huh?!?

I once left New Zealand for seven years and came back to find that nothing much had changed; now I go away for 5 days and find that it all has.

I don't know what worries me more: that the police could be using anti-terrorist laws against Wellington activists who I - even though I don't really love their politics - couldn't in a million years believe would be planning violent acts; or, that there really might have been a group of Maori Sovereignty (?) activists plotting armed rebellion in the Uraweras.

[Update: just changed the wording of the last paragraph; now I think it is closer to what I think I want to say. Also, one other thought: the threat from armed activists is not so much, I think, from the actions that they might try and undertake (how long do you really think it would take the army to flush them out of their hiding places) but more what they might achieve in terms of further polarising race-relations in this country. I'm not a member of the 'Balkans here we come' school of pessimism on race relations; however, I think we might all be surprised just how quickly we could find ourselves living in a much tenser country in the wake of a few acts of race related violence.)

Democratically Challenged

I don't think I will be following the exact voting patterns of Maia; however, I have to admit she makes an excellent point when discussing the DHB candidates she won't be voting for:

Ruth Gotleib - Apparently she has a principle not to fill in surveys. What kind of a principle is it to ask people to vote for you and not say what you stand for?

The survey in question was a New Zealand Nurses Association one. Gotleib wasn't the only person not to fill it out; that's fine. But to not respond to voter instigated surveys as a matter of principle?!? Does Ms Gotlieb have the faintest idea what democracy entails? She certainly just lost my vote.

A Good Reason to hate the French (government)

No, not the Rugby, the colonialism. Johann Hari visits the Central African Republic and finds French imperialism alive and well in a country that few have ever heard of.

Here's the first paragraph:

For forty years, the French government has been fighting a secret war in the dead-centre of Africa, hidden not only from the French people and parliament, but from the world. It has led the French to slaughter democrats, install dictator after dictator - and even to fund and fuel the most vicious genocide since the Nazis. Today, this war is so vicious that thousands are even fleeing across the border from the Central African Republic into Darfur - seeking sanctuary on the world's most notorious killing fields. I first heard whispers of this war in March, when a few scattered newspapers across the world reported in passing that the French military was bombing the remote city of Birao, in the far North of the Central African Republic. Why were French soldiers fighting there, thousands of miles from home? Why had they been intervening in central Africa this way for so many decades? I could find no answers out here - so I decided to travel there, into the belly of France's forgotten war.

Forget the footie, read the rest.

Sweatshops

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a debate/panel discussion hosted by Victoria University's International Development Society. The discussion was titled "Sweatshops: a blessing or a curse". The other speakers were Roger Kerr (Business Round Table), Christopher LaMonica (Victoria University), Gary Reese (Amnesty International), and Keith Locke (Green Party).

My speech is posted in below:

Are sweatshops a blessing or a curse? This is not a question I can easily answer. Indeed, I don’t think there are easy answers to the dilemma of sweatshops. So tonight I aim not so much to bury or praise sweatshops but, rather, to try and bury simplistic arguments.

To do this, I want to start with a point that, while simple, is true. This is that, in a world as wealthy as ours, the existence of sweatshops is ethically abhorrent.

We live on a planet flush will millionaires and billionaires; yet also one which cannot guarantee humane working conditions and a living wage for all. This is profoundly unjust, and surely one of the key questions of our time is how can we change it?

Yet the moment you ask “how can we change this?” things become complicated.

To show you what I mean I’m going to ask another question: “what on Earth could be worse than working in a sweatshop?” It sounds like a rhetorical question but it isn’t because, as it happens, there are worse occupations.

Consider the following from the New York Times:

In Cambodia…we met a 40-year-old woman named Nhem Yen, who told us why she moved to an area with particularly lethal malaria. "We needed to eat," she said. "And here there is wood, so we thought we could cut it and sell it."

But then Nhem Yen's daughter and son-in-law both died of malaria, leaving her with two grandchildren and five children of her own. With just one mosquito net, she had to choose which children would sleep protected and which would sleep exposed.

In Cambodia, a large mosquito net costs $5.

Compared to this, working in a sweatshop, despite the long hours, despite the low pay, is actually an improvement. Which is why, throughout various parts of Asia, tens of millions of people have migrated in search of such work.

Does this mean that sweatshop jobs are great jobs? No. Does it mean that the people working in sweatshops shouldn’t have better labour conditions? No. Does it mean that they shouldn’t be paid more? No.

But it does mean that we need to be careful what we wish for.

To give you an example of what I mean, consider the case of child workers in Bangladesh. In 1992 as a result of international pressure Bangladeshi exporters laid-off 50,000 child workers.

The outcome was not a happy one for the child labourers though, many of whom were forced by need to work as stone crushers and, in some cases, prostitutes.

If we are actually concerned about people working in sweatshops we need to concentrate on actions that can help lift them up out of the conditions they are in, not actions that push them out of sweatshops and down another rung on the economic ladder.

It is for this reason that I don’t think that opposing trade agreements with China or “Buy New Zealand Made” campaigns are a solution to the problem of sweatshops. What are we going to achieve if we stop buying clothes from China? Most probably we’re going to force a few people who currently have bad jobs into worse ones. This doesn’t strike me as a success.

While we are on the subject of over-simplistic approaches, I should point out that there are equally simplistic claims being made by the other side of the debate.

Particularly, the argument that sweatshops will be eventually confined the dust-bin of history by economic processes alone – as they supposedly were in our own countries. The problem with this is that we only got rid of sweatshops in developed countries with political activism. It wasn’t simply an economic process but also an organised campaign that improved working conditions. And the trouble is, in the case of China, for example, this can’t take place because independent trade unions are illegal.

Moreover, the improvements in living standards offered by sweatshops, while real, are tiny. Returning to an ethical perspective, couldn’t we be doing better than this? Shouldn’t we be doing better than this?

I think we should.

So what can we do?

Here are three suggestions.

1. Campaign against sweatshops, asking companies not to pull out of developing countries but to improve working conditions.

2. Buy fair-trade – it is a real solution. You can double the wage of jean factory workers and only increase the price of a pair of jeans by a couple of dollars. Fair trade sales in New Zealand grew by 141% between 2005 and 06 and there’s good research to show that the average consumer will pay a premium for ethical clothes.

3. Stop our business interests from actually making matters worse in developing countries. An example of this: when the Chinese Communist party recently moved to pass legislation that would improve worker’s rights, who lobbied hard and (partially) effectively against it? The US Chamber of Commerce and other Western Business Interests. Our business interests lobbying to stop the Chinese Communist Party from improving human rights! I’ll leave it to the representative of the business round table to discuss the ethics of this…

So, to conclude, by all means be appalled by sweatshops and strive for a world that is free of them. But do so with care, lest you harm the people you are hoping to help.

________________

For people interested in 'the Sweatshop dilemma' and fair trade here's a few good links:

In Praise of Cheap Labor by Paul Krugman (makes a the pro-sweatshop case as good as it can be made).

A good explanation of the economic case for fair trade by Alex Nichols.

Research showing the people will pay a premium for ethical products.