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.
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.
Prisoners prop up global powers.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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https://github.com/aclist/kbin-kes/
Although this is not going to work where you are at lemmy.world.
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