Hacker News Reader

Comment by typeformer | Hacker News Reader

Our society should not be built on SLAVERY! It is the responsibility of these brands to know their supply chains or we all pay the price.

View on HN

They've known the conditions of workers for decades. Back home they'll talk about fairness and justice and progressive causes not so much because that is what they believe in (if they did their sourcing would be different) but because this is what their consumers want to _hear_. That's the only reason.

They also know that shipping semi skilled jobs overseas is hard and devastating to local communities, but again, they don't care. They promise they'll sell you things for cheap in the bargain.

If they don't care about the local communities, they're also not going to care about other communities.

It's always humoring to hear cries of the oppressed upper middle class in the Western world.

This is totally different.

'Conditions' for any group of Chinese working in Western factories have massively improved during that time, largely due to said 'factories', paradoxically.

'Trade and business' have pulled 100's of millions in China out of extreme poverty. We can argue about equality, but on the whole, things are getting significantly better.

The issue here is one of the people in concentration camps due to their ethnicity, and of forced labour. Which is altogether another level of oppression.

I think to them it's a spectrum; the seas are wide and the consumer is far away. Do you think Nike and so on will balk? Is it a bridge too far?

In other words, I don't think the following ever entered mr Knight's calculus when he first closed down factories in the US and opened them in China "What are these American workers going to do, how will our closures affect the communities and what is our responsibility to workers in China in terms of work conditions and bringing them out of CCP perpetuated poverty? I don't one bit. It was more like, how many more shoes will we make and sell and how will our profits improve?

Do you only care about economic injustice when its perpetrated by companies led by left-leaning management, or do you apply that same scrutiny to right-leaning industries and companies as well? What are your thoughts on the Coal industry and the prevalence of black lung in their workforce? Does that kind of stuff bother you?

All industries, including Auto, resource extraction, etc. I’m not a socialist or anti-capitalist but I think over the last 30 years people (parties) who historically have espoused support for the working class, only do it as a token symbol and don’t mean anything with their words. Everything is a political calculus with the objective to win and return favors. Bernie is the only one who is ideological (normally not a good thing) enough to mean it, but I’m afraid he’ll go too far and make things worse economically, if unchecked by congress.

Politicians didn’t used to become millionaires after they did their stint.

We’ve been accepting of slave labor for decades now. Your clothes and electronics are built on virtual slave wages, for decades.

"Slave wages" is hyperbole when compared to actual forced slave labor. I agree that it's tragic that lack of opportunity allows for foreign enterprises to pay extremely low wages, but it's a far cry from falsely imprisoning people and forcing them to work.

I tried to throw the word ‘virtual’ in there. This stuff can always be boiled down to semantics. Anyway, possibly relevant Onion article on the semantics of it:

https://www.theonion.com/jeff-bezos-tables-latest-breakthrou...

I know you threw in the word 'virtual,' but that's just a way to weasel out of actually having said that we've been accustomed to slave wages for a long time, while still trying to make an emotional equivocation between captive, forced, slave labor, and paltry factory wages.

Okay, so here is a question for you. What would virtual slave wages look like if it actually existed in this world (I’ll operate on the supposed fact it doesn’t exist)? And to follow up, what would a society reliant on that labor be like?

Not OP, but I just wanted to put in my $0.02 regarding the importance of understanding that the enslavement spectrum is orthogonal to the poverty spectrum. You can be a rich slave or a poor slave. Slavery is about freedom. Freedom even to choose a slightly poorer subsistence life compared to a crappy factory is still a freedom.

Just to give the conceptual example of a relatively rich slave, a worker in a fully centrally planned communist/socialist state is a slave to the state, even though such a worker might have a clean/safe place to live and modern luxuries. They don't have the freedom to choose their job, negotiate wages, choose where they live, etc.

And I’ll add, to be poetic about it, we Westerners are slaves to this supply chain. Of course, I can just choose not to buy that 10 dollar t-shirt from H&M, but it’s mostly hard in our economy.

We can’t even vote with our wallet because everything is literally made there. Decades of compliance with this system. The comedy of it all is that got to actual slavery in these Uyghur camps.

We're fighting it now. With every new bit of leaked evidence about the plight of the Uighurs, conversations are sparked. The electorate isn't happy about the CCP.

Change isn't as fast as I'd like, but it is happening.

Coronavirus is a reckoning for our supply chain as well.

No, have a look [1]

Wages have been massively improving, precisely because of said business operations.

'Buying stuff' from China doesn't make them poorer, it makes them richer.

Holding people in concentration camps is a different kind of activity.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages

I’d argue that the ability to go from one paradigm to the next indicates a scalable pattern. So for example, a country with real human rights and labor laws wouldn’t shift into this paradigm until it went through all the steps. China is one step removed from slave labor.

I have no data to back this up other than I think they have giant factories that make stuff for a couple cents on the hour.

Yes the wages are low - but you have to compare the wage to cost of living vs just the currency transaction.

Also it is wholly incorrect to equate low wages with forced and unpaid labor.

Similarly, disregarding the whole concentration camp, torture, and murder as being a meaningless distinction is immoral.

Slave wages? How do you figure? Are you comparing eg Foxconn wages to wages of Western workers in Western factories? If so then that’s a ridiculous comparison to make because COL and culture are so different.

Slave wages...sometimes is that or no job at all. BILLIONS of people live on $1-$2 a day, obviously any salary will be less than $65K plus benefits.

Work at a slave factory and stay alive or die in a prison camp. We can keep boiling this down all the way if we need to.

I wasn't talking about actual forced Chinese prison labor, was talking about low wages ("slave wages") in poor countries.

The brands are certainly in a better position to do it than consumers, but it still doesn't seem all that great to have every company doing it separately? There need to be international standards for supply chains.

And this probably means companies being more open about vendor relationships that they normally keep confidential? A label saying what country some product is from isn't enough.

It is absolutely not a responsibility of businesses to effect social change. Get politics out of business and business out of politics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com