The single hand-knotted area rug (8' x 9') was made in India and was entirely hand-made. According to the sales associate, it would take a person about one year and three months of steady work to complete a hand-knotted rug like that (although, generally, there are four people working on the rug full-time for about 25% of that time). The rug was for sale for $2,800.

Now, assuming that "full-time" means eight hours of work per day, five days per week, that means that the rug was worked on for about 325 person-days (or about 2,600 hours). Further assuming that half of the retail value of the rug went into the pockets of the people working on it, they earned about $0.50 an hour.

Now, if you had folks in the USA or Canada working on a rug like that for, say, ten bucks an hour, that same hand-made rug would have cost about $52,000 (assuming no benefits or employment taxes on top of the $10 going to the employees making such a rug).

So, I was thinking: If a hand-made rug like that was to be made and sold in the USA or Canada, very few people would buy it (very few would buy it at $2,800 but certainly even fewer would buy it for $52,000).

What do babblers think about a product like that?

Should a product like that be permitted to be sold in North America, knowing that the people working on it probably made something in the neighborhood of $0.50 per hour (and maybe less) but that in the absence of such a market for the product, the people otherwise making those kinds of rugs would made even less (maybe nothing).

Interestingly, that rug was for sale in one of the wealthier suburbs of the Twin Cities and the sales person said that it had sat unsold in the store for nearly a year. It was on the floor being walked on by countless customers every day but the sales person said that a rug like that is likely to last about three hundred years' of steady use.

ETA: Corrected for grammar.

[ 02 July 2006: Message edited by: Sven ]

[ 02 July 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

Moreover, its worth is actually a figment in my opinion.

Some people seem more than happy to apply the "sink or swim" model to the rights of indivdual workers, while at the same time getting their knickers in a knot should it be suggested that companies too, can sink or swim, and that we consumers have a right to determine the value of thier prodcusts using whatever yardsticks we choose, including judging them on the basis of how they treat their staff.

You demand however, that people only apply the recieved wisdom of the "economist" which states that only "economic" should be used to define the social value of a companies endeavours, but should we ever allude to the idea that mere "economic viability" is not the sole standard by which a companies value to society at large should be taken into account, you accuse us of breaking the rules.

Life is tough. Live with it.

[ 02 July 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Originally posted by Cueball:
The point is to create social condition upon which those companies who exploit workers are forced to more equitably ditribute the income derived from the enterprise. Pretty simple.

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If we were able to somehow mandate a higher living wage for that work (say, $10 per hour), very, very few people would even buy the finished product (a $50,000 rug)--like I said, the rug being sold for $2,800 was in a furniture store located in a relatively wealthy American suburb and it had been sitting on the showroom floor for nearly a year unsold. So, mandating a minimum "living wage" for someone whose skill it is to hand-knot rugs doesn't seem workable.

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Originally posted by Sven:
I wonder what the women crafting the rugs would suggest? My guess is that they would rather work for $0.50 per hour than not work for anything at all. For a North American, those wages would be apalling. But, if a person lives in a country with people starving around you, maybe making $4 per day isn't too bad.

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The point is to create social condition upon which those companies who exploit workers are forced to more equitably ditribute the income derived from the enterprise. Pretty simple.

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Originally posted by Left Turn:
The thing to do is to pass a law requiring all goods sold in Canada to be produced according to Canadian labour standards.

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I suspect that the standard of living in Canada would dive precipitously. And, as a mere example, it would mean even less income to the women who hand-knot rugs.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
It's easy, Sven. That woman in India should move to socialist Kerala

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So, these women who are skilled in the hand-knotting of rugs would do what, then, for an income?

ETA: Perhaps you could create another India-based customer service call center in Karala to employ them, Fidel?

[ 03 July 2006: Message edited by: Sven ]

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Originally posted by Sven:

So, these women who are skilled in the hand-knotting of rugs would do what, then, for an income?

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I wonder what the women crafting the rugs would suggest?

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To get the really tight weaves it takes the tiny hands of children to make the wee knots and India has a long history of using up children in their carpet making industries and then discarding them when their hands get too big, probably to the child sex industry or body parts market.
. congressional report

4 yr olds are tied to looms as their daycare while 7 yr olds toil at the machines.
and more

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Originally posted by Michelle:
Wow. That bonded labour thing is horrifying.

Have a rug, Sven. Some child slave made it for you. Hope you enjoy it. But hey, don't worry - if you weren't around to buy the rug, the kid wouldn't have such a great job. Er, slave placement. Or whatever.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
Sven, I think you are attempting to make the conservative supply side argument that those poor slobs should be greatful that there are middle class American's who can afford to buy their rugs. If that's the case, then I can't begin to tell you how flawed that ideology is. India was once ahead of China in terms of infant mortality and levels of poverty in a comparison of fourth world nations. China's poverty and infant mortality was better than India's situation today by the time of Mao's death in 1976. Sven, you tell me what that woman and her children need - the one's that survived birth as well as her own miraculous survival after multiple pregnancies. Do you think she and her family live well by some quirk of economics and good will of western demand for her lowly skilled albeit a fine craft, but lowly paid, non-unionized work ?.

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As I see it, there are two options: (1) ban these rugs entirely or (2) require that the workers earn union-level wages (say $15 per hour), which would essentially eliminate the market for the rugs (because they'd then cost $50,000 to $100,000 each, for, say, an elaborately crafted 8' x 10' rug).

ETA: The per capita GNP in China is about $1200 (about $0.60 per hour) and in India is about $620 (about $0.30 per hour).

[ 03 July 2006: Message edited by: Sven ]

quote:

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Originally posted by Sven:

As I see it, there are two options: (1) ban these rugs entirely or (2) require that the workers earn union-level wages (say $15 per hour), which would essentially eliminate the market for the rugs (because they'd then cost $50,000 to $100,000 each, for, say, an elaborately crafted 8' x 10' rug).

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I think the picture loses focus at the thought of labour-intensive rug-making for a pittance. People in Cuba broke their backs in the cane fields from sunup to sundown and had nothing to show for it at the end of their lives, too, Sven. This still goes on in Haiti and Dominican Rep., just 50 miles from Cuba. There are children and infants weak from hunger in Port Au Prince as we speak. All their mother's had for some of them today was maybe some boiled grass or shadow soup, Sven. There three year old kids in Calcutta and Port Au Prince walking around with kwashiorker bellies. Hunger is a sharp thorn in the democratic capitalist third world for hundreds of millions of real human beings. Fuck the rugs, Sven. It's not working for them.

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ETA: The per capita GNP in China is about $1200 (about $0.60 per hour) and in India is about $620 (about $0.30 per hour).

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And yet India's infant mortality is more than double the figure for China. And Chinese live several years longer on average. Purchasing power parity of the two nations is different by comparison. You can have a shitload of natural resources and cash crops leaving a country every day along with impressive GDP numbers, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the people have a share in the wealth being exported or salted away into offshore bank accounts untaxed. Sven, no country suffers chronic hunger in greater numbers than India, and they export food to "the market" every year. Millions of innocent children in India will die of Washington consensus this year, next year and the year after that one. It's planned and enforced genocide. How much is that worth to them on an hourly basis or for the sake of propping up a GDP?. Democratic capitalism in India makes Mao's legacy seem even more spactacular, because China's per capita GNP was even lower in 1976 while mortality statistics had improved markedly over India's. Buy the rug if it makes you feel good. Yes, we need unionization world-wide and a level playing field for workers everywhere. We need free markets in labour and labour laws enforcing by something like a UN-level agency with member nations signing on to it. The most powerful and influential nations could make that happen in the blink of an eye if there was the political will to do it. I think like all of the achievements made by the left, people will have to push and shove hard for a long time for these kinds of gains. Global investments, as far as the really fat cats are concerned, is all about being optimistic about this country's economy or that one over there, but never all of them at the same time. Gotta keep the workers off balance and their noses to the grindstones in order for a handful of people to become filthy rich off the blood, sweat and tears of the many.

[ 05 July 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

quote:

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Originally posted by Sven:

As I see it, there are two options: (1) ban these rugs entirely or (2) require that the workers earn union-level wages (say $15 per hour), which would essentially eliminate the market for the rugs (because they'd then cost $50,000 to $100,000 each, for, say, an elaborately crafted 8' x 10' rug).

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I agree with you, Sven: under our ridiculous economic system there are only two bad options.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
Fuck the rugs, Sven.

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Rugs are merely an example, Fidel. What do you propose that all of the rug-makers and all of the hundreds of millions of other similarly-situated craftspeople and manual laborers do for a living?

If a person in China spends six months carving a mammoth ivory “puzzle ball” and gets paid $600 for that work (and the puzzle ball sells in North America for $1,500), do you propose that the carver get $15 union wages (plus benefits) so that the puzzle ball would then sell for $39,000? I’m sure a $1,500 puzzle ball doesn’t have many buyers now. That small number would approach zero if the ball sold for even $15,000 (which is not enough to even cover the pay for the craftsperson compensated at $15 per hour plus benefits).

So, what happens to all of those people, Fidel?

Let’s say that you have a person in China who works for a Chinese company to produce a product for sale only in China and that that person gets paid $0.50 per hour. Now, let’s assume you have a North American company offer to pay that person $1 per hour to produce something for export to North America. The products for export could be made by a North American worker who was paid $15 per hour (plus bennies) or by a machine that would do it at an amortized cost similar to the North American worker’s compensation, with both the North American worker and the machine both being much more efficient than the Chinese worker.

If the Chinese worker must get the same pay, the Chinese worker will lose his job (why would we pay a less productive worker the same rate as a North American worker and incur all of the transportation costs that could be avoided if the product was made here instead?

It's like our two countries, Sven. It's said that the bottom 60 percent of income earners in Canada have more purchasing power parity than the same group in the U.S. Food and stuff tends to be cheaper for you guys the farther south you go, but services are more affordable in Canada - health care being a biggy for us ... for now. So for the most part, we're better off in Canada, Sven. China is experimenting with partial privatization of health care services like the rest of the world, and it looks like they are beginning to realize they don't wanna be trusting just the market with the nation's health as have other countries concluded similarly.

[ 06 July 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

I've always been very uncomfortable with the idea that our culture's standard of living is so much higher than so much of the planets. There is really no good reason for it, it falls far short of anything like social justice.

I think we should aspire to a global culture in which wages are normalized independent of country.

Here in east Germany you can visit these charming little villages in the nearby hills that, for a century or so, flourished from a sort of craft industry of home weaving: their houses were specially constructed to float above the looms which would otherwise shake them to pieces. That industry collapsed when some new industrial process came along; no doubt there was a lot of pissing and moaning at the time and a lot of people were wiped out....but what do you do? Now they are just these quaint little tourist sites.

4 bucks a day in India is a pretty good wage.

But India is a despicably feudal culture.

What do you do?

One thing that we often do is make the mistake of comparing our conditions here, to conditions in those countries.

Many people in the world subsist on less than a dollar a day, so by those standards .50 cents an hour looks pretty good.

Most of the arguments against globalization aren't aimed at helping the poor. The poor in North America are delighted to have Wal-Marts so that prices are 30% less. The poor in Bangladesh are delighted to have Nike because their sweatshops offer much better wages and conditions than the Bangladeshi owned companies.

The arguments come from small business owners here in North America who like to be able to sell over-priced goods. They come from upscale urbanites who are worried that their trendy little shops will dissapear and be replaced with a mega-mall that the common people will want to shop in.

Globalization does not hurt the third world - it helps it, from that perspective. The problem is that there is such an opportunity to help the third world even more that is passed by.