Shorter Nick Kristof
Above: Missionary of Crapitalism
- He who builds a sweatshop builds a temple; he who toils there worships there. Only a misguided do-gooder would come between a man and his, as it were, God.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
MOAR: You too can apply the Kristof Principle, which he advocates for the Third World, next time you see a homeless person on the streets here in America. First ask yourself, would this homeless person be happier getting paid a nickel an hour, inevitably getting his fingers chopped off and inhaling brain-damaging solvents just to produce, say, tennis shoes? Of course! I mean, compared to homelessness, this is like a trip to Disneyland! Also, the homeless person is getting paid nothing now, and he might lose fingers to frostbite and brain cells to cheap booze without transnational capital or Western consumers having anything to show for it! Obviously, then, the answer is to destroy the battery of U.S. law dealing with workplace safety, the minimum wage, overtime regulations, etc., etc. Only then will such people, living in squalor, be elevated to a position of marginally better squalor.
But here’s the best part: For advancing the Kristof Principle, which by sheer magic perfectly dovetails with the longstanding goal of libertarians, conservatives, multinational corporations, and robber barons to race to the bottom of the global labor pool, you get to call yourself a “liberal.” No wait! Even better, you get to call yourself a “humanitarian.” And not only do you get to sleep so much better at night, you get to use the ultimate trump card of craptastic journalism: you get to call yourself a “contrarian,” a title you’ve earned by “showing” how the anti-globalization Left, with their so-called “labor standards,” are the real menace to the Third World. Enjoy your Pulitzers!
Good stuff! I like how the arc of prosperity has been lost to men like Kristof. You know, good labor laws resulted in a rising median income during the middle of last century. This in turn benefited the producers, as the workers had money to consume…
Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?
And more: there’s this sort of race to the bottom in effect. You know, imagine if there really was a free market. Then any organization that worked harder for less money could turn this efficiency into a competitive advantage in the marketplace. They could then crowd out lazy competitors and the world would be “better off”. But no one involved will have time to go shopping anymore, because if they did, their competitors could skip that step, gain an advantage, and put them out of business. Hell, all leisure time should vanish.
Actually, as I understand this, this is the whole Wal-Mart way. Everyone from the bottom to the top is working more and more, but there doesn’t seem to be a dividend.
Mr. Kristof,
When you get to Hell we’ve got you scheduled to run sewing machine #13. By the way, it’s a non-union shop.
The bottom workers at Wal-Mart, last I knew, were not given enough hours to qualify them as full-time so that management could avoid paying full-time benefits. Maybe the situation’s changed.
Teh Magic of the Markets
See how this works? People who buy tainted milk will eventually all die, so the companies who sell tainted milk will have no more customers, and then all the other people will go buy milk from the milk companies who didn’t cheat (except they’ve gone out of business long ago, thanks to competition from cheaters).
But it’s all ok, because we can outsource to China….
It’s strange that Kristof can recognize, and speak passionately against, slavery in the form of sex trafficking and then argue that dangerous, exploitative factories are ultimately a good thing. I mean, he’d never write something like “Sure, blowing white tourists for five dollars a day is terrible, but I’d rather do that than scavenge at a dump,” would he?
Sure there is. You die, which also leaves a place for someone else to be enslaved.
Hmm.
Interesting, this written word thing and it’s varied interpretations.
I read this Kristof piece last week, and my interpretation of it was vastly different than yours. I wrote in my crappy little blog:
I saw it more as a real interesting reminder that the global problems of poverty and wealth imbalance are not going to solve themselves, and it’s important to think about them in a much broader context, to consider solutions that may be counter-intuitive.
What’s obvious is that the vested interests cannot be motivated to address these issues on a human rights basis. And since we’re both against using military force to try to improve workers rights in the poorest corners of the world, the important question is what CAN be done that actually begins to improve people’s lives?
When Kristof says those people living in that garbage dump DREAM about a job in a sweatshop factory, I believe him. And while we stamp our nice clean feet and rail against the horror of those sweatshops, those other people still live in a garbage dump.
I think it’s REAL unfair to read that piece and see it as Nick Kristof RECOMMENDING sweatshops. He’s clearly not doing that. He’s making an important point that it is going to take employment to raise a couple billion people out of poverty, and in this foul world we’ve all created that means there has to be a profit in it, or it’s not going to happen.
Now it shouldn’t be necessary, but let me be REAL clear here, to the point of near monosyllables. I don’t approve of sweatshops. And I have NO IDEA if there is iron truth at the bottom of Kristof’s premise. But my takeaway from that article was that in order to do something other than talk talk talk talk talk, we need to start thinking in terms of incremental solutions that WORK.
And for that reason, I found the piece valuable…
mikey
Rush Limburgh owns the IP rights for the “Sex tourism rescues third-world women and boys from slavery” argument.
WalMart keeps workers below full time, to avoid paying benefits, and it’s easiest for them to make those hours erratic, so the workers can’t pick up another job.
So if there is somewhere else to work, they would certainly work there.
What Kristof conveniently ignores is that there are alternative methods of economic development that can allow the Third Wold to rise above sweatshops. The East Asian tigers sure as hell did not get rich because of free trade, I’ll tell you that.
As far as I can tell, this is an example of a poorly-executed False Dichotomy. Third worlders have a choice between A – living on top of smouldering shit and garbage, or B – getting paid pennies an hour to make iPods and Hello Kitty Vibrators (and the inevitable Vibrating Hello iPod Kitties) for privileged Westerners.
So, the option C – fair wages for their labor is somehow excluded – why? Is it unrealistic, or undesireable? The definition of a “Liberal” is someone who answers “neither.”
Seriously read some Ha-Joon Chang people.
Indeed. I suppose a modestly managed free market might Get There One Day, but it’s like hoping that evolution produces a tiger instead of a gazelle.
Really what Cambodia should be doing is building a nuclear weapon so they can be bribed not to use it.
This racket,… er, “argument” comes up every once and a while.
With the tiniest effort he could advocate gainful employment in humane working conditions but alas, his imagination is limited to being a toxic waste dump.
Hell, even he seems to almost realize his thinking is filled to the uttermost with poo: “Manufacturing is one sector that can provide millions of jobs. Yet sweatshops usually go not to the poorest nations but to better-off countries with more reliable electricity and ports.” Then maybe improving transportation and electrical grids would be better than, well, I don’t even know what he’s proposing; lowering already non-existent labor standards in the worst off countries? A sweat-shop labor law war between the worst off and the next to worst off to see who can secure the shittiest working conditions for their populace?
Most likely, Kristof never worked a job that caused him to rough his hands and perspire. That effeminism is what makes people in the Village Center and on the Right call him a liberal; not that any of them ever did real work either, but that is never part of the equation. Like C. Kennedy’s rishes and her being so out of touch compared with the criminal Cheney who never left the welfare teet unless it was to exploit the teet’s flow at Halliburton.
That’s kinda weird right there. There is no reason anybody needs to have driven a forklift to be taken seriously. Take it from a former forklift driver.
Would these fuckers please just go John Galt on us already and get it over with? Frankly they are starting to sound like my brother-in-law who always threatens to leave our dull parties but conveniently manages to stay long enough to consume all the beer in the house.
Actually that’s exactly what he’s doing.
Working in a sweatshop isn’t the best job, but it’s not the worst either is really old marketing when you consider these shitholes have been operating for at least 25 years.
What galls me most is the country he’s focused on. Solutions for places like Cambodia – that is deeply and irrevocably affected by an American foreign policy – aren’t going to come from the likes of patronizing assholes spewing 30 year old rhetoric designed to make greedy capitalists feel better. Or to be more accurate, designed to persuade the public that their hearts are in the right place. And heh, there’s only so much you can do, right?
Bubba, if you’re a former forklifter, how can I take you seriously? Did it make you sweat?
Well, why not? They can’t really be much worse off if they’re rag-pickers now, & someone should be able to make a little profit here, shouldn’t they?
Or: What Lesley said.
You gotta love the big chunk o’explanin’ that Kristof leaves out, too, to wit: we should encourage more sweatshops to produce even more consumer goods cheaply to be sold to…people in other countries who no longer have disposable income because their countries no longer make anything and rely instead on cheap imports from sweatshop countries.
The part of it that really rubbed me the wrong way though, was him telling Obama that he needs to see this and think about it, presumably instead of wasting time on plans to re-build American manufacturing so that you and I don’t end up scavenging garbage dumps.
I must say that the Palatelitist 9000 had wonderful air-conditioning and the sound system was top-notch. The drink holder was too small.
The 10,000 fixes the drink holder issue.
Although half the engine’s resources being diverted to the inset-TV on the back of your chair’s a bit weird.
Kristoff disingenuously paints outsourced manufacturing as a panacea for third world economies. Sweatshops will lift the people out of poverty…eventually. Like never.
Third world sweatshops are probably evolving at or below the pace of the North American minimum wage. From what I can tell, with inflation factored in, the minimum wage has never been lower.
I vaguely recall that John Sladek began his career as an author by writing the technical manual for a forklift truck, so they are not incompatible with seriousness.
The comments on Kristof’s blog about this are actually pretty interesting and well worth a read. A couple of excerpts:
and
I wonder who Kristof is really advocating for in all this.
Is it the people in the dumps? The people in the sweatshops?
Or is it Nike (and such as)?
Well, cool.
Can you guys point me at somebody offering non-mainstream solutions to these problems that are working?
Or, and it’s kind of hard to tell here, are you just delighted with the status quo?
I’m serious. I don’t have a dog in this fight. I thought the Kristof piece was valuable in the way it made me think about effective, real-world solutions.
So if he’s evil and objectively pro sweatshop, who DOES have good, functional, implementable solutions that aren’t just rich comfortable american foot stamping?
mikey
Oh, c’mon Thunder.
Nick Kristof has a body of work. I think to honestly question his compassion is pretty disingenuous.
You can question his policy prescriptions, but questioning his motives seems pretty harsh to me, and probably should come with some sort of background of his corporate evilness…
mikey
OK, Bubba and Bouffant, I give. You guys are right–mea culpa about working a real job.
Kristof’s problem is that he’s content to say “well, sweatshops are bad, but starving is worse”.
The general principle of the economy having a grand arc is a good one. The problem is that, under people very like Kristof, the terminal end of that arc – citizenship in a First World social democracy, ready access to a productive life spent in labors of the mind – has basically been cut off and left to bleed to death.
A man who goes from making just enough to eat to making just enough to have a roof over his head has nothing to be thankful for, and however positive a step it might be, it’s not anything like a sufficient one.
A man who goes from making just enough to eat to making just enough to have a roof over his head has nothing to be thankful for, and however positive a step it might be, it’s not anything like a sufficient one.
Are you sure you want to stand up and say that to a man without a roof over his head?
mikey
I think the first thing I’d say to someone without a roof over his head is to start shooting.
Or, in less metaphoric / pissant troll terms, organizing. Kristof is trying to game the system in favor of the nickel-and-diming shop-runner elite in an environment where decaying labor standards have already basically produced an unworkable market. The costs to companies to provide a living local wage are generally minimal; the problem is that there’s no international enforcing body as there is with the UN and human rights, so there’s a race to the bottom – kind of like if the US had abolished slavery in 1960 and US business were regularly renationalizing under whichever state allowed the use of the stoutest whips. Wouldn’t make smaller whips a bad thing, but it wouldn’t make them sufficient, either.
You can question his policy prescriptions, but questioning his motives seems pretty harsh to me, and probably should come with some sort of background of his corporate evilness…
mikey
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I’ll start with Joe Klein and work my way around, mikey.
Right now, I gotta do my laundry.
I spent exactly one day in the slums of Mumbai, picking over garbage heaps and sewer water to see the schools, houses, and factories of the poor, so I can’t exaclty speak for them. I can, however, do a better job of it than this douchebag.
It isn’t true that people who aren’t working in sweatshops aren’t working. They have remarkably complex cottage industries they they design, own, and execute themselves. For example, recycling: some people pick through the streets for recyclable plastics; they sell bags of it to the owners of large melting tubs; they melt it down, dye it, and stretch out the plastic into cord; another machine cuts the cord into pellets; the pellets are sold to manufacturers at a profit. The slums are a beehive of entreprenurial activity. They are also noxious death traps.
Now here is what amazes me: the Indian government passed a law in 1995 that would give the residents their own free flats, allowing the slums to be demolished. This law is enormously unpopular, among the slum dwellers. It is partly that they know they will be cheated out of their flats and moved around someplace else, but it is also that they do not want to be forced into sweatshop jobs where they don’t have any ownership.
The press in India and here tries at times to portray them as lazy, greedy, and criminal, and at others as hapless victims in need of someone to run their lives. Of course, they DO need help – starting with clean water, decent schools, and a functioning sewage system. What they don’t need is to have their suddenly valuable land taken from them and their means of livelihood disassembled and auctioned off.
They vote, they scrounge up money to send their kids to private schools so they can learn English – what they don’t do is idle on refuse heaps all day and sob for the poor millionaires who are too hampered by labor regulations to enslave them.
Working in a sweatshop? Pshaw.
Luxury!!!
We used to dream of working in a sweatshop.
Back then we used to have to wake up 2 hours before we went to sleep, and start work the previous evening, and we would pay the shop owner a dollar a day for the privilege of working in his plant 36 hours a day!
Times were tight, but it taught us values!
Such a shitmoat I’m gonna build around my Pulitzer. You Sadly Pathetics will NEVER SEE IT.
mikey, Kristof is comparing sweatshops simply to toxic dumps and not to any other alternative. HTH you see through to the essential dishonesty of his piece.
If not, try this:
“I hate my job.”
“You should be grateful. Some people have to work in sewers all day.”
“I don’t have enough food for my children.”
“You should be grateful. Mrs Jones next door cannot have kids.”
Do you see? It doesn’t magic away a bad thing that you can think up something that would be worse. It’s like saying being kicked in the teeth isn’t so bad because you could also have your nuts stomped. No. Being kicked in the teeth is still bad, dude.
Damn.
You guys live in a wacky, lockstep world.
You scare me as much as THEY do…
mikey
I wonder who Kristof is really advocating for in all this.
Good question. When Lou Dobbs, over-weight business reporter, started not to be a typical business brown-nose, & began railing against corporate entities shipping jobs over-seas, I questioned his ulterior motive, thinking “low/no taxes for businesses that keep jobs here” was his ultimate goal.
Then the (pseudo) populist thing took off for him, & who knows? And who knows w/ Kristof, who’s always struck me as a “no particular reason to read this shit” columnist. Though he did have an interesting one a month or so back on iodine deficiency & intelligence in the “developing” world.
The solution? Not pretty. There are too many people on the planet, & not enough shit to go around, if you want everyone to have a simple, lower middle-class American life, w/ running water, sanitation, electricity & everything else we computer-using literates would consider a minimum. That is, enough labor-savers to allow for the leisure time to type in the ethersphere as though there’s no tomorrow .
The solution is death on a massive scale, or complete human extinction. A matter of degree, essentially.
I am seriously glad to be my age at this time, as I’ll be able to laugh at it all as it screams downhill, but I’ll be gone before it loses it’s humor. (I. e., affects ME!)
On that note, I wish all a New & Improved Yr.!
P. S.: Go ahead, get a job. I’ve had several. They’re not all they’re cracked up to be.
compliance with labor standards was a key reason for them to remain in the country.
Cambodia benefits from a bilateral trade agreement with the US and some heavy influence by the ILO to improve labour standards.
From the ILO’s FAQs on Cambodia labour standards.
A fairly recent paper on labour monitoring in Cambodia’s garment industry highlights conditions the workers – mostly women – endure:
http://www.realizingrights.org/pdf/Labor_Monitoring_in_the_Garment_Industry_May2007_A_Marston.pdf
Mikey, few would disagree that earning $45 a month working 12-16 hours a day in a toxic sweatshop enduring a lot of unreported harrassment because you’re shitscared you might lose your job, is an improvement over foraging for food in a garbage dump on no income, I believe the point is much more should and can be achieved for factory workers in the third world. Outsourcing of manufacturing started in the 80s and it’s like pulling teeth to change conditions.
Can you guys point me at somebody offering non-mainstream solutions to these problems that are working?
Uh, BRAC has been doing sustainable development in Bangladesh for 30 years or so. It is kind of a two-steps-forward proposition, and the government there is so useless that at one time BRAC was educating more of Bangladesh’s school-age children than the Bangladesh public school system was, so there is that. The Grameen Bank and its like organisations around the world have been doing some really amazing things with microcredit that actually do grow local economies in ways that benefit the people living in them, as opposed to turning them into the wage-slaves of overseas absentee (land)lords. Personally, I’m in favour of solutions that keep people on their (ancestral or otherwise) land, rather than drawing them to urban areas and forcing them to live in tenement slums, which is what generally happens with sweatshop economies — the rural areas empty out, and the urban areas fill up with desperate migrant workers, to the detriment of both places.
I also think Kristof’s committing a huge fallacy of the excluded middle. “Better than nothing” is about the softest bigotry of low expectations I’ve heard in a while. Maybe if people in the Global North really did care about poverty in the developing world, we’d do something about making our transnational corporations create and enforce labour standards worldwide, instead of only where rich white people live, and then only under governmental duress. If being caught running a sweatshop meant you’d lose your North American business, sweatshops would almost entirely disappear post-haste.
And living in a wacky, ambivalent world where saying, “you’re *lucky* to be practically enslaved to this sweatshop, mister” is better than saying, “y’know, maybe we should do something about both the guys in the dumps *and* the guys in the sweatshop”…
How, precisely?
I mean, are you utilizing the law of averages?
Hoping that one of these days, people like Kristof have to come up with an idea that isn’t awful and degrading to humanity because they can’t be wrong one-hundred times out of a hundred?
Fuck that.
This response to Kristoff in the New York Times makes the point (bolded by yours truly):
Mikey, there was a time in the US when bands of hungry children picked through garbage on the streets, and families could not feed themselves without the extra income that their youngsters brought in.
The argument against ending child labor was the same one Kristof uses – the lucky kids are the ones with jobs!
What would you say to the poor, deluded, middle-class progressives who wanted to take bread out of the mouths of working people so that they could feel better about themselves?
But if you watch feel-good movie of the year and likely Academy Award winner “Slumdog Millionaire” you will see that it is possible to get out of absolute poverty in the worst slum in India, win a fortune AND get the super-model.
Reagan-era Hollywood storytelling in a Third World setting — with a sexy torture scene to bring it into the 21st century.
A triumph!
Applying Kristoff’s theory of economic relativity here at home, how about the schlubs having to enlist in droves because they can’t find or get a job anywhere now, not even a crappy minimum wage job. Sure they risk being wounded and/or killed in Iraq, but at least they’re “employed.”
I like Kristof’s argument but I would take it one step further.
I propose that the impoverished slum urchins of the Third World be rounded up and sold on the international market as slaves. Surely their daily ration of slave-gruel will be better than eating garbage or nothing at all — their work aprons and canvas smocks better than the shameful nakedness of their present indigence. Would they rather huddle under muddy tarps or enjoy the warmth and comfort of modern slave quarters?
Won’t these abolitionists think of the children? Slavery now! Slavery forever!
The fact is, liberals know nothing of hard work, they are subsidized by the liberal media to be biased.
Adrian, we could even consider a more “modest” proposal…
Ruppert: Bullshit!
I’m not subsidized by the liberal media to be biased. I’m paid a full salary by the gov’t. to be biased! And I’m not a weak-kneed, spineless liberal.
tigrismus:
Yum yum …
Essentially, Mikey, Kristoff is just another handsomely-suited, western porker dangling a moldy, shriveled carrot in front of a starving person and calling it food. Not just calling it food, but consulting with the starving person – as if they’re on some equal footing – and asking “Is this food?” And when the starving person replies “Yes, to me this is food,” as anyone would expect them to, taking that carrot he knows has very little value and marketing it as nutritional.
And speaking of topsy turvy approaches, I think a full-bellied westerner standing on a garbage heap in Cambodia asking impoverished scavengers what food is when he knows damn well what it is makes him rather scummy.
I’d just like to say that presenting labor rights and jobs as mutually exclusive is a poisonous supply-sider meme that refuses to die, one that fails in any meaningful sense to describe reality (allowing sub-right jobs to exist results in the degradation of life for everyone else and the further erosion of the local middle class); worse, it presumes, as all supply-side dross does, that the employer knows best and should be the one setting the terms on which the job is done, that the owner is in charge of the contract, that the golden rule is who has the gold makes the rules.
It’s a workable paradigm for an economy built from whole cloth, but America isn’t one – as every attempt to ‘let the market work’ readily winds up showing. (Of course, the sick irony is that bust cycles seem to recur in 8-year cycles these days – so by the time the sucker goes down, the supply-siders are out of office and whining again about the free market being interfered with.)
This kind of false dichotomy means a great deal, and fighting it isn’t just a matter of “lockstep”. It’s a well-accepted element of faith in the DLC and other corporatist plant bodies in the Democratic Party, which means that if we let “pity these poor workers who are being denied the chance to work by the hated union” shit slide, it happens to us next.
If Kristof gets to make his voice heard, the next New Deal becomes about slashing regulation and letting all boats rise with the tide.
And I’m not particularly attached to the American economy, but what happened to Argentina happening to the US isn’t something I imagine those of you with savings accounts are gonna want to live through.
A relative who lives in Cambodia (in a nice house on a very nice income) used to (not sure if she still does) support child labour. Not for her kid, who happens to be half Cambodian, but for the impoverished kids and their families. Like Kristoff, she has argued that the alternative is worse and she’s right, of course. I just don’t get supporting the lesser evil as a solution or a feasible plan for someone’s future.
You guys live in a wacky, lockstep world.
You scare me as much as THEY do…
Mikey, it’s not that anybody begrudges anybody else a trip off the garbage dump. It’s that it’s a step up on the escalator headed down. The purpose of the sweatshop is not to raise anybody up, it’s to deliver products more and more cheaply.
I’ve read Kristof on other things and enjoyed him – although was he the guy whining about $250 000 a year in NYC?* – and it’s safe to say that he probably knows more about economics and Cambodia than I do. In this case, however, there’s a big picture being missed in which the poor the world over are offered the holy grail of shit jobs at rates of pay and with working standards that only decline. When Cambodians can’t make stuff cheaply enough these jobs disappear and some other place picks them up.
So: help ’em build roads and bridges and telephone lines and plumbing and whatever, I’m for it – and also for factory jobs in reasonable conditions. But laissez faire doesn’t do the world many favours.
*Flame bait.
And more to the point, isn’t it strange that he can’t see the very obvious connection between the shitty life of the sweatshop and the (comparatively) paradisiacal life-choice of selling one’s ass to pedophiles?
$250 000 a year in NYC
I think that was Nicholas Lemann.
And more to the point, isn’t it strange that he can’t see the very obvious connection between the shitty life of the sweatshop and the (comparatively) paradisiacal life-choice of selling one’s ass to pedophiles?
Let us not forget that many of these countries also suffer from a severe gender imbalance, so if it weren’t for sex tourism these lads probably wouldn’t be having sex at all!
My views on sweatshops are shaped by years living in East Asia, watching as living standards soared — including those in my wife’s ancestral village in southern China — because of sweatshop jobs.
What an asshole. he even throws in the old; ‘.. well I’ve been there, I know what its like…’, which he obviously never had. Why dont you ask you mail order bride’s family or friends what working in a sweatshop is like, the unsafe conditions, the physical & mental abuse, sometime not being paid. I know, pace Megan, hes trying to be cute and oh so contrarian, but having seen the inside of these places, after reading this shit, i want punch his lights out…
OK, back to ‘het snark…….’
Yes. Google “Hugo Chávez”.
and another thing, a lot of this is based on the so called ‘fact’ that providing safe & secure working environment means that things cost more, generally is not the case. Ensuring that working hours are restricted, staff are safe (a lot of sweatshops are predominantly women workers and male bosses), and HSE is followed usually means that productivity is higher than places that don’t. In SE Asia, the standards for he good places are well below what you would expect in Europe or N America, but its better than living on a rubbish dump, ffs.
Oh, is that what they call Teh Snark in Holland?
Seeryus flame bait & beyond my pay grade, but considering how much effort and money is usually thrown at pissing all over anti-US leaders, they tend to make pretty uninstructive examples, especially in periods when investors will spend money on anything.
how many of the women and girls are pressured to blow the boss for perks.
Would you really say that to a poor woman who can’t blow anyone for enough to buy a handful of rice?
BTW, another good thing to google is the recovered factories movement in Argentina. That’s a non-conventional solution to the sweatshop thing if ever I saw one. Particularly since the first factory to be thus recovered was the Brukman suit factory–yep, a CLOTHING sweatshop. Sweatshop no more, and the seamstresses are still working–for themselves, with no male boss to breathe down their necklines. Gotta love that!
somebody asked for examples:
theworkingworld.org
http://www.worldblu.com/ – democratic workplaces
their list for 2008
Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International
http://www.fairtrade.net/
http://www.nosweatapparel.com/ (this is in the US. I can vouch for the Keds.)
Most North American garment factories were hellholes that exploited immigrant women before they shifted overseas where they could carry on the same shitty practices indiscriminately for lower wages.
Another modest proposal:
In keeping with the spirit of free enterprise and “market solutions,” impoverished children of the world’s shantytowns should be allowed to sell their organs, limbs, etc. on the international market. Certainly, life is less fun with only one kidney rather than a full set of two, but the income from a kidney sale would be enough to feed one ragamuffin and a good many of his or her relations for more than a year. Would we sooner let a little girl die of starvation rather than let her sell a cornea or a patch of skin?
Opponents of organ sale are snatching food from the mouths of hungry children. Won’t somebody other than Mr. Kristof think of the children? Organ markets now! Organ markets forever!
Um, yea I’m going to have to agree with Mikey, though i’m sure we both share no love for Kristof. Alot of you guys seem to have an ass-backward view of how human societies develop, where everything was fine until teh markets invaded.
Humans had been dirt-eating, dirt farming poor people for thousands of years until the industrial revolution. Every country that has ever dragged itself out of this awfulness, save perhaps some oil-rich Arab kingdoms, have all undergone wrenching social changes that even led to initial declines in living standards and even life expectancy as people moved from the countryside to cities, taking up shitty jobs that bore little if any fruit for the generation that made the change. People in developing countries today have an even harder time of it since they have to compete against already highly advanced economies. You dont have to like it, its just a fact. Pointing it out doesn’t amount to advocacy of poverty for third-worlders.
It would be one thing if the initial sweatshop, low-wage drudgery model of economic development wasn’t bearing fruit. Except, you know, it has. Although absolute poverty is about the same as it was (i.e. the number of poor people), the world just saw an astonishing fall in the proportion of people in poverty over the last 25 years despite massive population growth, mainly in places where that model has been replicated over and over. The children of those who slaved in factories are more likely to be educated and have more productive and higher-paying jobs. And that’s another thing, wages have risen dramatically in these places if you hadn’t noticed.
So yea, acknowledging some of the above would be useful I guess.
Opponents of organ sale are snatching food from the mouths of hungry children. Won’t somebody other than Mr. Kristof think of the children? Organ markets now! Organ markets forever!
This snark would be more effective if T. Sowell had not already made the same argument in non-snark mode.
Ok, so the misery *caused by* the industrial revolution in England and the United States was necessary — and must be repeated in every other society. Congrats; that’s exactly what the robber barons said then, and what their modern equivalents say now. Why don’t you just admit you’re a libertarian and be done with it?
ha yep, wow dude, you saw right through me. that’s exactly what i’m saying.
“Luxury!!!”
I can’t believe it took so long in the thread to reach this. “Aye, we were poor then. But we were happy.”
My take-away from the Kristoff piece was the inherent and inevitable race to the bottom of the “free” market, which will affect everyone, everywhere, the more capitalism is globalised. UNLESS other forces intervene, such as unions, environmental laws (and their enforcement), and so on.
The antipathy toward these proven benefits for great masses of mankind is one of the things (but not the only one) that marks the right-wing as, not only stupid (since it will result in the impoverishment of them, too), and hypocritical (to the extent that feel themselves to be “Christians” and therefore benign toward their neighbors), but, in the end, yes, say it with me, now: evil.
Todd:
You use England and the US as examples, to which I strongly disagree. History no more demands that the industrializing world repeat child labor or industrial drudgery than modern typsetters need repeat the habitual exposure to lead and hot presses dogging the sixteenth-century printer. Many of the hard-won lessons of the Industrial Revolution are pretty roundly repeatable without the need to ruin people’s lives – a good example would be Japan, which managed to spend the 50s through 70s emitting poisonous levels of heavy industrial and agricultural pollutants without going through the intermediary stage of proletarian serfdom and robber-baronetcy present in the US or UK during their industrial revolution.
It’s an easy argument to buy into, but as an admittedly amateur student of history I don’t feel it’s a sound one. Economics isn’t a natural process but a human one, and cultural and ideological appropriation can do amazing – and sometimes horrible – things. The long, convoluted history that produced the Holocaust, for instance, was completely absent in the Rwandan genocide – which nonetheless managed to pretty efficiently adopt Himmler’s methods of organized, industrial-scale manslaughter. If first-world results can come without second-world experience in the taking of human life, why should the improvement of it be different?
It’s very simple — assume that Kristof is right. If that were the case, any organizing or legislating for better labor standards means that foreign investors would bolt (which is not really what actually happens, see Cambodia for example). They do have to go somewhere else, though, so that means that while the people of Shitholistan A lose their shitty slave jobs. BUT, the people of Evenworseshitholeistan now get to have shitty slave jobs! And of course, they were worse off, so hooray for them!
I don’t really get how pointing out that Kristof presents a false dichotomy is wacky lockstep thinking. I mean, you don’t say that about how we all think Bush is a douchebag.
Adrian:
http://www.gatt.org/wharton.html
If you’re not familiar with The Yes Men, you should become so.
Oh, right wing cocksucker pundits. What won’t you defend?
The fact is, Gary Ruppert eats retard sandwiches. On Wonder Bread.
I mean, you don’t say that about how we all think Bush is a douchebag
Just because everyone thinks he’s a douchebag, doesn’t mean he’s not a douchebag.
Solutions?
Yeah, actually there are several – all proven successes. Subsidies for high-tech & state ownership, in conjunction with quality education & an ambitious R&D policy (see Japan post-1945), micro-banking (see India), worker-owned industry (see South America) … none of which require anyone to be poisoned or worked to death for a princely 48 cents an hour, 12-18 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, while being “housed” in a Free-Enterprise-Zone surrounded by 18-foot fences topped with razorwire … & all simple historical realities that Kristof has to be aware of. Ergo, he’s a bloody shill for multinational money-pigs masquerading as a humanitarian. Not too hard to see that when you look at what sort of stupid shit he writes:
Gentlemen, we must not allow the Third World to create an Exploitation Gap!
The Maquiladoras must move north to protect our precious bodily fluids!
The peons in the new sweatshops will thank us for their servitude with their dying breaths – as will the workers in the rest of the economy, as they watch their paychecks shrivel away to nothing while more & more of their jobs are “outsourced” … God, how I love the smell of lowered salaries & benefits in the morning … it smells like … VICTORY!
Yes We Can … win the race to the bottom!
“Why dont you ask you mail order bride’s family or friends…”
lobbey, way to undermine whatever correct and reasoned arguments you might have been presenting by being a completely and utterly sexist, racist prick.
That pic is fantastic. It’s what Max Headroom would look like if he spent the last 20 years huffing.
I contribute nothing to the conversation.