After an all-day seminar at a college, I came across a high quality poster decrying exploited labor, and in particular accusing the Gap of nefarious activities. The poster featured a victim, one Chie (Carmencita) Abad. Something just wasn’t right. She did not look abused. The poster had such high production values, and she was dressed in, well, Gap-hip clothes!
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I googled her and discovered she is a Filipina garment worker who spent 5 years in the Marianas (US Territory) working in a sweatshop. She became a labor agitator (a very good thing in my book) and the managers did not renew her yearly contract to work in retaliation.
Wait. If the conditions are bad, how is non-renewing a work-contract a bad thing?
Well, the work conditions are bad. Often people work 14 hour days. Oh.... Wait! When I was young, I often volunteered to work 14 hour days (we called them double shifts) in a hospital kitchen, hot dangerous work, in at 5am, out at 8pm, because one could rack up the hours and pay that way. And I did this at 15 years old, by lying about my age to get the job. I loved it. I begged to cover for people who wanted the day off. I loved three day weekends, when people wanted to go camping or something, and I could line up 3 double shifts in a row, and rack up overtime on top of that. Bingo! Dude, your getting a stereo!
But that is exploitation of children. Well, the sick got eager, attentive energetic kitchen help, I stayed off the streets, and very much enjoyed the esprit de corp of restaurant work. I was of the age of reason, let me decide. Stevie Wonder was 12 when he was banging out the hits. Should we have been denied the good of his work because of his age? Should he be forbidden to earn because of his age? He gets an exception because people make millions of him. Any other 12 year old gets locked up in school. And drugged.
These people leave the Philippines to work for a year, and want to make as much money as possible, to take back home and use it to start up something good. Crab fisherman do it. Roughnecks do it. As a kid I did it. The question is not whether people work 14 hour days, the question is whether they have a choice.
Ms. Chie is not complaining about 14 hour days, she complains they did not renew her contract, so she could work 14 hour days! She lost her choice to work.
Now choice is not enough. A choice between prostitution and starvation is no choice, although many people make it. It is not right to take advantage of people who have no choice.
A choice has to be within a system where there is no force or fraud. We will never see such a system this side of the parousia, so it is a matter of relative degree. Hong Kong and Switzerland, plenty of freedom. USA, not so much.
In USA, licensure and regulation, on the pretext of quality control, limit access to work. Haircutting, taxi medallions, even rent control limit our opportunities for choice. So we have problems here, too. We do have many contrived jobs, that add costs, like govt building inspectors. Insurance companies are necessary and sufficient for building safety, yet we tolerate an entire expensive layer of pointless activity in our construction industry.
Some people defend low wages with various arguments, that I do not accept.
A. To say that the little money goes further for them than for us may be true, but the workers have to be free to contract, not coerced at any wage level. To say the workers are relatively well off compared to others does not cut it, it doesn’t matter if you are coerced in any way.
B. To say they are lucky to have the work, well that is not right.
1. If work is bad, they are objectively not lucky
2. If they have no alternative, they are not lucky, they are stuck.
C. $1 to them buys more than $1 buys in USA. So what? If our economy is so distorted as to make things too expensive for foreigners, it does not follow that this is good for foreigners. Again, are they free to choose, or at least to what degree?
D. If I don't do it someone else will... in high school that attitude gets you married to the wrong person. So it is in international trade.
Places like Vietnam, and the Philippines, opportunities abound. A poor person in Vietnam exploits an opportunity presented. Pou Chen Corporation, agent to the shoemakers, opens an office to make Nikes in Vietnam (I saw their offices when I was there). Countless people present themselves to labor making Nikes. Every single person in line has the same idea: if I can just get hired, then I can leverage my way to better and better.
If there are too few opportunities in a given country, then that is the problem for the people in that country, not for anyone outside of that country. We may buy things from a given country, but as a matter of fact, the less freedom a country has, the less we buy, the less likely we will do business. The more we buy, the more liberal it becomes. We merchants are the only real nation builders working in history.
We talk of failed states. There are no failed economies, only failed state economic policies. The worst economic systems are the most state controlled: Cuba and North Korea. We trade with neither, by law, but getting rid of the laws would not change much. If the people of those countries do not care for their system, they can make the changes.
Redistribution polices do more harm than good. We propose to redistribute wealth by taking a dollar from a millionaire and giving it to a poor person. Well, when a government is involved, they take a dollar, spend 92 cents on themselves, and the poor get about 8 cents, but I digress. When we take dollar from millionaire who has many extra dollars, that dollar is not very important to the millionaire. And the millionaire would just blow it on a cigar. But that cigar was made by a poor person, for whom that dollar was his first dollar, and is important to the poor person. When you redistribute the wealth of the rich, you steal from the the poor person who made the cigar. You give it to another poor person in USA (well, 8 cents of it.)
We try to do “foreign aid” to help the poor overseas. The poor in USA are taxed for this money. The money ends up in the hands of the rich overseas. Wacky: USA Aid takes money form the poor in the USA and gives it to the rich overseas.
Change will come from the very workers themselves. Agitation, nonviolent noncooperation... protests... these are how USA labor advanced, and how anyone else can too. The oppressors and exploiters care what others think. But nonviolence is the key to progress.
We all face times when we choose to do do less then we are capable to get where we want. We all give up money now on speculation of payoff later. Often we just call it "school." Countless people put in unpaid work at dotcoms for experience or stock options later. People work at Mcdonalds to work their way up. The Nike worker does exactly what we do... looks at circumstances and makes a choice. and is every bit as, no more or less, exploited as we are. There is a way out, but it takes heroic effort, which can and does happen. We can no more pity the Vietnamese worker than we can the Microsoft or Starbucks worker, or for that matter, the self-employed.
So Ms. Abad has chosen the heroic path of agitation. Good for her! So, how is the Poster Gal for worker exploitation (literally) faring these days?
Check her out...
She is a very popular speaker. Her name brings up 232,000 results on google... at page 50 there is a reference to yet another speaking engagement, with about 10 entries a page, that’s over 500 right there!
Hmmm. I wonder what she gets for such a speech, maybe 30 minutes long.
*Honorarium: What amount are you able to provide in terms of honorarium? (Keep in mind that most of our speakers receive an honorarium of around $1000 while some need more and some need less, based on their own situation and where they are located. Almost all of the speakers will require an honorarium to cover their time.
What!? $1000, for a half hour! I am in the wrong business! OK, OK.. she probably pays her own way, but she also likely gets all sorts of other benefits too, non-monetary.
I am not complaining. All I am doing is pointing out exactly how people work. Oppress them, they figure a way around it. It is only because Ms. Abad sought out the work as a seamstress that she got to the Marianas. It is precisely because she agitated for better conditions that she got fired, and parlayed that into a lucrative career describing in no doubt colorful terms labor exploitation to an eager audience desperate to hear about wicked industrialists who make money selling clothes to the very people in her audience.
Atta girl!
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