fact.
Actually, not that I want to let the US off the hook, but you can’t blame everything on one country. If it was that powerful and evil, I can’t imagine why we’d be able to converse like this.
Here’s how I see it. The article I linked to mentioned a WalMart sweatshop that paid workers 20 cents an hours because the minimum wage in Bangladesh of 33 cents and hour was apparently too high.
Let’s suppose that workers in that sweatshop work 100 per week, 50 weeks per year. By basic math, that means they earn $1,000 per year. Let’s suppose there are a thousand workers in that sweatshop and a thousand such sweatshops in WalMart’s supply chain. Then there’s a million workers total, earning a total of a billion dollars per year.
Now imagine that for no reason other than pity for their condition, Walmart made the decision to double the salary of all these workers. The cost of doing so would be one billion dollars per year.
Each of the four WalMart heirs has over 23 billion dollars in the bank. Each would need to chip in roughly one percent of their net worth to make this happen.
So their is an alternative to having stuff made by third-world laborers under the current, sub-human conditions. What’s missing is the will to make it happen.
As I said above, if the companies are in collusion w/ the governments to limit the opportunities of the workers, then that would make the scenario exploitation, with a bad connotation.
So, yes, I do agree that just having the choice between different companies is not enough to prove bad exploitation isn’t occurring.
So, let’s look at each situation as it presents itself, and then we can decide whether bad or neutral exploitation is taking place.
Well sure, they could cut into their profits. Or they could cut the work force in half (pushing for automation). Or they could move to a country where the min wage is 11cents an hour, then run an ad campaign about how they pay twice as much as anyone else. Or they would raise the cost of the items produced.
Lower profits means investors dump Wal-mart in favour of Target or JC Penny, lower investment makes it harder to expand or open new stores.
Cutting the workforce just means more unemployment in an already economically strapped area. I heard stories recently about a global shift in sweatshops moving from traditional areas like China to even cheaper places. Which brings us back to, “is it better to be exploited or left to die?” Unless their slaves, these workers aren’t forced to work at this shops.
Raising the cost of the item hurts the American consumer, it’s essentially going to cause massive inflation at a time when Americans most desperately NEED cheaper crap from Wal-mart. It would also cut into Wal-mart’s profits, because the American consumer is simply going to cross the street (and by that I mean drive down the street) to Target.
The point here is that Wal-mart doesn’t get to act altruistically or the magic hand of the free market will destroy them. Hence, it’s the fault of the American consumer.
If you don’t like this, consider the recent push in “fair trade coffee.” It costs way more than exploited coffee, but what are consumers willing to pay?
While I agree that it’s a bad analogy, I’d like to see some evidence that this is true:
After a certain point, it would seem pretty difficult for the agrarian peasant to return to his previous life. His fields would have been sold, or taken over by others, or simply reverted to nature once he’d been away for awhile. In order to go back, he’d at the very least need money to buy seed, and to buy food while working his fields to make them productive again.
Farming’s one of those things that. due to its seasonality and the lag time between effort and results, works reasonably well once you’re in the cycle of farming. But there are some real start-up costs involved in entering the cycle for the first time, or even re-entering it after a hiatus.
So while I don’t have any data, my supposition would be that if a factory offered a bunch of former peasant farmers decent wages and conditions for a couple of years, and only then decided to change the rules, it would have its labor force by the short hairs, and exploitation would be not just possible but easy.
I learned what exploitation was through a pair of vocab words - oppression & exploitation. Oppression was keeping a people so poor and out of options that they had to take any job offered, and exploitation was offering a job that would only be taken due to oppression. It is pretty clear that that’s happening, though I find it extremely questionable that the oppression is intentional. Arguably American companies are less exploitative then local companies, and arguably a thief is less evil than a murderer. What should be done? A company could offer jobs to the oppressed people at well above market rates, but they would go out of business to a company that exploited those same people. Asking consumers to police companies is tenuous at best. A ban on importing anything produced by exploited workers would be seen as a huge tarriff by some of our free trade partners.
It’s “pretty clear that that’s happening” where and how often? Everywhere in the third world? 100% of the time by American companies? I hear these vague claims a lot around here. Some actual data or objective studies of the situation would be helpful.
RTF: You make a good point, although it’s not clear to me that your typical factory worker is a landed peasant who sold his land to move the city. Although I am no expert, it seems to me that the typical worker is the son or daughter of a peasant (maybe landed, maybe not), sent to the city to earn cash for the family. But I could be wrong.
A farmer who sells his land to move to the city and make it rich is perhaps taking a gamble that he shouldn’t take. It’s unclear to me that we should prevent him from making that gamble, although I certainly don’t condone tricking him into doing it.
They don’t offer cheaper soccer balls. The price is pretty much the same across the market. They just cut labor costs and make more profits. Just like America’s increase in productivity has resulted in more profits and better bonuses for the bosses’, without a concomitant wage increase. They do not pass the savings to the consumer. They don’t compete on price.
Most of you have never seen price competition. Back before oil companies swallowed up all the competition, gas stations had competition. They had huge signs that changed over and over to undercut the surrounding stations. When you filled up ,you got glasses or cups. Many gave out redeemable stamps . They fought on the streets for customers.
Another option. Pay a fair wage and hire the parent. Let the kid go to school.