Writing in his recent post The Alleged "Perils" of "Premature De-Industrialisation." Economist Gavin Kennedy writes:
"... I also recall more recently of a Vietnamese woman on being questioned by a Western journalist about her 14-hour working day that she worked six days a week in a new computer-board manufacturing plant near her home village. The Western Journalist considered this was a dreadful example of Western capitalist exploitation of the Vietnamese poor and he seemed to want her to receive US wage rates, so she boldly introduced him to the real world. She told him of the real effect that the 14-hour days for light work in an air-conditioned computer factory: it was not exploitation in her circumstance because it was a significant improvement on her experience of grinding 18-hours, seven-day working in near-by farming fields, and it paid her a whole lot more, and more regularly, than in her previous working life. True, by US standards, her pay was still small and her hours were long, but in Vietnam in the 21st century, it was better paid than any financial rewards from the grinding uncertainties of heavy fieldwork to which she was condemned in before the arrival of the local factory.
I think some Western economists should get out more."
This is a delicate topic. There is slave labor in various locales around the world, with people made to work in unbearable conditions, but most manufacturing labor in newly industrializing economies comes from people freely choosing that work. Why? Because life in rural villages is often filled with long hard work just to stay above subsistence and with no prospect of economic improvement. Industrial jobs pay better, offer more opportunities, and have better working conditions. What many of us Westerners see as substandard work conditions are seen by locals as radical improvements. The typical pattern is that worker skill sets and productivity begin to rise. Work hours shorten, managerial skills are learned, productivity rises, and prosperity cycles upward. People are not being ripped from lives of idyllic peasantry into slave camps. People living on bare subsistence are choosing greater wealth and opportunity. But this is where the topic is delicate.
It is myopic to look at these situations through Western eyes and see injustice everywhere, as this critique correctly exposes. But it is also myopic to think that industrializing countries will magically go through the industrialization process with the best interest of workers in mind and that multinational corporations, if not closely watched, will never exploit workers. Both critics and advocates of industrialization need to be sure they are looking through the eyes of locals toward opportunity and justice, not just playing out Western ideologies in other locales.
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