Posted on 07/17/2010 2:01:17 AM PDT by citizenredstater9271
Liberals and socialists like to cry about "sweatshops" and claim they show the "failure" of capitalism. That is false. This video explains it.
>>Like is tough, more so in the third world. When plagued by the consequences of the good intentions of westerners, even more so.
Just look at the history of Africa for the last 50-60 years.
how about honest capitalism?? has that notion vanished there as well as here??
Check out the price of foodstuffs in their neighbourhood.
Precisely!
Not saying there isn't some abuse that exists, but that doesn't have to happen.
I know a lot of kids in the U.S. who grew up on farms and worked their asses of as soon as they could handle a job (usually starting around 5 or 6 years old).
Some liberals would call that abuse...but funny how much greater was the character of those who worked than the liberals with vast spare time spent wtaching cartoons and complaining to their mommies that they were bored.
Another supporter of the minimum wage, I guess.
Wages in NYC are quite different than wages in a small town in Tennessee.
Should a factory in China pay the NYC wage or the Tennessee wage? Or perhaps should the labor market in China dictate the wages for China?
As the video says, it's amazing how economically illiterate Americans are!
Is the picture meant to imply that the kid spends his days assembling computers from tangled scrap wire...or what?
Or perhaps did some liberal take a kid and place him in what is supposed to appear to be a miserable place?
Having worked in factories, all I see is a cute, rather well dressed kid posing among scrap wire.
What's the abuse? Is it the dustiness of the floor that is so horrible?
“Between 1990 and 2002 more than 174 million people escaped poverty in China, about 1.2 million per month. With an estimated $23 billion in Chinese exports in 2005 (out of a total of $713 billion in manufacturing exports), Wal-Mart might well be single-handedly responsible for bringing about 38,000 people out of poverty in China each month, about 460,000 per year. It is unlikely that there is any single organization on the planet that alleviates poverty so effectively for so many people.” Walmart outperforms world bank in reducing world poverty - “China is the most populous country, with 1.3 billion people, most still poor enough to willingly move hundreds of miles from home for jobs that would be shunned by anyone with better prospects.” About half a million of these people each year would be stuck in rural poverty that is, for most of them, far worse than sweatshop labor. most of the sweatshops workers in Japan in the 1950s and 60s, as well as the most of the sweatshop workers in Taiwan and South Korea in the 1970s and 80s, are now middle class retirees in developed nations. Likewise most of the “underpaid” Chinese workers of today will retire in a state of comfort and luxury unimaginable to them in their rural youth, as average Chinese wages will gradually rise just as they have risen in every other nation that has experienced long-term economic growth. At present rates of economic growth, China will reach a U.S. standard of living in 2031.
Paul Krugman, one of the most aggressively left-liberal economists writing today, understands how economic growth helps the poor:
“These improvements ... [are] the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It is not an edifying spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful but nonetheless significantly better.”
The Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas once said “Once you start thinking about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else.” Non-economists, especially those associated with the environmental movement, regard this as evidence that economics is a form of brain damage, a cancer on our earth. But rural Chinese peasants surviving on less than a dollar per day do not regard economic growth, or Wal-Mart factory jobs, as a cancer. When a Mongolian student at a U.S. workshop on globalization heard U.S. college students denounce sweatshops, he shouted: “Please give us your sweatshops!
http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2006/08/forget-the-world-bank-try-wal-mart.html
I remember a few trips to the DMV before they got A/C at most locations. Now THAT was a sweatshop.
The kid works at a Chinese computer factory and is sorting wire.
THIS is beyond Conservatism vs. Liberalism, and quite frankly, I’m embarrassed and appalled that there are people on this board who actually are trying to defend sweatshops and the exploitation of child (infant?) labor.
There’s a huge difference between a child getting up early in the morning to do chores on the family farm and being sent into a dirty, hot, extremely dangerous industrial environment, which is the norm in the 3rd World and in Red China, despite what this posted video wants you to believe.
Come on people-—use your common sense here! Good grief!
IMHO you are overreacting.
No one here is in favor of child abuse. They just aren't in favor of throwing the baby of capitalism out with the bath water.
And you don't know that baby is sorting wire. He is just sitting (posed) near piles of tangled wire.
You are letting your emotions (which are certainly justified in the case of child abuse) overwhelm your rational knowledge that the solution to child abuse is not to ban capitalism, but to institute and enforce regulations to prevent the abuse.
My liberal SIL sent me a picture of a Chinese kitten who is forced to work inside a glass cage sorting shredded paper (oh, the huge manatee...GET A GRIP MAN!)...
Virginia, you just don’t get it. In the 1980s China was a pre-industrial country. Do you know what rural pre-industrial life is like? Imagine having serious food shortages every 4-5 years, a famine every 10 years. Disease like cholera, tb, tetanus, and polio would ravage entire communities. 10% infant mortality was the norm. National literacy rates of 40% were considered acceptable. And most people were stunted mentally and physically due to childhood malnutrition.
Nowadays, the poorest Chinese person at least would get food, basic medical care, and some education, significantly more than the average person in the world. There is nothing romantic about living in mud huts and working in rice paddies, Chinese peasants refer to farm life in two words, bitter and short.
You're upset about sweatshops, because you don't get to see the alternative. People are in sweatshops because all their other choices are worse, and if you close down the factory, they will have to submit to the worse alternative.
Demanding that they get paid more will just mean the factory gets closed down due to unprofitably.
No, over the long term, you can't.
The facts of life are that wages for commodity manufacturing tend to be no higher than they can be and still maintain an adequate profit. If the companies offered higher wages, they would be out of business, as the company down the road, with lower labor costs, would be able to underbid them on their products.
What happens in a place that has workers who produce highly per unit of pay, is that other companies try to set up shop there. Competition for productive workers drives up pay right up to the point where it stops being profitable for new companies to set up at that location. Then pay stops going up until the labor pool gets better trained over time.
Yes. I said before, the choices are either sweatshops, starvation or socialism. What would you choose? I’d take working in a sweatshop over starving and gov.-controlling socialism any day.
The problem is, many times, local bosses can abuse their positions of authority. While the developing world already is in a labor pricing war between one another (e.g., $1/day in one country vs $1.25/day in another), a local boss can continue to make it worse. He/she can threaten a local worker with termination if the worker refuses to work long gruelling hours. The local boss can drive the wages even further down and pocket a greater share of the profits. And this is where multi-national corporations, with their greater leverge can help out, pressing local governments for greater labor oversight.
While many of these liberal "white youths" from priviledge backgrounds may not understand the full economic picture, I find their activism useful in bringing to light absuive conditions that can occur in 3rd world countries.
true that. (think UN “Oil for Food” programs and the like)
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