Joblessness

[lostnfound]

Youth unemployment in the U.S. is high and workers fret about the absence of jobs.
These people DO have jobs -- making clothing for U.S. shelves, though:


Is this the ideal, the dream, of Free Trade Agreements?
How many U.S. Capitalists are earning profit on the backs of the decisions that give jobs to children and leave American young adults unemployed? Leave young American adults racking up college debt to get degrees that won't necessarily land them jobs? Leave young American adults dependent on their parents for longer periods of time, squeezing their parents resources?

I assume we still have the same or greater need for clothing as we always did. Fifty or a hundred years ago, how many people made a living making clothing here?

Unemployed youth, employed children. Is that defensible? Sensible? Desirable?

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/lwp/NLC_childlabor.html
According to a National Labor Committee 2006 report, an estimated 200 children, some 11 years old or even younger, are sewing clothing for Hanes, Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Puma at the Harvest Rich factory in Bangladesh.

The children report being routinely slapped and beaten, sometimes falling down from exhaustion, forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day, even some all-night, 19-to-20-hour shifts, often seven days a week, for wages as low as 6 ½ cents an hour. The wages are so wretchedly low that many of the child workers get up at 5:00 a.m. each morning to brush their teeth using just their finger and ashes from the fire, since they cannot afford a toothbrush or toothpaste.

The workers say that if they could earn just 36 cents an hour, they could climb out of misery and into poverty, where they could live with a modicum of decency.

Thirty six cents per hour.
And in Haiti, they tried to raise the minimum wage, and it also got stopped.
Is that the society we want? Is that progress?

[Hoyt]

1. Yeah sure. Young graduates aren't clamoring for the jobs that help poor countries. Get real.

[lostnfound]

2. Compared to flipping burgers or delivering pizza?

Plenty of high school grads would be glad to have jobs making clothes if the pay wasn't so low. They don't mind making air conditioners at Carrier and Oreos..,except those jobs are recent departures to Mexico.

Making clothes is an honest living.

[pampango]

3. I think all of our problems are caused by poor foreigners ("these people").

We need yuuuuge walls and tariffs. Whom should I turn to? Donald would be the obvious answer but his level of caring for the crime of child labor is, let's say, 'underwhelming'.

We could act through international negotiation to punish countries that use child labor. I know that is not as bold and satisfying as acting unilaterally (walls, tariffs). Unilateral action just shifts their markets elsewhere. I suspect that progressive countries, which as wealthy countries are the markets for these goods, would be willing to join in agreements that would reduce or eliminate child labor. I think that is something that Bernie would stand for.

And how in the hell do workers, unions and the middle class have it so good in progressive countries when there are so many damn poor foreigners in the world?

FDR's "Four Freedoms" speech emphasized that the freedoms were for "everywhere in the world".

Harry Hopkins (FDR adviser and an architect of the New Deal) interrupted FDR while he was dictating the speech and told FDR that he should not say "everywhere in the world because Americans are not going to give a damn about people in Java".

FDR replied, "Well Harry. They are going to have to give a damn about people in Java from now on."

We do have to 'give a damn' about people in "Java" and in Bangladesh. And FDR would shake his head that we have undermined unions, slashed taxes for the rich and deregulated corporations. Things that protect our workers and middle class. Things that progressive countries in the modern world have preserved and strengthened while not fearing the poor foreigners in the world.

Bernie is the closest one we have to FDR now.

[lostnfound]

4. The energy costs of massive global trade, the environmental consequences, the race to the bottom,

And especially the failure to spread child labor laws are devastating consequences of the massive FTA.s.
I don't think foreigners are the problem. I am rather in favor of the principle of open borders.

My description of them as "these people" was meant to be wry, overlooking the obvious fact that they were children. Which is horrendous.

Imagine a world where all people were equal, and we had a choice to decide who to employ and who not to employ: should the 20-somethings be sewing our blue jeans, or the 12 year olds?

It's intrinsically better to have our labor needs met with healthy adults that want to work, not impoverished children being given no other options in life. If those were american kids, we would see as indefensible.