Over elsewhere
I get taken to task about Bangladeshi clothing factories:
Progressives are generally horrified at the notion that people are becoming wealthier and can be quite open that they want it stopped. What’s baffling is how they draw votes.
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EAP
EAP
3 hours ago
Reply to TD
It’s not people getting richer that we have an issue with, it’s people getting richer at the expense of others (usually in the Global South). Fast-fashion garment workers (predominantly women) work in terrible conditions so that we can afford that £3.75 dress, so yes, we’re going to ‘whine’ about it.
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Tim Worstall
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Tim Worstall
3 hours ago
Reply to EAP
Fast fashion jobs are vastly better than those on offer to the same people, in the same place, but not in fast fashion. Producing what people want to buy is also the way that places get rich. Which is why fast fashion is a good idea – both reasons.
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EAP
EAP
3 hours ago
Reply to Tim Worstall
Do I need to remind you of the Rana Plaza disaster or are you just blindly ignoring those kind of events? Factories still have inadequate fire safety standards, among other issues. Just because they could be treated worse in other industries, that does not make it humane to allow them to work in the current conditions. The way you are clearly separating yourself from human beings that are being treated horrendously in garment factories is very telling of the patriarchal capitalist system we currently live in.
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Tim Worstall
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Tim Worstall
1 hour ago
Reply to EAP
I do know of Rana Plaza. I know more than that too. The money from my weekly column in a Bangladeshi newspaper goes through the hands of one of the guys who is one of the new, since Rana, factory inspectors. Through his hands and into a charity that provides hot food to street children and the like. I’ve even checked up with economists who study the issue. The factory jobs are indeed better than the alternatives to those workers. One person in one of these jobs improves the lifestyle of the whole family, increases both the nutrition and schooling of the children. I’ve even, if you can believe it, been out there and had one on one discussions with such economists.
Those clothing factories are beneficial to the lifestyles of those who work in them. Their lives would be worse if they did not exist. As they were worse before they did.
I support industrial revolutions because it is the only way, ever, that anyone has found to increase the living standards of the average person. This is what did it for us, here, in the 1800s. It’s happening now out there in the still poor countries. It’s absolutely damn marvellous that is too. It’s why absolute poverty has fallen from 40% of all humans to under 10% in only 40 years – the biggest reduction in poverty in the history of our species.
Far from “blindly ignoring” things I actually know rather a lot about them. And you?