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Re:The shipbreaking essay is pretty sweet too

2007-06-06 10:52:40

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2007, @05:44AM (#19206343)

The owner, keenly aware of both the monetary value and the environmental

hazards of the work, was sympathetic to the workers but made it clear that

despite the nature of the work and the few dollars per day they earned, his

employees would have no work whatsoever [if this job was not available]

Yeah, that's the usual platitude in defense of sweatshops. That it's the "best

alternative of a bad lot."

Thing is, the people who use this line usually don't mention why the other

choices are so few and so bad. It's due to economic policy and the pressure of

foreign multinationals to "modernize" the economy of third world nations, and

it's nothing new.

Back in England there was a thing called 'The Enclosure of the Commons.' This

was a period when the people of England had their self-subsistence

systematically taken away from them by force of law. New rules took away rights

to previously public land and put restrictions on personal gardening on small

plots, so people who previously grew their own food or traded with their

neighbors were suddenly forced to buy at the markets, which required money,

which meant getting a job, probably at a factory. It was frequently justified

at the time by letters written by wealthy industrialists (who, in a completely

unrelated fact, were having a hard time getting a self-sufficient people of

artisans, craftsmen, and farmers to come in and apply for jobs in factories for

pennies a week) claiming that leisure-time was bad for people and would lead

the commoners to crime and wickedness and perhaps even revolutionary politics.

(Gasp!)

Similar things have happened and are happening all over the world. People have

their traditional way of life destroyed, their self-sufficiency ripped away

from them, and in the end, are given the 'free choice' of hard labor in a

sweatshop or dying of starvation. ...and we're supposed to applaud that?

There's a good post on Kevin Carson's Mutualist blog on the whole 'Sweatshops

Ain't So Bad!' argument over here (http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/01/

vulgar-libertarianism-watch-part-1.html). [blogspot.com] No, I'm not

affiliated, actually I'm more of a red anarchist sort than a mutualist, but

damned if he isn't one of the smartest people writing on the internet.