"Privileged white collars shocked and dismayed that blue collar work can really, really suck. News at 11."
Your comment made me think: Privileged white collar shows complete disregard for those that have it worse. News at 11.
Your comment made me think: Privileged white collar shows complete disregard for those that have it worse. News at 11.
What I do think is that this article makes much ado about nothing - sweatshop labor permitted my parents' generation to pull themselves out of poverty, get educated, and get white collar jobs - in fact my mother and all of her siblings eventually all got white collar, comfortable desk jobs.
What we're looking at is a country in a natural evolutionary state towards wealth - much like the US's tendency to impose democracy on nations with no foundation necessary for its success, it would IMHO be disastrous to attempt to enforce Western standards of work (or hell, enforcing white collar definitions of what is reasonable and fair).
Taiwan has evolved from a cheap-labor, sweatshop labor model to an educated, R&D-centric model. The island has gone from an agrarian backwater to one of the urban jewels of the Pacific. I am glad that this has happened - and yet I'm not convinced it would have gone down that well if well-meaning Western labor activists had their way.
I do think that fundamental worker safety must be ensured - companies certainly have proven that they can't be trusted to do that on their own, but enforcing someone's "right" to use a cell phone while working? Really?
AFAIK most of this work is now done via sub-sub-subcontractors and goes on in special economic zones. Workers are usually employed for the short term and the work may randomly migrate to a SEZ in a different country to take advantage of "tax holidays", periods of no tax for when a company first sets up in a SEZ. There are no permanent factories or permanent jobs. Wages don't rise because it's easy to just go to some other place where people are desperate for work, literally shipping the workshop to the new location.
So what ends up happening is that the workers never work at the same thing for long enough to acquire skills or wage rises and that they don't make enough money for a proper education. And the assembly lines are so ephemeral and set apart from normal society that no infrastructure or know-how ever accumulates in the country.
So this ain't your parents' kind of sweatshop. Literally.
(Note that I'm talking about the kind of sweatshops that assemble consumer goods in general here, not specifically the one in the article. I have no specific insight about that one, but this is the general trend - this is where the west gets its clothes and gadgets from.)
Yes, but this in no way absolves us. You don't have to buy just because someone's offering.
> Apple should under no circumstances be held accountable for China's inability (or unwillingness) to regulate its economy.
In your example, Apple should absolutely be held accountable. If I buy goods I know are stolen, I'm committing a crime. So why shouldn't a company be accountable for buying goods that it knows were made through exploitation?
Apple should under no circumstances be held accountable for China's inability (or unwillingness) to regulate its economy.
And yes, you absolutely have to regulate both the supply and the demand, it's just WHO has to be doing the regulating. China is no fool: if they regulated their GDP would plummet and their ridiculous 9% year on year growth would finally stop.
I think your point of view it's too simplistic and auto-absolving.
As for prostitution, if the family doesn't need the money to eat and survive that is one thing, and actually based on the economic specifics going on there I don't actually think it's relevant. If they are selling their daughter for hunger/survival, well it really sucks but we with cushy lives forget that survival is actually the most important thing. In that case, sadly, the buyer is supporting the local economy. (hello downvotes...)
http://www.chinacsr.com/en/2009/07/17/5713-apple-admits-its-...
Year after year stories like this appear, headlined, "OMG, Apple's bad labor practices", ignoring that unlike Martha Stewart et al., this labor news comes from Apple's own audits and public reports.
First you overestimating the extent to which the sweatshops in Taiwan are the cause of its progress and ignoring what other factors were involved. There are plenty of countries in the world teaming with sweatshops, few are growing into Taiwan 2.0
What are those other factors?
1) It is a smaller country.
2) Taiwan's opposition to China was/is very valuable to and respected by western nations. Is it a coincidence that the country that most antagonizes China is supported by the US and gets a lot of business/help from the US? I know companies that refuse to outsource to China but will to Taiwan in a heartbeat.
3) etc
Second, it doesn't _have to be this way_. There are manufacturers in China in less competitive industries that follow more western practices. The really competitive industries have these sorts of problems (and yes, slave wages and total control of a workers life are problems even if they aren't living in a toxic waste dump). The only way to solve that problem is systematic change because fixing any single factory just puts it out of business. Since systematic change from within China the way it happened in Western countries is not happening due to the lack of free speech and political forces, activists put pressure on western companies to stop outsourcing to these places.
And where would they go instead? Probably Taiwan.
So if you carved up China into smaller countries, that might help?
That may have been possible in the 1960s, but it's certainly not going to happen for 99% of these workers now. There is way more menial, blue-collar labour to be done than white-collar work, and there are less jobs than there are people already.
I think what irritates people is that you say this as though non-sweatshop labor cannot offer this sort of improvement. Lots of countries have the possibility for upward mobility without sweatshop labor.
The relevant question is: 'Will removing the sweatshop be better for the employee?' If you can say why removing the sweatshop will cause a better place of work to appear in it's stead, go ahead.
Yes, this is the question we are losing track of.
I think short "slave work" internships for first year students should be more common.
I did find the article pretty sensationalist. The sexual harassment issues are believable though and weren't picked up on in these comments.
Actually, his comment is more analogous to "people get killed in war all the time, what's the big deal."