You want to know why China is so absurdly cheap for everything? This is part of the reason why. I wonder how many prison mining camps, prison garment/textile camps, etc. Are operating with the sole goal of keeping costs as absolutely rock bottom as possible. China is making a killing by undercutting the global market on costs for just about everything.
Forced prison labour is the foundation of a number of economies, including the US’. It’s explicitly not prohibited in the Constitution.
China can’t use prison labour to undercut global markets because they have a smaller prison labour pool than their key economic competitor (the US).
I don’t believe that. Chinas prison stats are around 1.69mil (which is oddly on par with the US - per capita not taken into consideration). However, per the Global Slavery Index, there’s an estimated 5.8 million people enslaved there. And we know that there were over 1 million Uyghur Muslims, and we really don’t even know the extent to which that is happening either.
I’d be willing to bet that there’s a lot more slave/prison labor going over there than even we realize.
In the US, we don’t call them slaves. We call them prisoners. That’s how we stay off the index.
Never mind that we intentionally arrest specific racial groups more than others, and that the laws are such that you can be arrested for almost anything, including things like “looking suspicious while driving and then resisting arrest.”
Slavery never left America. We just decided to start including some poor white people too.
We just decided
At least half of them were forced into it by the government and are keen on reminding everyone else about it with their douchey flags.
Yeah, I wouldn’t put much stock into statistics coming from the Chinese government.
Do they count extreme work hours as effective slavery? If so, then I wouldn’t be surprised at all if China has more “slavery”. If not, then you’ll have to quantify your numbers as well. If they’re including things that are only effectively slavery, then both countries have millions upon millions more than either of those stats, so where the line is drawn makes all the difference.
Company towns are effective slavery.
The GSI is not a reliable index. The Walk Free initiative that publishes the GSI doesn’t use a consistent methodology for every country and will also uncritically accepts reports of human trafficking from unreliable sources.
For example, their report on China includes unverified claims of harvesting organs from members of the Falun Gong, a right wing cult operating out of the US. The Falun Gong also operates the Epoch Times which is a far right conspiratorial newspaper that has promoted Qanon, antivax propaganda, and claims of election fraud in the 2020 US presidential election. You can not trust their testimony on faith alone and yet that’s what Walk Free did.
This post has so many controversial aspects:
- There are no real numbers from china, how many people are actually imprisoned or what even means imprisoned. For example the Uyghurs are not Prisoners in Prison but “Citizens in reeducation camps”- what is a lie. Pictures show they are indeed imprisoned . China is fudging these numbers like the economy numbers at a grand scale.
- China is able to force people to work in certain regions or cities. They have a complex system on how to channel work by prohibiting living-, healthcare- and pensions-systems to citizens based on their location and citizens need to apply for changes to these systems to be able to work in other regions.
- China - as an authoritarian regime - can force every prisoner to work if they deem it useful. The US has different rules for penal labor, but not make prisoners work like china. The US has a much different landscape.
- China undercut every good, in every sector (except some high tech sectors) based on their vast (forced) workforce but also in the strategic sense. They act like Uber (or is Uber acting like China?) in the sense, that their strategy in the last 4 decades was to undercut e.g. Steel-Production for their own advances, but also to cripple the industries in the US and the West in general to come out as the sole supplier for these products and services to then control the prices (like Uber). The US Steelworker Industry is practically gone by now. They did the same with raw-materials and lately with Solar, where they undercut the European (German) markets, to cripple it and control the production/income/spread.
They have a complex system on how to channel work by prohibiting living-, healthcare- and pensions-systems to citizens based on their location and citizens need to apply for changes to these systems to be able to work in other regions.
This is called indentured servitude, it was common in feudal societies.
BTW, you should add a new line between points to have proper formatting
Tell it to the 13th Amendment:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction
Coincidentally, those convicted parties are predominantly Black.
Person A: it’s bad that China is bad.
Person B: OMFG but USA bad too!
Like, do you actually think this is a real defense for China’s behavior? Or are you just blustering because you understand there is no defense and that hurts your world view?
The OP claimed China has a competitive edge from prison labour. I disproved that statement.
Not really. Because China’a numbers are demonstrably false. It’s the good old “you can’t prove it’s happening if we just don’t count them” logic.
You can disprove China’s numbers… How, exactly?
Instead, China uses their prison population to bolster their organ transplant market.
Edit: I wonder if the people who downvoted realise that China admitted they had been harvesting organs from prisoners but claimed it was voluntary and that they were stopping. Meanwhile, the exponential growth of their transplant industry continued beyond 2014.
Zydrate comes in a little glass vial
Cool, I was just thinking the answer to this problem was either ‘both sides’ or ‘what about’.
Meanwhile, the price of products of prison labour in Germany. About the best grills you can get, anywhere, period. All 2mm stainless, well thought through design (removable rods!), excellent craftsmanship.
Don’t get me wrong though prisoners still earn a pittance, anything under 2 Euros/hour has just been declared definitely unconstitutional – that’s raw, untaxed wage though without deduction for any costs, a day of prison costs the state something like 120 Euros and those grills sell like hotcakes even at those prices so why would the state lower prices.
What you should definitely look at in this context is, two things: First, where the money is flowing: Are the prisons hiring out prisoners at a pittance allowing private companies to reap profit still burdening society with the full costs of lockup – or, worse, the profits exceeding the lockup costs and prisoners not seeing a cent of that excess. That’s called straight-up slavery, no ambiguity or grey zone to be had there. Secondly, whether the prisoners actually and truly benefit – and I don’t really mean in monetary terms (though if you go poor to prison you definitely shouldn’t go out indebted, that’s bad policy), but in terms of being able to get a proper and dignified job afterwards: Mindlessly folding cardboard boxes which a machine could do for cheaper if it wasn’t for the fact that you’re earning a cent an hour vs. to wit above, people becoming skilled metalworkers. One of those makes recidivism less likely, the other teaches inmates that labour is something no sane person would ever want to do.
Not just China!
QI show about US prisons: https://youtu.be/sHz2Hmq7soo … so many years ago, so it’s slightly out of date.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/sHz2Hmq7soo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I don’t remember what it was called, but I seem to recall there being some sort of documentary or movie or something of the likes about someone here in the US who found a note from a prisoner in their brand new pack of Christmas lights (or some similar holiday product).
Edit: a word.
their being
Whose being?
Thanks for pointing out that mistake. Meant there.
Prisoners prop up global powers.
Slave labor?
For all we know it could be the exact same thing the US does with our prisoner work programs.
So if we’re going to call out China, can we please stop doing it here too?
B-but China bad
Both? Both. Both is good.
Sure, but the sheer number of warcrimes the US has committed in foreign countries, like the 1973 Chilean coup to overthrow the democratically elected Salvador Allende and install a military dictatorship, or the 1965 Indonesian mass killings etc. aren’t even comparable to China, or any other country for that matter.
Not to mention the Palestinian genocide they’re funding right now. At least China handles extremist groups like the ETIM by ‘re-educating’ them and assimilating them into the rest of the country. As fucked up as that is since it’s cultural repression, at least they’re not fucking bombing them.
I’m sure you can Google china warcrimes as well. Assuming you’re not inside the great firewall of China, that is. Let’s not pretend China is good just because US is bad.
Never said they were good. Just that it’s absurd to compare China to the sheer amount of death and destruction the US has selfishly caused, and continues to cause, everywhere in the world for the profit of the ruling class.
as opposed to the exact same thing China does for the profit of their ruling class, but worse
Since Xiaoping’s market reforms, China has nationalized numerous exploitative private companies, decreased working hours to 8 per day, improved working conditions, gotten rid of hundreds of thousands of corrupt officials, purged greedy billionaires like Jack Ma, and built the most extensive high-speed rail and public transport system in the world.
China, with 5x the population of the US, had 121k covid deaths, while the US had 1.2mil. Because the latter prioritizes capital/profit over human lives, while China does the opposite.
These are clearly in the interest of the Proletariat/working class, not the ruling class; China has actively punished the latter.
And all that without overthrowing foreign governments and causing genocides. So how is China even comparable to the US, aside from their economic growth? Has it ever occurred to you that maybe western media tries to show their geopolitical rivals in a bad light, even when they’re objectively better?
If by assimilating them, you mean castrating the men and raping their women, sure
No one asked for a definition of whataboutism.
Have to pay the prisoners a prevailing wage in the USA when working for private businesses.
Edit: You don’t need to pay them the prevailing wage when they are not working for private companies so. If they are cooking or cleaning in the prison or making license plates they make peanuts.
Seems China underpays their prison labourers but they should get paid. Should.
Edit 2: I kept looking and there is a lack of evidence from what I wrote other than the US government saying they get a prevailing wage, nobody seems to give an exact number of what they make. China actually gives a number. 600 yuan a month in 2019. Take that as you will.
That prevailing wage? Most prison laborers in America make less than $0.50 an hour If they’re even paid at all, and are severely punished if they try to take a sick day.
I can’t find anything that specifically says that Walmart, Wendy’s, McDonald’s or any of the other ones pays even minimum wage to prison laborers, but these businesses do get a $2,400 tax credit for each work release inmate they employ. The work release inmates are probably paid a real wage because they count as real people but I have trouble believing they would ever pay more than they absolutely had to for an inmate’s labor.
Thats correct when it’s not private industry. So if they make license plates as that’s government owned they can pay them whatever they want.
I’ll throw an edit in my comment. Thought I made it clear enough.
I suggest you update your information, because there are plenty of inmates working for less than prevailing wage in the US.
It came out a couple years ago that inmates in my state were raising goats and making goat cheese for Whole Foods. The wage for prisoners here is $2/day. There’s a state somewhere to my east where prisoners work at Burger King for similar wages.
If Regatta was truly committed to zero prison labor and zero slave labor, then they wouldn’t have any products made in China.
Chinese prison labor bad. Western prison labor good.
Chinese prison labor bad.
WesternUS prison labor good.ftfy
I was talking to a relative about Temu the other day, “How can they sell shit so cheap? Like, there’s got to be slavery involved somewhere.”
Temu and Shein have some of the most absurdly optimized supply chains in the world
Chinese workers are also just more efficient than American ones LOL
Lemmy.ml calling slave labor efficient because it’s Chinese slave labor.
Got to love your patriotism, but maybe dial it back a bit on the justifying slavery.
I use that KES script that has a feature to highlight the instances so I can discern between what’s my home instance content, federated instances and moderated instances. Moderated ones have a red circle in them.
Every time I see a red circle, I know it’s going to be yet another shit take from a lemmy.x user, and it never fails.
deleted by creator
https://github.com/aclist/kbin-kes/
Although this is not going to work where you are at lemmy.world.
deleted by creator
Temu, at least, is just a dropshipper. Temu itself doesn’t have any supply chain. The vendors that sell through Temu do.
Well, not doing anything is pretty efficient.
Why wouldn’t they be more efficient? If I mess up at my job, they don’t execute me for it.
I hope this is all part of some psy opp to fuck with the west. I too hope to find a prize sewn inside my clothes and really recapture that cereal box feeling.
It’s that cereal Box feeling Now exclusively with dead ugyhers woop de doo!!!
Despite feeling uneasy, the woman disposed of the card and “thought nothing more of it”.
Who here would actually throw away the ID?
Definitely Primark 2.0.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The card was found inside a plastic holder embossed with the words: “Produced by the Ministry of Justice prisons bureau.”
The prison identified on the ID card found in the Regatta coat says on its website that it specialises in clothing production and the processing of electronics components.
Last month, the French broadcaster Arte aired a documentary about a handwritten Chinese letter that was found inside a pregnancy test bought in Paris.
The finding in the Regatta coat is unusual in that it identifies a specific individual, which risks repercussions for that person, and did not come with a note.
Sarah Brooks, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for China, said: “Companies have a responsibility to do much more to guarantee their supply chains are free of human rights abuses – wherever they operate in the world.
The mere existence of allegations of forced or compulsory labour must at a minimum alert companies to the risk of having links to these abuses.”
The original article contains 1,008 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Yeah let’s focus on Chinese prison labour, ignoring the US’s much higher incarceration rate, and the literal genocide they’re funding right now.
Yeah let’s focus on Chinese prison labour
Since that’s what we’re talking about right now, yes, let’s.
I can boycott regatta and American prison made licence plates at the same time. I have many other talents besides.
Can you do anything about the genocide on natives that your tax dollars are funding right now?
what?
The US sends $3.3bil to Israel every year, and has sent a bonus $14.5bil 2 months ago.
Not what we’re talking about, but you should be writing to your reps about this. Most people just feel bad and move on. Actually writing a letter will get attention
I’m not a USian (un?)fortunately but I appreciate the sentiment.
Me either, but my government is an ally to the US and also contributes their own aid to Israel, so it applies to me. Assuming you’re in a democracy, it’s very likely you have some stake (even small) in the genocide.
Even boycotting goods produced on occupied land is a small step anyone can take.
criticising other countries is banned if you were born in the wrong country
Two things can be bad and you can discuss both of them. Let’s not lose our sights on something because something else is worse.
Are US prisoners risking their lives to tell the world what’s happening to them?
