NationStates Jolt Archive

Why do some of you consider it morally superior to leave someone living as an indigent retch in an open sewer of a shantytown in some third world nation than to give them a job and a reasonable standard of living?

This stems from a discussion about relative purchasing power and how standards of wealth have changed over the last couple centuries. Just about everyone in a developed nation lives with material wealth far beyond even wealthy men of the 18th century, yet labor is so comparatively expensive that we lack the ability to hire servants, which even middle-class men took for granted.

Illegal immigrants are used as low-cost nannies, gardeners, maids, etc. precisely because labor laws make it too difficult to hire someone. Most of them make pretty good money – while I certainly don’t deny that sweatshops do exist, the vast majority make a reasonable living.

If I were to offer a small room in my house, plenty of food to eat, plus a small sum of money for incidental purchases in exchange for an individual maintaining my house and yard, I would be giving a massive boost to the standard of living of this servant, plus a nice boost to my own standard of living (clean house and nice yard for minimal expenditure). It is a win-win scenario. Yet somehow, it is morally repugnant. The ‘right thing to do’ is to leave them unemployed and living in squalor and live in a messy house I don’t have the time to clean properly because otherwise I would be ‘exploiting’ this person’s situation.

I cannot afford to hire someone right now, not legally at least. Hiring a servant would be very expensive; it is well beyond the means of most middle class people. Many people do have a spare bedroom (or somewhere that could be converted into one) which could house a servant, the marginal cost of feeding one more person is fairly little, and if room and board are covered the actual cash cost in wages would be very low. This would put having a household servant within the reach of even the middle class.

There are a lot of people in the world who would love to have this opportunity – it gives them good food and nice housing far beyond what they have now. Sure, the actual cash going into the bank is pretty small, but if food and housing is covered, your needs are fairly low. Its not like I’m advocating slavery here, I’m offering a job. If they feel they would not be better off, they wouldn’t take the job or would quit. Just like any other job. I fail to see what is so morally repugnant about this.

Why do some of you consider it morally superior to leave someone living as an indigent retch in an open sewer of a shantytown in some third world nation than to give them a job and a reasonable standard of living?

Strawman.

Now ask yourself this - what's the moral quality of offering aid to someone drowning in a river, but only under the condition that she contracts herself into life-long slavery?

Strawman.

Now ask yourself this - what's the moral quality of offering aid to someone drowning in a river, but only under the condition that she contracts herself into life-long slavery?

Strawman

Giving someone a job does not mean contracting them into lifelong slavery.

Giving someone a job does not mean contracting them into lifelong slavery.

I don't believe I said it was.

The point is that an action can better a person's present state while still being exploitative and immoral. The general principle is applicable to both cases - though I'll grant that there's a difference of degree.

I see your point - I'd taken it to mean that being a nanny/gardener was equivalent to slavery

The moral repugnance stems from a number of factors, but that's just me. Here's a few examples.

#1 A man opens a factory up in the countryside. To do so, he buys over the land that the farmers used to operate on, paying them something that they could live with, but not for long, and strongarming those who refuse. He then proceeds to offer them jobs at his factory, however, at a lower rate than what they used to work on their lands. This is morally repugnant because the factory owner reduced the standards of living for the formerly agricultural society.

#2 Contracted foreign labor part 1. In many, not all, but many, cases, firms in the business of contracting foreign labor withold the passports of the immigrants for the duration of their stay, not to mention charging them a certain sum for processing costs. Normally acceptable, but too many cases occur where the people are cheated of their money and left without jobs, passports or money in a foreign land.

#3 Contracted foreign labor part 2. Forced labor. After coming to the foreign country, immigrants are held in what are effectively labor camps and are held against their will under poor conditions. Noted to have occured in many countries including first world countries like the US.

#4 Employee abuse. There are quite a few cases where employees treat their maids with what can only be called assault. Boiling water, heated irons, forced to eat their own excrement, imprisonment, withholding of food. Noted to occur worldwide, but highly urbanized countries with high stress populations like Hong Kong and Singapore are of particular note for maid abuse.

These are some of the more common reasons.

The moral repugnance stems from a number of factors, but that's just me. Here's a few examples.

#1 A man opens a factory up in the countryside. To do so, he buys over the land that the farmers used to operate on, paying them something that they could live with, but not for long, and strongarming those who refuse. He then proceeds to offer them jobs at his factory, however, at a lower rate than what they used to work on their lands. This is morally repugnant because the factory owner reduced the standards of living for the formerly agricultural society.

#2 Contracted foreign labor part 1. In many, not all, but many, cases, firms in the business of contracting foreign labor withold the passports of the immigrants for the duration of their stay, not to mention charging them a certain sum for processing costs. Normally acceptable, but too many cases occur where the people are cheated of their money and left without jobs, passports or money in a foreign land.

#3 Contracted foreign labor part 2. Forced labor. After coming to the foreign country, immigrants are held in what are effectively labor camps and are held against their will under poor conditions. Noted to have occured in many countries including first world countries like the US.

#4 Employee abuse. There are quite a few cases where employees treat their maids with what can only be called assault. Boiling water, heated irons, forced to eat their own excrement, imprisonment, withholding of food. Noted to occur worldwide, but highly urbanized countries with high stress populations like Hong Kong and Singapore are of particular note for maid abuse.

These are some of the more common reasons.

You just described Shitty Arabia in a nutshell.

Because what you're talking about is not exploitation.

Exploitation is when you send a fireworks factory to India or China. Now, if these workers are not afforded adequate safety (training as well as protection), then their health and lives are at risk. They probably barely get paid enough to sustain themselves and possibly their family. They can get fired pretty easily, if they dissent. This, and a whole range of issues, is exploitation.

What you mentioned, however, isn't. What you mentioned is actually providing good housing. It's giving them an oppurtunity. They are getting paid enough to sustain themselves and even do more than that. Chances are that, if one day they should find a better job, you probably wouldn't mind letting them rent the room, would you?

Because at the end of the day, the first situation is a dead-end. It's just something to keep you going when the times are really bad and then you might as well just go out and work for yourself (But such oppurtunities can be limited sometimes). The second situation isn't a dead-end.

There's a thin-line between exploitation and... whatever, sometimes. Sometimes, that line isn't quite so thin. Your description is a far-cry from what Non Aligned States came up with, but are you the norm?

Business "exploitation" isn't what you're discribing.

Buisness Exploitation is taking someone who was stuck in a shantytown without food or a job.

Making them work 18 hours a day, and paying them just enough to go back to their shanty town with a loaf of stale bread.

Strawman.

Now ask yourself this - what's the moral quality of offering aid to someone drowning in a river, but only under the condition that she contracts herself into life-long slavery?
A better analogy might be:

You offer the drowning person a small floatation device tethered to a submerged pole in the middle of the raging current and leave them there.

You justify yourself by claiming that since they're not dead, they much better off thanks to your action. They should be grateful for your 'help' and you can feel morally superior for having done a 'good' deed.

Why do some of you consider it morally superior to leave someone living as an indigent retch in an open sewer of a shantytown in some third world nation than to give them a job and a reasonable standard of living?

This stems from a discussion about relative purchasing power and how standards of wealth have changed over the last couple centuries. Just about everyone in a developed nation lives with material wealth far beyond even wealthy men of the 18th century, yet labor is so comparatively expensive that we lack the ability to hire servants, which even middle-class men took for granted.

Illegal immigrants are used as low-cost nannies, gardeners, maids, etc. precisely because labor laws make it too difficult to hire someone. Most of them make pretty good money – while I certainly don’t deny that sweatshops do exist, the vast majority make a reasonable living.

If I were to offer a small room in my house, plenty of food to eat, plus a small sum of money for incidental purchases in exchange for an individual maintaining my house and yard, I would be giving a massive boost to the standard of living of this servant, plus a nice boost to my own standard of living (clean house and nice yard for minimal expenditure). It is a win-win scenario. Yet somehow, it is morally repugnant. The ‘right thing to do’ is to leave them unemployed and living in squalor and live in a messy house I don’t have the time to clean properly because otherwise I would be ‘exploiting’ this person’s situation.

I cannot afford to hire someone right now, not legally at least. Hiring a servant would be very expensive; it is well beyond the means of most middle class people. Many people do have a spare bedroom (or somewhere that could be converted into one) which could house a servant, the marginal cost of feeding one more person is fairly little, and if room and board are covered the actual cash cost in wages would be very low. This would put having a household servant within the reach of even the middle class.

There are a lot of people in the world who would love to have this opportunity – it gives them good food and nice housing far beyond what they have now. Sure, the actual cash going into the bank is pretty small, but if food and housing is covered, your needs are fairly low. Its not like I’m advocating slavery here, I’m offering a job. If they feel they would not be better off, they wouldn’t take the job or would quit. Just like any other job. I fail to see what is so morally repugnant about this.

So perhaps things like "Room and board" should be included in the minimum a person has to pay an employee. however, for that to really work, there would have to be some sort of agency to verify that the room and board you were providing met a certain minimum standard, so that this servant of yours isn't living in a shithole and eating scraps from your plate. If you pay them the minimum wage in cash, it's much easier to measure if they are getting a fair deal.

Maids (or Domestic Helpers - DHs - as they're known here in Hong Kong) are a tricky one re:exploitation.

I found it very repugnant their working conditions and pay when I first came here to HK. The DHs work 6 days a week, with Sunday off. Really one should say 6 1/2 days as many families insist they make breakfast for everyone before they leave for the day, and they have to be back home before 10pm at the latest.
The average DH's day would be getting up before everyone else and preparing breakfast and lunch for everyone. As this is workaholic HK, this means getting up around 5am, perhaps earlier.
The day might be spent cleaning and/or looking after the infant(s). Evening it's preparing dinner and washing up for all before making it for themselves.
Bedtime is only after everyone else has gone to bed - again, with workaholic HK this might mean 1 or even 2am.
Their accomodation usually consists of a small bedroom not much bigger than your average prison cell (I've seen ones that measure 6'6" by 6'6") - enough for a bed and a chest of drawers.
They're not allowed to bring guests back home - as a result Sundays they all congregate together in the parks and along the walkways to socialise. Most of them send all their money home, so this is the most they can afford.
For all this, the minimum salary is $3200HK a month - around $400US. Most families pay the min. This comes to ~$1US an hour when you work it out.
After 4 years, they're entitled to a long service grant of 4 months pay - but most families will fire the DH just before that to save themselves the cost.

And - yes - as Non Aligned States has mentioned, there are regular enough stories of abuse (either physical and/or sexually) to indicate that this is not uncommon.

However...
If you have a young family here in HK, you're pretty much forced into hiring a helper. There's no childcare to speak of for one thing. Any childcare there is, is so expensive it's actually much cheaper to just have a DH.
They are getting a lot more than they would be in their own countries. In comparison - China has a higher average income than any of the countries one is allowed to employ DHs from (Phillipines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand), yet the average monthy salary in cities in China is $800HK ($100US) and <$200HK ($25US) in the rural areas.
So the pay in comparison is extremely good.
A DH working here for several years can set themselves up quite comfortably back in their home country. A friend of mine had one come in and clean her flat a couple of times a week (the DH's employer let her work outside his home, which is a rarity). She had, in 12 years of being a DH, bought outright 3 houses back in the Phillipines for her family to live in one and rent out the other 2 for income.

So now I feel ambivalent towards the idea. There's good and bad in it. If the DH gets a good boss, they have the opportunity to really make a difference in their lives for themselves and their families. Though it pretty much does mean sacrificing yourself and having no existance outside domestic drudgery for several years in order to do this. But when faced with the alternatives, that probably isn't that dreadful a choice.

--snip--


I totally agree. But we must not forget that many of the DHs who leave their country of origin also leave a family back home. They might be much better off materially, but the development of their families and their children may be neglected. In almost all cases, the price of being better off materially and economically is being away from your family, you children, and your homeland for a long time.

But I know - with many people in poverty, a good portion of them would choose to leave their country to search for better opportunities abroad despite the sacrifices it may entail.

Strawman

Giving someone a job does not mean contracting them into lifelong slavery.

It does when you provide no capacity for advancement, like gathering savings.

Try watching a show like "Edwardian House" and see how live-in servants live.

Aside from that, the middle class meant something different then than it does now. A middle class person as was understood then would be someone who makes about two-hundred thousand dollars a year in todays money. But not only that, he lived off the labor of others. A plumber, even a well paid one, was not middle class. He was working class.

On top of that, live in servants aren't the necessity today that they were then. For a family whose wage earner has an expensive job and whose wife must spend time organizing events to further her husbands career (local charity boards and so on) there simply wasn't time left to do laundry by hand, bake pies, cater dinner parties for business associates and so on.

Today we have lots of labor-saving devices. Servants, for the purposes they were needed then, are superfluous now. Today, a lawyer who spends 18 hours working can bring his briefs home with him, pick up his dry cleaning that he left there this morning (dispensing with the need for a scullery maid) and take out a frozen meal purchased at the supermarket (dispensing with the need for servant who will spend the day shopping at half a dozen different markets) and pop it in the microwave (dispensing with the need for a cook.) Yes, he will still want someone to clean his place, but with modern cleaning supplies and machines like vacuum-cleaners one person can clean the place from top to bottom in an hour or two and then go home, (dispensing with the need for a corp of chamber maids).

Because these things are less necessary, they become luxuries, therefore more expensive. A few hundred years ago the poorest most lice-riddled people wore linen. Now linen is an expensive material to make clothes out of. Same thing with domestic servitude. It's a luxury because it has largely been replace.

I totally agree. But we must not forget that many of the DHs who leave their country of origin also leave a family back home. They might be much better off materially, but the development of their families and their children may be neglected. In almost all cases, the price of being better off materially and economically is being away from your family, you children, and your homeland for a long time.

But I know - with many people in poverty, a good portion of them would choose to leave their country to search for better opportunities abroad despite the sacrifices it may entail.

Which is why I want to puke whenever conservatives talk about "family values," while making every effort to keep wages down as much as possible.

Ireland used to have one of the most tightly knit family structures in the Western world, but when England took over they plunged the Irish into poverty. Some people think it was culinary preferences that drove the Irish to become so dependent on potatoes that they starved, but it was the English that forced them to grow cash crops. If the English hadn't run off with all the wheat and mutton there would have been no famine. Because the land couldn't support both families and the men with fancy coats and guns, Irish families scattered, like spiderlings looking for places to hunt without stepping on their siblings metaphorical toes.

If you care about families, you help families make a living. You don't just punish them when they fail to be a living Norman Rockwell painting.

So perhaps things like "Room and board" should be included in the minimum a person has to pay an employee. however, for that to really work, there would have to be some sort of agency to verify that the room and board you were providing met a certain minimum standard, so that this servant of yours isn't living in a shithole and eating scraps from your plate. If you pay them the minimum wage in cash, it's much easier to measure if they are getting a fair deal.

It is (or can be). Just like an employer can deduct union dues from your paycheck, if you live with them they can deduct rent. Officially you'll be making more than your paycheck says. You'll even be paying tax on more than you get. But officially you're still making money.

In NYC one will occasionally see "help wanted" ads that are live in positions that offer no money whatever.

Though you may not want such a position, why do you want to deny others that choice?
The point is, if someone would be better off taking such a position, why do you force them not to take it ‘for their own good’?

What seriously annoys me is the arrogance of people who assume they know what is best for everyone and want to impose their sensibilities on others. So you wouldn’t want to be a live in maid or nanny, that is your prerogative, but why force everyone to live by your choices?

Offering to save a drowning person only if they agree to a life of slavery is a straw man in that there is no actual choice offered. I am not saying we take a couple boats over to a third world nation, grab a few people and put them in chains, then forcibly bring them back to work for us. They have a choice just like any other job.

Anyone who chooses it is going to be better off than not – otherwise they would not take the job. Why close off opportunities? Yes, I am exploiting the fact that these people do not have high paying jobs – but that is not a bad thing. My job exploits my lack of a personal fortune, that doesn’t mean it is immoral to hire me – it is the same thing with a servant just on a slightly smaller pay scale.

Though you may not want such a position, why do you want to deny others that choice?
The point is, if someone would be better off taking such a position, why do you force them not to take it ‘for their own good’?

More strawmen. :rolleyes:

Edit: Do you tell the drowning person that she should let herself drown?

Do you tell her potential rescuer that he should let her drown?

Or do you merely insist that he act without demanding unfair and extortionist compensation from her?

Offering to save a drowning person only if they agree to a life of slavery is a straw man in that there is no actual choice offered.

Um, yes, there is. I can always drown, right? I don't have to accept the deal.

Similarly, I can always choose to remain in a "shithole."

Anyone who chooses it is going to be better off than not – otherwise they would not take the job.

And as I pointed out, this is not a sufficient condition of moral acceptability.

so you, entropic creations, feel that you should be able to bring some poor soul in from...malawi...and have them live and work in your home for less than minimum wage?

or are you suggesting that it should be OK to hire someone who legally resides inside the US (or your country) room board and money that adds up to at least minumum wage for the time spent working for you?

or are you bugged that its not considered morally right to shirk your housework/yardwork duties by hiring someone to do them for you?

anyway you seem to be suggesting that it should be morally fine to flout immigration and wage/hour laws by hiding an illegal alien in your home and working them as much as you see fit. its not. if you cant find someone to work legally for you then you are wrong to try to skirt the rules. they are there for a reason

actually you would end up with the raw deal if you were attempting that legally in the US, due to the fact that you would have to pay household employee taxes on the "servant", which are rather expensive.

if you did everything "under the table" it would be illegal, and wrong.