The new triangle trade
March 9, 2016 12:00 AM   Subscribe

 
Great article. Toward the end I thought it was going to address US prison labor, which it nearly did, but then didn't. Still, very good article, lots to think about. I had some vague inkling of chaos in the Congo around the turn of the millennium, but hadn't quite been aware of the scope and horror of it all.

Thanks for posting!
posted by hippybear at 1:01 AM on March 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


I wish liberals and progressives would focus as much on ethically produced consumer electronics as they do on organically and ethically produced food.

A fairly recent cultural change has led to a demand for improved food choices, we could and should build on that.

If we can better the lives of chickens with cage-free eggs, why not the lives of workers with cage-free cell phones?
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 1:49 AM on March 9, 2016 [16 favorites]


why not the lives of workers with cage-free cell phones?

I don't have any links at the moment, but I do know (or have met, or know people who know) people in the tech industry and elsewhere who are trying to get momentum going there. Last summer I met a really major player who had put a ton of work into personally investigating manufacturing plants abroad, but part of the problem is that there's a whole supply and manufacturing chain you have to account for, and it gets harder to do that the deeper it goes.
posted by teponaztli at 1:58 AM on March 9, 2016 [6 favorites]


"it gets harder to do that the deeper it goes"

I think the goal should be to improve the situation without expecting a total moral victory. Improving part of the supply chain still counts.

The food industry hasn't stopped obscuring organic and cage-free designations either, but from my PoV there's been steady, incremental improvement.

Maybe talking and spreading these ideas on electronics can help. I can't be the only one willing to pay higher prices for a phone I have reason to believe wasn't assembled by forced Chinese prison labor.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 2:34 AM on March 9, 2016 [1 favorite]




Maybe talking and spreading these ideas on electronics can help. I can't be the only one willing to pay higher prices for a phone I have reason to believe wasn't assembled by forced Chinese prison labor.

I agree, but if my phone were to cost the double or more, I'd expect it to live longer - and that has a lot of implications, too (good in my book). Think of this article together with the Lodge-article - the cast-iron skillets are made in the US, and apparently under fair conditions, and they last for generations. So there is no need for consumers to buy a new one every five years. Not good for the business-model at Apple (or any other tech company).
posted by mumimor at 4:29 AM on March 9, 2016 [6 favorites]


I heard an interview with this author that focused more on the shrimp industry. It reminded me of one of my dad's best friends. Some of my best childhood memoires were on his boat at the government docks in False Creek, cooking and preparing platters to serve to people walking by, in the hopes of selling for a few bucks a pound BC spot prawns, something that these days commands a premium as ethical seafood. I didn't know it then, but he was desperately trying to keep the bank from taking his boat as competing product from slavers was making his livelihood untenable. Rather than declare bankruptcy, he swallowed a mouthful of buckshot. I was 10 years old. It was the first time I can remember crying at a funeral.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 4:34 AM on March 9, 2016 [21 favorites]


Reflecting on what I just wrote. I realize I may come off as a little self-absorbed and parochial. It was not my intent to deflect attention from the horror of modern slavery.

This is the interview I was referring to. It's an hour and well worth the time.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 5:22 AM on March 9, 2016 [5 favorites]


This was just an excerpt from the much-longer book. I read this essay yesterday, and despite a reaction of visceral horror, I ordered the book. I suspect it delves into American prison labor, but I can't tell you for certain until it gets here tomorrow.

We might not want to hear it, but it's our responsibility as consumers to know just how much human suffering makes our gadgets possible.
posted by Mayor West at 5:32 AM on March 9, 2016 [3 favorites]


What about forced American prison labor?

You know, not everything is about America.
posted by IndigoJones at 5:59 AM on March 9, 2016 [4 favorites]



What about forced American prison labor?

You know, not everything is about America.


Can I repeat this?

Americans should be concerned how we treat our prisoners, but this.... This is beyond horrific. Those people working under the slavery we implicitly condone with every purchase would think US prisons are a resort.

I am ashamed and can't comprend how truly fortunate I am.

TL;CF

Too long; Couldn't finish
This is too much to take in at one sitting.
posted by BlueHorse at 7:06 AM on March 9, 2016 [2 favorites]




Absolutely we could and should increase the transparency of what's in our devices. Corporations have learned to develop and take advantage of massive increases in supply chain management capabilities, and that depends on having much more data on what's happening where and where, where it's going and where it comes from.

So, the modern business has a vastly better idea of its inputs. Leglslate to make that visible from the outside, analogously (but with better metrics) to the food industry, so it's actually illegal to sell stuff that doesn't have proper provenance for its components.

It doesn't have to be just electronics. Selling a granite product? Slap an ID on it that links to its life story online. No ID, no sale.

Of course, this is more government regulation and interference in business. For what happens when there is less government and more freedom for businesses and individuals to operate, I suggest you ask the Indian granite miners working in debt slavery as they destroy the national parks.
posted by Devonian at 7:57 AM on March 9, 2016 [4 favorites]


If we can better the lives of chickens with cage-free eggs, why not the lives of workers with cage-free cell phones?

Forgive my unusually dark cynicism, but: because those chickens are physically located in a place where the rule of law exists. And it took a century of progress before social pressure reached a tipping point where it finally became a liability to the bottom line to keep chickens that AREN'T cage free.

I've been stewing on this ever since reading the essay, so forgive me if I'm rambling and disorganized.

Assume I had infinite time and money: I can dispatch my own legion of hired hands to dig through the supply chains of Apple and Samsung and anyone else with a domestic presence, with no upper bound on cost. Do you think I'd be able to find the next generation of Woodward and Bernstein, fearless investigators who are willing to put their names on a report that will surely get them blackballed? Do they exist, in numbers great enough to pull back the covers and track the cadmium supplies back to the mines in Africa where they're being dug out by enslaved hands? And even if I could somehow build a documented link between those same mines and a high-ranking executive at Apple who signed the purchase order for the factory in China, do you think that exec would face any serious backlash, beyond his inevitable termination (and subsequent rehiring elsewhere) as a token sacrifice to appease the mob? Do you think that a sticker, prominently affixed to the side of every new smart phone, with the same A-F rating that Whole Foods uses to document the welfare of animals in its products, would make a difference? Given the option between buying the latest technology, and languishing in six-year-old hardware for ethical reasons, how many people do you think will let their concerns about human trafficking win, given how abstract and distant that suffering is?

I want to fix this. Truly I do. But even in this wildly unrealistic best case, I honestly don't see a path that leads us to anything more effective than a UN-defended outpost in East Congo, with the occasional journalist flying in to interview the locals.
posted by Mayor West at 8:36 AM on March 9, 2016 [7 favorites]


If we can better the lives of chickens with cage-free eggs, why not the lives of workers with cage-free cell phones?

This is such a well-phrased sentiment. But in addition to Mayor West's comment above (those chickens are physically located in a place where the rule of law exists), it comes down to scale. Similar links have been on MeFi before, but just to illustrate a tiny corner of the problem:

Time, 2013: Our reliance on rare earth minerals, used in everything from smartphones to clean tech, is leaving us exposed to future risks.

Guardian, 2014: Rare earth mining in China: the bleak social and environmental costs.

E&E, 2015: 5 years after crisis, U.S. remains dependent on China's rare earth elements.
posted by RedOrGreen at 9:23 AM on March 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


Maybe talking and spreading these ideas on electronics can help. I can't be the only one willing to pay higher prices for a phone I have reason to believe wasn't assembled by forced Chinese prison labor.

We had one, it was the very reasonably priced Moto X, and not enough of you bought it to make it financially feasible so they had to close down their production site in Texas.

I have given no end of shit about this to my dad who was more than happy to rail about everything being made in China until actually given the choice, at which point he got an iPhone because "it's what your mother has."

When companies actually give you an option to buy something "physically located in a place where the rule of law exists," fucking buy it because otherwise it will go away.
posted by phunniemee at 10:53 AM on March 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


What about forced American prison labor?

You know, not everything is about America.


America uses the products created by these people. America still has a prison-industrial system with a clear continuity from the way slavery in the Americas worked. This article was written by an American, who uses the same terms "slavery" and "abolitionist" whilst failing to point out that slavery in the Americas was and is a very different thing in terms of industrial scale transplantation of people, cultural reprogramming, propaganda and a racial system that still governs the way people are treated differently across the world.

Not everything is about America, but this is perhaps not the best example of that.
posted by iotic at 11:19 AM on March 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


When companies actually give you an option to buy something "physically located in a place where the rule of law exists," fucking buy it because otherwise it will go away.

I don't watch a lot of television with commercials, but I remember commercials for the Moto X from a few years ago, and I don't remember "Made In The USA" was ever a part of its marketing. Maybe it should have been.

Anyone else remember, like, 20-25 years ago when Walmart when on this major "Make In The USA" marketing blitz, claiming that they would buy equivalent products made in the US and would even encourage the creation of US companies to make equivalent products they couldn't buy domestically? Whatever happened to that? Oh right. Walmart started price shaving their suppliers to the point where a lot of them went under or chose to try to exist without selling to Walmart rather than dilute their brand quality.

When the largest economy on the planet has had zero household wage growth across the past 40 years, one of the ways to trick them into thinking they have more spending power now than before is to reduce the perceived cost of the products they aspire to own. So people get crappier stuff (or smaller packaging, when it comes to consumables, the "grocery shrink ray"]) at the same price, or else the cost of producing quality products has to continue to be reduced, meaning either automation or slave labor.

How does one create a global economy in which nobody is being exploited? Where the workers are universally fairly compensated, and the customers are not being manipulated about value?
posted by hippybear at 11:32 AM on March 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


There is a problem with only buying ethically produced stuff if it's only ethically produced because it's in the US.

For example, every time a sweat shop is closed down in India, the number of under-age workers goes down and the number of under-age prostitutes goes up. Not that working in a sweat shop is good, but if the alternative is prostitution, it's hard to argue that the sweat shop should be shut down.

What we need to generate demand for ethically produced goods, some regulation that requires or at least encourages manufacturers to produce things more ethically. When the workers get paid reasonably well, they start to have the power to drive change locally. I read a story about a Qualcomm factory in Southeast Asia. The men all had jobs so they ended up hiring almost all women. Over time, the women went from walking to work barefoot, to walking with shoes, to biking, to driving. And a bunch of other, locally owned, businesses popped up around the factory. Then, since the women were now usually the primary income earner for their household, the gender dynamics started to change. So if US based companies are building factories in other countries, paying their workers a fair wage, and keeping the factories to a minimal environmental impact, I don't really have a problem with globalization. And really, globalization isn't something that I think can be stopped. So I think we're better off pushing to do it as well as can be done rather than pushing to slow it down.
posted by VTX at 11:34 AM on March 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


What about forced American prison labor?

You know, not everything is about America.

America uses the products created by these people. America still has a prison-industrial system with a clear continuity from the way slavery in the Americas worked.


Not only that, but that article actually starts to address the ways in which the criminal justice systems of various countries are used to create slave labor, and describes how peonage slavery worked in the US and how it still exists in other countries, and how effective it is...

And right there, at that intersection with criminal justice and slave labor, it would have been easy to go into how prisoners in some countries (is the US the only one?) are used. And yes, the lives of the prisoners being forced into labor are undoubtedly better than most of the people described in this article, but is slavery judged on a sliding scale, or is it all just bad and should be stopped.
posted by hippybear at 11:42 AM on March 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


intel is adopting a conflict-free mineral supply chain[*]

Intel Supports Conflict-Free Minerals in the Congo - "Intel supports miners and their families in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with a responsible and humane supply chain that ensures only conflict-free minerals end up in the technology you use every day."

there's also companies like provenance who are trying to introduce greater transparency into supply chain management to help end consumers more easily make purchasing decisions, but to me it still looks a long way from reaching any kind of critical scale but then there was a time i guess when it looked like fossil fuel or israel divestment would never happen either...
posted by kliuless at 6:24 PM on March 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yeah, finish the article before you assume it's US-centric liberal whining to connect this to the racist prison-industrial complex.
posted by gingerest at 1:24 AM on March 10, 2016


Thanks to [expletive deleted] for the interview link! I'm at work and can't read the article right now.
posted by fiercecupcake at 1:09 PM on March 10, 2016


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