Use of Forced Labor "Systemic" In Malaysian IT Manufacturing 183
itwbennett (1594911) writes "The use of forced labor is so prevalent in the Malaysian electronics manufacturing industry that there is hardly a major brand name that isn't touched by the illegal practice, according to a report funded by the U.S. Department of Labor and undertaken by Verité, a nonprofit organization focused on labor issues. The two-year study surveyed more than 500 migrant workers at around 200 companies in Malaysia's IT manufacturing sector and found one in three were working under conditions of forced labor."
"forced labor" (Score:5, Funny)
Which is what, a euphemism for "slavery" ?
Isn't that the GOAL of Capitalism??
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Isn't that the GOAL of Capitalism??
No, maximizing profit is the goal of a capitalist. An immoral capitalist has no problem with it if it maximizes profit. Now before you get your panties in a bunch, remember that any other immoral idealogue will also tend to have no problem with it if it maximizes their objectives. Thus, while communism in theory doesn't espouse slavery; in practice those who profess communism will send you to a "re-education" camp or "assign you to a dangerous project that's vital for
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The problem is, if you don't institutionalize morality, you get a situation which rewards the immoral psychopathic capitalist and punishes a moral and sane one, and if you do institutionalize it - for example in the form of welfar
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Which is what, a euphemism for "slavery" ? Isn't that the GOAL of Capitalism??
Doing anything for free is by definition not capitalism.
Re:"forced labor" (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that the GOAL of Capitalism??
Only if you ask a Republican.
Republicans freed the slaves.
Re:"forced labor" (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that Republicans of today aren't the same as the Republicans of the 1860s, right? When it comes to the oldest Republicans still alive and in power today, they're still 6 or 7 generations removed from the Republicans of those days. Political parties can undergo massive changes within just a single generation. When you're talking 6 to 10 generations difference, the policies sure as fuck aren't the same!
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The Republican party used to be referred to as "the party of the negro".
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You do realize that Republicans of today aren't the same as the Republicans of the 1860s, right?
I suspect the last republican alive in 1860 died by the mid 1900's, yes.
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Even Democratic Congressmen use [cbsnews.com] (and defend the use rather than apologize for it) the "Uncle Tom" racial slur to refer to Justice Thomas because he, apparently, doesn't "think Black enough".
This same Congressman asserts that another Congressman stating he would not support Obama's polices was because of racism -- ignoring the fact that President Obama is the least experienced President and ran on the most progressive platform (albeit, he hasn't followed through on his stated principles) of any President in
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Single payer? LOL no.
Her health plan leaked and some people were actually able to read it before voting. It failed. Wasn't remotely single payer. Convoluted pig fuck, same as today. Every constituency got it's blowjob.
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I use the phrase 'giving blowjobs to customers' when talking about marketers of any gender. Politicians are just marketers with an army to back them up.
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The pubs of then and now are completely different.
Re:"forced labor" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hmm... I thought it happened more recently, with the Southern Strategy [wikipedia.org]?
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Whether you say Dems started giving a shit about minorities in the 60's or Pubs stopped giving a shit about minorities in the 60's, the point is the parties switched how they felt about tolerance, equality, and civil rights in the 60's.
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It works a lot better when applied to political parties. There's a sliding scale for how much worth one should put on the past actions of a political party, and actions a decade-old without either further followup or continued attempts to followup are meaningless.
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Exactly. The Republicans you speak of are from the Civil War era, and the policies of that
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Isn't that the GOAL of Capitalism??
Only if you ask a Republican.
Republicans freed the slaves.
And they've been going backwards ever since.
You cant rest on your laurels and talk about what happened 150 years ago (my descendants started freeing slaves in the 11th century, when the US was having it's civil war, they had the largest single fleet in the world dedicated to stopping the slave trade out of Africa, just for a bit of context). Its like Berlusconi claiming he is Caesar because Julius Caesar was Roman or Putin calling himself Peter the Great because he was also a Russian leader.
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my descendants started freeing slaves in the 11th century
Time travelin', eh?
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Attempting to claim modern day Republicans were responsible for spearheading Women's and Civil Rights is laughable.
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Mostly cause you have to feed and shelter slaves. It's simply cheaper to pay people to work for you. If you need proof, try to feed&shelter your family on a slave-level job today.
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So only rich people should be allowed to breed? Hey, now it all makes sense. After all, reproduction is the most capitalist of all kinds of things humans can do, the production means are fully in private hands!
Re:"forced labor" (Score:4, Insightful)
Here they called it "salary". Work 80 hours and get paid for 40.
Re:"forced labor" (Score:4, Interesting)
"one in three were working under conditions of forced labor."
Those stats are amazing! 3 in 5 graduates work in forced labour conditions in Canada/US. They just call them internships.
One person I know, 2 degrees, 1 professional certificate, 2 years of internships. Coming up on a decade of paying for training, working for free, and finding no one will hire because they can just exploit the next slave.
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Editorial Internship: Filling out passport documents, writing fictional reviews for a travel magazine of places she'd never been to (even though the owner was *paid* to come and stay to review them), and generally spending most of the day searching for stock photos that the magazine hadn't previously used.
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Valuable experience in how to bullshit customers, invent colorful descriptions of events and places she's never seen or experienced and finding visual proof of those aforementioned stories.
Great resume for a political career, everything you need to convince your people to go to war with some country is right there.
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LOL - that's true, unfortunately the philosophy degree she has already gave her training in advanced bullshit, the english degree provided the creative lying, and a monkey could do the rest.
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That's a great story. And where, say, do you get your customers? Where did you meet them? How did they learn that you're in the market? And that you're worth any dime they pay you?
Re: "forced labor" (Score:2)
And the unemployed are the property of the welfare state.
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That's the new innovation of forced labor. In the bad old days, slaves were quite expensive so you had to provide food, clothing, shelter, and at least minimal healthcare.
The new improved forced labor lets them pick up the slaves cheap, provide them minimal food and shelter and just let them die from overwork.
Re:"forced labor" (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus, as human beings, slaves were just as inclined to sex as anyone else, and since anyone born to a slave was also a slave, it meant a continuous supply of new slaves for those plantations large enough to have multiple generations of slaves on one property, and probably gave them a surplus to sell. That's how the United States could continue to have slavery for decades after the last slave was imported from Africa, they just bred them or encouraged them to breed themselves like livestock.
This current phenomenon is indentured servitude, with the added indignity of paying for the privilege in advance.
Re:"forced labor" (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that and the fact that slaves probably didn't count in the "per capita" part of "GDP per capita."
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
Re:"forced labor" (Score:4, Informative)
For reference, the US National Income in 2012 was $15.7 trillion, i.e. a few percent less than the GDP. 150% of that is about equal to the total value of all residential real estate in the US.
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As timeOday said, they cost about 10 years wages for an equivalent free worker, so if the owner didn't keep them alive and well at least that long, it was a losing proposition.
So as despicable as the practice was, the modern practice is in some ways worse.
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By that time there were millions of slaves in the U.S. and as you pointed out, they reproduced and even resulted in a surplus for the larger plantations. There was a lively internal slave trade at that point.
Um... huh? (Score:3)
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Societies depending on slavery (or any kind of cheap labor) are by definition behind when it comes to invention, industrialization and progress. Simply because R&D is expensive. If it's cheaper to stick to employing humans, there is zero incentive to develop machines.
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Complete bullshit. The south was poor and unindustrialized. If they had been a rich society they might have stood a chance of winning. They never did, even with Lee and _incompetent_ Union leadership they lost.
The fact is slaves are shitty workers. They only work hard enough not to get whipped, and to get that you have to pay someone to hold the whip. Might as well pay them directly.
Slaves built the US is just mythology.
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The South started the war owning exactly zero cannon foundries and had a disjoint rail system with multiple track gauges. The North had a unified rail system (one gauge) and enough industrial capacity to make arms.
The strategic incompetence of an agrarian 'country' starting a war against an industrialized opponent outweighed the tactical advantage of field leadership ... eventually.
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The South started the war
As an outsider, but a slightly knowledgable one, I though the North started it. Yes, the South declared secession, but the North started the war by marching into Virginia with the intent of occupying Richmond, although they only got as far as Bull Run. It would be like England invading Scotland tomorrow if the Scotish Nationalists win. Or like Germany and France invading the UK if the UK declared it had left the EU.
Pity this discussion has gone off-topic (was about Malasian workers).
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Battle of Fort Sumter [wikipedia.org].
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And yet this lesson still remains unlearnt. Just look at how most companies treat their employees, who respond by putting in the absolute minimum effort they can get away with, and sometimes with outright sabotage.
I think it's because we're still socialized to value domination over cooperation. "Putting someone in their place" feeds
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If you work someplace that bad, get a new fucking job.
It's not like actual Stalinism, you don't go to the Gulag for trying to leave.
That's one (of many) good thing about capitalism, corporations aren't alone you can vote with your feet.
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Every place is the same. They're made of people socialized into the same values, after all.
Of course not. You simply lose your mortgage and get thrown to the street. That's entirely different.
You can vote with your feet, but the candidates are pre-selected by the system, t
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The union had incredibly incompetent generals. The south had Lee. That was the difference for the first year+.
After that the north's greater wealth overwhelmed the south.
Land rich? That's another way of saying 'dirt poor'. Africa is 'land rich' today.
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The Union wound up with some quite competent generals, such as Grant and Sherman, but it took some time to get the incompetents out. (McClellan was actually very good at many things, just not at winning battles.)
Also, while the early battles in the East were capturing a lot of attention, the Union was dismantling the western part of the Confederacy. The "high water mark of the Confederacy" at Gettysburg was roughly contemporaneous with the Union taking complete control of the Mississippi.
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So it's like today?
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You have NO idea how hard it is to refrain from pulling a Godwin right now...
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Actually, the war on poverty was working until the GOP insisted on surrendering.
And yes, businesses that mooch on the taxpayer to supplement their inadequate payroll are evil. They know damned well they are mooching off of people with a lot less than they already have.
We don't claim the car thief is blameless if you leave your keys in your car, do we?
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Odd. A good deal of Europe won that war. Well, at least 'til we decided it would be a great idea to copy the idiocy of the US in that matter.
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That is the most ridiculous view of those thing I have ever read.
Capitalism, slave, socialism. You got them ALL wrong.
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So socialism doesn't give you a choice, you're a slave or if you refuse, you get paid by the state by wellfare.
Capitalism gives you the choice to be a slave or to starve.
I dunno. Most people would probably prefer socialism. But hey, what do I know about socialism, being in Europe. That's something I should leave to the experts across the big pond who have loads and loads of first hand experience with socialist systems...
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Ethically capitalism is way ahead. Nobody should be in enforced slavery. The state shouldn't actively harm us, they should be procting us from people who want to harm us. Socialism (of the kind in the US, Europe and almost everywhere else) sees the state actively harming people under the guise of "helping" them. That's ethically and morally wrong.
There is no slavery in a proper capitalist system (that is, a system where people are free) - at least not slavery of the kind we're talking about. People will alw
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Ethically, socialism is way ahead. Nobody should live in grinding poverty, with the first industrial accident or serious illness wiping them out of even their meager lifestyle.
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The only reason anybody pays minimum wage is because they can't find anybody worth more than that.
Seriously have you seen the kind of 'work' those mouth breathers do? Nobody hires them if they have any better options. Robotic burger flippers are here and the $15 minimum wage people are going to be sorry unless they get their shit together. Minimum wage=minimum productivity.
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Bull. The only reason anyone pays minimum is because they get away with it. Why the heck should I pay more than minimum wage if I can get what I want for that? Do you honestly think anyone would go "gee, that guy is good, I needn't pay him more 'cause there's nothing he can do, but 'cause I'm so impressed with his great work, here's five bucks more per hour!"?
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Nobody _want's_ the morons that get minimum. It's all they can hire so they live with them. Treat employees like middle school students. Demerits, detention etc. If they do good they get a ice cream party at the end of the month.
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Other way 'round it is, if you only pay minimum, you get morons. Don't expect anything other than monkeys if you offer just peanuts!
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There are many morons who make more then minimum. They aren't worth it.
That said. A moron that shows up on time and sober when scheduled will be making more than minimum in 6 months, tops.
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Depends on the economy, really. When it's bad, there's plenty of competent people who will accept pretty much any job they can get. When it picks up, they all get better jobs and the only people who'll work at minimum wage are those who can't function in a responsible job. There are places and time where you could get quite competent people for minimum wage, which is positively frightening.
If you're paying for a job... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't matter if it's 'clean' multilevel marketing, paying a 'headhunter' to market you to local companies in your area, or paying someone to get you to a job somewhere else, if you're paying, then it's not a job.
At least around here, headhunters are paid by the companies that need workers with particular skills. That's a negotiation between the company and the headhunter. Good headhunters actually take the time to talk to prospective workers to determine their skill sets, so that they can develop a reputation of being good matchmakers between companies and workers. Bad ones just send anyone through with keywords that might sort of apply.
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Why? Mainly because of the exact kind of crap that they are describing here. The employer has the money, which he demonstrates by paying the headhunter. If he can't afford to pay the headhunter, he can't afford to pay you.
Also note they use the payment as a filter. That is, they don't want smart people working for these crap jobs.The smart people refuse to give
Re: If you're paying for a job... (Score:3)
Not stupidity. Desperation.
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In America, they use a similar technique to get desperate people, it's a variation on the "Multi Level Marketing Scheme".
Here they make you buy 'samples' to sell to your customers. No. If the company is real, they provide all samples and tools you need.
People that buy the samples are desperate. But paying a head hunter to send you to another country, that is not desperate, that is stupid.
Re: If you're paying for a job... (Score:3)
You are not them. They've little or no choice. Overpopulation has consequences, one of which is reducing labor to negative cost.
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And the same thing applies to MLM here and ev
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Interesting note: That's a new approach, spawned from the boom in the 90's.
Prior to that it was common for the person looking for a job to pay the headhunter.
Pre-internet making contacts to find out who was hiring was very difficult.
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I don't think that my parents ever paid a headhunter to find them a job either. Dad's computer skills were all he needed, in concert with looking at the want-ads. Funny enough, the demand for COBOL and RPG programmers now is probably at least as strong as it was in the early seventies when he started working in the field.
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There have always been both kinds of headhunters. Even some that play in both arenas.
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I'm a lot older than that, and never paid a headhunter. Way back when, I did see contracts where I'd be liable for some of the cost if I didn't work a whole year if I got hired through them.
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if you're paying, then it's not a job.
The only exception I know of in the USA is certain companies (like insurance companies, trucking companies, or life guards) that require passing
a certain test or having a particular certification. In almost all legitimate cases you can take the test from multiple 3rd parties and the test or
certification transfers to other similiar type job and even in those cases most of the better companies will pay you to take the test or provide the
training free of charge. I would be very reluctant to work at any job t
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It's my experience that employer requirements for certifications are generally for third-party certificat
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"It might actually be illegal for the employer to charge the employee for something that only the employer provides and requires of the employee."
When I used to work at Arby's forever ago, they charged me for the shirt I had to wear while working.
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Really this isn't so dissimilar to the racket now being perpetrated by colleges and universities in the US in conjunction with employers looking for cheap skilled labor.
The end result is generation saddled with crushing debt and wages that are failing to keep up with inflation. Assuming they are employed.
Shocked, I say! Simply shocked! (Score:4, Insightful)
Lack of regulation and oversight breeds rampant victimization of the labor force?!
Forced Symantec? (Score:2)
The Horror! Isn't the use of that bloatware banned by some UN Charter? Have they no sympathy for the plight of computers under the burden of that cpu hogging virus allowing software!
Some people *do* pay for jobs, and quite rightly (Score:2, Interesting)
a) America is not the world. There are *many* places where you're expected to pay for your job, in one way or another. Sometimes it's above-board, sometimes not. I don't know about Malaysia, but wouldn't be surprised at all if that was the custom there.
b) Oh, wait, we have this in America, too! I pai
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"...workers forced to pay for their uniforms and so forth."
Where in the us is the legal?
Also, where you self employed as an agent?
OTOH, you were a real estate agent, so nothing you say is worth squat.
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OK, let's put it this way - if you don't show up in uniform, you're sent home and don't get invited back to the party. The employer gives you a list of place(s) to buy your uniforms. How you pay for those is up to you. This happened at the first low wage job I had (as an orderly in a nursing home), as a construction worker (you couldn't show up in tennis shoes), and I'm pretty sure that's the case in almost any place in this country where low-wage employees are hired. And it's completely legal. So legal tha
Re: Some people *do* pay for jobs, and quite right (Score:2)
Don't forget authors and actors, who have to pay agents to intermediate, or they don't get contracts.
Global Economy (Score:3)
A look from the view of ultra-capitalism. (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's play devil's advocate here. Let's think about this assuming we don't care about the mass suffering, slavery and murder of humans, which is kinda bad enough already for us to try to end this practice any way we can. Say we are just bare naked capitalists, only interested in profit, past the point even Adam Smith would find horrific.
This is still bad enough for us to care.
We can't use slavery to produce our products because of laws and non-corruption in our countries, nor can we change our system to allow slavery. It would cost too much. So there is no way we can compete with Malaysia who is allow things, official or not. They are gaining an 'unfair' advantage by resorting to this practice that only they can use.
Therefore, even if you are an inhuman psychopathic capitalist (or at least a long-term high functioning one), you should care about abolishing slavery, since it grants those who do an unfair advantage.
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You say that we can't use forced labor, but we can if someone is being punished for a crime, as is stated in the 13th Amendment.
Thus many prisons in the US run for-profit manufacturing businesses, using forced labor.
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Well, I don't really know about the US, but the prisoners up here in Canada are paid for their work. Not very well and the system of having them buy daily necessities isn't great now, but apparently they've gone on strike to protest that last year. If the US is forcing their prisoners to work for no pay then that might be something they need to change.
Although, I was thinking outright slavery since it reminded me of news reports in June talking about slaves being used in Thailand for the shrimp trade. In
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Looking into it more, prisoners in US prisons get paid between $0.23 and $1.05 per hour.
Not if you're global... (Score:4, Insightful)
As for Adam Smith, he actually as against this sort of naked capitalism. He wrote at a time of small merchant artisans. He didn't see the industrial revolution coming and if he had probably wouldn't have written the books he did. These days he's like Marx: all anybody remembers about him is what fits in with what they want.
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Yeah, I realized that a bit as soon as I hit submit. I tried. 8)
The article sparked my thoughts of what I heard about the shrimp slave trade from Thailand, for example, and not just necessarily factory workers in Malaysia. Possibly what is going on is this race to the bottom via slave labor, 'forced' labor as the article says, prison labor, dissident labor, etc. In order to compete countries are taking this tack. But I was thinking with the outrage of slavery, maybe it's enough justification going in t
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Same thing with Orwell. I had a conservative friend try to tell me Orwell was a capitalist because he wrote Animal Farm. No, he was a socialist. He wrote Animal Farm as a criticism of Stalinism (totalitarianism with the drapings of communism). Also, as a comment on the self-censorship of English socialists who looked the other way with regards to Stalin's purges and other atrocities because they just really wanted this experiment in communism to work so badly.
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From a "inhuman psychopathic capitalist" perspective, you shouldn't even think about competing with Malaysian slaveowners. Rather, you should *become* a Malaysian slaveowner. Purchase a company in Malaysia whose workforce is slaves.
Of course, it's not practical for everyone to do that. But if you're one of the inhuman psychopathic capitalists in the US, then why not? It's not in the interests of the US workforce or the US population as a whole. But it's in YOUR interest. So you'll do it.
A Union (Score:3)
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Globalization has a fringe benefit: you can just make your products in countries where slavery is legal!
(For the uninformed, Malaysia and its neighbor Thailand make the majority of the world's hard drives. [ieee.org])
It's not a fringe benefit; it's a driving force.
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You missed a word: "officially".
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slavery isn't legal anywhere on the planet.
That's true, and I was being a little facetious. But a driving force behind the globalization movement is the ability to take advantage of much lower wages in poorer countries to avoid higher labor costs in wealthier countries. If you look at what is legal in those poorer countries, it's not too far from forced or sweatshop labor.
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And this is news how? There's a reason our tech products are so cheap and it's not because the robots are making them (which is what will inevitably happen, just not yet)
I thought it was because I signed a two-year contract!
Naw, it's just profits (Score:2)
I've been filling the head of a good friend of mine with liberalism and it prompted his Dad to ask "What do you have against Profit". This. This is what I have against profit. It's _never_ enough.