so my blogs have been getting consecutively more serious, i guess my outlook is getting grimmer :/

I’ve been taking a course this semester on sweatshops, Taylorism, and all that joy. It’s interesting stuff. Sweatshops are primarily associated with the textile industry because unlike other products, textile patterns tend to vary and change a lot, requiring versatility in the production, and it’s easier to teach a person a new pattern than a machine.

However, thinking more on it, the face of sweatshops seems to have taken on a slightly different face in the US, and possibly the world. This would be software development. Prior to 9/11, a lot of the software positions were permanent career tracks in companies, and the market was good. Plans could be made, and then those plans were interrupted. Software, like a lot of other career fields, took hits. The majority of those former career tracks were suddenly gone, and something new rose in their place, contractors. And they rose in a big way. A lot of the remaining positions are management. The work is outsourced to India, or else to contracted workers who need to get a job at any cost in order to try to deal with previous financial commitements made with a different financial situation. So you have skilled programmers doing stuff for far lower wages, for far worse hours, in the hope of trying to get a permanent position in a company, and back into their former financial success.
People who’re trying to get a better position in life, for themselves or children or others, and willing to do so at any cost, such that even working at a sweatshop would be the best they can hope for at that time.

It seems that to solve the problem of horrendous working conditions such as sweatshops is not something we can directly influence with laws and stuff. They can work after a sweatshop is found, but that’s exactly the problem. They will always exist, and we will always have to find them. To create a way to spy on everyone and thus always detect a sweatshop isn’t ideal, that destroys too many rights. So to go about it, it seems as if we need to destroy the conditions that will create a sweatshop. A sweatshop can only come about through the participation of two parties directly, the employer and the labour, where the employer can offer a better situation to the labourer, even if that better condition is as bad as a sweatshop. The consumer can indirectly affect the situation by their demand for the product, but since there is a given demand for clothes, I’ll rule them out of the relationship between employer and labourer. So then, if sweatshops are better conditions for labourers, then it seems the only way to solve the problem, is to make sweatshops worse conditions for everyone. That is, to raise the condition of life for everyone such that to work in a sweatshop would be to put more pressure, trouble, stress and hardness and suffering upon oneself. To make it undesirable.

Of course, this is no easy feat :/