From a reader:
Globalization has been the ingenious “get out of jail free” card the corporations have played:
As these “savvy businessmen” go global to freely impose the conditions which appalled America a century ago (The number of confirmed dead from the Bangladesh garment factory collapse and fire Is approaching and will certainly surpass 1000,)
I offer this:
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911
At the time of the fire the only safety measures available for the workers were 27 buckets of water and a fire escape that would collapse when people tried to use it. Most of the doors were locked and those that were not locked only opened inwards and were effectively held shut by the onrush of workers escaping the fire.
As the clothing materials feed the fire workers tried to escape anyway they could. 25 passengers flung themselves down the elevator shaft trying to escape the fire. Their bodies rained blood and coins down onto the employees who made it into the elevator cars. Engine Company 72 and 33 were the first on the scene. To add to the already bleak situation the water streams from their hoses could only reach the 7th floor.
Their ladders could only reach between the 6th and 7th floor. 19 bodies were found charred against the locked doors. 25 bodies were found huddled in a cloakroom. These deaths, although horrible, was not what changed the feelings toward government regulation. Upon finding that they could not use the doors to escape and the fire burning at their clothes and hair, the girls of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, aged mostly between 13 and 23 years of age, jumped 9 stories to their death.
One after another the girls jumped to their deaths on the concrete over one hundred of feet below. Sometimes the girls jumped three and four at a time. On lookers watched in horror as body after body fell to the earth. “Thud — dead; thud — dead; thud — dead; thud — dead. Sixty-two thud — deads. I call them that, because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time, at the same instant,” said United Press reporter William Shephard.
The bodies of teenage girls lined the street below. Blankets that would-be rescuers used ripped at the weight and the speed the bodies were falling. Fire Department blankets were ripped when multiple girls tried to jump into the same blanket. Some girls tried to jump to the ladders that could not reach the ninth floor. None reached the ladders. The fire escape in the rear of the building collapsed and trapped the employees even more.
A wealthy Bostonian who had come to New York for a Columbia University graduate degree, Frances Perkins (April 10, 1882 – May 14, 1965) was having tea nearby on March 25 when she heard the fire engines. She arrived at the scene of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in time to see workers jumping from the windows above.
Her words, spoken a little more than 50 years later, capture her own feelings and those of her contemporaries. “I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere. It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry. Mea culpa! Mea culpa! We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 boys and girls killed in a factory.
This scene motivated Perkins to work for reform in working conditions, especially for women and children. She served on the Committee on Safety of the City of New York as executive secretary, working to improve factory conditions.
Frances Perkins met Franklin D. Roosevelt in this capacity, while he was New York governor, and in 1932, he appointed her as Secretary of Labor, the first woman to be appointed to a cabinet position.
Frances Perkins called the day of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire “the day the New Deal began.”
——————–
The Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union burst into the national consciousness in 1909 when 20,000 shirtwaist makers went on strike in New York City. .
The 1909 strike lasted 14 weeks, Union membership grew to 25,000 by the strike’s end.. Most of the larger factories had settled with the growing union, and conditions for workers seemed to be improving.
But the owners of the Triangle Waist Company, the largest blouse factory in the city at the time, led the opposition to the 1909 strike, hfiring thugs and prostitutes to harass the workers as they picketed.
Triangle was among the few nonunion holdouts when the factory went up in flamesMarch 25 of 1911, killing 146 workers.
“Everyone noticed that the Triangle factory, the one nonunionized shop, was the place of the fire. The company’s refusal to work with the unions was especially poignant, because a decent fire escape, and factory doors that opened outward, had been among the strikers’ demands.
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http://www.laboreducator.org/stevens.htm
http://www.forward.com/articles/136018/
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http://www.csun.edu/~ghy7463/mw2.html
Cornell University – ILR School – The Triangle Factory Fire – Legacy – Legislative Reform
http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/legacy/legislativeReform.html
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/triangle/a/perkins_fire.htm
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My friend’s mother was a union organizer. We are in the 75 age group so not many people know of these stories. My friend says that her house was “wired” or “bugged” and that she remembers it and her father knew what the bugging equipment was because of his field of training. I recall when Regan took on the union for air traffic controllers and others as an indicator of future prospects; it was a dismal day. Thank you for this post. From my own perspective of the depression era, there was no work and my dad had to travel between MA and NY looking for work…. later, when my dad was gone and I was in high school I knew that the dads who belonged to unions had more of a “safety” or “security” built into the home. My friend Claire’s father had been gassed in World War I (as my father was driving an ambulance in France) but their stories did not match Ernest Hemingway’s…. unions made some of the family lives better for which I am grateful today. Thanks for your posting this comment.
“A wealthy Bostonian who had come to New York for a Columbia University graduate degree, Frances Perkins (April 10, 1882 – May 14, 1965) was having tea nearby on March 25 when she heard the fire engines. ”
“I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere. It was as though we had all done something wrong.”
As a wealthy woman, Perkins could sit on committees where the workers were not included, but it was the workers on factory floors and in the streets for the ILGWU strike, who won these reforms. We unionized workers here, today, are inextricably tied to the working conditions of people all over the planet. We’re the ones who have to support our brothers and sisters in Bangladesh, because the rich today have twisted even charity into self-serving arrogance. No, they aren’t going to admit they’ve “done something wrong”, here or in garment factories in Bangaldesh, or at Foxconn in China.
Teachers especially are standing in the middle of this drama now. Every time I try to drink a cup of tea, I see this on my Google news, and hear people dying right on my screen. I understand what unions are for, and I’m in one, but the people dying are on the other side of the planet, sewing clothes in sweatshops to make Walmart’s profits in Texas.
They won’t support the kind of legislative import guarantees needed to “level the playing field”, and bring worker safety and living wages to our wage “competitors” in the third world. Instead, they now espouse an ugly theory that increasing their profits even more is the only salvation for humanity. They’re going to direct “market forces” to address the poverty, by using their “charitable” funds and their government influence to bolster their own corporate profits (at public expense), thus motivating corporations to do good..
“While the private sector does a phenomenal job meeting human needs among those who can pay, there are billions of people who have no way to express their needs in ways that matter to markets….We used foundation funds to set up a system to make market forces work in favor of the poor, guaranteeing purchases so drug companies could make a little bit of money or at least not lose their shirts. As the value of this approach became clearer, governments put in money to add to the market incentives …”
Bill Gates, “My New Model for Giving”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2012/09/18/bill-gates-my-new-model-for-giving/2/
In the case of the Walton family, the connection to their charitable work against unions is grim and direct. Education and health workers don’t burn in our workplaces, but we can and must ally ourselves with those who do.
http://lightbox.time.com/2013/05/08/a-final-embrace-the-most-haunting-photograph-from-bangladesh/#1 Thank you, Diane, for this most poignant analogy.
Oh, the painful sadness of the dead in Bangladesh and the memories of those immigrant girls leaping to their deaths where NYU now stands, a meager wall placque all that remains of that terrible day in 1911. Amer business has exported its worst practices to foreign lands with very cheap labor and very expensive dictators who jail, torture, and kill dissenters. The boatloads of goods produced there sell all over the place here. We get Apple’s ingenious devices produced by barracked labor in China and Walmart’s cheap pants sewn by the hands of dead Bangla mothers, invisibile to us until a catastrophe reveals the terrible price for the globalization enrichening a handful among us. The billionaires and their minions rampaging through Amer pub schls demand “college and career ready” graduates for their global regime. What nerve for such unprincipled owners and leaders to compel us to feed their ugly system. Instead, we should demand that they humanize their system first, because conditions at home and abroad are NOT “graduate-ready” to receive humanely and fairly the young we develop. It is immoral for teachers to produce labor for an immoral industrial regime, something Dewey asserted 100 yrs ago and Freire 50 years ago. We assert our own professional ethics when we demand a humane “graduate-ready” society based in democracy, equality, ecology, and peace.
Well said irashor, well said.
Does anyone know where we can get a list of companies that use these factories and workers in Bangladesh?
Great question Linda.
I would also like very much to know all of the names and all of the products.
A terrific group – Students Against Sweatshops – is one way to help. http://usas.org/
Let’s make sure to link current events with this history in classrooms, using quality non-fiction literature. That’s what authentic, deep reading means, not some bubble on a Pearson test: BRAVE GIRL: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers Strike of 1909- http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780061804427
I had a blog post about it here: http://unpackingpicturebookpower.blogspot.com/2013/03/shaping-history-one-woman-at-time.html
This, and other union history stories, are being scrubbed from our classrooms. Teachers must keep this history of labor alive. Young people today believe all their workplace benefits were “gifts” of their companies, management and owners.
Our new “national standards” must include the struggles of organized labor.
I agree. Also the text being “fed” to kids is being preselected by corporate interests.
Another picture book title that is remarkable and compelling is BREAKER BOYS: How a Photograph Helped End Child Labor, by Michael Burgan http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780756545109
It was barely a century ago that we WERE Bangledesh- an emerging industrial country with highly concentrated wealth, minimal/nonexistent regulation, and a mass of vulnerable and desperate workers.
Sandy: “Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.”
Make no mistake–we will, once again, BE Bangladesh if we do not stop the cannibalization of the American public school system.
But–yes WE WILL!
My first thought on reading this was that it was “non-fiction” (or at least isn’t considered to be fiction yet — give the corporate reformers time). Common Core demands non-fiction texts, right?
Lets make the architects of Common Core eat their words. There are many “nonfiction” texts out there just like this one.
Seriously — wouldn’t that be a project? Simply gathering an assortment of pro-union nonfiction texts that were aligned to the Common Core, sorted by grade level. Worth considering. Probably worth doing.
Teachers (of all grades) should be aware that authors of non-fiction books (often picture books, with illustrations and/or photos) are well aware of this opportunity and are eager to work with teachers. The quality (including difficulty level, text markers, back matter, bibliographies, research notes, etc.) of their work is extraordinary, often winning major awards. Please find them at blog: http://inkrethink.blogspot.com (INK means Interesting Non-fiction for Kids) and also check their pilot/expanding school-interaction site, INK Think Tank: http://inkthinktank.com. They are eager to make authentic learning happen in classrooms.
So correct!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We learn from History all of the mistakes that were made ..all of the mistakes that costs people their lives..THEIR LIVELIHOODS!!!!!
That is what education is all about.;
It must be included in the curriculum ..IT MUST.
These corporate people making these decisions need to butt out.
The word is slowly getting to the people but not fast enough.
We should and shall never forget the Holocaust, the Slavery, these factory disasters and so many more.
I will teach these things..fire me if you want.. I will teach each of these tragedies that occurred because of THE MONEY MONGREL BIG GREEDY BUCKS MEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WILL….WILL….WILL….
My statement that I made up: we have a FEED Market for the elite and so-called FREE Market for us peons. This is how the politicians get money for campaigns. Then when congress leaves office ALL campaign contributions are claimed as personal income and goes with the politicians. Congress passed this law for themselves. Is this in the CCSS? Of course not.
JCPenney, Mango Among Companies That Used Fatal Bangladesh Factory
by Nina Strochlic Apr 30, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
The list of retailers whose clothing was made at the Bangladesh factory complex where the collapse has killed nearly 400 is growing. Nina Strochlic on the unending cycle of tragedies.
Was your shirt or jeans stitched by one of the nearly 1,000 garment workers who were injured or killed in the recent factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh? You might want to check the label.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/30/jcpenney-mango-among-companies-that-used-fatal-bangladesh-factory.html
Two British companies have vowed to compensate victims while PVH Corp., the U.S. parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, agreed to support new, independent building safety inspections in Bangladesh and to underwrite any needed building or fire safety improvements.
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/05/western_companies_share_in_the.html
Diane, thank you for reminding your readers that the exploitation of workers that was exposed by the Triangle fire is not so different from what the Bangladeshi tragedies have now exposed. What’s different now is that there are many more entrenched obstacles to remedying this situation than there were then – too many consumers don’t identify with the victims, and the companies that exploit workers, in garments, computer electronics, mining, or just about any labor intensive industry, have been allowed to do so by government inaction and the power of moneyed capitalists who have learned how to bust unions. If your readers are interested in keeping the memory of the Triangle fire alive to protect workers today, please see http://rememberthetrianglefire.org
Thank You PVH for now picking up the ball and to make sure it gets done. I hope so anyway. This is the reason there are unions and so many died for us to not be totally enslaved by our employer. With the decline of unions people are becoming once again “Indentured Servants.” No one individual can negotiate with a company or corporation. You have no standing or power. Only by organization can you protect yourself and make changes against large power. All in “Art of War.” We still operate under those rules. Recently in under three weeks with under $25,000 we stopped a $90 billion, Measure J in L.A., tax until 2069 that only had one paragraph of language. We had to organize and cooperate in order to do that. All large projects take a team. No one individual can do it alone. Therefore, the necessity of unions against the super large multinational corporations. Now they are out of control with their greed for money and power. Organize and we can have a government that represents the “People” not just the elite. In California there was just a meeting of CREATE CA to reinstitute arts back into education. One week previous to that State Senator Curren Price and Assemblyman Ian Calderon had a hearing at the Grammy Museum in L.A. about how well the arts helps in high security prisons, youth authority and K-12 schools. The longitudinal studies show dramatic lowering of violence and coming back to jail and youth authority and in K-12 the same results also as the arts makes both sides of the brain work together with creative thinking. Even Boeing, Northurp-Grumman and JPL agree.
Why not use what works and is not expensive to implement?
Annie Leonard does a great job of explaining the Materials Economy in a 20-minute video.
http://www.storyofstuff.org/movies-all/story-of-stuff/
In fact, Annie Leonard would be a great person to research and do a video explaining the Story of the Demise of Public School Education in America. I just suggested that to her agent, and I gave Diane Ravitch as a great resource for Annie.
Do folks here really think that the citizens of Bangladesh would be better off if they were isolated from the international economy?
Being part of the “international economy” shouldn’t result in unspeakable death and suffering.
Not being part of it does result in unspeakable death and suffering though.
TE. So there’s no way to do that and not be crushed by a building and burned in a fire? If you’re dead the international economy is quite isolating. Grow a heart please.
Linda: a dicho [saying] in Spanish that might explain how likely your polite suggestion will be taken seriously, goes
“No pedirle peras al olmo” — don’t ask for pears from an elm tree [i.e., don’t ask for or expect the impossible].
Spoken like a true teacher. Thank you for your heartfelt comment.
🙂
I save my patience and politeness for the children. I take out my frustrations here. You would think there could be some concern for the dead more than concerns for the international economy for at least a day or so. I am still searching for a list of companies who employ these workers in Bangladesh, so I can add them to my list of what not to buy. A list that just keeps growing: Microcoft, JC Penney, Walmart, Netflix, NY Times, Amazon, etc. I rarely watch television or the corportate news anymore either. My husband believes they will be feeling the pain soon. Ha!
Look at the change in life expectancy at bieprth, maternal mortality rates, child waiting, stunting, literacy rates, basically anything you or more importantly the citizens of Bangadesh value. You want to deny the opportunity for these people to live the life you have.
Talk about not having a heart.
You’re clueless.
He’s not clueless. He is shedding light on a truth — as our capitalist economy goes global, so too must unions. They must.
And you believe he is advocating for unions? That was his point?
There of course is a way to do that, but there is no way for these women to avoid dying in childbirth, suffering from fistulas, watching their children die from malnutrition or drown in floods if you decide they can’t have “our jobs” and force them to go back to traditional subsistence farming on the delta.
Linda, this has to be one of your best comments.
And–TE–it’s ALL about the perpetuation of global suffering due to the 1% keeping the world’s wealth in the hands of the greedy, selfish few–adversely affecting everyone, all over the world. Help people in third world countries by paying them barely any money at all (not to mention any provision of health care) and forcing them to work in unsafe sweat shops (&, oftentimes, living in substandard housing provided by these corporation$) is, indeed, an act of great generosity on the part of our big bu$ine$$ corporation$.
(Wait…what? Isn’t this being done to provide cheap labor {of course, taking jobs away from American workers who might–gasp!–be unionized?} so these “corporations-who-are-people” and CEOs can rake in million$, billion$?)
In fact, I recently read in the WSJ that the Waltons DONATED (yes, DONATED) $1.6 million to help improve factory conditions. Donated?! Give me a break!
No–wait–that’s give THEM (1%ers) a break–a great, big TAX break!
On the backs of every worker in the world.
Oh, & BTW Bill & Melinda, just leave our schools ALONE and keep working on your clinics, schools & housing in countries like Bangladesh. (Or–how about using some of your billion$ to help eradicate the effects of poverty in your own country–you know, give some money to start clinics, healthy food programs, etc.?)
Actually it is about the elimination of global suffering through economic growth. That is what we have seen in China and around the world as a result of globalization.
Profit rates provide information and incentives. They tell us where the people are most in need of help to become more productive and give the folks who have the ability to raise their productivity a reason to do it.
What you are missing is that the life of a garment worker in Bangadesh, while still leaving them in poverty, is still better than the life they were leading in subsistance agriculture in the country side. If you reduce the number if jobs in the formal sector of the economy you will be pushing more people into deeper poverty, not fewer.
I think your heart is in the right place, but your policy recommendations would make the lives of most of these people worse, not better.
I’m sorry, Linda, my first sentence in the above comment was directed at your May 12th 7:00 PM comments to TE. The rest of my comments are directed to TE & to all others who profess that paying people lower than cost of living (yes, in THEIR countries) wages and placing them in sweat shops is going to ameliorate all the effects of poverty that they would otherwise suffer. BIG NEWS–they’re STILL in poverty, but now they’re also in hell for as many long hours as they work a day. (YOU go work in a sweat shop, TE, & see how much of a life improvement that is.)
And–as Linda pointed out–LOTS of them are DEAD, with many more to come, I’m sure. This fact certainly has enriched the lives of their families.
Working in a garment factory would not be an improvement in my life or yours. What you seem to find difficult to understand is that it is an improvement in the lives of the people who work there. If you take that option away, you will be making those people worse off, not improving their lives.
Take a look at the research linking vigilance against women and the lack of economic opportunity outside the home in Bangadesh and around the world. That may change your mind about reducing the opportunities for these young women to find independent sources of income.
I see your point, but I’ve also seen it used to defend brothels and what amounts to child slavery on cocoa plantations in Africa. “Better than the alternative…”
The international entrepreneurs often create an alternate set of miseries. To suggest that they are somehow “corporate missionaries” is to believe in the tooth fairy.
Ron,
The soloution to women feeling that becoming a sexworker is thier only option is to provide them with more options. This is what the garment industry in Bangladesh (and industrialization around the world) can do. If we curtail that option for these young women, the result will be more sexworkers, more child brides, more beaten women.
Slavery is another issue entirely. Being a slave is the absence of choice, so my argument can not be used to justify it.
Reading Exchange,
Foreign investment tends to find misery and eventually eliminate it. The solution to poor working conditions and low wages is more foreign investment, more opportunities for the citizens there, not less.
TE, this type of foreign investment is designed to profit from the lack of choice. Why would anyone choose to work under sweatshop conditions? Because the alternative is worse, of course.
That some investors would choose to profit from this situation is bad enough. That they would then choose to pat themselves on the back after things got better because the government reacted to their abuse of power being so bad that it resulted in sensational tragedy is just sick.
I have never unsubscribed to a thread, if that is even possible. I can’t even read TE anymore. He is making me sick to my stomach. Everything is stats and numbers. Disgusting excuses and rationalizations……..is this even a human being? Signing off
Linda,
You could try skipping his comments.
Ron,
I think you are right that people choose to work under harsh conditions for little pay because the other options are worse.
Where we disagree is that you would leave them only with the other worse options, while I would urge as many multinationals in as possible to give the workers, and especially the women, as many opportunities as possible. The solution to poor working conditions and low pay is not to refuse to buy anything made by a person in Bangladesh, but to buy more things made by a person in Bangladesh.
What is your solution to the lack of opportunity for the rural people of Bangladesh, Thailand, Kenya, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, ….
Global unionism would seem to be the only solution. We have reached a point where predatory capitalism can always move to another backwater.
I’m a grown up and can understand why things are the way they are, but to hear someone prattle on about how predatory capitalists are some kind of sainted saviors (because things get better when their abuses are exposed and corrected) is really disgusting.
“Venture philanthropy”, indeed.
Ron,
I certainly don’t think they are sainted saviours. If we had to depend on sainted saviours to create economic growth and prosperity I doubt any of us in the world would have gotten beyond subsistence farming.
What foreign investment does is gives people options that they would not otherwise have. The more options the better for the people, worse, of course for the foreign investors. That is why I argue to create as many options as possible.
Things don’t get better because poor working conditions in export industries are exposed\, they get better when the father in a family decides he does not have to sell his 14 year old daughter off to the local landowner because she could now contribute to the family by her working in the garment industry. I know Linda would now get upset that I seem to be advocating child labor. I am not. I just recognize that virtually all poor children in the developing world do hard and dangerous jobs (though we are making good progress on the Millennium education goal for most of the world). Making it illegal would only make those jobs more dangerous and difficult.
I am not sure how a global union would work. Would it require the same pay standards for all in an industry? Would the union set a pay scale that encourages expansion of an industry in a desperately poor country at the expense of existing members in wealthy countries? It would seem to me that country based unions would better look after the common interest of the citizens in the country.
Yes, yes, commerce is like a river flowing downhill, and the investors are like a mill wheel dipping into the river and extracting energy to be used for all manner of productive endeavors while leaving he river to do what it naturally does.
Is there such a thing as exploitation in your world, or is the concept incomprehensible to you?
Of course there is exploitation and oppression in the world. The most vicious forms of it take place in the rural areas of traditional societies where women are little better than the property of their older male relatives, where sharecroppers must buy and sell only with the landowner, where you must buy from the company store.
Density of choices is the best cure for exploitation and oppression. You achieve this by having more possible places for women to work, not fewer. You achieve this by respecting the choices that they make about their lives, not by insisting that they should be either paid more or not have a job at a garment factory at all. You archive this by saying you will help these women by buying more of what they make precisely because they are making it, not by refusing to buy it.
TE, there is no arguing this point with me. Bottom line: these people are NOT being paid even a decent wage, when they COULD be. The “global” (global, meaning comprehensive) economy is not, in fact, global, unless when is looking at the millionaires, billionaires & gazillionaires who are raking up the bucks in all parts of the world. (And why are certain third world countries third world in the first place? Strictly because their political leaders, or dictators, or moneyed people who live in those countries have stolen the money meant to actually run the country.Haiti is an outstanding example of this; the country has been propagandized, robbed and raped by its leaders and wealthy forever, Its people were/are purposely kept illiterate–and that’s how it all happens.)* And, say, it works SO well for the Waltons in Bangladesh or wherever, why not import it back to the U.S.?
TE, I do respect your right to have an opposing opinion and the fact that you are an economist, but I have to continue to more than wholeheartedly disagree with you.
It’s about PEOPLE.
*A bit off-thread–I know that blog readers here all see the dangerous parallels as to what’s happened in Haiti & other 3rd world countries vis-a-vis what’s going on here–right under our noses–with the privatization of public schools.
Retired, please don’t accord any respect to the slimy argument that dead workers should be grateful to the neoimperialists who suck out the value of their labor, so the surplus can never be reinvested in their own country.
What that argument does is expose the bankrupt and ignorant “economists” of the corporate education $$$ grab. Accord no respect to such mealy-mouthed presumption, please, because it is disrespect to those who are working, dying, and fighting for their own right to just livelihood.
This discussion has more or less passed on to other places, but I logged back on to report good news.
“Bangladesh’s government agreed on Monday to allow the country’s 4 million garment workers to form trade unions without prior permission from factory owners, a major concession to campaigners lobbying for widespread reforms to the industry following a building collapse last month that killed more than 1,100 people.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/13/bangladesh-trade-union-laws
The long and the short answer is democracy. Venceremos.
Retired,
Lets take your argument to the logical conclusion. Is what you mean by they could be paid more, but are not, something like a worker in Bangladesh creates $100 a week in value while only costing $10 to employ?
If so, your complaint is really that the factory owner is not maximizing profits. If the owner can make an extra profit of $90 by hiring an additional employee, the owner should make the hire, and another, and another, and another, until finally the cost of hiring the extra worker for a week comes close to (or the same as) the revenue the worker creates in that week. Any lower level of employment than that means that the employer is NOT maximizing profits.
The citizens of Bangladesh are working, dying, and fighting to earn a living every day on little patches of ground in the middle of a river delta that get smaller with each flood. In an average year, 5,000 die in floods. In a bad year, like 1974, 28,600 died in a single flood. Most of the poor everywhere in the world live in rural areas as subsistence farmers or landless laborers. Their struggles do not make good television, but they are the ones hoping to get a job in the city, a job in a factory.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/may/01/dhaka-may-day-protests-factory-collapse-video
This video (from the Guardian story I cited) takes us back to reality and the enormity of the crimes that are being committed against workers in Bangladesh. Owners there have been arrested, and we have an apologist here babbling trivial business-booster talking points. “If the owner can make an extra profit of $90 by hiring … blah blah.”
The other argument is even filthier, and I’m unwilling to relinquish this thread to it. The people rural and urban people of the world are robbed twice when foreign profit gouging is so deep and remorseless, it leaves no value left to invest in a country’s own infrastructure. A people’s labor has to build the prosperity of all its people, so what the factory workers are leading now is a defense of agricultural workers, too.
No country can live without agriculture. Bangladesh struggles to support its farmers, and there is a lot that could be improved if the urban workers could afford to buy decent food from them. That’s the in-country cycle being choked off by the Walton Family’s superprofits. Corrupt business interests prefer a destitute and displaced rural workforce, to drive down factory labor prices, just as our vicious armchair economist describes.
My husband is a professor of nutrition, and has visited Bangladesh villagers as part of World Health Organization programs, working with in-country scientists and (real) economists. teachingeconomist’s talking points are toxic drivel, and Linda is right to be outraged.
chemtchr writes: “The rural and urban people of the world are robbed twice when foreign profit gouging is so deep and remorseless, it leaves no value left to invest in a country’s own infrastructure.”
But don’t you think that protesting foreign profit gouging is UNAMERICAN?
There was never any money to invest in infrastructure domestically.
Where do you think the money to build railroads in th United States came from? Bond sales in Europe. Those terrible international investors paid to open up the great agricultural lands of the Midwest to the consumers in the east. Along the way they destroyed the jobs of the folks on the Erie Canal and hurt many farmers on the coast.
It must bother you that America celebrates the Boston Tea Party.
It does not, and I am puzzled about why you think it should.
Because it is a celebration of poor people making trouble for their benevolent benefactors from across the seas. Didn’t they realize that the British companies were only giving them more choices?
I have thought about your words, though, and I believe they can be made more palatable to human beings.
Your logic, in essence, says that giving people more options is always a good thing. If those people are living in grinding poverty, and the option you provide elevates them only slightly from grinding poverty, it is good. It should be accepted, if not celebrated. Correct?
The concept of “exploitation” is nonsensical. Giving people more options in life is always good.
Now, an opportunistic pedophile who finds a homeless child and offers to give them a place to live in exchange for molesting them is giving that child more options in life — right? Similarly, a pedophile who regularly takes “sex tour” vacations to Thailand and elsewhere in order to gain access to children that they can pay to molest is giving those children access to more options in life. Correct?
In fact, in both cases, the child may well die without the intervention of the pedophile, who can provide him or her with resources necessary for their survival. They should be accepted, even celebrated, to the same extent as the predatory capitalist you describe in your argument. Correct? It’s all about providing options, even lifesaving ones.
TE, I think everyone here could agree with the statement that predatory capitalists are every bit as laudable as child sex tourists and traffickers. What do you say?
I have no problem with poor people making trouble. My objection here is that rich people are deciding that poor people are making bad choices so they are campaigning that those choices not be available to them without thinking through the implications of their decisions.
I think you are missing something important about urban factory life in your statement that working in poor conditions only elevates the garment workers slightly. For these women (and 80% of the workers are women), create the possibility that their children, especially their daughters, can live a better life than the parents. This is not possible in the traditional rural societies which offer the only alternative life most of these women have.
Did you miss my description of exploitation and oppression in the previous post or simply ignore it? It is true that the exploitation and oppression women suffer in traditional societies is routine so folks have come to accept it. Indeed there is often a problem with agency in these societies.
When it comes to sex-workers, simply making a practice illegal seems to have only been moderately effective in curbing the activity. Giving the potential sex-worker some other choice, any other choice, will be more effective than declaring the practice to be illegal. Indeed, I think a perfectly foreseeable result of a campaign to reduce the number of women employed in the garment industry in Bangladesh would be that some portion of them would become sex-workers in order to survive.
Sorry–in that last part, I also meant to add “with the buying up of the media and the press,” as well. As there continue to be literate Americans, they will have to feed us propaganda. Of course, it’s happening as I type.
OK, so along with the boycott of TE and Walmart, now add the GAP: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/six-retailers-join-bangladesh-factory-pact.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
Ron Poinier: As to your 5/14 8:34 AM comment above–well said! And I love that you are talking about “choice” in your exposition. You gave some excellent examples of choices. I can give another one–school choice. Say, is it better to keep your child in a public (actual school building) school with experienced teachers, but is “failing” according to the possibly improperly scored Pear$on “standardized” (in quotes, because their tests have been proven to be neither valid nor reliable–could be many,many more “Pineapple-Hare” type ???–we don’t know, as we’re not allowed to see them!), or–because said school is “failing,” send your child to a charter school housed in a former warehouse or–hey!–in a strip mall, between the adult video store & the gun shop, where the “registrar” is also the school “counselor,” and the playground is the area behind said mall? Gee–what a good “choice” for other peoples’
children!
Oh–forgot to mention: isn’t it nice that the little people have choices, choices that are granted to them by people like the Waltons (and the Benevolent Dictator Bloomberg)?
Just like the people in third world countries!