Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

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Despite what you might think, I'm no Ayn Rand-quoting objectivist ;)

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?

Taiwan is not the counterexample to this article to prove that China needs the sweatshops and they are excusable because the ends justify the means.

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.

> 1) It is a smaller country.

So if you carved up China into smaller countries, that might help?

It probably would, decentralizing control and allowing competitive economic regimes to emerge, rather than the counterproductive nepotism rampant there now.

That might be true. As long as they can preserve a free trade area / customs union, pushing authority down to the lowest level possible is probably a good idea.

I think the big question is if sweatshop labour still does do this.

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.)

At a certain point the host country has to start taking responsibility for whoring its people out. You can be disgruntled with Apple because Chinese workers got hurt making ipods, but the honest truth is that as long as there are people selling cheap labor there will be people buying.

> At a certain point the host country has to start taking responsibility for whoring its people out.

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?

You don't have to buy, but if you want what they are freely offering quite frankly I don't see where Apple (I'm using Apple as example, I mean Apple et al) is wrong.

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.

So,for example, if a family need money and they sell their young little girl as a prostitute, just to make money, you know, but in a country where the State is not so hard in fighting that behavior, the "buyer" should under no circumstances be held accountable for that Country's inability (or unwillingness) to regulate its economy?

I think your point of view it's too simplistic and auto-absolving.

I think you are missing entirely the value of a cultural and societal system. The alternative to what is currently going on in China isn't a workers' paradise where everyone is happy with a middle class, 40 hour a week job. The alternative is a nation starving (Mao?). I think your view discounts the rubble that China has come out of and the place it is today entirely. I doubt many Chinese feel their parents were better of than they are.

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...)

No, the alternative is that we stop making excuses for what we're doing and demand that the people who make our junk are paid a living wage. Yes, really.

Talk about too simplistic.

Apple is one of the ones that takes that accountability seriously, monitors and requires compliance from its vendors:

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.

It goes both ways, you have to regulate the supply and the demand, ignore either and nothing changes.

Just like money flows to the least taxed location, labor flows to the least regulated one.

"sweatshop labor permitted my parents' generation to pull themselves out of poverty, get educated, and get white collar jobs "

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.

Anything to support your argument?

sweatshop labor permitted my parents' generation to pull themselves out of poverty, get educated, and get white collar jobs

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.

That is a complete false choice. People work in sweatshops (or any crappy job) because better jobs aren't available.

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.

The relevant question is: 'Will removing the sweatshop be better for the employee?'

Yes, this is the question we are losing track of.

Hear hear

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