>it's like amazon entire business model is based on exploitation of labor
Wait till you find out how the electronics and clothes in your house are made and how the materials they're made from are sourced or what the workforce that picks the fruit and vegetables you see in the supermarket, endures.
It is rarely (never?) discussed in the west how all the consumer goods are cheap simply because the supply chain relies on poor exploitable people and exploiting the environment.
All we hear about is the positive spin, how capitalism and globalization have blessed us with cheap goods and how those poor farmers halfway around the world now have paying jobs, woo-hoo!
> nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.
Nobody seems to want to do something about it. It's easy, vote with your wallet. But since the choice is either A) help humanity by stop buying cheap consumer electronics or B) don't get any cheap consumer electronics to make your day 0.5% better, it seems we're stuck in exploiting humanity.
Not sure how buying expensive consumer electronics helps either, given how the excess profits continue to be captured rather than fairly distributed. There's even case studies celebrating these COOs turned CEOs for how well they've "optimised" their supply chains.
Well, my point was more to stop buying consumer electronics we don't really need, that just marginally increase our quality of life. Not that we should buy expensive electronics instead.
Another option legally would be to disincentive the purchase of materials manufactured in those overseas areas to which you refer, or tax the bejesus out of companies using them as labor sources. I think there’s room for talk of tariffs and tax penalties for offshoring labor/manufacturing, and I’m not really familiar with other levers to turn that would fix this. Efforts to enforce better working conditions in other countries come and go, are easy to game and are quickly forgotten.
The parts of our society that profit off cheap offshore labor are quick to spin stories accusing people of being nationalist/protectionist/racist, but their profit margin is being defended in the process and the issues distracted from.
At the same time, if I lived in a largely agrarian society and factory work offered me the choice to get out of poor farm labor work, I’d jump at it the same way my ancestors did. I feel most of us can appreciate the value and prosperity that the global supply chain has brought, while simultaneously lamenting the destruction of domestic industry and the exploitation that has accompanied it.
We don’t have to be all-for or all-against, though I think when “free trade” agreements come up, they should be regarded very suspiciously, and when accusations fly about nationalism and protectionism, those should be seen as the cheap and distracting rhetorical devices they are.
I tried that for a while. Some time later I found out that they source their products from the same factories and the only thing I've done is prove that marketing works if you wanna convince people to pay premiums for imaginary differences.
The percentage of humans living in poverty around the world has never been lower [0]. How is that just spin?
I also can’t relate to your “all we hear about” point at all. I feel like I really have to go out of my way to find any discussion about anything good in the world, the vast majority of what I hear is negative takes like yours about how everything is horrible and everyone is oppressed.
It really depends on the definition of poverty. I pretty much took the argument you are making for granted until recently. I mean, how can we argue against raising people out of poverty, right? But recently I watched this interview with Paul Kingsnorth and he makes a compelling case for why these numbers don't tell the whole story. I am linking to the middle of the interview more or less this is mentioned but the whole interview is quite interesting:
Inflation in different countries goes at different rates. You can't use dollar inflation for these conditions, as prices rise much faster in those countries.
As for Chinese people, it is amazing that they came out of poverty. But clearly it's not thanks to free market capitalism.
Those numbers mean nothing. First of all, anything before maybe 1900—1950 is meaningless, as no one was collecting data about how people actually lived. They are only estimates based on national fortunes, for periods of time when many people mostly lived off the land.
The poverty line is also arbitrarily low, with many countless people over the poverty line who are dying of hunger. A more realistic poverty line would probably be several times bigger than the current value, which would fuether skew the numbers.
Not to mention, as others have pointed out, the vast majority of people taken out of poverty were taken out by dictatorial China's social programs, not capitalism.
Wait till you find out that they have a twitter handle & department for Public Policy as well. Why does a global e-commerce giant even need one unless they want to lobby/pressurise politicians & govt's altogether
they are scared. they are really scared.
it's like amazon entire business model is based on exploitation of labor.