Aw, dude, I’m sorry. You’re right. I should have given some facts and some references. Just using an unsupported two-word insult to discredit you was bad form. Again, my apologies, I’ll try not to be such a jerk next time.
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But how many openings are there for vintage vacuum-tube radio repairmen or piano tuners? And how long until they get replaced by cheap disposable radios and auto-tuning or electronic pianos? We need to come up with enough demand for enough variety of skills to employ the majority of the workforce, and due to our culture, we’ll need them working way more than enough to fill society’s needs so we’ll also need a way to dispose of all the excess work…
Food inherently spoils, so agriculture was easy. Manufacturing came up with cheap disposable stuff and planned obsolescence. How do we make the products of skilled labor/services massively disposable?
Other animals can largely nest wherever they find a comfy unoccupied spot and harvest whatever they find. If humans do that, it’s vagrancy, breaking and entering, trespassing, theft/shoplifting/burglary (even if it’s just unused land or the house would be vacant for months and that food would just be thrown in the dumpster). Humans have to pay to get along just fine. And while they may always be able to create value for other humans, how much they get paid for it vs how much they have to pay to get along just fine is up to those paying them and those that they have to pay. When the amount that they can get paid decreases below the amount that they have to pay, it won’t really matter anymore whether they could technically still create value.
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You did attack me - when you tell me I may “have seriously fucked up standards”, that sounds pretty vicious.
So you can’t think of a better solution. That’s not constructive, so I guess we’ve got nothing more to discuss.
I’m sorry, that was a bit compulsive of me. Mea culpa trolla. I do acknowledge the complexity of the situation described in the article. However, the work environment described is explotative in a way that is detrimental in the extreme. That is a problem. It should not be accepted. Certainly those who consume the fruits of the technoshere should be made aware of the plight of those who toil in it’s guts.
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Me: Mainland Chinese- loads of high school friends went to work in factories in the Pearl River Delta.
Dorms: Our concept of personal space is completely different. These are a little shabby but normal dorms, my college was not all that different. Most of us consider some of our best memories to be from our days in our dormitories. There are some real issues with Foxconn dorms in that they often house people from all different provinces together.
Days off: I take two days off a month. 2-4 a month is pretty common for white collar workers in Shenzhen. If the Foxconn workers have to take off every week guaranteed they are complaining about it.
Workday: Yes. 1.5 hour lunch. Two is normal. Civil servants sometimes three hours. We nap and run errands during the time.
Yelling: All Chinese companies, teachers, parents etc.
Of course Dejian Zeng probably knows all this (if his family can afford to send him abroad to NYU he is .001% and most likely he has never worked before), and knows it’s not an issue here. But he’s a smart guy he knows that the real issues won’t get traffic so he puts on the “downtrodden Chinese” show for the foreign audience (big demand for this, I get asked all the time). This is probably ok and for a good cause.
Real issues are here and quite sensible points to raise:
https://wp.nyu.edu/gallatin_human_rights_fellows/category/2016/dejian-zeng/
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The reason they are working is for access to sex. Work, save enough money so they can buy a house and get married.
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IMHO I don’t really see the point of all this because in my experience Americans don’t give a shit what their communities, people or companies do in China- they just love stories like this so they can feel that they are still on top and get in a little virtue signaling while they’re at it.
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Sadly, you’re not wrong. We seem to get satisfaction from “feel good” moments, rather than “do (or be) good” movements. It’s frustrating to see happening.
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Oh, agreed - totally bad situation. I’d love them to have first-world jobs, but unless someone figures out a plan to do this, even these bad jobs are steps up from even worse jobs (coal mining, chemical exposure jobs, loss-of-limb jobs, starvation). And the whole suicide thing really irks me because people imply causation, and they do it in the opposite way.
Two things from my experience:
- As an engineer, I want to make manufacturing as easy as possible… I don’t want to create a bad job. But, even factories in Japan don’t think twice about adding menial tasks, because engineering an automatic solution is beyond their resources.
- But then a trip to a poorer Asian country made me reconsider. At a particular popular tourist site, each group hires a tuk tuk to bring them from the hotel to the site. Then that tuk tuk driver waits and hour or two nearby while you go through the site, and then takes you to the next site. There are probably 200 people who work 1 hour a day, and wait around the remaining 5. My engineer brain said a disney-world-style train could shuttle people all day … 20 people (15 drivers + 5 mechanics) could easily do this. But then 180 people would be out of work and it would devastate the local economy. I couldn’t think of a better solution than this menial job (besides a much-improved education system for the whole country, which is something I used to work on).
I would argue that retaining the drivers who work one hour per day is keeping those places in the third world. It locks in low labor prices. Reminds me of the time in Malaysia I went to a car wash. Inside the original structure of the car wash were eight guys with mops. The machinery had been ripped out.
Government policies in these places try hard to modernize their economies, while local capitalists want to maintain their status as the 0.01%. They don’t want an expanded middle class to turn them into the 10% or 50%.
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Americans have no idea how rich the US is. Only $450 a month was what I used to make as an engineer out of college, about twice the going rate today for unskilled labor.
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Aside from the pay and the dorms, this isn’t that different than American factory work.
For three summers during college I worked at a factory in Indiana that made door latches for three different car companies.
One year we had mandatory overtime and since it was a multishift factory that meant we had to go in early. And on Saturdays. So 58 hours a week. We also didn’t get paid during lunch or breaks. I had a couple different jobs but the ones I remember most was pulling rubber stopper things into a hole in the inside of the door latch and taking little mothers and putting them in a machine that pressed a gear onto the shaft. And I didn’t actually work for the company but I was a “temp” who worked for Manpower and didn’t have any benefits.
But I could go home to my parent’s house at the end of the day and I did get paid more.
Of course all that money went to pay for college and it wasn’t enough which is why I have tens of thousands in student loan debt…
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But WE’RE not buying the produce the farmer grows! We ARE buying the fruits of the factory workers’ labor. It’s not enough to say that their alternative is worse.
It is morally reprehensible to, say, take someone who is a slave working in some horrific condition rife with corporal punishment and bring them home to be your personal slave albeit with much nicer living conditions. You’re still a slaver.
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The carrot works better, unless you’re paying your employees next to nothing. Then yelling and incarceration might work better.
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Reply sent from iPhone.
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The fact that people want those jobs demonstrates nothing. For instance, if someone is living in abject poverty and utter misery and you offer them something slightly less miserable and pay them a pittance, and you’re profiting from their labor, of course you’re exploiting them!
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They should organize!
Grad students work hard too, I promise (Or I did, at least - still am, actually, technically until may 10). Everyone deserves to be well treated, have work that isn’t detrimental to their physical or mental health and that pays their bills. Even those lazy assholes known as grad students! 
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Are you a workplace with lower than expected suicide count? Are you admitting that that is how you measure worker satisfaction and quality of life? The if at the beginning of the sentence really has an impact on its meaning. Ignoring that and focusing only on the “you have seriously fucked up standards” will probably lead to the perception that you’re being attacked.
That’s bullshit. I can think of better solutions. They just aren’t relevant because my ideas aren’t going to be heard or adopted. Why do you think that having a solution is a prerequisite for being able to discuss negative situations that need to change? Discussion often leads to solutions, not the other way around.
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But that is how industrial society has always functioned. The middle and upper classes can only survive through the suffering of the industrial workers. The only thing that’s different now is that the industrial workers are elsewhere. Ultimately (and not that far away) production will be fully automated which sounds great until you wonder how the now displaced workers are going to live. And I suppose, being Earth Day and all, more and cheaper gadgets from automated factories won’t be a great thing for the environment either.
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