

Workers welfare comes into question







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RE: You guys socialist or what?
By lemonadesoda on 6/22/2006 6:09:53 PM , Rating: 2
...unfortunately that's a rather naiive view. The next thing along that line of thought is that child labour is OK as long as the kids weren't forced to do it. And having 15 year old prostitutes is OK as long as they do it of their own choice. And that its ok to let people starve... its their own fault for not working hard enough... since the influx of capital and profits will always alleviate any economic situation situation. And an alternative to letting your family starve is to go to another city and work and sleep in the factory 24hrs a day AND NOT GET PAID the amount you are contractually and legally obliged to receive... sand this is OK since if you don't like the conditions, you can always leave.

I suggest you switch your college major to economics or law. You could use the help.

RE: You guys socialist or what?
By jtesoro on 6/22/2006 11:07:56 PM , Rating: 2
I think its a matter of where we draw the line, and it will be different for each individual (or corporation). I think the child prostitutes thing is easy.

Child labor I actually thought was easy until I started to define in my mind what it was. Having a kid mow the neighbor's lawn for a few bucks is OK. How about helping to gather crops for the neighboring farm for a week? What if a group of kids decide "hey, why don't we go over to Mr. Smith's farm down the road and earn a few bucks"? What if they ask one of their Dads to front for them because he can better convice Mr. Smith? Maybe Dad starts becoming systematic and starts planning the summer schedule for this "group of kids" so they can "earn a few bucks". For kicks, they later call themselves FarmHelp Company, and Dad gets a portion of the earnings so he can "buy himself some coffee"...

At what point does it become child labor? Each of us may define it differently. The law may have its own definition. But Chinese law is different from US law, and so on.

I don't want to say Apple is right or wrong because I think there's too little information. On one hand maybe it's OK because they might be doing regular (or even random) audits and its just that the Chinese company is able to hide things somehow. On the other hand, Apple may have known but chose to do nothing until things leaked out. Its not even clear what the violation is. The article uses the word "mistreatment", but it doesn't say anything else other than lower wages compared to another factory. I don't think that's mistreatment. I don't think that's against the law either.


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