With that kind of philosophy you have no safety or sanitary regulation.
Everyone should know how what consume is made. It’s up to us, as consumer, to hold industrials as responsible and it’s the up to politicians to impose them regulation and safety standards.
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The problem with talking about countries as if the rising tide is lifting all ships is that it ignores the fact that the true beneficiaries are the investor and political classes, not the working classes. The labor class especially is given only what it absolutely has to to survive, are denied political access, don’t have access to education for more valuable skillsets, and aren’t valued by companies because the labor supply greatly exceeds the labor demand even though the demand has risen.
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At $450/month?
The disappearance of cannery jobs where I live is viewed as a mixed blessing: hard, boring work, but the pay was better than the alternatives that have replaced them.
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yes automation of that kind of work is seriously the thing that needs to be done and is the easy part… how we deal with making a livable solutions for income for everyone replaced that is the hard part.
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I’m sure the workers in the factory and the families of the ones who committed suicide would have much higher morale if someone told them that. No amount of fewer suicides than you would statistically expect justifies the bad working conditions. If your low suicide count is how you measure worker satisfaction and quality of life, you have seriously fucked up standards. Most workplaces don’t need suicide nets on the outside of their buildings.
Upton Sinclair told the US how the sausage was made and it led to sweeping reforms of the meat packing industry and food regulations. I’d like to know, or in the least have a government agency that regulates those who handle my food because I don’t have the time to take a tour, if they’re even available to the public.
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[quote=“GulliverFoyle, post:14, topic:99559”]
Foxconn is one of the lesser evils among Chinese factory corporations. It doesn’t make it a good system, and it’s still part of that system.
[/quote]This is the real take away right here. And from personal experience Pegatron conditions are worse than Foxconn even with newer facilities (I think, it’s honestly hard to tell in China), though I have not been to that specific factory in the video.
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So, do you prefer free markets?
It looks to me that they have done good, and have improved the system. They offer jobs to people who want them. Is that exploitative? To whom? It seems to me the story of China in the last few decades is clear indication that the beneficiaries of China’s prosperity has very well included the working class. Your argument is that the working class deserves more. Perhaps they do. But to minimize the fact that they have actually gotten more than anyone might have ever dreamed just fifty years ago is a luxury we in the West can indulge with a great deal of glibness.
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Trump said he was going to force Apple to make iPhones in the USA, so that solves the problem. It would boost the cost to about $5k per phone but, hey…jobs, jobs, jobs!!!
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Not to mention the sniggering that you get when you tell people where you work.
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I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have safety standards or regulations. It’s that people don’t care. They don’t care about the person making their coffee or Big Mac either. Hell some even berate and yell at them for no reason. Or the millions of Americans who have shit jobs compared to yours. And the millions of migrant workers with shittier jobs than that. You expect people to care about others half a world away they don’t even see?
That’s a valid criticism that has been an issue since the dawn of civilization. There have always been elites who rise higher than those around them, because of those around them. Some are put there on a pedestal, some of them claw their way up there with force.
Certainly there is a lot of work to be done both in China and everywhere else. Still since some of their policy revisions, more and more Chinese are moving up. The middle class is growing by leaps and bounds. No one is saying its perfect, but I think overall there is progress.
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In a technical post-industrial economy, the types of jobs that replace unskilled labor tend to be unskilled service jobs, which pay less. The solution to that is education, especially in skilled jobs. But to do that, they’re has to be investment in education. The companies that made a bonanza off the backs of unskilled laborers have zero interest in giving anything back in return, and they have the political influence to dodge having to do so. Those companies use up people and places and then toss them away like dirty rags. And then when they do somewhere else to do it again, the discarded people they use often come to their defense because the companies that replaced them are even worse!
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Most emphatically. I’m a capitalist. That’s why I hate the corrupt marriage of corporatocracy and state. It’s little better than pre-industrial feudalism, which is why I call it corporate feudalism.
No, my argument is that the working class deserves equal political influence and equal practical freedom to organize (not just the theoretical right, but they have neither in China).
The last fifty years of Chinese history have been an orgy of organized criminals overthrowing the previous corrupt colonial government and installing themselves as the oligarchs that became China’s aristocracy. The idea that it’s been good for the Chinese people as a whole is ludicrous.
Are you saying that since it’s always been that way, we should just accept that it always has to be that way? That sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Oh I agree the conditions in China are improving. But there will come a time when these jobs will, as you pointed out, all be cheaper to automate, and then the labor force will be thrown away just like it was in the US, having gotten a couple generations of being a little better off and then back into the dirt of a depleted ecosystem while the Chinese oligarchs take their place among the international investor class on Mount Olympus. And then they’ll do it again in Brazil and Africa.
And to be clear, I’m not even against wealth inequality. Some people being richer than others is not something to which I’m opposed. I’m against the reigns power being left in the hands of the elites, allowing them to use the working and middle classes instead of work with them.
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So what you are saying is you cant afford that?
Cannery Works Represent!
Ekuk, AK. Summer of 89
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The problem there is there are not as many of those as there were of the unskilled jobs and hell I have seen a lot of my skilled work get automated away for the better but it meant less admins needed to do the work.
We will get to the point of having more people than work and it will be a hard problem to solve.
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I read these articles and I see the wages and working conditions that Americans will have to compete with if they want their manufacturing jobs back. Fortunately, our president has promised to make it happen and, at this point, I shouldn’t be surprised if he succeeds.
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I don’t know where to begin. You’ve got a lot of vitriol for things I didn’t say. Instead of attacking me, what’s your solution?
Do you not agree that the spate of near-daily jumpings in May 2012 is more likely a collective protest? If so, would you not agree that regardless of what the alternative lifestyles these workers might have had access to / been willing to subject themselves to for wage, they were saying that they wanted change in some organized fashion?
And coming back to bars on the windows – I think these are indicative of active prevention of these types of protest.
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Does assembling medical supplies by hand count? I worked for a summer at a warehouse putting together the valves and whatnots needed for saline bags and intubation. You had to dip a flexible tube into a container of solvent, then quickly insert the tube into a valve body before the solvent dried. There were usually 4 or 5 people, each adding a specific part onto the completed gadget, which eventually was put in a bag to be sterilized and shipped. It was brain-numbing, second shift work, but paid better than fast food work. It probably could be easily automated, but at the time, hands were cheaper than robots.
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Unless we reach the point in general purpose machine intelligence where humans are entirely obsolete, it should always be possible for humans to create value for other humans. Bear in mind, no one ever had to make anything. Other animals get along just fine without economies. Trade only exists because of the law of comparative advantage. In a specialist economy, it should actually be easier to find niches for new jobs. But people will have to be trained and educated to fill them.
And not just once. Education in a world of accelerating technological change requires continuing education of one form or another. It’s true that unskilled jobs will be demoted to hobbies and historical reenactment. But the genie can’t be re-bottled.
What we must absolutely make sure of is that the investor class don’t horde all intellectual property through their influence in the legislatures and courts, or they’ll turn the labor class into the rentier class unable to own anything, even their own daily lives. But that’s exactly the direction things are going. Private property rights only work if the majority of people aren’t locked out of exercising them. Again, we’re backsliding into aristocratic feudalism.
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