As long as companies Apple are not legally responsible for their supply chain in front of developed countries’ courts nothing will change. In Switzerland a law that would have changed this was recently rejected. Hopefully another country makes the first step.
I’d really be curious to see how far we could push this.
Cobalt is an essential part of lithium-ion batteries. 70% of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, much of it in forced conditions.
So I guess we have three options: go without lithium-ion batteries, enforce a minimum standard of labor conditions in the DRC by any means necessary, or just try not to think about it too much. Is it any wonder that we picked door number 3?
It is a very simple and clear difference, yet it is a common tactic for a debater to change the narrative and manipulate the argument away to prove some other point.
Honestly, you remind me of “Thank you for smoking”. I will not be surprised if this is how lobbying or CCP’s campaigns work.
Weird that you make up your own source and counter it as if the person you were replying to had used it, then go on about how they use sleazy debating tactics. I think there's a proverb about a kettle that might apply.
Both talk about people being forced to mine. Not they're poor and need to eat. Debt bondage, bogus criminal charges then sent to the mines to work as prisoners, or just straight up forced to at gun point by militias/gangs. You know, actual forced labour.
Thanks for those sources. Yep, those examples are more in par with the case at hand.
To answer the original post then, education is key: "knowledge is power, power is responsibility".
The issue here is that Apple is employing tactics with lobbying, PR, marketing (sort of brainwashing) to make you "try not to think about it too much", so yeah it is "no wonder people pick door number 3". The hypocrisy that fuels the hype and demand for its brand is what consumers should be aware of.
As austhrow alluded to, I was indeed alluding to actual forced/child labor in the DR Congo.
I would invite you to peruse my comment history (perhaps via the search functionality) if you really think I’m a shill for either Apple or the CCP. I would be even more outspoken about the issue were it not for the often-aggressive moderation of “nationalistic flame war” that I’ve seen on HN. But the truth is that none of our hands are clean given the complexity of global supply chains, the resource curse, and the apathetic attitude of the developed world towards human rights issues in general.
... or, we could nudge companies to go to LFP batteries, which can be made without cobalt, and have much better safety. It takes a lot more to make them blow up.
The energy density's a bit lower though, but not so low you can't make a Model 3 with it for the Chinese market...
That doesn’t really scale. Minerals are where they are in the earth’s crust, and at some point we need to go to DR Congo if we want enough cobalt to go around. Especially if we want stuff like electric cars.
And that’s just one example of one mineral. There is the notion of the “resource curse” —countries rich in natural resources often stay poor because why develop a modern economy when you can just become a warlord and force children to mine diamonds or cobalt for you? The flip side of this is the part where we in the developed world don’t like to think too much about where these basic resources come from.
Out toppling a democratically elected government that threatened US investors' profit margins.
I'm pretty sure they're stirring up trouble in xinjiang also. Pitting ethnic minorities in hard to defend mountainous border regions against central government is a standard divide and conquer empire tactic. The British Empire used it a lot in Asia, for instance.
You usually cannot "topple" a rogue regime, unlike a civil government.
Dictators almost always have secret police, and domestic espionage agencies in every corner.
This is why I do not subscribe to notion that Western spies are trying to stage revolutions in repressive regimes for a simple reason that they can not.
They failed in Venezuela recently but that didn't stop them from trying. There was a democratic Senator who ascribed the failure to Trump's incompetence.
Most of Latin America had had a US backed coup at some point in its history. Many very successful. Pinochet, etc.
Except that the spooks failed even when it came to unseating Noriega because they had to call in the military to stage an invasion.
The only two cases that I’m aware of where the US clandestinely toppled a foreign government were Chile and Iran - and apparently even the Iranian operation was mostly driven by the British secret service. And by all accounts, Chile was more of a nudge than a push.
A downstream issue with importing the product of forced labor into the US is that US manufacturing markets, business (small & medium in particular), labor, & markets affected by finance are distorted. The argument that an influx of cheap foreign goods & cheap labor costs are good for the economy does not properly consider the long term & strategic costs of hollowing out large markets where the USA once lead the world as well as the poverty/blight incurred by former middle-class communities.
I grew up in Hawaii, which used to have a large sugar cane industry. I found it strange that the sugar cane was shipped to the mainland, to be processed, then packaged, shipped back, & sold to the consumer in Hawaii. The value added was effectively removed the local market, which created a monopoly for H,C,&S to buy land, have authority over water rights, allowing them to break treaties & promises to the citizens of the islands. There were also celebrated things that occurred due to the sugar industry, such as importing many people of different ethnicities to work in the plantations.
Today, Hawaii has highly prized land, which is expensive, & many families living there for generations who do not make much money. With few employable industries (government & tourism being the largest employers), the economy is vulnerable to Black Swan events, such as the Covid lockdowns.
> A downstream issue with importing the product of forced labor into the US is that US manufacturing markets, business (small & medium in particular), labor, & markets affected by finance are distorted. The argument that an influx of cheap foreign goods are good for the economy does not properly consider the long term & strategic costs of hollowing out large markets where the USA once lead the world.
That's potentially a very valuable point politically: Those complaining about unfair competition from China and those concerned about human rights can find common cause, and maybe enough support to pass such a bill.
'American workers should not have to compete with slave labor!'
> 'American workers should not have to compete with slave labor!'
That's a powerful point! This is a big issue that will affect our lives & the lives of generations to come.
Not to mention National Security issues & living in safe/strong neighborhoods. There are many reasons to promote ethical behavior & transparency with suppliers, on par with US standards. Ensuring that suppliers are ethical also disincentives industry/labor from leaving the US, as labor & compliance costs will be equalized.
> Ensuring that suppliers are ethical also disincentives industry/labor from leaving the US, as labor & compliance costs will be equalized.
We want lower-paying jobs to leave, to be replaced by higher paying jobs. I think the focus should be on the latter: improve people's skill and productivity, and make sure that people can make the transition from the old jobs to the new, including a proper social safety net to see them through.
I agree that we should improve skill & productivity. The best way to create wealth & knowledge is to create a market for small & medium businesses. Employees can gain skills & learn about the industry to create their own businesses, which further evolves the market & creates more jobs & opportunity for advancement. Education with auto-didactic learning, tax law, & practical business is important, to help people reach the next level of wealth.
There's probably effective & ineffective ways of promoting citizens' interests with local, national, & international business; however if we care about our neighbors & our values as a country, we should invest in our neighbors who share these values.
Foe the sake of argument I put it rather bluntly: I don't think this happened by accident but on purpose. There is simply no way to end up in a situation where you use forced labor by accident. Poverty and forced labor are just the other side of wealth and freedom. Same coin. Someone has to to pay the price. Earth's ressources are limited and if not shared you'll end up where we currently are.
Some examples. Some might be good others less. But I want to convey something.
Your freedom to kill people is limited to zero to ensure their right to live.
Our freedom to pollute the environment is limited by nature's ability to compensate.
My freedom to watch the latest shows for free is limited by e.g. Netflix to earn some money.
You are free to by e.g. Apple stuff. But you know... seems to limite quite some people's freedom.
I'm not free to live by the sea. To expensive.
I say therfore freedom of choice does not translate to freedom bit it is often confused to be the latter
The other thing is simply inflation.
Too much money around and you have it. Kind of offer and demand out of balance. For any given state of the earth's economy there is a perfect amount of money to keep everthing going. That means the amount of money is finite. If the economy growth the amount of money can grow as well (what you described). But is is still finite unless you want to have inflation. But if this money is disproportinally distributed you have the rich and the poor. Being rich requires poverty somewhere else.
This reminds me of a piece of local history I recently learned in my hometown (Northeast FL).
In the late 1800s, a number of slave families traveled down-river from Georgia after being emancipated and homesteaded in my area on the St. Johns River. As property values increased and they started being taxed more heavily on their (mostly waterfront) land, many of these families (whose patriarchs were mostly illiterate and not at all business-savvy) ended up selling to (i.e. getting taken advantage of by) housing developers, basically losing their identity and heritage.
The story isn't necessarily a direct parallel, but the pattern reminds me of the "milkshake" scene from the movie There Will Be Blood. People shouldn't have to worry about their basic livelihood and property being stripped away by anything other than perhaps a natural disaster of some kind.
> People shouldn't have to worry about their basic livelihood and property being stripped away by anything other than perhaps a natural disaster of some kind.
This is a very interesting point. I'm not sure what to think of it. Maybe it needs a bit more complexity. After all the exploitation of disadvantaged minority owners is seen as hopefully almost universally bad, whereas using eminent domain to create a park/hospital/bus-stop/townhouse might be a good thing. Yet tyranny of the majority is also problem. (And of course it's hyperdimensional interlocking turtles in every direction philosophically.)
NIMBY-ism that happens in growing cities - so basically in all of them, since urbanization and migration to urban areas, and urban revival is going on - is seen as usually bad. Yet usually the problem is that any new development puts additional burden on the incumbents. (Eg. as population and population density grows there will be more people, more traffic, more big houses blocking out the sun, god forbid even more diversity too.) Which is a very similar in certain aspects. (A community trying to set themselves and their circumstances in stone. And we know people pretty much prefer stability.)
Land Value Tax comes up a lot to fight NIMBY-ism, but that's again a kind of tyranny of the majority. (If you have a small plot of land, let's say a garden, or a small grocery store in the middle of the city, LVT would probably force you to sell or develop it.)
However, at the same time we see that - for example in California - raising taxes on property is very much frowned upon. Sure, we know they have a very big financial interest in keeping housing prices going up and keeping taxes down.
...
So after all this rambling, probably what I'm trying to say is that the right to self-determination is important on many levels, but it naturally implies the conflict between those levels. Individual vs. group interests.
I have a friend from Ibiza who described the same problem of vastly disproportionate income opportunity for locals compared to the price of real estate. For them, moving out from the home means leaving the island.
Keep in mind part of the demographic you are talking to here- (mostly) high salaried tech and the elite. Does this affect them? They will happily ignore these issues as long as they keep on getting their shiny iPhones and Macs.
It's a shame that a country as rich as Switzerland is unwilling to do that first step. I think that would have been a good way to start making corporations take responsibility.
The majority of the population was actually willing to do this, as it was a referendum that captured 50.3% of the vote. But it also had to capture a majority of the cantons in the country, which it did not do. And so the initiative failed.
The USA still allows prison slave labor, so good luck with that.
Examples: [1]
Whole Foods – This organic supermarket buys artisan cheeses and fishes from companies that employ inmates.
McDonald’s – Certain McDonald store items such as cutlery and containers were made in prison. Prisoners also sew their employee uniforms, and they only make a few cents an hour from it.
Target – Since the early 2000s, Target has relied on suppliers that are known to use prison labor.
IBM – Apparently, inmates from Lockhart Prison in Texas manufacture this tech giant’s circuit boards.
Texas Instruments – Like IBM, their circuit boards are also made by prisoners. They even got a new factory assembly room specially made for inmate laborers.
Boeing – A subcontractor of Boeing was found to have used inmates to cut airplane components. Unsurprisingly, the prisoners only get paid less than a quarter of the usual wage for such type of work.
Nordstrom – The company was once under fire for selling jeans made by inmates. They have since stopped the practice though, and have promised not to use involuntary labor of any kind again.
Intel – Like other tech giants in this list, Intel has also outsourced labor from prison. Some of their computer parts were made in a prison manufacturing facility.
Walmart – Despite pledging not to sell products made by prisoners, some of the retail giant’s subcontractors were using prison labor to dispose of customer returns and excess inventory.
Victoria’s Secret – The top American underwear designer was paying inmates peanuts to make their expensive lingerie.
AT&T – Rather than outsource their call centers to other English-speaking countries, AT&T hired prisoners instead. The problem is, they only receive $2 an hour for a job that usually pays $15.
British Petroleum (BP) – In 2010, BP hired Louisiana inmates to clean up an oil spill. They received no payment from it.
Starbucks – We all know that Starbucks employees make little hourly. But the prisoners who make the packaged coffee sold in their stores make even much less money. They only receive as little as 23 cents an hour.
Microsoft – In the 1990s, Microsoft made a conscious decision to hire prisoners to pack their software and mouse. A spokesperson at that time even claimed that the company sees nothing wrong about it.
Honda Motor Company – The Japanese car company hires inmates from Ohio Mansfield Correctional Institution to make some of its car parts. As expected, the company paid them next to nothing.
Macy’s – Like Walmart and Target, this retail giant also uses prison labor to save on its operating costs.
Sprint – Following the footsteps of its competitor, AT&T, Sprint also staffs its call centers with underpaid inmates.
Nintendo – To pack their Game Boys, Nintendo hired a subcontractor who, in turn, hires prisoners at deplorable rates.
JC Penney – Since the 90s, JC Penney has used prison labor for its clothing line. Female inmates used to sew leisurewear sold in their stores, and more recently, prisoners from Tennessee are making jeans for them.
Wendy’s – As part of its cost-cutting measures, Wendy’s uses prison labor to process beef for their hamburgers.
I am surprised by today's lack of ethics discernment - there is big a difference.
Prison labor is compensating for crimes committed against society and other people, while uyghur labor is direct discrimination against an entire minority without probable cause.
If they happen to commit terrorism, then yes, those specific individuals' forced labor is justified as debt, but right now they are just labeled as "enemies of the state" because they threaten CCP's interests. This is much like what happened with Nazi Germany or the USSR, even the controversial US Japanese internment camps.
In the original thread it was mentioned that Apple fans are brainwashed by the brand, it is obvious from the responses here that this is clearly working...
How does some private company getting labor for 10c an hour benefit anyone but them? It's "compensating" for jack shit. You might have a point if they had to pay minimum wage for each employee to the government to be used on social services.
and the incentive for private prisons to not even try to behave as a "correctional" facilities, since your revenue is tied to having more criminals, not less.
Your argument assumes the non-Chinese justice system in question is actually just in its enforcement of the laws and fair in its sentencing.
If that system is the US, we can question those assumptions along a few lines:
- racial bias in enforcement and sentencing
- inhumane prison terms in general
- unjust laws e.g. the war on drugs
- the failure of the society to provide entire classes of people with sufficient non-criminal routes out of poverty and despair
I doubt anyone in this thread is arguing that forced labor would be ok anywhere. But hypocrisy is its own destructive force in the world, and there’s a weird meme in Western culture whereby unsavory behavior in China is somehow a sign of evil while the West is somehow more pure. The respective body counts and the number of people in jail (absolute and per-capita) make this highly questionable.
The article is talking about something very specific.
Muslims being forced into labor camps against their will.
The US has it's share of problems - nobody sane would deny that. But, what the US does do that the CCP does not is allow the open discourse of it's problems, and to change it's policies if people agree.
Even the very numbers that come from the CCP regarding their prison population are extremely suspect - they do not allow independent auditing, and we discover new slave labor camps like the ones in this article nearly every other day it seems. Flatly, the numbers put forth by the CCP are not to be trusted because the CCP has done nothing to make the numbers trustworthy.
Bringing things up from the US' past, nearly a century ago or longer, or equivocating paid voluntary prison labor with mandatory forced labor based on religion is flatly wrong.
I think you're being earnest so I'll dive into this thread for a few more minutes before I go back to work. Because I'm being earnest too:
If the West wants to influence internal China policy, it needs either a clear moral high ground for Chinese citizens to refer to, or clear economic upper hand. It doesn't have the latter right now (maybe never will again), and as this thread demonstrates, it doesn't have the former either.
Re: open discourse and changeable policies, China policies are more changeable than you would gather from the cartoon picture in Western media. They change constantly, in response not only to public opinion (as expressed on the internet these days), but also in response to continual internal debate within the CCP.
The US, for all its waving of the "free speech" banner, is only as changeable as the culture allows. Right now, for example, there would be no hope of reforming either prisons or e.g. a climate policy that might destroy civilization itself, because ~50% of US culture believes those aren't necessary.
Also note that open discourse is only allowed to a certain extent, as seen in surveillance and countermeasures against protests and organizers of any kind, from 1776 until the present day. So we can't in reality claim to be a society of free discourse when it comes to threats against the status quo, perceived or otherwise.
Prison labor in the US is only voluntary if people choose it over labor outside of prison. The fact that people sometimes choose it over staring at a wall for decades (and, one can imagine, being harassed by prison staff for not making the place more profitable) doesn't make it voluntary.
And finally re: Muslims being forced into labor camps against their will. It was not a century ago that the West dealt with its Muslim-extremism problem by bombing cities and weddings, and causing the economic collapse of entire countries. You want leverage over Chinese policy, you need to address this first.
This is laojiao, not laogai, these people haven’t been convicted of any crimes and this is administrative punishment for unharmonious but not criminal behavior and thoughts.
The west is held responsible for Chinese behavior by the Chinese themselves. Notice how China was criticizing the west for taking advantage of recycling contracts in China with terms that were too good to be true, and eventually were found to basically be dumping in China. Likewise, as you say, this is our responsible as well: we must make sure that we operating with Chinese businesses with acceptable labor practices.
Bottom line: China has forced a million Muslims into slave labor camps simply because they are Muslim... But you want to focus on how the US doesn't pay enough for voluntary prison labor.
> what the US does do that the CCP does not is allow the open discourse of it's problems, and to change it's policies if people agree
If this is true in practice, then the US prison labor problem is much more tractable than trying to fix an issue in a far off land where they don't allow open discourse. It wouldn't be a disaster if Americans focused their attention on their many domestic issues first, which they have direct control over. But currently there is very little open discourse in the US about prison labor, especially compared to the amount of discourse about Xinjiang.
This doesn't excuse China for the things they are doing wrong.
The US doesn't need to be perfect before US citizens can decry Religious Slave Labor Camps in China, that the CCP denies exist despite overwhelming evidence that continues to flourish.
I think you've lost sight of the original context of this thread. Here's the top comment:
> As long as companies Apple are not legally responsible for their supply chain in front of developed countries’ courts nothing will change.
Of course Americans can and should decry Chinese slave labour camps, but you've just finished explaining why the American slave labour issue is a lot easier to address and deal with, so if they can't get that one sorted out I don't have high hopes for their chances of enforcing legal responsibility when dealing with China.
Some people believe as long as the US underpays prisoners convicted of crimes, the CCP gets carte blanche to imprison a million people because of their religion, and force them into labor camps.
Or did I misread this entire thread?
And making companies like Apple legally responsible for their supply chain labor will do nothing to stem the flurry of actual slave labor camps seemingly sprouting up all over China.
Chinese companies will continue to use the free labor and compete on an uneven global playing field, so long as the CCP sees a benefit.
Sure thing. The most recent comment in this thread not made by one of us was by quicklime, and ended with this line:
> [The lack of open discourse about America's prison slavery problem] doesn't excuse China for the things they are doing wrong.
The one immediately prior to that was by mike_h and started with this:
> I doubt anyone in this thread is arguing that forced labor would be ok anywhere.
I'm not sure how you read either of those statements and extracted "the CCP gets carte blanche to imprison a million people because of their religion, and force them into labor camps".
>> The US doesn't need to be perfect before US citizens can decry Religious Slave Labor Camps in China
> Oh, yes, it does. Surely not perfect, but much better, or at least not as bad.
The country that was founded on the principal of religious freedom, by people that fled religious persecution, and felt so strongly as to list religious freedom as item number one in their list of human rights, does not need to be "much better" to call out religious slave labor camps.
>The country that was founded on the principal of religious freedom, by people that fled religious persecution, and felt so strongly as to list religious freedom as item number one in their list of human rights, does not need to be "much better" to call out religious slave labor camps.
"The country that founded on the principal of religious freedom" is nationalistic trite, like "land of the free" (which ended slavery later than other western countries, gave poor, blacks, and women the vote later, has 25% of the world's prison population, and so on), and "home of the brave" (where the Army is professional and the majority of the population had never had the chance to fight in any war or suffer any war domestically for over a century, so one wonders how/what this "braveness" is measured with and against).
First, what the country was "founded on" means little. What the country has historically did and up to now does (warred, enslaved, invaded, occupied, strong-armed, intimidated, etc.) matters more.
Second, the fact that a country was founded by religious hardcores literally thrown out of Europe for being such, and that they wanted "religious freedom" in their new dwellings so as to they not kill each other, doesn't give it any special moral high ground. Heck, if it was up to any of the religious sects that ended up there, the others would be illegal (the US still has the most fundamentalist religious people in the West, which when they had the upper hand were ok with forcing their will as law on anything from abortions to music releases). But they needed "religious freedom" because none of them had the power over all the other denominations (all Christian at the time, mostly variations of protestantism), and thus they made a virtue out of necessity.
Not to mention that they still managed all together to opress the blacks (nuff said), the native americans ("trail of tears"), the early Chinese, Irish, etc immigrants, and so on...
So effectively you are arguing that since the US did bad things in the past, China should be allowed to imprison millions based on their religion alone?
No, effectively I'm arguing that the US should check its own hypocrisy before pointing fingers, especially if it does it selectively (doesn't matter when allies / we do it), hypocritically, and as part of a power play/trade war. (Also, it wasn't "in the past", the US does bad things continuously. W. Bush, Obama -more of the same-, and Trump presidencies weren't in some distant past...)
How about both China and the US stop fucking over with millions, and people don't "patriotically" only point fingers to the other, and give their home team a pass (with much less, and much tamer, criticism, whereas it should be even more vigorous, it being their own domain?).
Nobody is giving the US a "pass". All of our problems are out in the open for everyone to see and comment on, US Citizens or foreigners alike! That's part of what makes the US so unique.
Regardless, no issue any country has domestically is going to excuse Religious Slave Labor Camps in China. That's wrong no matter where you live or who you are. People like to throw Hitler around too easily... but this is exactly what the Nazis did... imprison and exterminate entire populations of "undesirables" based solely on religion.
Arguing the US needs to shut it's mouth because it has some domestic issues doesn't fly...
I agree. The attempts to change the subject to the U.S. are classic whataboutist arguments, and transparently weak ones. It's hard to imagine what's wrong with your points that you would be downvoted.
>Prison labor is compensating for crimes committed against society and other people
Strange how this "just" system getting inmates "compensating for crimes committed against society and other people", ended up with 25% of the world's prison population in a country with a mere 4% of the world's population.
Not to mention this 25% seems also racially targeted - predominantly blacks and latinos...
Prison slave labor was instituted in the US as a substitute for chattel slavery, and criminalization of Black lives immediately matured around it. It’s certainly a lot less visibly oriented around race relations and a lot more couched in a legalistic framework that fits our system and culture, but there’s a direct line from antebellum slavery to the modern prison system.
We manage to imprison 4x as many people per capita compared to China.
Think of every bad thing you think and have been told about the big bad CCP and then think that we manage to imprison at 4x their rate. What does that make us?
> Prison labor is compensating for crimes committed against society and other people
But the prisoners didn’t commit crimes against “society” they committed them against particular people. Why not force the inmate into indentured servitude under the injured party rather than an opportunistic third party like Walmart?
There is a big difference between slave/forced labor and paying for cheap labor.
Majority of your examples state something along the lines of "paying inmates peanuts to make expensive things"... which literally is not the definition of slave labor.
The article is about literal Chinese Slave Labor camps. There is no comparison with any of the things in your list.
Most people would also agree, providing a purpose - jobs, training and skills to inmates is a net win for everyone involved, and is a core component in rehabilitation - directly combating rescindance.
Oh yeah, these companies are totally doing this for the public good and not just simply exploiting cheap labor. And considering how hard it is for an ex con to get a job, I doubt this has any major impact on recidivism.
Except they did when they said “ Most people would also agree, providing a purpose - jobs, training and skills to inmates is a net win for everyone involved, and is a core component in rehabilitation - directly combating rescindance.”
I’m not down playing the Chinese labor camps, I’m taking issue with claiming the prison labor in the US is some moral good. It’s exploiting people, not attempting to rehabilitating them.
Yes, you can indeed continue to move the goal posts, but acknowledge we're far into the weeds and even further from what the article focused on - Religious Slave Labor Camps in China.
Why aren't inmates paid a "fair" wage? Well, that's up for debate and I think I'd enjoy hearing pros and cons.
Some cons I could think of are:
* These are inmates, serving a sentence as punishment for a crime they were convicted of.
* Most of their living expenses are already provided.
* Alternatives include doing nothing all day instead of a job.
* If inmate labor cost what non-inmate labor costs, why would anyone hire inmates?
* The labor programs are largely voluntary.
* The money earned is used as a reward for participation, good behavior, and showing a willingness to work and get along with other inmates. Misbehave and you don't get to work, and don't earn money.
Now maybe it is time to step up some sort of minimum wage for inmates... but that doesn't distract from atrocities the CCP is committing in present day.
> * These are inmates, serving a sentence as punishment for a crime they were convicted of.
If the gaol sentence is their punishment, why are they being penalised further by reduced wages?
> * If inmate labor cost what non-inmate labor costs, why would anyone hire inmates?
Government-backed incentives. It's in everyone's best interests for people convicted of crimes to have a path back on to the straight-and-narrow. Investing in reducing recidivism is far better value for money than almost any other anti-crime measures.
> * The labor programs are largely voluntary. [...] Alternatives include doing nothing all day instead of a job.
I’m not the one moving the goal post, I remain steadfast that they are being exploited and every time I point this out you give a slightly different reason as to why they are not. First it was the two systems (China vs US) are vastly different, then it was the convict leasing was ended, then it was voluntary (except when it isn’t), then it was at least they get paid, then it was well they are criminals so they deserve it.
That is a debate worth having - but calling cheaply paid prison labor "Slave Labor", or equivocating it to Chinese Forced Labor Camps is disingenuous and dishonest.
They are flatly not the same, even if you believe it's debatably exploitive.
> The practice peaked around 1880, was formally outlawed by the last state (Alabama) in 1928, and persisted in various forms until it was abolished by President Franklin D. Roosevelt via Francis Biddle's "Circular 3591" of December 12, 1941.
You use something that was ended (because people thought it was wrong!) nearly a century ago as supporting evidence for what exactly?
Convict Leasing is different, and people felt strongly enough that it was bad that the laws were changed (nearly 100 years ago!).
Now the prisoners can get paid some wages in return for labor, in a mostly voluntary labor system.
Unlike the CCP, every inmate had a trial and was found guilty of some crime, and is now repaying their debt to society - as it were.
What did the million Muslims in the article get convicted of in China? Being Muslims? What about the Uyghurs? So now they are slaves for the rest of their lives...
“The article is about literal Chinese Slave Labor camps”
Actually it’s not... did you read it?
The central allegation is that a few thousand Xinjiang Muslims were offered employment possibly in exchange for political indoctrination.
There’s a side allegation that prisoners are also being put to work in factories. There’s no allegation let alone evidence that this is without compensation. And the pennies offered in US prisons hardly count, and certainly don’t absolve the US justice system of the conflict of interest one can allege upon seeing how profitable it is for localities to throw people in jail.
> “The article is about literal Chinese Slave Labor camps”
> > Actually it’s not... did you read it?
Yes, but apparently you did not. Here's the quote:
> Xinjiang, in the far reaches of Western China bordering Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Muslim-majority countries, is facing a brutal crackdown by China’s government, which has placed more than a million Muslims in concentration camps or forced them to work in factories making everything from cotton to soft drinks to electronics.
Trying to spin this off as some sort of voluntary job thing is extremely disingenuous. Almost as disingenuous as trying to spin paid prison labor in the US as slave labor.
Did you know how such a whole number of one million come to be? Apparently eight persons were asked about their heresay and then someone extend the result to the whole population of xinjiang..
Simply do a quick search for Xinjiang forced labor; you will find endless reports from the world's most credible sources. What is your basis for saying it's debatable?
You argue every point, but what do you think should be done?
Nope, that is not the distinguishing factor. Historically, money was used as an incentive for slave labor done especially well. That does not prevent it from being slavery.
I take issue with describing it as "voluntary", when the alternative is a longer prison sentence. It is paid a pittance, and is effectively involuntary.
"Even though, in a lot of cases, it is technically voluntary, there can be serious consequences for people who refuse to work or who advocate for better working conditions because a lot of prisoners use working as a way of having their sentences reduced."
In that section of the article they are discussing labor internal to the prison, specifically maintenance and daily chores. Yes, it is true, while in prison you do not have a choice but to participate in that kind of labor and refusal will not help you be released early for "good behavior" or anything similar.
External labor, the kind discussed here - contracted by a 3rd party for money - is voluntary.
Modern slavery in the US often works by bringing people in from another country, requiring them to pay for lodging and food at a "company store," and paying low enough wages that their debt steadily increases. Then you hold their passports and tell them they can't leave until they're paid up.
It's illegal, of course, because it's literally slavery despite the window-dressing of money changing hands. But the slaves are vulnerable and don't necessarily know it's illegal, or they're threatened.
What do you think should be done about Xinjiang? Do you believe the U.S. and Americans will do nothing simply because it has issues with prisons (so different that they are practically unrelated)?
Recently, Apple's supplier, Wistron faced revolt after treating workers unfairly here in India. And India is not really the most shining example of protecting our workers from unfair and harsh working conditions. So, if such treatments don't fly here, I don't think they will fly anywhere else. The kind of labor expectation that these companies have after their stints in China is ethically incompatible with most other countries. So, I can't see the condition improving in the near future, companies will continue chasing profits at all cost and China will remain the most fertile ground to do that.
Note that immediately after this become public, Apple put Wistron on probation refusing to award them any more work and requiring them to resolve the issues.
Governments really need to do the heavy lifting though because apart from refusing to hand over money/work they are very limited in what they can do.
I respectfully disagree. The only heavy lifting that governments need is to hold Apple and their executives criminally responsible. Apple has shown ruthless effectiveness in tracking down leakers and prosecuting them. But making sure the workers who are making their parts and assembling their devices aren't slaves or being abused is a bridge too far for the richest company in the world?
I don't believe it. It's Apple's responsibility, and if achieving such a goal in some backwater is too difficult then maybe it shouldn't have been doing business there in the first place.
They do publish an annual Supplier Responsibility Report. It's been a while since I read it, but they've definitely found and punished misbehaving suppliers.
I think I remember one instance where underage workers were discovered and Apple forced the supplier to finance their higher education. In another they found a false wall had been installed in a factory to conceal hazardously stored chemicals and, again if memory serves, immediately terminated the supplier's contract.
According to HN search this is the only comment in over 600 that mentions this page. Beyond the marketing text, the PDFs at the bottom cover thousands of pages of supplier guidelines, government filings, lists of suppliers, audit results, etc.
Take with as large a grain of salt as you'd like, but at least it is a primary source on the topic. Apple naturally will be tightlipped during their investigation of these incidents, but I'm curious how they will be covered in their subsequent publications.
Hmm, I was not putting the blame on Apple here, rather Wistron. While indirectly, Apple may be responsible for Wistron's behavior, most of the fault lies with Wistron and how they are used to treat their employees as disposable, while chasing higher margins.
> Note that immediately after this become public, Apple put Wistron on probation refusing to award them any more work and requiring them to resolve the issues.
Apple is currently incentivized to stay naive about the labor conditions of their manufacturing partners. As long as they can maintain ignorance, it's difficult to hold them accountable. We should demand better from a company as massive and profitable as Apple.
They deserve credit for changing behavior, but their policy should be proactive not reactive. This ought to be embedded into their branding such that they profit from their stance on human rights while also making it a desirable marketing point for competitors. (And surely they can afford to)
Traditionally slavery was an alternative to death for the conquered. I'm morbidly curious what the effects of all Western corporations banning slave labor would be. I doubt it would result in liberation. Would working conditions for the slaves worsen when they worked for local, lower-margin factories instead? I can't imagine them improving.
I have little faith in legal remedies to liberate slaves. Arming them seems the only long-term effective solution. Otherwise the man with the gun will order the slave back to work the second the man in the wig isn't looking. And the man in the wig will remain silent, to avoid revealing his impotence.
Slave labor is inefficient, so perhaps the best way is to topple inefficient slave societies through full-spectrum competition, from military to economic. This pressure incentivizes efficient human resource utilization.
One thing's for sure: Individual Westerner guilt over whether to buy the next iPhone will add zero value.
Having spent several years in Chinese supply chain activities, the factories building iPhones, XBoxes etc. Are some of the nicest ones around. Clean, large campuses with organized activities for workers etc.
There are several tiers of factories below that, with worse worker accommodations, Longer working hours, worse working conditions. Some of the smaller, poorer factories will provide little in terms of personal protective equipment, ergonomics, and make stuff for the local, African and South Asian markets where there’s little pressure on companies to have a “clean” supply chain. These workers would go there.
That sounds to me like "if we don't let our suppliers use child labor, those children's families will starve" argumentation.
We in the west are complicit in the use of child and slave labor when we buy products produced in this manner, but because it happens on the other side of the globe and is cheaper that way, we turn a blind eye.
The solution is not to ignore the issue. The solution is to draw a line in the sand and say "this is unacceptable, clean up your act or no deal", and for that to be backed by international trade agreements. It is up to us, as the lucrative market they wish to sell to, to make these demands.
Full transparency and accountability in all supply lines is a must. It should not be possible to hide behind "a supplier did this, we're not responsible".
I hope we'll see a move to more local production, instead of shipping stuff around the globe like crazy. It makes no sense for me in Europe to have my clothes produced in Asia, when we have world-class textile and garment production right here, with better environmental control and worker's rights.
> perhaps the best way is to topple inefficient slave societies through full-spectrum competition, from military to economic. This pressure incentivizes efficient human resource utilization.
Isn’t that what’s already happening though? One might even say that this neoliberalist take is precisely what brought about the current situation. For producers in the market to be competitive, they must (over)optimize for profit. One of the best ways to do that is by reducing cost. One of the best ways to reduce cost is by employing cheaper labor (“efficient human resource utilization”, you said), and to do that, tech companies must outsource to manufacturers located in poor countries with weak state institutions where the transacting parties can get away with slavery.
Wouldn’t a UBI effectively lower costs of labor and undermine the circumstances of forced work? It’d be a UBI in the developed region and not in the foreign country.
Humans envy wealth not justified by the generous hunter archetype, who shares his kill's meat with the tribe. Humans also lust to devour chips and candy until their teeth rot and their hearts explode. A three-pound brain comes with legacy firmware. Vulnerabilities should be patched in the next 10,000-year release. Please hold.
Tribal politics are mediated by emotion, settled by sex and violence, and recorded in genes. Unfelt but underlying is the telos of life: to accelerate the heat death of the universe and achieve a more perfectly-uniform field of lifeless subatomic dust. Inspiring! If God is the universe, then life is the cancer She dies of.
So if you really hate God, become Elon Musk and advance humanity along the Kardashev Scale. Which brings us to what international pressure really is: the race up the Kardashev ladder. Those left behind enjoy a century of humiliation, as China discovered when the European nations forcibly opened her ports for business in classically-rapey colonial fashion. If forcible anachronism is a form of societal slavery, then this was a liberation of the Chinese peasant, who now owns a cell phone and several outfits.
Later Mao attempted his Great Leap Forward, but gave up on it before meeting the fate of Pol Pot, whose supreme ideological commitment weakened Cambodia so badly that Vietnam invaded. Thus the threat of invasion checks the degree of enslavement feasible. Of course, it rarely comes to that. Even Communists can be reasonable.
> Isn’t that what’s already happening though?
China should be enjoying her Asian tiger rise in per capita GDP, and filling the vacuum left by the USA's receding thalassocracy. However, it's always possible to overplay a good hand, and it appears Xi did exactly that. If he's replaced by moderate after Deng's heart, it will be partly due to the pressure Trump put on China, in a reversal of the USA's prior indulgence. Not that Trump is doing much on an absolute scale, but relatively, it's a dramatic shift. Mostly though, it's China's own fault. Burning all her international goodwill to hoard COVID19 PPE will prove very expensive, among other shenanigans.
Just because I make a factual historical observation, doesn't make me a neoliberal. Slave societies are an extreme case. I doubt China could be described as one at her current levels of forced labor.
> For producers in the market to be competitive, they must (over)optimize for profit. One of the best ways to do that is by reducing cost. One of the best ways to reduce cost is by employing cheaper labor (“efficient human resource utilization”, you said), and to do that, tech companies must outsource to manufacturers located in poor countries with weak state institutions where the transacting parties can get away with slavery.
Here's where you're right: Tribal politics represent the genetic feedback system, and they dislike arbitrary wealth because of its damaging distortion of genetic fitness feedback. The market economy makes wealth a much less arbitrary signal of genetic fitness, but it is nowhere near a replacement for tribal politics. Unless you think Bill Gates should get all the California girls...
That's why successful societies balance the interests of the rich against the interests of the commoners.
However, I wouldn't call China a "poor country with weak state institutions". If their slaves are outcompeting our free skilled tech workers, there's a simple solution for that: Slap a tariff on it. This move will garner enough popularity to guarantee a crowd of adoring iPhone assembly technicians in front of the golden statue of yourself you erect with the proceeds.
Cedant arma togae: the man in the wig is not powerless. The man in the wig simply doesn't care about slaves. The man in the wig does, however, care about the opinions of the electorate (in a democracy), and so Westerner guilt may actually be useful.
Wow. A troglodyte on HN manages to get top votes by vomiting an incredibly incoherent spew of libertarianism, marxism, reactionary nationalism and militant western chauvinism. All of this in reaction to an article about slave labor going into every fanboy's favorite screen. Who woulda thunk it.
A lot of things you say are right: If Western civ actually held to its neoliberal values then things would cost more. Slave labor is inefficient (although it's more efficient and apparently more acceptable than executing people like they did during the Cultural Revolution).
But on what planet do you live where the only solution is armed violence? First of all, that's just not possible. Even in America, the idea that because we have guns we are able to stand up against oppressive government is nothing more than a wet dream fantasy of the far right. In China? Uighurs are going to arm up and stand to the CCP? Are you out of your mind? If that looked like anything, it would look like Islamic terrorism.
You and I in America, and the people in Hong Kong, and the Uighurs, are not in a "slave society", we are in a corporation. And our issues are not going to be cured by taking up small arms against nuclear states that act as part of that corporations, even if millions of us are armed. The only thing going on here is a battle for scarce resources, disguised as a bunch of ideologies.
Look, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have trillions of dollars they could spend to build up a Palestinian state rebuild Syria or help the Uighurs, but what do they do? Make arms deals with Israel and America and China. And logically they're doing what they need to do. There is no world in which your fantasy of small arms and liberation of slaves is a remote possibility.
The only possibility is people owning their own local resources. And not sharing them as marxists, either.
There are very few, if any, levers that we can pull from the West at this point to promulgate that strategy. We can't bomb the railway lines into the Uighur camps, as we should have in WWII, because it would cause a nuclear war. We can cut off trade, and encourage people not to trade with bad actors, that's about it. Everything else is just a wanker fantasy.
I didn't say arming slaves was good. I said it was the only effective long-term solution to the problem of liberating slaves. The consensus here is anti-slavery, so I accepted that premise.
The USA does permit minimum wage workers to purchase cheap pistols, which is probably why its police aren't brave enough to lock them down. Sometimes those workers even upset a predetermined election.
I do not support prisons. On average, it is better to be the slave of an individual and work for him than it is to be the slave of a state and live in a cage full of predators. Although of course I would rather be imprisoned for life in modern Scandinavia than serve 10 years of "indentured servitude" in Plantation America.
Since doing good starts from home, I suggest you liberate your extended family's children from compulsory labor. Let us know how that goes...
I'm not Chinese.. sorry if I was too rude... Agree that slavery is just hidden now and called by a different name.. it's sad, America with it's literally unlimited resources can do much better for it's own citizens, but it's too divided on class and uses race problems to divert attention from the real problem that the lower classes are screwed over in every possible way.. I think if the politicians there were a little less corrupt it would have been so much more nicer for regular folk..
No problem. Regarding realness, you might want to compare the number of years it takes to move between socioeconomic classes in America versus the number of years it takes to evolve a distinct race of humans.
Unity is a fine sentiment. Lions are unanimously in favor of lions laying down with lambs. If it hasn't worked yet, that only shows the weakness of our faith. Give until it hurts! Thank you Jesus!
Sorry, I was channeling a televangelist there. I don't know what possessed me.
What bothers me is there are so many fun immigration combinations that never get any press. Where's the lobby for unlimited Chinese immigration into Japan? Can you imagine the Godzilla movies we'd get out of that? What has Japan done for us lately, besides Dark Souls? A new national trauma is just the thing to refresh that fatalistic warrior muse.
If the Chinese and Japanese can't coexist, despite belonging to the same race and often being mutually indistinguishable, then who can?
Doing time in Scandinavia amounts to living for free in a socialist utopia. You call working in the US "indentured servitude"? Really? If so, it's a very nice kind of slavery, where lots of us can buy houses and many idiots have the time to stand in line for a PS5. If you took away the societal whim to buy the latest shoes / rims / playstations (which I think is temporary and only based on cheap credit) then you have a massively productive economy and still one of the highest living standards in the world. In spite of the obvious inequalities. The answer isn't to tear down the system, it's to get better education to more people so they stop trying to tear down the system, and start trying to make the system work better for them.
I’ve decided to leave the Apple ecosystem in 2021. But the problem is not isolated to Apple. In fact, I’d be surprised if other, cheaper products aren’t quite a bit worse.
Is there an electronics company that does a better job? (That’s not a rhetorical question.)
Sadly true. Years ago, I watched a brutal documentary on a mine where the life expectancy of the workers was insanely short. Their primary industrial clients were electronics manufacturers. I don’t know what I can do, though, as programming is my living.
I like the suggestion of always buying used goods. But obviously, a secondary market still encourages the primary market. It’s not a perfect solution.
Apple is one of the better ones in a sea of really bad. It's a low bar and certainly doesn't mean Apple is perfect. There might be some boutique phone makers who claim to be better like Librem or Fairphone, but because they have fewer resources than the big players it's much harder for them to really know.
And if you dig into the mining side of the rare earths, worker conditions drop quickly.
This is the big problem. Few of these companies have the resources to verify their supply chain is free of abuse. The smaller companies likely have even less control over their supply chain.
And supply chains aren’t necessarily constants. They can flip overnight when some distant vendor lights the contract on fire after the audit is complete by switching to a cheaper source, pocketing the difference. The most newsworthy instances often involve steel and catastrophic failure. People in this comment section saying that Apple executives should be held criminally liable have a very naive understanding of how long the tentacles of the supply chain go for anything made with more than a few raw materials.
Fairphone have dozens of suppliers in China, some of them indirect, and they say in their own literature they can't directly vouch for every company in their supply chain.
They're in exactly the same boat as Apple. IMHO this is about China, not any one company.
Oh absolutely, they work very hard on this and deserver a lot of credit for it, but then so do Apple. They have some of the strictest policies and most thorough inspections in the industry and this still keeps happening to them.
I don't think it's comparable no. The effort put by Fairphone to build an ethical tech company is not comparable with what apple have been doing.
There's a lot of information on their website and it's worth to have a look: https://www.fairphone.com/en/impact
Repair is only a factor because it contributes to device longevity, but iPhones have the longest average device lifetimes in the industry by a long way. In theory they could make it even longer but it's a relatively marginal issue in environmental terms. I agree there are other reasons that make it desirable as well and every little helps, but the fact remains iPhones have industry leading overall environmental impact.
“..researchers found that brand, an intangible property, is more important than repairability or memory size in extending the life of a product.”[0]
The article found that Apple phones last on average a year longer than Samsung’s.
The average for all smartphones is estimated as from 2 to 3 years, but bear in mind that includes many Apple devices, so non Apple devices must average the low end of that.[2]
> but iPhones have the longest average device lifetimes in the industry by a long way
After iPhones are not supported anymore they turn into bricks. This typically happens in 5 years, which is not too bad, but it's far from being perfect. Why should a smartphone be supported for much shorter than laptops? Remember: reduce, reuse, recycle, in this order.
Librem 5 GNU/Linux phone has a lifetime support with updates.
> After iPhones are not supported anymore they turn into bricks.
Where on Earth do you get that from? My iPhone 3GS could still connect to the App Store after 7 years. My wife’s iPhone 6 from 2014 just got a patch in November.
Look, I’m not going to assume bad faith, maybe you really believe this or thought it seemed true to you. When your preconceptions turn out to be this dramatically contrary to the actual facts, I seriously suggest you take a look at what it is about those preconceptions that is leading you so far away from reality.
I see comments like this all the time. Apple devices have built in redundancy, yet in fact they have industry leading device support and lifetimes. Apple is an arch polluter, yet over here in reality they have the highest environmental rating from Greenpeace of any major smartphone vendor. Where do people like you get this stuff, and why? What is it that’s motivating you to say these things that are so clearly wrong and we easily disproved?
> My iPhone 3GS could still connect to the App Store after 7 years.
Connection to App Store does not mean it's actually supported with patches or secure to use. I would call it "a brick".
> My wife’s iPhone 6 from 2014 just got a patch in November.
But the new OS is not going to be installed anymore (according to the link above). Any technical reasons for that, apart from the planned obsolescence?
> Look, I’m not going to assume bad faith, maybe you really believe this or thought it seemed true to you. When your preconceptions turn out to be this dramatically contrary to the actual facts, I seriously suggest you take a look at what it is about those preconceptions that is leading you so far away from reality.
Thank you, I am also assuming good faith and so could you please provide evidence for your claims? For how long do security updates typically come and for how long the OS is updated to new versions? Anecdotes are not enough on HN.
> industry leading device support and lifetimes
In the industry of planned obsolescence 5 years support becomes a gold standard praised by fanboys. But in reality it is very short and leads to nature pollution. I see no reason not to support devices forever or let the community support them when they are too old. Apple does neither of those.
> things that are so clearly wrong and we easily disproved?
Your words are very strong yet you give no (reliable) disprove.
You simply should not use a smartphone without security updates. It's as good as a brick in this case. (Or maybe never use Internet and Bluetooth on it).
So which OS or phone are you going to go with? Google only guarantees 3 years of support. Fairphone 2’s last OS update was 14 months ago, there’s no way that’s up to date with security issues so their track record is looking pretty dicey. After all they’re dependent on Google as well. Even if they do eventually get another update there’s no way a 14 month gap between security patches is acceptable. Fairphone only actually guarantee 2 years of support anyway.
So what phone do you use that can beat the iPhone 6 with 6 years of regular patches?
Apple has official repair locations all over the planet and they stock parts long after products are discontinued. Yes it kinda sucks that they killed third party repair but having an official location with official parts is actually more useful than being able to do it yourself but not being able to get parts.
For my pixel 2, while there were no technical restrictions preventing me from replacing the broken camera, the screen was glued in in a way making it very difficult to open without smashing. There were also no places to buy the camera other than what seemed to be cameras stripped out of broken/stolen pixel 2s.
> while there were no technical restrictions preventing me from replacing the broken camera, the screen was glued in in a way making it very difficult to open without smashing.
You just presented a technical restriction, didn't you?
> but having an official location with official parts is actually more useful than being able to do it yourself but not being able to get parts.
I disagree. This is not so much about DIY-repairs, but about a free market for third-party repairs, without which Apple can force people to pay as much as they want.
Did you read the link? It's manufactured in the US. The other version of Librem 5 which is made in China and assembled in US costs $800: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.
Honestly i never felt the ecosystem to be that great, its just the same shit others are doing in a walled garden way. I am sure you will be fine finding your own stack
Would you consider only buying a used/refurbished phone/computer? Obviously it’s not scalable to the masses, but not putting any money in Apple’s pocket directly
I fault companies like Apple for doing business with companies who do these things.
But I'm not sure if anything changes if local governments aren't interested in stopping it (or actually support it) either.
Markets don't care about human rights... and if the local government supports this (in this case China, but other places too). I don't see how this ever changes.
It changes by holding companies like Apple accountable. They are the largest company in the world for goodness sake. Their audits when so little as a picture of a manual gets leaked are incredibly thorough, yet when it comes to literal slavery they're unable to reign it in? If we were to hold executives liable for acting as slavers then it would be miraculous how quickly corporate leadership would suddenly be interested in the well being of their fellow man.
> We talk about slavery, that ended with state actions. I'm not sure China cares, and accordingly the practice will continue.
You're correct, but there's another angle to this than ending the practice: moral complicity.
An individual in the antebellum south couldn't reasonably end the institution of slavery in the US, but he could have taken actions that affected the degree he was personally complicit. If he owned and profited from slavery, he was clearly complicit. If he did but had a change of heart and manumitted them, he's far less so. If he became an abolitionist and did his best to avoid supporting slaveholders or the products of slavery, he's hardly complicit at all.
If Apple chooses to deal with companies that use forced labor (or chooses to look the other way), it's complicit, and that means it's customers are too (to a lesser degree).
The issue is arising from China potentially forcing Uighur people to find jobs 'on their own' lest they be held indefinitely in concentration camps. You can't audit that. You ask every worker and see if they say 'yes' or 'no' to the question "are you working here of your own free will" and see which ones say no with this threat looming over them.
But even if that's true, there's no law of nature that compels Apple to buy from suppliers located in China or locate its operations there. It could cut ties and pull out (and Apple's one of the few companies with the resources to build up new supply chains elsewhere), or it could direct its suppliers to setup new factories outside of China to supply its needs in an easily auditable way.
It may even be easier than that. As far as I can tell, this "Lens Technology" company makes phone cover glass, and Apple already deals with Corning to make other glass components, and I'm sure they'd like the business. It looks like none of their Gorilla Glass factories are inside China.
Right, I'm not disputing that there will always be someone horrible willing to do that. What I'm saying is that large American companies and their executives should be held legally responsible if that gets into their supply chain.
If a Sword of Damocles is hovering continuously above their head in the form of criminal punishment then they would have no choice but to think twice about off shoring to a region where it is "conveniently" difficult to enforce basic labor rights. My point is that purposeful ignorance as a defense is unacceptable.
> What I don’t understand is why companies want to be associated with these suppliers. Honestly the cost difference can’t be that big.
because ultimately the great majority of their customers do not care, as simple as that. They might care about local issues, wedge issues, but ethical and moral concerns in another country? not so much. Big luxury brands such as Apple pour billions in PR and marketing because they live or die by the reputation. The day their customers start caring more about it, things might change.
I just want to add, that I'm no way trying to diminish Apple's achievements when it comes to technology, product integration and creating remarkable ecosystems. I cannot think of another manufacturer that nailed that much in so little time. I think that Apple Silicon is game changer. But yes, they are a luxury brand.
I think even more than that they simply do not have a choice. Yes, it sucks that Apple's suppliers are unethical, but what am I supposed to do if I want to Snapchat my girlfriend or talk to my friends, or have a phone that is compatible with itunes/apple music? If my choice is between Apple and Google, how do I know that Google's ethics are any better? Am I supposed to spend hours and hours of my life investigating whether one is marginally more ethical than the other?
We simply have to stop making consumers responsible and accountable for every unethical thing a company does. Why is the status quo that every company is evil and that's ok? You'll see AMEX commercials imploring you to "shop local" during the pandemic but where is their relief for small business? Why is it my responsibility to save them but business as usual for those that want to exploit me?
> because ultimately the great majority of their customers do not care, as simple as that. They might care about local issues, wedge issues, but ethical and moral concerns in another country? not so much. Big luxury brands such as Apple pour billions in PR and marketing because they live or die by the reputation. The day their customers start caring more about it, things might change.
It's worth noting that one of the main reasons consumers "don't care" is the market is structured in a way to literally numb them to these issues. It makes it difficult to even learn about these issues (in relation to particular products), have that knowledge when making a purchasing decision, and take action against it (all competitors may be doing the same thing). The PR you mentioned also plays a part.
To give an slightly different example: Xinjiang produces a lot of cotton, and, IIRC, some of it is produced through forced labor. How am I supposed to show I care by avoiding that cotton? I can't, because it's pretty much impossible for me to know if a particular shirt I'm buying is made from that cotton or not, and it might actually be impossible for anyone to know without a very expensive and time consuming investigation.
If Apple put up big signs in it's stores saying "iPhones are made with forced labor," with compelling product storytelling about the forced labor practices involved, I think you'd Apple's sales drop as consumers show they do care. But that's not going to happen, all the market incentives are to obscure that kind of information.
Cost is part of it, but the other big piece is logistics. As we learned early in the year, Apple is moving manufacturing outside of China, but it takes time. Something like the iPhone is made in an industrial area where many of the part manufacturers are next to each other. This lets various parts be easily sourced and delivered. So when Apple wants to move to a new country, the end goal has to be to move the entire complex, and not just a piece. That takes time.
> While I question his motives, it’s kinda weird that Trump of all people seems to be the only one who is openly critical of China.
You fell into Trumps distortion field. Many are critical of China, but the difference is what to do about it. Trumps idea was to go it alone with tariffs, rhetoric, and go after things like TikTok. IMO, that's not a plan or a real policy.
If it were in the US you'd certainly see it in the news.
In China and other places just getting close to a factory can at times be difficult and crappy working conditions are sadly just assumed to be a fact :(
Trump's criticism of China I don't think intersects anywhere close to caring about the treatment of Chinese citizens... or anyone really.
Just a random anecdote, I'm American and work in the US. Trump personally approved the acquisition of a company I worked for and appeared with the CEO and talked about how all the great jobs that would come of it ... before the acquisition was official they laid most everyone off.
Part of it is that I think people generally understand that Apple doesn't go into a supplier contract negotiation and say, "Ok, how many slaves do we get in this deal?"
While they ultimately bear responsibility for their supply chain, it's easy to see how this stuff can happen without direct knowledge. What we need to do is pay attention to Apple's response and then act accordingly.
There's a Netflix documentary about the garlic industry where among other concerns journalists reveal that peeled garlic from China is the product of prison slave labor. Many of the prisoners work their hands raw and continue to cut garlic ends with their teeth. Prisoners have a daily quota with punishment for not meeting it.
I haven't come across peeled garlic that wasn't from China or was unlabeled. So, I stopped buying it entirely.
Netflix show "Rotten", Season 1, Episode "Garlic Breath". It's been a hotly contested episode. I haven't seen any debate about the peeled garlic, though.
I think the reason for saying forced labor was to distinguish it from chattel slavery (what most people think of when they see the word slavery), not downplaying the actions of this supplier.
To the tune of Childish Gambinos "This is America": This is globalism
This was always the point of offloading to other countries. Less regulations, lower wages, less powerful workers and workers unions, and higher profit margins. Ross Perot was right but nobody listened to him. Apple isnt unique, and this isnt the first time. Its systemic.
So tired of the trope of accusing anybody critical of globalism of being an isolationist. Protectionism is a valid and needed (to a certain degree) approach for all nation states, ours included.
You seem to want to kill flies with nuclear weapons.
The vast majority of third world workers benefit from free trade and freely choose the jobs it produces.
Protectionism sentences people far poorer than you to far worse economic lives. Taking away Apple assembly jobs doesn’t increase third world wages or worker protections, it makes them worse. Those workers are consigned to work back in brutal rural jobs that not only pay less but are far more dangerous.
Globalism is how the third world living standards catch up.
> The vast majority of third world workers benefit from free trade and freely choose the jobs it produces.
Source? Especially for the second statement.
They don't benefit from free trade, free trade is the reason why they are exploited and their countries kept in poverty. And how can you say that they freely choose their jobs if the only alternative they have to ridicolous wages and low safety jobs is to starve?
Third world workers don’t have to work for first world manufacturers like Apple, they can keep doing the jobs they already have.
The reason they don’t is their existing jobs are far worse, typically far more difficult and dangerous farm jobs.That’s why when Foxconn used to post new iPhone assembly jobs, Chinese would line up by thousands because an Apple assembly job is a ticket out of poverty.
So if first world manufacturers left, your reducing third world workers choices back to the lower paying, much worse work they had before.
Too lazy to Google but India used protectionism because it wanted to do its own thing after independence and keep the evil western corporation away. By the end of 1980's India was almost bankrupt and had to get loans from IMF one of the condition was to open up the economy. India's poverty rate started to fall down after the economy opened up.
My countries government should understand the implications of the policies it impliments, including the impact on people in other countries, but my governments first concern shouldn't be those other peoples, it should be it's own citizens! For those who seriously try to understand this topic, the implication you aren't talking about (and a myriad more) is that due to this we can expect the first world standards/wealth to decrease in response. Of course there are those who then respond "good! about time!" or some equivalent, but I digress.
The mental gymanstics I see being performed in comments here boggles the mind, but I am thankful at least to have a refresher on all the kinds of responses I need to be prepared to rebute. Lets restate them as prereq for responding to them: (on globalism)
It increases the wealth of poor people in other countries
It offers more employment opportunities for said people
It increases the wealth of the third world in general
It's not globalism, it's the companies who participate in it and aren't heald accountable.
You had a "protectionist" president and how did that work out?
It's not globalisms fault, it's capitalisms fault.
Globalism as a term is a "racist dog whistle" and an "antisemitic conspiratorial buzzword"
So far, none of these are particularly well thought out or presented, and suffer obvious weaknesses. I'm not sure if I feel like taking the time currently to dissect them each right now, but they will go in the todo list.
> My countries government should understand the implications of the policies it impliments, including the impact on people in other countries, but my governments first concern shouldn't be those other peoples, it should be it's own citizens!
The people in other countries are human beings with exactly the same value and rights as I have. The responsible thing to do is to do both. Just like my responsibility is to both take care of my family and my community and the world, all at once. If I sacrifice one, I'm irresponsible and failing. I would be (and sometimes am) ashamed that my government fails at those responsibilities.
The parent assumes a zero-sum tradeoff, but that's not how trade, peace, and freedom work - they benefit everyone. Thankfully, I have great solutions internationally. Globalization and the democratic world order have been the most successful international policies by orders of magnitude. Name any point in history, any approach to international trade or international relations, that has yielded the success of the post-WWII era? Not only in economics, but in peace and freedom.
We need to do better. What better option do you offer, that will improve the lives of the next generation
> The people in other countries are human beings with exactly the same value and rights as I have.
This is untrue. I am very much a believer in individual rights as set forth in the decleration of independence, so on a philosophical level to an extent I agree, but the to say people in other countries have the same rights as a citizen of the empire is just silly.
> The parent assumes a zero-sum tradeoff, but that's not how trade, peace, and freedom work - they benefit everyone.
This is at best a naive approach to what peace is in the reality of current machaviellian globalism. As Tacitus said: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace."
> The responsible thing to do is to do both.
Like when on an airplane in an emergency, you should put the ogygen on yourself first. To just ignore my point and say, "well, but it is better" doesn't address the issue. There are all kinds of complications with proping up third worlds, but I'll get to that in a second.
> (other commenter) Free trade increases the standard of living of all participants, including both the third and first world, so I’m having trouble understanding your point.
The point is that not only is this not true, but there are a vast array of costs being ignored. (when I say this isn't true, I have listened to plenty of pro-globalist/pro-free-traders talk about how America and other first world countries are just going to have to get used to the idea that their wealth is going to decrease as it equalizes out globally, of course what they don't say is that the elite a supranational and won't be affected for the most part)
So many people here seem to be pretending it's either complete free-trade, or complete isolationism, which not only isn't true, just proves my point that it is abused as a cudgel whenever the topic comes up, but doesn't stand up to any decent level of scrutiny, and is just a strawman fallacy. A great example of this is how the former British empire and later the American empire decided that that would rather have dictators they could influence and control rather than nationalists take power in the third world. Have you seen, in reality, what free trade has done in the case of Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic just for a small list of examples? Massive amounts of death and destruction, later papered over by dictators friendly to IMF and globalist corporations. This is what I mean when I quote Tacitus about them making a desert and calling it peace. More on the IMF, being a great example, promising to lift a people out of poverty, when in reality what they do is embroil a country into debt and servitude while corrupting the political and elite class into aquiscence. So the companies get what they want, the IMF gets what they want, and the elite of a country get rich... and the poor people continue to suffer...
but at least they got a few more jobs at the resulting factories so they could buy a few more cokes with their marginally higher chattel-like slave wages... and can now pretend to have exited third world status, despite the continued blowback from those "interventions" leaking onto the global stage. I've only touched on a handful in South America, but if we wanted to we could talk about Africa, or SE Asia, etc. who have all suffered similar fates.
I want to say can't believe this is the state of discourse on the topic, but I can. One of the things that woke me up about it is just this kind of response... how any even modicum of criticism of globalism and free-trade is met with a myriad of half-retorts and white-washing, while completely ignoring or mischaracterizing the valid at least for consideration arguments against it. I don't even have to get into details like the ~700k manufacturing jobs lost since the implimentation of NAFTA, or the trade good deficit chart since then to criticize these arguments, and citing some narrowly defined "law" such as comparative advantage that fails to take into account other factors doesn't change that. One just has to look at Mexico post-NAFTA to see how theory doesn't match reality.
Yall need to go read Smedley Butlers "War is a Racket", because make no mistake, globalistic free-trade as it exists today was built on a backbone of war, corruption, death and destruction. So think on that as you defend it.
Another Tacitus quote while I'm at it: "No doubt, there was peace after all this, but it was a peace stained with blood."
> I have listened to plenty of pro-globalist/pro-free-traders talk about how America and other first world countries are just going to have to get used to the idea that their wealth is going to decrease as it equalizes out globally
Anyone who says this doesn’t understand free trade, even if they advocate it.
And US/Western anti-communist policies of supporting friendly dictators has nothing to do with allowing citizens freedom to trade. Again the same politicians often can support two different policies, one invaluable and one abhorrent, with no physical requirement that they are linked.
And US manufacturing post NAFTA has been stronger than ever, so stop repeating that old saw. If you thought NAFTA would create gumdrops rain showers and candy coated roads in Mexico, you are mistaken. NAFTA brought many better jobs to Mexico, but it can’t solve the war on drugs, bring back circular migration, eliminate governmental corruption, or reduce the stifling influence of the Catholic Church.
And while Smedleys book is a classic, free trade isn’t responsible for mercantilism, they are literally polar opposite philosophies. Mercantilism is the use of government resources and restrictions to support a small set of favored businesses, while free trade dictates a level playing field for all participants.
And wake me up when you can think of a coherent criticism of the law of comparative advantage. It’s been a bedrock of economics for over two hundred years because it’s critics have never been able to disprove it and it’s massive benefits.
> And wake me up when you can think of a coherent criticism of the law of comparative advantage.
In exchange I would like you to tell me exactly how in the world you can claim "US manufacturing post NAFTA has been stronger than ever". I've heard about the benifits to consumer prices sure, and that a certain amount of manufacturing has returned due to robotization, but even if that is factored in I'm a bit confused as to how this claim is even close to reality.
1. CA assumes particpating consumers and businesses have knowledge of location of lowest cost, which isn't always true.
2. CA ignores transport costs which can easily offset the raw CA numbers.
3. CA fails to factor in lack of or monopoly on economies of scale.
4. CA also fails to factor in rates of inflation, subsidies, lack of or high import controls etc.
5. It fails to take into account non-price factors such as brand loyalty, item quality, etc.
6. Exchange rates can undermine raw CA numbers.
7. CA ignores IP legal issues mostly surrounding R&D investment.
8. CA still fails to take into account second and third teir effects needed to institute CA. So as I referenced before, Guatemala as an example, had to have a coup performed against it first, with massive amounts of suffering and theft from people to pave a way for the "free-trade" state needed for CA to come into effect. That loss of life and wealth as a prereq isn't factored in.
One correction to your previous citizen of the world comment, the US Bill of Rights lists rights for all people, not just US Citizens (outside specific voting rights).
Ok, US manufacturing has nearly doubled in actual value since 1990.
It doesn’t employ as many people, but that’s progress. Making more stuff with fewer people is the only way to grow wages over the long run.
The law of comparative advantage has remained an economic bedrock because none of the criticisms you cribbed from a web page have stood up outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances.
1. Producers always have a very good idea of their costs and where they are lower. Minor Exceptions don’t make a difference, a market doesn’t have to be perfectly efficient to be efficient.
2. Producers know transport costs, that’s a trivial calculation. Clearly CA works better the lower transportation costs are, and it’s harder the higher they are. But if you have free trade in gravel, it doesn’t rebut CA that gravel is frequently too cheap and heavy to transport, so while African gravel can be produced cheaper it’s not going to be shipped to America.
3. Monopolies and economies of scale just drive costs/pricing. Again it’s costs that drive CA, so not rebutting anything.
4. CA takes into account all costs, even such as tariffs. Protectionism is a way of eliminating the magical benefits of CA by increasing the costs of foreign goods and services to local levels or higher. So now the local economy is burdened with all the low value work that could have been cheaply exported, and has fewer resources for the most productive and valuable work.
1-7, really none of are coherent arguments against CA, it’s as if you don’t even understand how it works. An economic participant never needs perfect knowledge of costs, exchange rates, etc to enter into profitable transactions. For one example, interest and exchange rates are easy to hedge for relatively long periods. If you find a significantly cheaper assembler in China, hedging is just one of your costs, and if exchange rates move against you in such a huge amount that Chinese assembly becomes too expensive you simply move assembly when your hedges expire.
And 8) is just a rant about Guatemala. Whatever government runs Guatemala, the benefits of CA are available if it allows free trade. If Guatemalan workers can improve their living standards by taking on another countries low value work at a lower cost, both will benefit.
Free trade increases the standard of living of all participants, including both the third and first world, so I’m having trouble understanding your point.
Go read up about comparative advantage to understand the true benefits of free trade.
Or ask yourself, if you were a lawyer billing $200 an hour for your services, and had a secretary costing you $20/hour doing your typing, would you fire them if you could type twice as fast as them? Would spending part of your work hours on less valuable work make you wealthier or poorer?
How does exporting dirty industry and dangerous jobs to a place where they are less regulated serve humanity?
Let me change your analogy because it is completely unrepresentative of the externalities involved in manufacturing.
Say you own a business that happens to produce a bunch of toxic waste that requires dangerous handling, and special payment to dispose of. You don’t want your employees to do it because it’s requires a specially trained employee and having them around increases you workers comp insurance significantly, and they also want hazard pay as a result of their training. Buuut you can go down the street and hire Jo from the corner to take it off your hands for $50. He doesn’t care how dangerous it is, he just needs money for heroin. You can just report that you didn’t produce the waste he’s taking and nobody will be the wiser.
Should you hire Jo to take care of it, or handle it yourself? You understand the danger, know how to handle the material, and have the means to dispose of it in an equitable way to everyone. Would hiring Jo be right, simply because he’d be $50 poorer if I didn’t hire him?
What if my business didn’t produce toxic waste? What if Jo isn’t a heroin addict but instead a poor third world person who lives a subsistence level life?
Should I be prevented from offering Jo a better, higher paying assembly job because a small group of sleazy manufacturers use his country to escape environmental regulations?
Apple isn’t outsourcing assembly to escape environmental regulations. It’s offering better paying jobs that are lifting chinese and Indian workers out of poverty, while also reducing the cost of their products. That makes them more affordable to a wider audience. Apple, workers and consumers win, because free trade benefits all parties.
Environmental controls can only be implemented at the national and international level. If China doesn’t implement them, it’s not the fault of US companies.
If you make leading edge batteries that produce lots of toxic waste as a byproduct, the US will require you institute expensive controls/cleaning processes to prevent it from leaking into the environment.
But if China doesn’t have similar controls, making those batteries will be cheaper in China. If the US maker doesn’t go to China to make their batteries, they will lose marketshare to companies that do, or more likely Chinese companies.
If the US bans Chinese made batteries over environmental reasons, it makes US made electric cars uncompetitive and we lose sales and jobs to Chinese and European car makers.
So it’s never free trade at fault, it’s lack of international cooperation on environmental policies. If Chinese made products had to meet a base set of environmental manufacturing standards to be sold in Europe AND North America, they’d comply or lose 90% of their sales.
But the problem is that your arguments are often used disingenuously by labor unions whose actual agenda is protectionist policies to raise manufacturing costs in the third world to protect their members from competition. They really want to impose US level minimum wages in third world nations, which would be a disaster given they don’t have the capital and skills to support them. A backwards policy that hurts us too by protecting low value jobs we should be advancing out of.
>What if my business didn’t produce hazardous waste.
Then it wouldn’t be a good fit for an analogy regarding the externalities of globalism.
> Environmental controls can only be implemented at the national and international level.
False. Apple could have actually applied their own internal standards that they market, and shareholders could also have standards(lol).
>if the US bans Chinese batteries, it makes US made cars uncompetitive
You don’t say, this has been a tad condescending my dude. That said, aren’t batteries kind of an ironic choice given that Tesla built its gigafactory here? Which kinda illustrates what bugs me about the realities of globalism, most of the time regulations on industry predominantly increase start-up costs. Having dealt with both OSHA and the EPA extensively in the manufacturing sector, the marginal cost of compliance was typically low, but only once the process was set up.
>so it’s never free trade at fault, it’s lack of international cooperation on environmental policies.
I’m mostly with you here, I place a great deal of the blame on corrupt politicians in the West. But I disagree that it’s not the fault of free trade. Free trade is an animal and globalism is its handler. Globalism in the west has failed to rein in the beast that is the free market. Leaders pay plenty of lip service to the human cost of things and the environment. But as the dominant species on the planet we should be striving to prevent rising cultures from making the same mistakes that cultures who have already lifted themselves up made. Our planet can’t take us all following the same path.
I strongly believe and advocate that Western countries should band together and form a trade union based on occupational safety and environmental protection. Because until they do that, I see all of the liberal grandstanding about saving the environment and wanting things made safely as nothing but fraud. These departments do little but shift the damage somewhere else, and I care not at all where the person getting cancer from the mine is from, or who pours chemicals into the water. I care that it happens at all.
>your arguments are made disingenuously by labor unions.
Well I’m really not sure if it’s important that they make it disingenuously, but I will certainly agree that enforcing minimum wage in other countries is ridiculous. And I’m all for offshoring when it’s a good fit, but if a product is sold in a country it should be manufactured following the same environmental and occupational safety regulations as the country in which it is to be sold. I’m 100% for bringing up poorer countries, but we should be strongly disincentivizing avoiding automation in favor of loosely regulated human capital. I’ve watched many manufacturing businesses get killed in the US as a result of these sorts of regulations, and it’s horrifying to me. It’s super sad to see a US manufacturing sector business die from the proverbial straw, knowing that it will be replaced with a business in another country doing things considerably worse.
So I have a kind of rule about regulation that I also advocate.
If a regulation of a given industry creates a burden, then policy should be adopted to offset that burden either through trade policy(tariffs/duties,ideally as a block of developed nations) or through domestic policy(subsidies or grants to help bring them to compliance).
I disagree that only western countries should be advancing out of these jobs. Human kind as a whole should be advancing out of as many of them as we can, and many times we have the means to do so, but it’s cheaper just to be happy with our community advancing past these jobs.
I wouldn't call that a good sign of leadership. That's more an act of shutting everyone else off from access to technology.
Instead, a good leader will help lift others. Take Microsoft Research. For a long time, they were a leader in scientific publications in CS, with many awards. Compare that to Apple, and imho any sign of "leadership" is completely non-existent in comparison.
Why should we consider any moral stance, by any for-profit corporation, as anything other than marketing?
The real problem, as I see it, is that individuals see their relationships to corporations as anything other than transactional. Strange things happen when people adopt a company’s marketing effort into their personal identity.
Instead, we should be looking at corporations objectively and deciding whether their incentives align with our own. Keep our identities with other individuals, not with corporations and branding.
Someone should calculate how much energy an iPhone uses for rendering that page (or any other on their website). I bet reducing that would make a difference environmentally.
I agree, but globalism has on the whole improved the human condition by a lot. The vast majority of people aren’t middle-class citizens of developed countries. Like everything, balance is key.
Indeed. Without the outsourcing, they would still be in those same conditions, but earning less. Now there is external money coming into their economy.
Instead of blaming globalism, maybe one should make companies responsible for their external effects? As in, lawfully responsible, to be tried as if they did it themselves. Like pollution, using other companies to do their unethical biddings etc (child or slave labor for instance).
Why not just ban outsourcing to countries with poor labor laws? The commonly stated purpose of the U.S. outsourcing to China was to 1. help lift it out of poverty and 2. bring it democracy through capitalism.
Goal #1 has been largely achieved and Goal #2 has been an epic failure. The U.S. should completely phase out outsourcing to China over the next decade. This would drive a huge acceleration of automated manufacturing in the U.S. which is the future anyway.
Companies like Apple could move all manufacturing to the U.S. over a decade if they wanted to. They have the money and the technology. But they're currently addicted to cheap (and unethical) labor. They're unlikely quit on their own, as long as U.S. law enables their addiction.
It also spreads wealth. China lifted more people out of poverty than any nation in history, because of globalisation.
Are you saying poverty is less important than workers rights?
Economies develop. This is part of it. You’ve just had a “protectionist” President, US is worse off by almost every measure... as a counter example to your “protectionism is needed”
>You’ve just had a “protectionist” President, US is worse off by almost every measure... as a counter example to your “protectionism is needed”
That is not a counter-example to anything AFAICT. We didn't have a 'protectionist' President. We had an incompetent President, who faked to be a protectionist.
Citation, with inflation adjustments. Please provide.
Why is the US passing stimulus packages if it’s going so well?
(To further my point was that growth a hang over from the globalist President? Or a result of the protectionist one? Did it continue throughout the 4 years? I already know the answer, but just pointing out the flaw in your point for you so you don’t need to find it)
> You’ve just had a “protectionist” President, US is worse off by almost every measure...
Could we get some citations to back this up? It seems too soon to even evaluate all of the effects of the (soon to be) previous administrations policies.
But as a discussion point, Trump moved to end the postal subsidies China enjoyed which made it cheaper for us to have something shipped from there than to buy locally. How does this hurt the US?
That’s a single policy. Perhaps that’s a good one?
Imagine a world where China and the U.S. were on better terms, start of the health crisis China helped provide huge amounts Of PPE required. Drs and epidemiologists from China with experience could have helped drs in the US. Instead they were coming off the back of a trade war over soy beans and hiding information from each other.
Globalisation has effects that expand beyond the economy.
As for citations: the US has just passed the second, largest stimulus package in its history beating or the first from a couple of months back. Are we’re ignoring this gorilla so much that people need citations?
> As for citations: the US has just passed the second, largest stimulus package in its history beating or the first from a couple of months back. Are we’re ignoring this gorilla so much that people need citations?
I'm going to push back on the tenuous link between the US being protectionist and the stimulus package. It's not like protectionist policies directly led to the economic problems the US - and a lot of the world - are experiencing thus requiring the stimulus package.
Your argument is that if the trade war didn't happen China would have been far more likely to help us. That's not an unreasonable argument but even if they did do that how would that have prevented the economic damages caused by all of the lockdowns the US - and China - went through?
A reasonable argument could also be made that even if the trade war didn't happen China would not have done what you described anyway. China and the US have always had a tumultuous relationship. Plus let's not forget the panicked free-for-all when it came to PPE during the early days of the pandemic which many, many countries participated in.
So I would say the US's bungled response to the early days of the pandemic are what lead to the stimulus package, not any sort of protectionist policies. If the US were on better terms with China perhaps it would have been slightly less severe due to Chinese supplied masks during the shortage and all that; but given how difficult its been to make people wear masks in general I'm not so sure.
> I'm going to push back on the tenuous link between the US being protectionist and the stimulus package. It's not like protectionist policies directly led to the economic problems the US - and a lot of the world - are experiencing thus requiring the stimulus package.
The trade war didn't improve the US economy. COVID actually squeezed the Stockmarket up (as interest rates hit 0 or negative) from stimulus (around the world).
I think you are probably right that it wasn't protectionist policies directly. But the US governments "Me, and Mine" (America First) approach has wilfully ignored good advice, policy and approach that has lead to its current situation.
It wasn't a bungled response to early days... it's consistent bungling from the first day until right this minute. (A pandemic with no generally available vaccine, wide spread infection, and no nationally coordinated mitigation = bungling, whatever excuses you make about US gov structure etc...).
China and US have always had a tumultuous relationship exactly because they don't try to resolve it, they see each other as rivals, and a threat.
To me it's two fold:
- The US would not have a relationship say similar to Britain/US because of the fundamental differences and problems with CCP's behavior
- Vis a vis the CCP's habitual covering up of anything embarrassing and Xi's / CCPs singular focus on maintaining and growing their own power. see COVID, SARs and the many examples from business to free speech & 'press.'
It's circularly not possible.
CCPs behavior must fundamentally change, (or scarily the US becomes like CCP)
The hiding was squarely on CCP. Maybe you could argue if COVID popped up in US first it would have been the same.
But if the tables were turned I don't believe there would be any attempts to hide facts and not offer support beyond Trump's own incompetence and pathological personality disorder wishing it would 'magically go away' so he could get elected again.
--
And to the parent parent there are plenty of facts both ways but it's impossible to separate effects of policy from the HUGE negative pain caused by Trump's abdication of responsibility. Trump has undeniably left us in a horrible place, far greater than any gains from policy.
The shoe IS on the other foot, and the US DID hide the facts. Their administration purposefully suppressed CDC information and pursued a herd immunity strategy without expressing it. You can't say "beyond trumps own incompetence and personality" without also saying "without Xi's incompetence and personality"... I don't think that is intellectually fair.
I'm happy to criticise china for the things it could do better:
- It's fast approach to full blown dictatorship, the death of the party, the rise of Xi
- Or its suppression/persecution of people actually trying to improve things for the Chinese people (Wuhan reporters, Rights activists etc)
But "Forced labour"... while developed nations like the US have prison labour? Persecution of Uighers, while Guantanamo is still a thing. Fix the things in your own back yard, which you have control over then from the moral high ground try and fix further abroad, otherwise no one (including the Chinese) pay no attention to what they see as just agg-prop. HN loves to jump on the latest china bashing and just make excuses/justifications US based domestic problems
Every single China thread on HN turns into a false equivalence 'no the US has far worse history / false whataboutism'
A couple Trump political appointees attempted to do that. The system worked and the US didn't jail the NYTimes and the press for reporting the facts. Their stupidly half assed political crap didn't work and they lost the election.
I wouldn't call Xi incompetent but instead scarily so. The power of Trump versus Xi & CCP are not even in the same ballpark
It's pointless to engage but sometimes I can't help it
You are right, but it's because people are generally not willing to enter a proper debate on the issues in China. Take the Uigher issue, it is ALWAYS reported with a lack of context.
No mention of the bombings, the mass killing events, the huge domestic terrorism issue it has caused China for the last 20 years. Instead we just get reports of China "randomly" persecuting these people for seemingly no reason.
When you have people showing up at one of the largest train stations[0] in the country openly representing an ethnic minority and randomly stabbing men, woman and children of Han decent... what is the correct government response?
This isn't even the debate that we have. We don't ask this question at all, we instead publish photos of prisons, and reeducation camps, but no one ever seems to ask "Why is china doing this?" because the assumption that Western Media would like you to make is "Because they are just evil communists".
It would be like reporting on Guantanamo as an "off shore prison where America kidnaps people from foreign countries and keeps them there for no reason, most have never even been the the US" --- There would be uproar if news was reported that way. But when it's China, everyone is happy to have their blinders on, and not understand or explore the full context of a difficult issue.
There are plenty of terrorist attacks in the US too, from the wiki below China does have a few years with big numbers but the US page doesn't include a bunch of mass shootings by far right white MAGA and single white men wackos.
And despite those numbers the US isn't rounding up millions of our own citizens into 're-education camps.' I'm sure the 'whatabout' is the stupid wars in the middle east which are undoubtedly horrible and should fairly be condemned (and definitely are). But the US is not waging an ethnic genocide on our own citizens.
That's a straw man. They're saying that hundreds of millions of Chinese people (and others around the world) have risen out of poverty because of globalism. You're only giving credit for the negative impacts of globalism, and in kind of a duplicitous manner.
I am not sure I understand this argument. The article states the "laborers" in question are given a choice as follows: submit to unpaid forced labor else go to a CCP reeducation camp. Nowhere is it stated those subjected to this choice have the opportunity to take advantage of rising living standards.
I agree “forced work” or slavery should be stopped. But go and visit these factories in China... the people are their voluntarily... because their alternative is worse than those conditions.
Like I said economies develop, China should improve its workers rights laws, and slowly it has and will.
We should avoid and remove slavery. Agree.
But using developing countries as an example of why developed countries should be more protectionist at exactly the point in time where the US tried that and lost out on almost every front is insane and disconnected from reality
Mostly agree but highly doubt if China would change the worker rights laws. Actually they do not need change since they already got a good one (including 40 hour work week and overtime pay), but it's rarely enforced by local governments.
As the saying in China goes: "Government Policy, Peoples' Anti-Policy". If the government don't police the laws, then they aren't really laws.
Working conditions in a lot of Chinese companies are terrible in comparison to US/EU counterparts. Any evidence you need is just look at how much a Chinese company will change things if they hire a "westerner" (just for that westerner mind you)... It's ridiculous, China can and should do better.
True, but really if they hire a foreigner, that must be a different position that natives are not capable of. If you are a native and asking something even legal according the law (like double payment for working in weekend), your boss could fire you and there're plenty of people want that job. Also suing that company for wrongful termination takes much time and effort, many blue collar workers even do not know how to do it. With all being said, the working condition is getting better comparing that decades ago, but it's not because of government, it's only because the economy are growing and it takes more money to hire people.
I don’t vote for a president to achieve global fairness. I vote for one who will make my life the best. If that’s not great for Chinese peasants that’s not the US President’s problem. China should develop its economy, but the US should not have allowed its corporations to have given China such a huge leg up in doing so.
Isn't it just 1 parameter: cheaper?
This kind of work is outsourcing anyway. So I think all the things you mention there have no impact, since it all wouldn't matter when the price would be the same.
I think “this is capitalism/liberalism” is a better way to call it out.
I am tired of the globalism/isolationism dichotomy that gets thrown around too, but there are good reasons to criticize attributing all of these problems to globalism. For one, “globalism” is commonly used as a racist dog whistle, and is a popular antisemitic conspiratorial buzzword. Second, calling out globalism as the root of the problem leaves out the fact that it’s capitalism that drives the need for globalism, not globalism existing just for the sake of globalism.
