= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Dahlen comments on Why capitalism? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (163)
That's... better news than I hoped for. I had a hunch that extremely cheap labour is not so much a necessity than a preference of the producers, but not that the practice could be eradicated altogether.
You ever been to a village with a "sweatshop"? I have. They're the highest paying employers in town. The kids working at the "sweatshop" have more food, more clothing, and ultimately more education than their peers. These "sweatshop" factories result in more social benefit than all of the foreign aid that flows into these countries.
This is important. On an absolute scale, sweatshop jobs are not great jobs. But they are better than many of the jobs that most of humanity has worked over the centuries, both in terms of labor and reward.
Many people are enthusiastic about eliminating sweatshop jobs. Eliminating bad options does not create better ones. If a sweatshop job is the least bad option around, and you eliminate it without creating a better option, you have just worsened someone's life.
I wouldn't want to work in a sweatshop. I don't want anyone to need to work in a sweatshop. But we should recognize that bad options are the best options available when all the other options are even worse. You can't just get rid of bad things. You must also create something better to replace them.
Even if Nike wants to have it's T-Shirts manufactured at a higher hourly wage, it's not as easy for them to do so because they don't own the factories in which the T-Shirts get produced.
There were attempts by Western companies to pay workers more money but the factories owners simply lie over the wage they pay the workers. That wages also often is still over the average wage in the region.