2007-06-06 10:52:40
Re:The shipbreaking essay is pretty sweet too
(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.