Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Must be a wonderful place SV lives in.

Again I sometimes wonder if living such a sheltered life is good or not.

Ill be responding in full to previous posts however in the meantime I have a question.

If I set up a factory in Malawi, Africa to make T-shirts and I offer workers $1/hr if they are willing to work 12hrs per day (minimum, more if they want) to work really hard with only two brief breaks, am I exploiting the workers ?

Please anyone who is reading this feel free to answer "yes" or "no" and if you feel like it your reason for your answer. Thanks !

Is there 10000 other people waiting in line for the job if I choose not to work there?

Yes or No would be good.

It doesn't matter. Lets just say there are at least some people in line (If there was no one in line I would be forced to put up my rates to attract them) so I am not forced to put my rates up.
I guess that is a yes.

So exploitation or not ?

As a working man, I have worked atthe best possible rates I could manage.
So, if any one of them come and work there, that means that is the best they could have done. And I believe they would thank you for the job provided.

If no one works there for that rate, then guess what? you will bring the rates up.

Step out of the fantasy world of "what if?" for a minute, only use real world examples..

You are not in Malawi..

What if I open a fairly shop down in Fremantle? Actually, bad idea there is already one there...

Really... .... never seen a "fairly" shop before... anywhere...

It's telling that you have to go waaay back to the beginning of the last century to find a lab setting to test these theories, or to un- or under-developed countries. A first-worlder would fight this no workers' rights crap (I would hope).

More research, I expect not a lot of people know why we have 8 hour work days or how this battle was fought:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

The next step in exploitation is to lure in people with slightly higher wages, but force them to live in an area with a higher cost of living. You may build your factory in Malawi with the best intentions. You also happen to be a good person SV. Most factory owners will bring as much back out of their workers as they can. A lot of times the factory is built remote from population centers. A new village is built around the factory, but there the rents are higher. The Company store is delighted to sell to the new worker on credit. Who cares that the prices are three times higher than it was in your familiar village. Instead of t shirts, why don't you put your efforts into serving the Malawi people instead. Perhaps a shop that sells and teaches aquaponic equipment. Or perhaps buying artesian products for resale in more affluent areas. A t shirt factory won't benefit anyone. I don't hear anyone complaining about a lack of tshirts. The people of Malawi would be much better served, and a small business would be much stronger, if the focus was building a reliable food source for it's people. A well digging service might be good too. Once you have a well drill there, the hard part is over. If you are hell bent on building a factory, perhaps a factory that sells goods that are of use there. Perhaps a factory that builds well drilling equipment. Now if you pay your workers a dollar a day, sell the equipment at a price reasonable for the cost of living there, build housing and charge rents no higher than they paying in their village, sell goods to them no higher than they pay in their village, than you would not be exploiting them. But that is not what the kind of people that build factories in third world countries do. They build in third world countries to maximize profits. Period.

The reason I am using Malawi is because it is a third world country, I am making the hypothetical example typical of a modern day sweat shop.
The factory does not service the people, it makes tshirts for wealthy fat westerners.

If it can happen it will

If your factory can enable people to have a truly better standard of life, than it is not exploitation. The thing to keep in mind is that a lot of companies target societies with exceptionally low standards of life. Instead of giving the people a better standard of life, they perpetuate the problem to ensure a large worker pool. However in Malawi, it would be surprising if you did find a large pool of workers. Most individuals there would sooner live off the bush than work in a factory, and disease is quite the issue. A consistent work force is difficult at best to get in most parts of Africa. So likely your t shirt factory will not get a chance to exploit people. You would have a much better chance of exploiting people in Sri Lanka, India, or Pakistan for your t shirt factory.

The point was to point out that exploitation seems very subjective.
In Malawi most people are on a couple of dollars per day, so $1 per hour would be a fantastic wage and people would be lining up to get a job there.

This wasn't the case when I was there for a week. Most individuals just want a job so they don't have to scratch out an existance from the "bush".

Would you take starvation over working with asbestos with poor safety practices ?
Since starvation means garunteed death, working with asbestos is a much better option, I would do it.

So the question I ask is: What would happen if, due to desired regulations, the asbestos factory closed. Wouldn't those regulations, by the logic of the progressives, damn those employees to starvation? Is starvation better than risking your lungs in the factory?

Progressives take the desperation of the "exploited" as an argument for regulating away their ability to make free choices. Their logic is wrong. That desperation should cause us to remove any artificial obstacles to whatever transactions the desperate people believe improves their condition. The more desperate they are, they more they need every option available to them, no matter how unpalatable it appears to third parties.

The focus shouldn't be on prohibiting unpalatable options, but on identifying root causes for limited choices. In the case of workers in India, an obvious cause is the mountain of government regulations which make opening a business in India much more difficult than it needs to be.

Surely if you had no regulation you would dream up something more profitable than a T Shirt factory
Organ trafficking, Child prostitution and night shift in the asbestos mines

Let us get together and build a huge Aquaponics in Malawi. See if with cheap labor it will be profitable or not.
Now, that is an experiment worth doing!