Sweatshops Benefit the Poor

[Toro]

From The New York Times

Before Barack Obama and his team act on their talk about “labor standards,” I’d like to offer them a tour of the vast garbage dump here in Phnom Penh.

This is a Dante-like vision of hell. It’s a mountain of festering refuse, a half-hour hike across, emitting clouds of smoke from subterranean fires.

The miasma of toxic stink leaves you gasping, breezes batter you with filth, and even the rats look forlorn. Then the smoke parts and you come across a child ambling barefoot, searching for old plastic cups that recyclers will buy for five cents a pound. Many families actually live in shacks on this smoking garbage.

Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.

Talk to these families in the dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children.

“I’d love to get a job in a factory,” said Pim Srey Rath, a 19-year-old woman scavenging for plastic. “At least that work is in the shade. Here is where it’s hot.”
Another woman, Vath Sam Oeun, hopes her 10-year-old boy, scavenging beside her, grows up to get a factory job, partly because she has seen other children run over by garbage trucks. Her boy has never been to a doctor or a dentist, and last bathed when he was 2, so a sweatshop job by comparison would be far more pleasant and less dangerous.

I’m glad that many Americans are repulsed by the idea of importing products made by barely paid, barely legal workers in dangerous factories. Yet sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty. At a time of tremendous economic distress and protectionist pressures, there’s a special danger that tighter labor standards will be used as an excuse to curb trade.

When I defend sweatshops, people always ask me: But would you want to work in a sweatshop? No, of course not. But I would want even less to pull a rickshaw. In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn’t the bottom.

 

[Againsheila]

From The New York Times

I was in Mexico 30 years ago, long before NAFTA, I traveled all over Mexico. There were poor people living in huts with mud floors that worked hard all day. And yet, they were better off than Mexico today. Today crime is rampant. Birth defects are at ever increasing rates thanks to lax environmental laws. Women are hired to work in the factories but not the men, too much of a chance they'll start a union. Any talk of unions and people are killed. People who work at factories live in cardboard huts in a slum worse than anything I saw while I traveled all over Mexico.

Families are breaking down as the working women don't need the men and the men can't get jobs to support a family, so they come up here. Mexico is falling apart and a lot of it is because of NAFTA and "free trade" Whoever wrote that article is an idiot. Go back and look at Thailand BEFORE those slave labor factories.

 

[Epsilon Delta]

The article is correct- Most people who work in sweatshops, even historically, are people who are doing it to escape the even-shittier subsistence agriculture life. But that doesn't change the need for workers to continually demand and take action to acquire better conditions.

 

[Modbert]

The article is correct- Most people who work in sweatshops, even historically, are people who are doing it to escape the even-shittier subsistence agriculture life. But that doesn't change the need for workers to continually demand and take action to acquire better conditions.

Exactly, and for people to sit there and be like "you should be happy with what you got" is bullshit.

 

[Agnapostate]

I've pointed this out myself, incidentally, in response to the urge of so many to boycott products made through child labor or whatever.

This is the natural result of the spread of hierarchical wage labor; it cannot be solved by mixed-market capitalism or whatever other nonsense the political mainstream is interested in. What is necessary is a radical alteration of the economy involving mass expropriation of the means of production, and the establishment of horizontal networks of worker-owned enterprises managed in a democratic manner.

 

[AllieBaba]

I was in Mexico 30 years ago, long before NAFTA, I traveled all over Mexico. There were poor people living in huts with mud floors that worked hard all day. And yet, they were better off than Mexico today. Today crime is rampant. Birth defects are at ever increasing rates thanks to lax environmental laws. Women are hired to work in the factories but not the men, too much of a chance they'll start a union. Any talk of unions and people are killed. People who work at factories live in cardboard huts in a slum worse than anything I saw while I traveled all over Mexico.

Families are breaking down as the working women don't need the men and the men can't get jobs to support a family, so they come up here. Mexico is falling apart and a lot of it is because of NAFTA and "free trade" Whoever wrote that article is an idiot. Go back and look at Thailand BEFORE those slave labor factories.

Not only that, but on payday the cops line up and the workers have to give each of them a chunk of their pay on their way home.

A Mexican family in my church came to America because they got sick of it.

 

[Neubarth]

I saw a good program on PBS about this topic yesterday or the day before. In some countries like Cambodia, that Sweatshop Labor is the only job for hundreds of miles around. The alternative was scavanging in the community garbage dump to make a living. Those poor people would be better off in a sweatshop.

Fact remains that as the world's population continues to skyrocket, more and more people are living in abject poverty.

 

[Agnapostate]

^^^

Of course "free trade" has a tendency to cause deleterious effects. I've repeated the basic fact that the expansion of neoliberalism into developing countries has the effect of harming infant industries, as Ha-Joon Chang's Kicking Away the Ladder indicates. I'm still wondering when this evidence will be addressed.

 

[xsited1]

I only buy products manufactured in sweatshops. It's my way of getting back at the unions.

 

[AllieBaba]

The Kingdom of Cambodia is doing just fine, since finding oil and natural oil deposits, and beginning to capitalize on tourism.

PBS on the other hand would like to see Cambodia return to the days of the Khmer Rouge when communism was the blessed order of the day, so of course they are going to play up the pitiful situation of the citizens of Cambodia today, and glorify work camps.

 

[Agnapostate]

The Khmer Rouge was not a communist government any more than the Politburo was. State capitalist regimes are inappropriately referred to by the anti-socialist.

 

[AllieBaba]

I only buy products manufactured in sweatshops. It's my way of getting back at the unions.

A brilliant idea and I may follow suit.

Speaking of suits, I curse the Filipinos and Thai people soundly every time I spend a fortune on material and patterns, then spend hour after back breaking grueling hour to create clothing and blankets....which don't look as good and cost much more than anything with a "Made in the Phillipines" or "Made in Thailand" tag on them.

 

[AllieBaba]

The Khmer Rouge was not a communist government any more than the Politburo was. State capitalist regimes are inappropriately referred to by the anti-socialist.

Fucking idiot.

"The Khmer Rouge (Red Khmer)(Khmer: ខ្មែរក្រហ&#6040 was the communist ruling political party of Cambodia — which it renamed the Democratic Kampuchea — from 1975 to 1979.

It was used to refer to a succession of Communist parties in Cambodia which evolved into the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and later the Party of Democratic Kampuchea. The organization was also known as the Khmer Communist Party and the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea.

The Khmer Rouge is remembered mainly for the many deaths of an estimated 1.5 million people or 1/5 of the country's total population[citation needed] (estimates range from 850,000 to two million) under its regime, through execution, torture, starvation and forced labor. Following their leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge imposed an extreme form of social engineering on Cambodian society — a radical form of agrarian communism where the whole population had to work in collective farms or forced labor projects. In terms of the number of people killed as a proportion of the population (est. 7.5 million people, as of 1975), it was one of the most lethal regimes of the 20th century.[citation needed]

Khmer Rouge wanted to eliminate anyone suspected of "involvement in free-market activities". Suspected capitalists encompassed professionals and almost everyone with an education, many urban dwellers, and people with connections to foreign governments. Khmer Rouge believed parents were tainted with capitalism. Consequently, children were separated from parents and brainwashed to socialism as well as taught torture methods with animals. Children were a "dictatorial instrument of the party"[2] and were given leadership in torture and executions.[citation needed]

Flag of Democratic KampucheaOne of their mottos, in reference to the New People, was: "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss." The ideology of the Khmer Rouge evolved over time. In the early days, it was an orthodox communist party and looked to the Vietnamese Communists for guidance. It became more Stalinist and anti-intellectual when groups of students who had been studying in France returned to Cambodia. The students, including future party leader Pol Pot, had been heavily influenced by the example of the French Communist Party (PCF).
"
Khmer Rouge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Agnapostate]

Wow! Wikipedia!

Try to learn a little more about political economy and the structure of socialism before you open your mouth, moron.

 

[AllieBaba]

I only used wiki because I thought it would be easier for you to comprehend.

In order to create the ideal communist society, all people would have to live and work in the countryside as peasants. Peasants, in fact, were the Khmer Rouge communist ideal, not unlike the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan of Nazi Germany. Peasants were seen as simple, uneducated, hard-working and not prone to exploiting others. Their way of life had not changed for centuries, yet they always managed to survive. It was this perception that caused the Khmer Rouge to view peasants - old people, to use their political jargon - as the ideal communists for the new Cambodian state.
The Khmer Rouge Years

The Khmer Rouge’s interpretation of Marxist/Leninist/Maoist communism allowed them to believe that they could create a classless society, simply by eliminating all social classes except for the “old people”; that is poor peasants, working on the land."

Hey, this sounds like the world progressive liberals want:

"Religion of all kinds was banned as was music and radios. Money was abolished and all aspects of life were subject to regulation. People were not allowed to choose their own marriage partners. They could not leave their given place of work or even select the clothes that they would wear.
By instigating “Year Zero” Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge officials wished to create a State focussed on their rural idyll, with all Kampucheans pledging loyalty to the State to such an extreme so as to prohibit all personal, community or religious allegiances."
Khmer Rouge Ideology

 

[FistyTheBadger]

I completely agree with the title.

 

[Dr Grump]

Fucking idiot.

"The Khmer Rouge (Red Khmer)(Khmer: ខ្មែរក្រហ&#6040 was the communist ruling political party of Cambodia — which it renamed the Democratic Kampuchea — from 1975 to 1979.

It was used to refer to a succession of Communist parties in Cambodia which evolved into the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and later the Party of Democratic Kampuchea. The organization was also known as the Khmer Communist Party and the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea.

The Khmer Rouge is remembered mainly for the many deaths of an estimated 1.5 million people or 1/5 of the country's total population[citation needed] (estimates range from 850,000 to two million) under its regime, through execution, torture, starvation and forced labor. Following their leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge imposed an extreme form of social engineering on Cambodian society — a radical form of agrarian communism where the whole population had to work in collective farms or forced labor projects. In terms of the number of people killed as a proportion of the population (est. 7.5 million people, as of 1975), it was one of the most lethal regimes of the 20th century.[citation needed]

Khmer Rouge wanted to eliminate anyone suspected of "involvement in free-market activities". Suspected capitalists encompassed professionals and almost everyone with an education, many urban dwellers, and people with connections to foreign governments. Khmer Rouge believed parents were tainted with capitalism. Consequently, children were separated from parents and brainwashed to socialism as well as taught torture methods with animals. Children were a "dictatorial instrument of the party"[2] and were given leadership in torture and executions.[citation needed]

Flag of Democratic KampucheaOne of their mottos, in reference to the New People, was: "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss." The ideology of the Khmer Rouge evolved over time. In the early days, it was an orthodox communist party and looked to the Vietnamese Communists for guidance. It became more Stalinist and anti-intellectual when groups of students who had been studying in France returned to Cambodia. The students, including future party leader Pol Pot, had been heavily influenced by the example of the French Communist Party (PCF).
"
Khmer Rouge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There have been no truly Communist countries in the world (not under the Marxist definition), just totalitarian regimes under the guise of saying they are communist...

 

[AllieBaba]

Lol. Yeah, right. I forgot..we change the definition when we can no longer deny the heinous outcome of a favored party.

So you espouse communism...therefore, you must deny that all past communist atrocities were truly communistic.

So predictable.

 

[Dr Grump]

Lol. Yeah, right. I forgot..we change the definition when we can no longer deny the heinous outcome of a favored party.

So you espouse communism...therefore, you must deny that all past communist atrocities were truly communistic.

So predictable.

Er, no. Communism is an economic system based on the collective where the state owns everything and all people are equal. Are you telling me that as well as Stalin having a Dacha on the Caspian Sea, that ALL other USSR families had them too? Are you saying that the guy who swept Red Square had the same standard of living as Stalin or other members of the Politburo? If you say no, then they were not living under a communist system. It would be a totalitarian system in the guise of communism. I didn't make the definition up Allie, Marx, Engels et al did...

 

[Said1]

All others have been self-styled, state-capitalists.