While I agree that a completely student-run IT department is probably a bad idea, I take exception with the assertion that "children today" are less trustworthy than they used to be. I'm a student IT worker, and I'm extremely trustworthy.
Now part of it is that there are full-timers who monitor network activity, and if I were to do something blatantly dishonest or illegal there's a good chance that I'd get caught. But I still have root on all the machines in the CS department, and I could wreak serious havok if I were so inclined. Neither I nor any of my co-workers have done so. As long as there's some "adult" supervision, I don't think it's an issue. Not all of us youngins are irresponsible children.
I work for the University of Minnesota computer science department. I'm a part time sysadmin/webmaster. The pay and hours are good, and I've gained valuable experience.
The staff ratio is about 50/50 students to fulltimers. The students handle most of the tech support grunt work and are assigned more in depth jobs as time and ability allows. Recently I've been assigned to do almost entirely web work-- some html writing and a fair amount of CGI scripting.
I think student-run IT departments are a good thing. We get experience, the U gets cheap labor, and everyone ends up happy. The level of professionalism and the relationship between fulltimers and students has been excellent. Most of the staff are former U students, so things work out quite well.
I think I'm extremely lucky to have a job that allows me to support myself, take classes, and build my resume all at the same time. Most of my friends make less than I do for tedious grunt work. CS students today really are spoiled.
Nothing may get changed thanks to my protest, but guaranteed nothing would get done, if I just carried on buying Nike.
This is where I believe you're wrong. The conditions of third world workers will improve because once the excess labor is all hired up, companies will start raising wages to compete for workers. By boycotting companies who use sweatshops, you are discouraging them from opening factories overseas, and so you are delaying (if not outright preventing) this from happening. If anything, we should be encouraging companies to open sweatshops, thus hastening the day when all workers in the third world have jobs, and factories are forced to raise wages.
The problem is that as long as the only reason they pay the higher wages is because you disagree with them, they'll work hard to find ways of getting the cost savings and sell you the shoes-- they'll try to lie to you. And boycotts will only do so much. If you demand too much from them and the boycott is widespread enough, they *will* close up shop and move elsewhere.
Market forces, on the other hand, don't have either of these downsides. They will cause every sweatshop to be improved, and will work even if no American consumer pays any attention to it. And the wage growth made possible is unbounded-- it *is* possible that they'll approach American-styly wages as the infrastructure improves and the workforce gains experience.
The boycott option is a short-term fix, while market forces are a long-term solution. My harm is that the former will slow down the operation of the latter, thus delaying jobs and higher wages for everyone so that a few workers in Nike plants can have higher wages now.
I'm not by any means arguing for apathy. I don't dislike boycotting because I don't there's anything we can or should do. I dislike it because I think it does harm to the prospects of third-world workers, by taking away choices and slowing the inflow of capital into poor regions.
ROTFL!!! At one time Jim Crow may have been government sponsored, but now it is a social and cultural thing, not a political thing.
What the hell are you talking about? Jim Crow was abolished in the sixties. Yes, there are still some racist white people, but conditions *have* improved. And most of the things that are holding minorities back are still government-run: public schools, minimum wage, discriminatory "not in my backyard" zoning laws, etc.
Jesus, first you are talking about government then you jump to unions. Do I need to remind you that unions are not the government?
No, my point (which perhaps I didn't make clearly) was that unions are given their priviledged position by law. If the majority of the union votes for a particular policy, they can dictate those terms to the minority, and it's an "unfair labor practice" to hire those who don't like the contract the union negotiated. Without those labor laws minorities would have been able to negotiate seperate contracts with employers and probably would have gotten better deals.
Were you asleep in History class? Do you even know the history of Affirmative Action? To blame the federal government is bogus.
You didn't address my point that prior to the 1960's at least the government was the primary means of perpetuating racism in society. In the South we went straight from Jim Crow to affirmative action and anti-discrimination law-- the free market option was never tried. To blame the market for the conditions of minorities is still ludicrous.
As for affirmative action, if it works so well, why are minorities still worse off than whites?
if no applicants apply at $5 but lots do at $7, then the effective prevailing local minimum wage is $7
That's kind of the point, isn't it? Is that such a hard concept to understand? The "effective minimum wage" rises when there are more jobs than workers. You claimed that only governmetn intervention would make employers pay higher wages. Obviously that's false.
By definition, minimium wage jobs do not require much education or training, so this statement is false.
Simply having a job is a step up the job ladder of sorts. Even a burger-flipping job gives you experience showing up for work on a regular basis, following directions, operating a cash register, etc. More importantly, once you have your first job, you can get references for future jobs. "Unemployed for 5 years" doesn't look good on the resume.
As for your ranting about the minimum wage, do you have an actual *argument* as to why it doesn't lock the least skilled out of the job market, or do you prefer to simply belittle me and accuse me of being part of some vast right-wing conspiracy? If you're not bright enough to understand elementary economics, I'm probably wasting my time explaining it to you.
Your last couple of paragraphs don't deserve a response. You are making a large number of stupid assumptions about my motivations and beliefs. I'm not in the mood to debunk a bunch of mindless ad homs.
The third world isn't desperately poor by accident. There are very real reasons why they have a lower standard of living-- poor infrastructure, uneducated workforce, unstable government, etc.
So low wages are just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to deciding whether to open a third-world factory. Low wages are what offsets the other costs that go into building a factory in the middle of an impoverished country that might be in the grips of a civil war in a few years.
All this is really beside the point, though. You can wish all you want that Nike treat their workers better, but the only important question is: what's your protests going to accomplish. I think there's a good case to be made that they'll simply encourage fewer companies to open overseas plants, and thus deprive workers of jobs. You don't run Nike, and Nike probably doesn't care if you disapprove of them.
So in short, yes, I think it's likely that all this harrassment is going to make Nike move elsewhere, if not to the US then to a more developed Asian country. If they are browbeaten into offering higher wages, they might as well get a better workforce and infrastructure out of the deal.
If labor was truly free and the marketplace then there would be no disparities when it comes to what the average woman or minority makes compared to the average White male.
You're forgetting a very important thing called Jim Crow, which was not a product of the market but a government program. Racist whites in the South used violence and intimidation--not economic competition-- to keep minorities down. And even in the North, racist zoning laws and other restrictions helped racists keep minorities down.
Case in point: unions prior to the civil rights movement were notoriously racist. They were usually segregated by race, and the white union would use its (government granted) position to impose inferior conditions on blacks. The black union would protest, but since the majority rules in a union, the white got their way and minorities got screwed.
The government was never the friend of minorities, and they would have done much better in a true free market in which they were free to offer their services to employers without being subject to violence. True, many employers were racist, but enough weren't that they would have been able to get decent jobs had the government not forcibly prevented them from doing so. I can give you specific examples of this if you like.
The idea that the government was the savior of minorities is complete and total bullshit. Until the 60's, governments in the South did everything they could to keep blacks down, and the Federal government did nothing to help them. To blame the market for these conditions is simply false.
Because business on its own won't do it even if it is the moral and ethical thing to do.
Again, complete and utter bullshit. Explain to me why the McDonalds down the street from me pays a starting wage of $7/hour. The minimum wage is $5, yet they offer $2 more without a law or a union to be seen. Is McDonalds one of those "ethical" businesses you claim don't exist? Of course not-- that's just how much they have to pay to keep their workers.
Yet none of these dire predictions have ever come to pass when the government has raised the minimum wage but you never hear these people admit they were wrong afterwards...
I dunno, I'd say we've been proven right-- one of the major causes of the high unemployment among African-Americans is that fact that the minimum wage has priced them out of the job market in many areas. They're not able to get a start on the job ladder because they don't have the skills necessary to earn minimum wage. It's true that few people get hired on the spot, but there *are* jobs destroyed in the long run. And the impact tends to be on those least able to handle it. The minimum wage harms those at the bottom of the economic ladder for the benefit of those just above them.
No, I'm suggesting that they'll simply open factories in more developed countries, where the costs are lower. They don't have to deal with power outages, civil wars, government corruption, lousy transportation, unskilled workers, or pestering from American activists. Yes, they'll have to pay higher wages, but this will be offset by other costs. And the third-world workers you claim to care so much about will end up with no jobs at all.
China has a population somewhere in excess of 1 billion people. The rest of Asia is far from underpopulated. You're trying to say that soon there will be a shortage of workers and companies will have to increase wages or face having their employees move to a different factory that pays better?
Yes, I am. If anything, the high populations in the third world are an argument *for* lax standards, because it increases the incentive to rapidly expand production in the third world. Yes, it will probably years if not decades before every Chinese worker has a job overseas. But in the meantime these companies will be raising the living standards of millions of Chinese peasants.
Factory workers in North America typically earn between $10 and $20 per hour, so up to $160 per day. Not a whole lot of math involved in figuring out where the work force deals are.
Except that's not true. Overseas labor is a relatively new phenomenon(last 20 years or so) because it has only recently become cost-effective to hire workers overseas. Third world countries have a host of disadvantages-- poor infrastructure, unstable governments, weak property rights, weak currencies, high shipping costs, poorly educated work force-- that makes building a third-world sweatshop far more expensive and risky than building an American one. Activist pressure will *never* raise wages to American levels or anywhere close to it, because long before they get that high it will become cheaper to move to the West.
If something is hurting the brand (like the swoosh being associated with sweatshops) companies will do what is necessary to protect their image.
OK, but is hurting their brand going to make them improve conditions, or just close up shop? And more to the point, is attacking Nike going to slow down the process of opening additional sweatshops? That's what ultimately going to drive up wages, and I fear that if you subject sweatshop operators to bad PR campaigns, you simply make sweatshops even more expensive, and they'll make fewer of them.
I haven't studied this issue in detail, so I can't give you specific details of the process of rising wages. But I believe South Korea and Taiwan are good examples-- thirty years ago both these countries were nearly as poor as any today, and they raised their standards of living largely by providing a capital-friendly environment and encouraging the building of "sweatshops." Today, there are hardly any sweatshops left because the experience and infrastructure from those sweatshops have been turned to semiconductors and other more high-skilled manufacturing. It does happen, it just takes time.
Neither laws nor unions are the primary driver of increased wages. Rather, wages are increased as a result of competition between employers for workers.
Don't believe me? The local McDonalds pays $7/hour. Explain to me how either the government or organized labor caused that to be higher then the minimum wage. If it happens here in the US, what makes you think it's any different overseas?
Now I'm an asshole because I believe people should be treated fairly?
No, you're an asshole because you use emotionally loaded terms and examples designed more to ridicule me than to make a real point. And "unfuckingbelievable" doesn't seem to me like a respectful response.
What I PROPOSE is a living wage for people working their assess off so you/he/she can have all the newest/latest/most expensive brandnames plastered all over your bodies.
And how do you propose to accomplish that? You're just going to mandate it by government fiat? That's not likely to work. Although since you seem more interested in beltling me than seriously discussing the issue, I don't expect you to understand this.
Maybe you ought first do some research into the REAL conditions these people are working under, and how much money they receive for this work - and how that money translates in their economy.
Did you even read my post? The question isn't whether they make "enough" money. The issue is whether they make more money than they would without the sweatshop.
If you cannot see why these practices are unethical and undesirable you must be wearing blinders.
And if you can't see that the world cannot be made over by government fiat, you should study some economics.
We don't tread lightly for fear that corporations like Nike will be offended and withdraw their benevolent jobs. Activists ultimately MAKE these corporations grow a social conscience, by (gasp) doing something about it, despite the scorn they face from a legion of psuedo-intellectual poo-pooing curmudgeons like yourself for it.
This is a nice theory. The problem is that smug jackasses like you destroy the lives of the people you're trying to help. To the extent you accomplish anything, you simply take jobs away from desperately poor people to soothe your aching conscience.
You haven't made any corporation grow a "social conscience," and aren't likely to do so. You haven't substantially improved anyone's working conditions or raised anyone's wages. What you have done is harass companies that are improving the lives of desperately poor people because *gasp* they're MAKING A PROFIT!!! We obviously can't have that.
I think it's *you* who need a free mind. Dismissing people who happen to disagree with you as "reactionary" and therefore "boring" is a simplistic and flawed way of viewing the world. The fact that the majority agree with you doesn't make you right, your smug assertions to the contrary.
You seem to be proposing that things are the way they are and we shouldn't be challenging these multinational corporations to change, that we should work to maintain the status quo
No, my proposal is that market forces will drive up wages, just as they did in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, America in the late-ninteenth, Japane, Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in this century. What drives wages is no unions or laws but competition for workers. By discouraging sweatshop formation you slow this process down and harm workers rather than helping them.
My proposal is that multinationals start paying their workers a working wage
That's not really a proposal. Are you saying that non-working wages should simply be outlawed? What happens if multinationals just fire their workers and bring production back to the states? How do you enforce this?
As you've said, multinationals aren't going to do this on their own.
Actually I believe they will. It just won't be out of the goodness of their hearts or the browbeating of US activists. They'll raise wages because they have to to keep their workforce from going to another employer.
What human rights did Nike violate? They provided jobs, which workers voluntarily accepted. How does that harm workers?
It would certainly be nice if they provided better jobs, but I don't see how it qualifies as a human rights violation when you offer someone a crappy job-- even if it's an undeniably, horribly crappy job. The bottom line is that if the worker felt he was better off without the job, he's welcome not to take it. So from his own perspective, he's better off.
The rhetoric of "slave wages" is nonsense. Paying a low wage is not slavery. Slavery is being forced to work. Calling third-world workers slaves (unless they really are being forced, in which case I'd agree it's wrong) trivializes the concept of slavery.
More to the point, it obscures the real issue, which is what's better for workers? You can label it slavery if you want, but the fact remains that third world workers are better off than they would be without it. Using loaded words doesn't change the issue.
They can charge it because people are willing to pay it. There *are* shoes available for $10. People choose to buy Nikes at the higher price because for whatever reason they feel it's worth it. I'm not sure I see what's immoral about it.
What I object to is Nike being allowed (by either the US or foriegn contries) to pay people less than a living wage for the area they live in, or to allow a manifestly unsafe work environment.
Even if this leads to those people losing their jobs? The greater the profits of sweatshops, the more that will be built, and the sooner wages will be driven up by competition. It's fine to say that you want wages to be at a certain level. But are you willing to take the risk that companies will simply refuse to operate in that country at all, leaving those people destitute?
It would take a fairly long discussion to explain the economics of comparative advantage. Here's the basic argument.
Every dollar worth of shoes that gets shipped out of the local economy means one dollar that comes into the local economy. That dollar will be spent by *someone* in exchange for American goods and services.
So, the question is, does the value of the labor that went into the shoes outweigh the value of the goods and services that got purchased with those wages? More specifically, let's suppose that from the perspective of the poor country the labor was *more* valuable than the American goods and services.
If this were the case, then the market price for goods produced with local labor would be lower than equivalently-valued goods from abroad. And so the locals would use their dollars to bid up the price of the local products, and the price of overseas goods and services would drop until they were equally valued.
Trade benefits both countries in a transaction. In order to convince third-world workers to work for them, they must offer more value to them than is available in local jobs. And that extra value represents a net inflow of resources to the country, counterbalancing the loss of labor. So the economy as a whole benefits from the trade.
This is a basic premise of economics, which even extremely liberal economists would agree with. Free trade doesn't benefit one country at the expense of the other. By specialization and comparative advantage, both economies benefit.
OK, fine, asshole, what do you propose? That we just let people starve because we don't want to feel bad that someone might be making less money than us? I'm not saying that Nike should get a medal for a great deed of humanitarianism, but your blind emotionalism doesn't change the fact that people in sweatshops *is* an improvement over people starving on the streets.
There are *still* millions of people who are so poor that they can't even afford the basic necessities. If a sweatshop opened in one of those countries and provided some of them with work, would you denounce them for "enslaving" them? Is it better to let people starve than to give them crappy jobs?
I can't speak to your specific example, but I don't buy the economic argument. The concept of comparative advantage is central and universally accepted in economic circles-- producing labor-intensive goods in low-wage areas and exporting them to high-wage areas benefits both countries.
I suspect that to fully hash out the economic argument here would take much longer than either of us have time for, but the basic point is that trade is always reciprocal-- that every dollar spent to hire cheap foreign labor comes back to the US to purchase American goods. And if it were true that the value of the labor sold were (from the perspective of the poor country) less than the value of the goods imported, the prices of the two would be different in the local market.
I don't have a clear idea of what your argument is, so I can't really address it more specifically than that. If you want to explain it in more detail in email, I'd be interested in discussing it further.
But why should children have to work to stay alive? Because sweatshop owners won't pay their employees enough to support themselves, let alone their children. Don't argue that the companies can't afford to.
OK, so what's your proposal? You claim that companies can afford to and should provide living wage jobs for every third world worker. Fine. What policy do you propose that will accomplish this goal?
You're setting up an entirely unreasonable scenario: that the evil corporations you loathe so much will spontaneously raise wages out of the goodness of their own hearts, or that wages can be raised by government fiat. This is simply false.
Again, poverty is not a new thing. It was not created by multinational corps. So if governments can raise standards of living by fiat, why didn't they do it long ago? Given that they haven't done so in the past, what makes you think more of the same will lead to any better result? It's fine to express your moral outrage, but what do *you* propose we do about it?
I don't follow your logic. Most of these workers get better wages than they otherwise would, and are able to buy food and other necessities with it. Please elaborate: how does giving a job to a third-world peasant not improve his life? How is he going to support himself without a job?
Holding a "candle to the dark" would consist of employing adults who are past school age to work at wages which would allow them to send their children to school. That isn't happening.
The question is: are those workers better off with those jobs than without them? You can focus all you want on whether the improvement is good enough, but if the alternative is starvation and poverty, I don't see what basis you have to complain. Yes, it would be great if all workers could make enough to send their children to school. But if you're talking about a country where many parents can't even *feed* their children enough, I don't see what's served by denouncing the only chance many of those workers have to feed their families.
Again, the question is: are workers better off with or without sweatshops? Giving everyone ideal jobs is not on the table. If you are going to denounce sweatshops, what's your alternative?
Well, I might ask what's served by defending them for it.
Because they're improving the lives of the poor? What's not to defend? Yes, they don't provide American-quality wages, but they are providing jobs that are better than what was there before. No matter how greedy and evil the companies themselves are, this is a Good Thing. Bad jobs is better than no jobs.
The improvement of working conditions in the US had nothing to do with Upton Sinclair and little to do with labor unions or labor laws. The biggest driver of increasing wages was competition for labor-- there were more jobs than workers, and so wages rose.
The fundamental cause of this is accumulation of capital-- nations with large capital stocks and good infrastructure will tend to pay higher wages because their workers can produce more. Labor unions and labor laws at best provide short-term improvement, and do nothing to change the underlying economics. Had a $5/hour minimum wage been instituted in 1900, it would have destroyed the US economy. Wages are driven up by market forces, not government intervention.
So while overseas conditions seem repugnant to us, bellyaching about it isn't going to improve things. What those people need is jobs-- even bad jobs are a good start compared with no jobs at all. As as more factories are opened, competition for labor will begin to drive up wages, as happened in Taiwan and South Korea.
Are corporations greedy and profit-seeking? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that they are necessarily harmful.
Please keep firmly in mind that you are looking at the world from the perspective of the richest nation on Earth. We are privileged to be at the pinnacle of the world economy, getting nice fat paychecks for highly technical work, short hours, and extremely generous benefits. Obviously the conditions of poor workers is appalling from our perspective.
But what you have to keep firmly in mind is: what's good for those workers? The fact that their wages seem pitifully low to us doesn't necessarily mean that those workers are being treated unfairly. It might be that if forced to raise wages, corporations would be unable to turn a profit and would leave those countries.
Don't let your moral revulsion cloud your judgement. Pursuing policies that eliminate sweatshops may just kick third world workers into even deeper poverty. Focusing on the evilness of the corporations deflects attention from what really matters-- the interests of the poor. If sweatshops are so terrible, what do you propose to do about it? And how do you prevent your policy from simply causing those corporations from closing up shop and making the poor even poorer?
Hmmmm...what about the simple solution of leaving the factories there, NOT hiring children, NOT beating or intimidating people, paying them a fair wage for their efforts, and letting them work a NORMAL workday instead of 14-16 hr shifts.
The question isn't what's wrong with it. The question is: how are you going to get Nike to do it? I don't think you can.
If you were to mandate a minimum wage, maximum hours, no child labor, etc, the reaction would be very simple-- they'd close up their third-world factories and move back to the US. What's the point of enduring poor infrastructure, unstable government, poorly skilled workforce, long shipping costs, etc when there's no cost advantage?
I'm not claiming that this calculation is a good thing, but that's what would happen. Putting a factory in the third world isn't cheap. Corporations won't do it unless they stand to make a profit from it. If you take away the few advantages the third world has (primarily low wages) you take away any possibility of those workers competing and condemn them to perpetual joblessness.
Are corporations greedy and ruthless? Perhaps, but so what? No law or boycott is going to change that. The question is: what's good for workers? If we make life miserable for corporations that run sweatshops, are they going to improve their factories, or are they simply going to pack up and go elsewhere where the infrastructure and education is better?
Imagine your child dies in some shoe press after a backbreaking 10 hr shift - would you really understand some chubby well paid American saying,
For every child who dies in this manner, there are dozens who die on the streets from malnutrition and lack of medicine. Sweatshops, no matter how distasteful to us, are the first step toward alleviating their suffering. I'll turn the example around on you: if someone's child is on the verge of starvation, are you going to tell him "sorry, you can't work in that sweatshop because they make you work long hours and don't pay enough."
You act like everything was rosy until the evil sweatshop came in and made all those children work. Children were dying from poverty long before Nike came on the scene. Even granting that they could and should drastically improve their facilities, the simple fact is that they *are* better off than they were before. Given that Nike is in it for profit, not the interests of its workers, what's served by criticizing them for providing jobs for poor people?
Of course they are. So is every business in America. That's not the issue.
The questions is: do sweatshops hurt or harm third-world workers? Are they worse off than they were before the sweatshop opened?
Again, corporations didn't create poverty. It was already there long before they came on the scene. They are improving conditions, not because they care about the poor, but simply as a side effect of their greedy, ruthless, pursuit of profits. But they are improving conditions nonetheless. And to condemn improvement in the lives of the poor simply because corporations make money off is absurd. I am not willing to condemn the third world poor to perpetual poverty simply to soothe the consceinces of wealthy Americans. Sweatshops might look cruel and inhumane to us, but for millions of starving peasants it's a ticket out of poverty. What right do you have to tell that peasant he can't have that job because you don't think his wages are high enough?
The problem is that Nike now has a vested interest in making sure that things don't get better.
Sure they do. But in most cases they can't. In most cases where they "shop around" for lower wages, it's because competition has driven up wages and working conditions in the previous country.
If they can get the governments in those countries to hold down wages by force, that's absolutely a bad thing, but I see no reason to believe that's the norm. And if that's the case, it's government corruption-- not sweatshops per se-- that we should be criticizing.
You mentioned child labor laws-- this is a good example of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good. In wealthy Western countries, it's perfectly reasonable to demand children not work. But if you're talking about a country where children have to work to stay alive, it's far from clear that banning it is a good thing. Would I like a world in which no child had to work? Absolutely. But I'm not going to condemn children to even deeper poverty so wealthy Americans can soothe their consciences.
Your claim is essentially that it is better to be a good slaveholder than to oppose slavery.
No, my claim is that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Sweatshop owners might be motivated by greed, but as a side effect they are improving conditions in the third world. I'd love it if conditions improved, but the fact that conditions are poor doesn't justify taking the jobs away.
The question isn't whether sweatshops meet American labor standards. If that were the requirement, we would condemn third-world workers to poverty in perpetuity. The question is whether sweatshops on net help or harm the poor. I don't see how you can claim that they hurt them. Again, poverty existed long before the greedy corporations arrived on the scene. It's absurd to blame them for it. Bad jobs at lousy wages is better than no job at all, yet sweatshop activists seem to believe that until coroporations are willing to pay a "living wage" the third-world poor shouldn't be allowed to have any jobs at all. I think that's a cruel and destructive policy.
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While I agree that a completely student-run IT department is probably a bad idea, I take exception with the assertion that "children today" are less trustworthy than they used to be. I'm a student IT worker, and I'm extremely trustworthy.
Now part of it is that there are full-timers who monitor network activity, and if I were to do something blatantly dishonest or illegal there's a good chance that I'd get caught. But I still have root on all the machines in the CS department, and I could wreak serious havok if I were so inclined. Neither I nor any of my co-workers have done so. As long as there's some "adult" supervision, I don't think it's an issue. Not all of us youngins are irresponsible children.
I work for the University of Minnesota computer science department. I'm a part time sysadmin/webmaster. The pay and hours are good, and I've gained valuable experience.
The staff ratio is about 50/50 students to fulltimers. The students handle most of the tech support grunt work and are assigned more in depth jobs as time and ability allows. Recently I've been assigned to do almost entirely web work-- some html writing and a fair amount of CGI scripting.
I think student-run IT departments are a good thing. We get experience, the U gets cheap labor, and everyone ends up happy. The level of professionalism and the relationship between fulltimers and students has been excellent. Most of the staff are former U students, so things work out quite well.
I think I'm extremely lucky to have a job that allows me to support myself, take classes, and build my resume all at the same time. Most of my friends make less than I do for tedious grunt work. CS students today really are spoiled.
Nothing may get changed thanks to my protest, but guaranteed nothing would get done, if I just carried on buying Nike.
This is where I believe you're wrong. The conditions of third world workers will improve because once the excess labor is all hired up, companies will start raising wages to compete for workers. By boycotting companies who use sweatshops, you are discouraging them from opening factories overseas, and so you are delaying (if not outright preventing) this from happening. If anything, we should be encouraging companies to open sweatshops, thus hastening the day when all workers in the third world have jobs, and factories are forced to raise wages.
The problem is that as long as the only reason they pay the higher wages is because you disagree with them, they'll work hard to find ways of getting the cost savings and sell you the shoes-- they'll try to lie to you. And boycotts will only do so much. If you demand too much from them and the boycott is widespread enough, they *will* close up shop and move elsewhere.
Market forces, on the other hand, don't have either of these downsides. They will cause every sweatshop to be improved, and will work even if no American consumer pays any attention to it. And the wage growth made possible is unbounded-- it *is* possible that they'll approach American-styly wages as the infrastructure improves and the workforce gains experience.
The boycott option is a short-term fix, while market forces are a long-term solution. My harm is that the former will slow down the operation of the latter, thus delaying jobs and higher wages for everyone so that a few workers in Nike plants can have higher wages now.
I'm not by any means arguing for apathy. I don't dislike boycotting because I don't there's anything we can or should do. I dislike it because I think it does harm to the prospects of third-world workers, by taking away choices and slowing the inflow of capital into poor regions.
ROTFL!!! At one time Jim Crow may have been government sponsored, but now it is a social and cultural thing, not a political thing.
What the hell are you talking about? Jim Crow was abolished in the sixties. Yes, there are still some racist white people, but conditions *have* improved. And most of the things that are holding minorities back are still government-run: public schools, minimum wage, discriminatory "not in my backyard" zoning laws, etc.
Jesus, first you are talking about government then you jump to unions. Do I need to remind you that unions are not the government?
No, my point (which perhaps I didn't make clearly) was that unions are given their priviledged position by law. If the majority of the union votes for a particular policy, they can dictate those terms to the minority, and it's an "unfair labor practice" to hire those who don't like the contract the union negotiated. Without those labor laws minorities would have been able to negotiate seperate contracts with employers and probably would have gotten better deals.
Were you asleep in History class? Do you even know the history of Affirmative Action? To blame the federal government is bogus.
You didn't address my point that prior to the 1960's at least the government was the primary means of perpetuating racism in society. In the South we went straight from Jim Crow to affirmative action and anti-discrimination law-- the free market option was never tried. To blame the market for the conditions of minorities is still ludicrous.
As for affirmative action, if it works so well, why are minorities still worse off than whites?
if no applicants apply at $5 but lots do at $7, then the effective prevailing local minimum wage is $7
That's kind of the point, isn't it? Is that such a hard concept to understand? The "effective minimum wage" rises when there are more jobs than workers. You claimed that only governmetn intervention would make employers pay higher wages. Obviously that's false.
By definition, minimium wage jobs do not require much education or training, so this statement is false.
Simply having a job is a step up the job ladder of sorts. Even a burger-flipping job gives you experience showing up for work on a regular basis, following directions, operating a cash register, etc. More importantly, once you have your first job, you can get references for future jobs. "Unemployed for 5 years" doesn't look good on the resume.
As for your ranting about the minimum wage, do you have an actual *argument* as to why it doesn't lock the least skilled out of the job market, or do you prefer to simply belittle me and accuse me of being part of some vast right-wing conspiracy? If you're not bright enough to understand elementary economics, I'm probably wasting my time explaining it to you.
Your last couple of paragraphs don't deserve a response. You are making a large number of stupid assumptions about my motivations and beliefs. I'm not in the mood to debunk a bunch of mindless ad homs.
The third world isn't desperately poor by accident. There are very real reasons why they have a lower standard of living-- poor infrastructure, uneducated workforce, unstable government, etc.
So low wages are just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to deciding whether to open a third-world factory. Low wages are what offsets the other costs that go into building a factory in the middle of an impoverished country that might be in the grips of a civil war in a few years.
All this is really beside the point, though. You can wish all you want that Nike treat their workers better, but the only important question is: what's your protests going to accomplish. I think there's a good case to be made that they'll simply encourage fewer companies to open overseas plants, and thus deprive workers of jobs. You don't run Nike, and Nike probably doesn't care if you disapprove of them.
So in short, yes, I think it's likely that all this harrassment is going to make Nike move elsewhere, if not to the US then to a more developed Asian country. If they are browbeaten into offering higher wages, they might as well get a better workforce and infrastructure out of the deal.
If labor was truly free and the marketplace then there would be no disparities when it comes to what the average woman or minority makes compared to the average White male.
You're forgetting a very important thing called Jim Crow, which was not a product of the market but a government program. Racist whites in the South used violence and intimidation--not economic competition-- to keep minorities down. And even in the North, racist zoning laws and other restrictions helped racists keep minorities down.
Case in point: unions prior to the civil rights movement were notoriously racist. They were usually segregated by race, and the white union would use its (government granted) position to impose inferior conditions on blacks. The black union would protest, but since the majority rules in a union, the white got their way and minorities got screwed.
The government was never the friend of minorities, and they would have done much better in a true free market in which they were free to offer their services to employers without being subject to violence. True, many employers were racist, but enough weren't that they would have been able to get decent jobs had the government not forcibly prevented them from doing so. I can give you specific examples of this if you like.
The idea that the government was the savior of minorities is complete and total bullshit. Until the 60's, governments in the South did everything they could to keep blacks down, and the Federal government did nothing to help them. To blame the market for these conditions is simply false.
Because business on its own won't do it even if it is the moral and ethical thing to do.
Again, complete and utter bullshit. Explain to me why the McDonalds down the street from me pays a starting wage of $7/hour. The minimum wage is $5, yet they offer $2 more without a law or a union to be seen. Is McDonalds one of those "ethical" businesses you claim don't exist? Of course not-- that's just how much they have to pay to keep their workers.
Yet none of these dire predictions have ever come to pass when the government has raised the minimum wage but you never hear these people admit they were wrong afterwards...
I dunno, I'd say we've been proven right-- one of the major causes of the high unemployment among African-Americans is that fact that the minimum wage has priced them out of the job market in many areas. They're not able to get a start on the job ladder because they don't have the skills necessary to earn minimum wage. It's true that few people get hired on the spot, but there *are* jobs destroyed in the long run. And the impact tends to be on those least able to handle it. The minimum wage harms those at the bottom of the economic ladder for the benefit of those just above them.
No, I'm suggesting that they'll simply open factories in more developed countries, where the costs are lower. They don't have to deal with power outages, civil wars, government corruption, lousy transportation, unskilled workers, or pestering from American activists. Yes, they'll have to pay higher wages, but this will be offset by other costs. And the third-world workers you claim to care so much about will end up with no jobs at all.
China has a population somewhere in excess of 1 billion people. The rest of Asia is far from underpopulated. You're trying to say that soon there will be a shortage of workers and companies will have to increase wages or face having their employees move to a different factory that pays better?
Yes, I am. If anything, the high populations in the third world are an argument *for* lax standards, because it increases the incentive to rapidly expand production in the third world. Yes, it will probably years if not decades before every Chinese worker has a job overseas. But in the meantime these companies will be raising the living standards of millions of Chinese peasants.
Factory workers in North America typically earn between $10 and $20 per hour, so up to $160 per day. Not a whole lot of math involved in figuring out where the work force deals are.
Except that's not true. Overseas labor is a relatively new phenomenon(last 20 years or so) because it has only recently become cost-effective to hire workers overseas. Third world countries have a host of disadvantages-- poor infrastructure, unstable governments, weak property rights, weak currencies, high shipping costs, poorly educated work force-- that makes building a third-world sweatshop far more expensive and risky than building an American one. Activist pressure will *never* raise wages to American levels or anywhere close to it, because long before they get that high it will become cheaper to move to the West.
If something is hurting the brand (like the swoosh being associated with sweatshops) companies will do what is necessary to protect their image.
OK, but is hurting their brand going to make them improve conditions, or just close up shop? And more to the point, is attacking Nike going to slow down the process of opening additional sweatshops? That's what ultimately going to drive up wages, and I fear that if you subject sweatshop operators to bad PR campaigns, you simply make sweatshops even more expensive, and they'll make fewer of them.
I haven't studied this issue in detail, so I can't give you specific details of the process of rising wages. But I believe South Korea and Taiwan are good examples-- thirty years ago both these countries were nearly as poor as any today, and they raised their standards of living largely by providing a capital-friendly environment and encouraging the building of "sweatshops." Today, there are hardly any sweatshops left because the experience and infrastructure from those sweatshops have been turned to semiconductors and other more high-skilled manufacturing. It does happen, it just takes time.
Neither laws nor unions are the primary driver of increased wages. Rather, wages are increased as a result of competition between employers for workers.
Don't believe me? The local McDonalds pays $7/hour. Explain to me how either the government or organized labor caused that to be higher then the minimum wage. If it happens here in the US, what makes you think it's any different overseas?
Now I'm an asshole because I believe people should be treated fairly?
No, you're an asshole because you use emotionally loaded terms and examples designed more to ridicule me than to make a real point. And "unfuckingbelievable" doesn't seem to me like a respectful response.
What I PROPOSE is a living wage for people working their assess off so you/he/she can have all the newest/latest/most expensive brandnames plastered all over your bodies.
And how do you propose to accomplish that? You're just going to mandate it by government fiat? That's not likely to work. Although since you seem more interested in beltling me than seriously discussing the issue, I don't expect you to understand this.
Maybe you ought first do some research into the REAL conditions these people are working under, and how much money they receive for this work - and how that money translates in their economy.
Did you even read my post? The question isn't whether they make "enough" money. The issue is whether they make more money than they would without the sweatshop.
If you cannot see why these practices are unethical and undesirable you must be wearing blinders.
And if you can't see that the world cannot be made over by government fiat, you should study some economics.
We don't tread lightly for fear that corporations like Nike will be offended and withdraw their benevolent jobs. Activists ultimately MAKE these corporations grow a social conscience, by (gasp) doing something about it, despite the scorn they face from a legion of psuedo-intellectual poo-pooing curmudgeons like yourself for it.
This is a nice theory. The problem is that smug jackasses like you destroy the lives of the people you're trying to help. To the extent you accomplish anything, you simply take jobs away from desperately poor people to soothe your aching conscience.
You haven't made any corporation grow a "social conscience," and aren't likely to do so. You haven't substantially improved anyone's working conditions or raised anyone's wages. What you have done is harass companies that are improving the lives of desperately poor people because *gasp* they're MAKING A PROFIT!!! We obviously can't have that.
I think it's *you* who need a free mind. Dismissing people who happen to disagree with you as "reactionary" and therefore "boring" is a simplistic and flawed way of viewing the world. The fact that the majority agree with you doesn't make you right, your smug assertions to the contrary.
You seem to be proposing that things are the way they are and we shouldn't be challenging these multinational corporations to change, that we should work to maintain the status quo
No, my proposal is that market forces will drive up wages, just as they did in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, America in the late-ninteenth, Japane, Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in this century. What drives wages is no unions or laws but competition for workers. By discouraging sweatshop formation you slow this process down and harm workers rather than helping them.
My proposal is that multinationals start paying their workers a working wage
That's not really a proposal. Are you saying that non-working wages should simply be outlawed? What happens if multinationals just fire their workers and bring production back to the states? How do you enforce this?
As you've said, multinationals aren't going to do this on their own.
Actually I believe they will. It just won't be out of the goodness of their hearts or the browbeating of US activists. They'll raise wages because they have to to keep their workforce from going to another employer.
What human rights did Nike violate? They provided jobs, which workers voluntarily accepted. How does that harm workers?
It would certainly be nice if they provided better jobs, but I don't see how it qualifies as a human rights violation when you offer someone a crappy job-- even if it's an undeniably, horribly crappy job. The bottom line is that if the worker felt he was better off without the job, he's welcome not to take it. So from his own perspective, he's better off.
The rhetoric of "slave wages" is nonsense. Paying a low wage is not slavery. Slavery is being forced to work. Calling third-world workers slaves (unless they really are being forced, in which case I'd agree it's wrong) trivializes the concept of slavery.
More to the point, it obscures the real issue, which is what's better for workers? You can label it slavery if you want, but the fact remains that third world workers are better off than they would be without it. Using loaded words doesn't change the issue.
They can charge it because people are willing to pay it. There *are* shoes available for $10. People choose to buy Nikes at the higher price because for whatever reason they feel it's worth it. I'm not sure I see what's immoral about it.
What I object to is Nike being allowed (by either the US or foriegn contries) to pay people less than a living wage for the area they live in, or to allow a manifestly unsafe work environment.
Even if this leads to those people losing their jobs? The greater the profits of sweatshops, the more that will be built, and the sooner wages will be driven up by competition. It's fine to say that you want wages to be at a certain level. But are you willing to take the risk that companies will simply refuse to operate in that country at all, leaving those people destitute?
It would take a fairly long discussion to explain the economics of comparative advantage. Here's the basic argument.
Every dollar worth of shoes that gets shipped out of the local economy means one dollar that comes into the local economy. That dollar will be spent by *someone* in exchange for American goods and services.
So, the question is, does the value of the labor that went into the shoes outweigh the value of the goods and services that got purchased with those wages? More specifically, let's suppose that from the perspective of the poor country the labor was *more* valuable than the American goods and services.
If this were the case, then the market price for goods produced with local labor would be lower than equivalently-valued goods from abroad. And so the locals would use their dollars to bid up the price of the local products, and the price of overseas goods and services would drop until they were equally valued.
Trade benefits both countries in a transaction. In order to convince third-world workers to work for them, they must offer more value to them than is available in local jobs. And that extra value represents a net inflow of resources to the country, counterbalancing the loss of labor. So the economy as a whole benefits from the trade.
This is a basic premise of economics, which even extremely liberal economists would agree with. Free trade doesn't benefit one country at the expense of the other. By specialization and comparative advantage, both economies benefit.
OK, fine, asshole, what do you propose? That we just let people starve because we don't want to feel bad that someone might be making less money than us? I'm not saying that Nike should get a medal for a great deed of humanitarianism, but your blind emotionalism doesn't change the fact that people in sweatshops *is* an improvement over people starving on the streets.
There are *still* millions of people who are so poor that they can't even afford the basic necessities. If a sweatshop opened in one of those countries and provided some of them with work, would you denounce them for "enslaving" them? Is it better to let people starve than to give them crappy jobs?
I can't speak to your specific example, but I don't buy the economic argument. The concept of comparative advantage is central and universally accepted in economic circles-- producing labor-intensive goods in low-wage areas and exporting them to high-wage areas benefits both countries.
I suspect that to fully hash out the economic argument here would take much longer than either of us have time for, but the basic point is that trade is always reciprocal-- that every dollar spent to hire cheap foreign labor comes back to the US to purchase American goods. And if it were true that the value of the labor sold were (from the perspective of the poor country) less than the value of the goods imported, the prices of the two would be different in the local market.
I don't have a clear idea of what your argument is, so I can't really address it more specifically than that. If you want to explain it in more detail in email, I'd be interested in discussing it further.
But why should children have to work to stay alive? Because sweatshop owners won't pay their employees enough to support themselves, let alone their children. Don't argue that the companies can't afford to.
OK, so what's your proposal? You claim that companies can afford to and should provide living wage jobs for every third world worker. Fine. What policy do you propose that will accomplish this goal?
You're setting up an entirely unreasonable scenario: that the evil corporations you loathe so much will spontaneously raise wages out of the goodness of their own hearts, or that wages can be raised by government fiat. This is simply false.
Again, poverty is not a new thing. It was not created by multinational corps. So if governments can raise standards of living by fiat, why didn't they do it long ago? Given that they haven't done so in the past, what makes you think more of the same will lead to any better result? It's fine to express your moral outrage, but what do *you* propose we do about it?
I don't follow your logic. Most of these workers get better wages than they otherwise would, and are able to buy food and other necessities with it. Please elaborate: how does giving a job to a third-world peasant not improve his life? How is he going to support himself without a job?
Holding a "candle to the dark" would consist of employing adults who are past school age to work at wages which would allow them to send their children to school. That isn't happening.
The question is: are those workers better off with those jobs than without them? You can focus all you want on whether the improvement is good enough, but if the alternative is starvation and poverty, I don't see what basis you have to complain. Yes, it would be great if all workers could make enough to send their children to school. But if you're talking about a country where many parents can't even *feed* their children enough, I don't see what's served by denouncing the only chance many of those workers have to feed their families.
Again, the question is: are workers better off with or without sweatshops? Giving everyone ideal jobs is not on the table. If you are going to denounce sweatshops, what's your alternative?
Well, I might ask what's served by defending them for it.
Because they're improving the lives of the poor? What's not to defend? Yes, they don't provide American-quality wages, but they are providing jobs that are better than what was there before. No matter how greedy and evil the companies themselves are, this is a Good Thing. Bad jobs is better than no jobs.
The improvement of working conditions in the US had nothing to do with Upton Sinclair and little to do with labor unions or labor laws. The biggest driver of increasing wages was competition for labor-- there were more jobs than workers, and so wages rose.
The fundamental cause of this is accumulation of capital-- nations with large capital stocks and good infrastructure will tend to pay higher wages because their workers can produce more. Labor unions and labor laws at best provide short-term improvement, and do nothing to change the underlying economics. Had a $5/hour minimum wage been instituted in 1900, it would have destroyed the US economy. Wages are driven up by market forces, not government intervention.
So while overseas conditions seem repugnant to us, bellyaching about it isn't going to improve things. What those people need is jobs-- even bad jobs are a good start compared with no jobs at all. As as more factories are opened, competition for labor will begin to drive up wages, as happened in Taiwan and South Korea.
Are corporations greedy and profit-seeking? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that they are necessarily harmful.
Please keep firmly in mind that you are looking at the world from the perspective of the richest nation on Earth. We are privileged to be at the pinnacle of the world economy, getting nice fat paychecks for highly technical work, short hours, and extremely generous benefits. Obviously the conditions of poor workers is appalling from our perspective.
But what you have to keep firmly in mind is: what's good for those workers? The fact that their wages seem pitifully low to us doesn't necessarily mean that those workers are being treated unfairly. It might be that if forced to raise wages, corporations would be unable to turn a profit and would leave those countries.
Don't let your moral revulsion cloud your judgement. Pursuing policies that eliminate sweatshops may just kick third world workers into even deeper poverty. Focusing on the evilness of the corporations deflects attention from what really matters-- the interests of the poor. If sweatshops are so terrible, what do you propose to do about it? And how do you prevent your policy from simply causing those corporations from closing up shop and making the poor even poorer?
Hmmmm...what about the simple solution of leaving the factories there, NOT hiring children, NOT beating or intimidating people, paying them a fair wage for their efforts, and letting them work a NORMAL workday instead of 14-16 hr shifts.
The question isn't what's wrong with it. The question is: how are you going to get Nike to do it? I don't think you can.
If you were to mandate a minimum wage, maximum hours, no child labor, etc, the reaction would be very simple-- they'd close up their third-world factories and move back to the US. What's the point of enduring poor infrastructure, unstable government, poorly skilled workforce, long shipping costs, etc when there's no cost advantage?
I'm not claiming that this calculation is a good thing, but that's what would happen. Putting a factory in the third world isn't cheap. Corporations won't do it unless they stand to make a profit from it. If you take away the few advantages the third world has (primarily low wages) you take away any possibility of those workers competing and condemn them to perpetual joblessness.
Are corporations greedy and ruthless? Perhaps, but so what? No law or boycott is going to change that. The question is: what's good for workers? If we make life miserable for corporations that run sweatshops, are they going to improve their factories, or are they simply going to pack up and go elsewhere where the infrastructure and education is better?
Imagine your child dies in some shoe press after a backbreaking 10 hr shift - would you really understand some chubby well paid American saying,
For every child who dies in this manner, there are dozens who die on the streets from malnutrition and lack of medicine. Sweatshops, no matter how distasteful to us, are the first step toward alleviating their suffering. I'll turn the example around on you: if someone's child is on the verge of starvation, are you going to tell him "sorry, you can't work in that sweatshop because they make you work long hours and don't pay enough."
You act like everything was rosy until the evil sweatshop came in and made all those children work. Children were dying from poverty long before Nike came on the scene. Even granting that they could and should drastically improve their facilities, the simple fact is that they *are* better off than they were before. Given that Nike is in it for profit, not the interests of its workers, what's served by criticizing them for providing jobs for poor people?
Of course they are. So is every business in America. That's not the issue.
The questions is: do sweatshops hurt or harm third-world workers? Are they worse off than they were before the sweatshop opened?
Again, corporations didn't create poverty. It was already there long before they came on the scene. They are improving conditions, not because they care about the poor, but simply as a side effect of their greedy, ruthless, pursuit of profits. But they are improving conditions nonetheless. And to condemn improvement in the lives of the poor simply because corporations make money off is absurd. I am not willing to condemn the third world poor to perpetual poverty simply to soothe the consceinces of wealthy Americans. Sweatshops might look cruel and inhumane to us, but for millions of starving peasants it's a ticket out of poverty. What right do you have to tell that peasant he can't have that job because you don't think his wages are high enough?
The problem is that Nike now has a vested interest in making sure that things don't get better.
Sure they do. But in most cases they can't. In most cases where they "shop around" for lower wages, it's because competition has driven up wages and working conditions in the previous country.
If they can get the governments in those countries to hold down wages by force, that's absolutely a bad thing, but I see no reason to believe that's the norm. And if that's the case, it's government corruption-- not sweatshops per se-- that we should be criticizing.
You mentioned child labor laws-- this is a good example of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good. In wealthy Western countries, it's perfectly reasonable to demand children not work. But if you're talking about a country where children have to work to stay alive, it's far from clear that banning it is a good thing. Would I like a world in which no child had to work? Absolutely. But I'm not going to condemn children to even deeper poverty so wealthy Americans can soothe their consciences.
Your claim is essentially that it is better to be a good slaveholder than to oppose slavery.
No, my claim is that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Sweatshop owners might be motivated by greed, but as a side effect they are improving conditions in the third world. I'd love it if conditions improved, but the fact that conditions are poor doesn't justify taking the jobs away.
The question isn't whether sweatshops meet American labor standards. If that were the requirement, we would condemn third-world workers to poverty in perpetuity. The question is whether sweatshops on net help or harm the poor. I don't see how you can claim that they hurt them. Again, poverty existed long before the greedy corporations arrived on the scene. It's absurd to blame them for it. Bad jobs at lousy wages is better than no job at all, yet sweatshop activists seem to believe that until coroporations are willing to pay a "living wage" the third-world poor shouldn't be allowed to have any jobs at all. I think that's a cruel and destructive policy.