In Support of Slave Labour

February 22nd, 2003 Posted in 2003

As is usually the case, I went quite some time without hearing about something, then heard about it twice in one day. If there isn’t a term for this already, I think there should be one—what about Echo’s Law, or something like that?

I went and saw City of God with Neil last night, an upbeat lighthearted romp about a housing project in Rio de Janeiro populated by dying, unemployed crack addicts. The film was a little simplistic (and somewhat long), but the point it tried to make was this, in a nutshell: these people were put in a housing project, which you should visualize as a lot of little dusty tool sheds in a field of dirt that people live in. There’s a bit of a marketplace but no real money. No one can start a business because they have no money; if no one can start a business no one can have a job.

You begin to see how an economic problem can get so bad that there isn’t really a solution to it. Short of going back to an agrarian farming community—and with what tools, and what seeds, and what knowledge?—the people of the City of God are left with two options: steal money to survive, or, well, don’t survive. It’s a little simplistic, yes, but the fact remains that they have no money, no options, no schools, and, as the generations go by, no memory or hope of any alternative. This in itself can twist social fabric to contorted, ugly shapes. The city turns to crime and drugs, and pretty much eats itself inside out.

If you can think of a better option, you should be in government. I thought about it and couldn’t think of one. Fire off a lot of loans to subsidize business? Who’d start a business in a den of thieves? What would it do to the devaluation of the dollar to start flipping over money like that? Start schools, maybe? To what end? How have these children been given any incentive to learn? It’s a circular argument that keeps coming back to the basic problem: once you’re really fucked, is there a such thing as being so fucked that you’re not able to become unfucked?

On the way home, I picked up Eat the Rich by P.J. O’Rourke at a used book shop. I only bought it for the laughs, but it turns out it’s also about economics. At one point O’Rourke travels to Albania, to Cuba, giving pretty much the same story—government muddling, lack of commerce, a return to guns and robbing and poverty. In both cases, the picture painted here is a thorough and tragically comic one, and I won’t bother trying to encapsulate his points here. Suffice it to say: it sucks in Cuba and Albania, don’t move there. And again, the problem: how fucked are Albania and Cuba? Where is a solution?

Again, I don’t know. Rapid globalization has unfortunately left many poorer countries in the dust, and with, for instance, Africa, globalization actually crippled it—through slavery, through ecological disturbance—to the point where most can’t ever see it getting back on its proverbial feet again, ever.

Is this morally wrong? Sure. But sitting around feeling bad about it won’t change anything. And sending over money certainly isnt helping either. Even assuming our money is getting to the people who need it most (it isn’t), it actually cures none of the deep-seated psychological and sociological problems that several generations of poverty have wrought. Degressive educational standards. No jobs. No commerce. A devalued dollar. Rampant child death, rampant child abuse. A social framework more violent and desperate than you or I could ever imagine. If true personality is only shown through true adversity, then these people have been pushed to the most adverse conditions imaginable. They’re on drugs. They steal. They kill. They abandon babies. They’re, at first glance, pretty reprehensible to anyone who’s never been forced to make difficult choices without luxury or education or money or privelege. Their lives are awful.

I don’t know what the answer is—but I do remember wondering what it would be like if there was a factory or something in City of God where these people could go to at least make money. That’s when I realized I was really talking about slave labour. And slave labour, as we know, is wrong. Overworked people toil in factories to early deaths, making pennies sewing Nike shoes. As enlightened North Americans, we know it’s wrong, and we cry murder whenever it is exposed in the media. And that factory must close down amidst a sea of controversy.

That’s when I got to thinking: if I was some uneducated starving Albanian, and OmniMegaDynaCorp opened up a factory in my little shithole hovel town, and I got a chance to make fifty cents an hour working for sixteen hours, and then some liberal fuckstick came in and closed the factory down, I’d be right pissed off. The factory leaves, I’m back to starving on the street, to deal drugs or steal or whore myself to eat. And the liberal fuckstick, I notice, doesn’t bother to set up another factory that might treat me properly. Which is probably for the best, since I’m starving and would probably just rob him anyway. And besides, liberal fucksticks never have money—just opinions.

And the problem here is that the liberal fuckstick has imposed his or her standards on my shitty reality. THEY wouldn’t want to have to deal with slave labour, and so they make the place close down. Then they forget about me. And they forget that getting shot at 21 in a drug deal turf war in Albania doesn’t get reported, because OmniMegaDynaCorp doesn’t make it in a factory. If I get my face cut up with a bottle while whoring, it doesn’t matter, because whoring isn’t a “nice” job like a factory job, so nobody in North America gets outraged.

No, if I was some poor, starving Albanian, I’d tell that liberal fuckstick to cram his indignance up his ass and let me make fifty cents an hour, since it’s the only game in town, and fifty cents is more than I made all last week lying in the gutter of my dirt shack. Yes, the corporation is exploiting me and Albania’s poverty—duh. Yes, they’re evil and should be censured. Yes, the job is awful and underpaying. But it SUCKS here. It SUCKS HERE. And it’s a job, and there aren’t any other jobs because there’s no industry, and no marketplace, and no opportunities, because it SUCKS HERE. I either work for fifty cents an hour—which is, I’ll be honest, really really sweet, since I have no education, no skills and am otherwise pretty fucking unemployable—or I get shot or stabbed or I overdose or contract AIDS or sell my baby. Fifty cents an hour is a godsend.

Slave labour ain’t right. But when nothing in a country’s right, it’s not necessarily wrong, either. It’s just there. And it’s a half-dollar an hour you wouldn’t otherwise have. If an entire country’s made up of slaves already, then it strikes me that slave labour is, well, labour. Am I advocating slave labour? No. But I’m no longer as adamantly opposed as I used to be, now that I’m a little more aware of the conditions of the places it occurs in.

Or, to put it a different way: say a corporation started up in Toronto, and offered to pay people $00.50/hr for mind-bogglingly oppressive work. Something tells me there wouldn’t be too many lines around the block. A market is dictated by what people are willing to pay, and economic hardship is governed by what people are willing to do for pay. The fact that a slave labour facility can start up in Mexico and not fold over isn’t just a commentary on that business (i.e. it’s evil), but on the state of the economic hardship of the society that business operates in (i.e. it’s necessary). It doesn’t make it right, of course—it will never be right to exploit. But it doesn’t make it wrong, either, because it, like the market, is a by-product of societal causes. Affluent societies want quality, inexpensive goods but refuse to be paid inexpensively to produce them. Oppressively poor societies want any goods at all and will by paid anything at all to obtain them so they don’t die.

So: If a corporation capitilizes on that, is it wrong?

Yes.

If that corporation is stopped from capitalizing on it, is the poor society any better off?

No. It’s worse off. With no alternatives, it’s been denied one of the few legal opportunities to provide services for money it had.

I know. It’s painful to think about, isn’t it?