Consumers of goods produced in developing countries take no responsibility at all for how the goods are produced and by whom. No matter how much workers are exploited in developing countries, the price of the goods they produce is near enough to the same as those produced in our own country. Just a few lousy cents less – enough apparently to make consumers ignore Australian owned and operated producers, and so help our politicians to bugger up the country even more.

Thousand of Australian jobs have been lost thanks to ‘cheap’ imports which can be downright dangerous to health in the food area, and which are often total rubbish in the manufactured goods area. Toys are certainly dangerous to children.

Australian consumers are not even interested in their own workers and country. They certainly will not take any interest in Third World workers. Does this author really believe that people who want to save a couple of cents on an item, to the detriment of their own people and country, will care about foreign workers being exploited?

Globalisation has altered the world to the bad for both developed countries and undeveloped countries. Who caused the changes? Politicians. Let them sort it out. And let Australian consumers help them on their way by buying Australian.

Mr Right forgot to add that when we purchase goods from overseas we increase our foreign debt. In 2009 Australia will pay for our huge reliance on foreign debt run up by the private sector.

Hi Mr Right,

I don't know if other Australians care about third world workers or not. I do and I write about what I care about rather than what I don't. Perhaps, like me, many people are not aware that many products are manufactured/produced with exploited labour. There was a time not long ago when I was not aware of it and it came as quite a revelation. As a mother, I find the idea of children and vulnerable people being forced to produce goods quite repugnant so perhaps I have hope that other parents will also have a conscience. If not, at least I have done something rather than nothing on this topic.

Having said that, in a practical sense it is very difficult to buy products which are not tainted with exploited labour. Buying Australian seems like a good suggestion I had not thought of so I'm glad it was raised.

I am interested in debate on this issue in case there are angles or information I have not thought of or wasn't able to mention.

regards
Rosie

The International Labour Organization has video documentaries on these issues:

http://www.ilo.org/global/About_the_ILO/Media_and_public_information/Broadcast_materials/Documentaries/lang--en/index.htm

Rosie

Thankyou, Rosie. I share your views on the exploitation of labour in Third World countries, and the GOVERNMENTS of developed countries can take the blame for it. Globalisation has damaged the very people it was meant to help.

But, as an ordinary consumer, my first loyalty is to Australia and I will buy Australian wherever possible. I can do absolutely nothing about what my own lousy politicians do once they are elected, let alone what goes on in foreign countries. There is a limit to what the average human being can take on board and concern himself/herself with.

I did not mean to disparage you at all.

Leigh

It is extremely hard to use trade pressures to engineer an improvement in children’s welfare, and those measures often backfire. About 95% of child labour in developing countries is not in export sectors and so is not likely to be influenced by trade boycotts or so-called "fair trade" conditionality. More importantly, boycotts often end up harming the very children they are intended to help. Many children working in bad conditions – horrible though they often are – do so because their alternatives are even worse.

Usually those calling for sanctions and boycotts don’t think though the effects. In 1996 UNICEF reported the effects of the threat of boycotts on clothing producing using child labour in Bangladesh. It found that:

“… the mere threat of such a measure panicked the garment industry of Bangladesh, 60 per cent of whose products — some $900 million in value — were exported to the US in 1994. Child workers, most of them girls, were summarily dismissed from the garment factories. A study sponsored by international organizations took the unusual step of tracing some of these children to see what happened to them after their dismissal. Some were found working in more hazardous situations, in unsafe workshops where they were paid less, or in prostitution.”

Source: UNICEF, State of the World’s Children Report 1997, p.23

http://www.unicef.org/publications/files/pub_sowc97_en.pdf

The best way to raise living standards in poor countries, as in rich countries, is to make them more productive. International trade and investment flows have been demonstrated time and gain to be the most effective way of doing that that.

Admittedly, globalisation and trade alone might not end child exploitation and the desperate poverty that often (not always) underpins it. I’d support the Australian government and citizens taking constructive measures to encourage and assist poor countries to move away from harmful child labour. But trade embargoes and similar measures are likely to do more harm than good.

Thank you Rosie for another human rights wake up.
As I see it as a human family, the old golden rule is fundamental to a happy, healthy society; "That we do to others as we would like done." What a principal! so simple, but sound, and so positive and pro-active; that 'We Do'(first) constructive leadership with example

Sadly, Rhian is right. Morally repugnant as child exploitation is, we need to be careful that, with the best intentions in the world, we don't make the situation worse. I don't like the Fair Trade movement for that reason.

This is not an excuse for doing nothing. The Oaktree Foundation and similar initiatives deserve our support as do all attempts to free up world trade and thereby significantly reduce the numbers of people living in poverty.

Two questions:
1. If forced labour is an abuse of human rights, what about taxation? Isn't it the forced taking of someone else's labour or fruits thereof? Obviously it's no defence that taxation is is legal, since it's no defence of forced labour. How do you distinguish it? Don't we have a human right not to have government treating us as their property, and threatening us with being violated and brutalised to force us to comply?

2. If the choice facing a child is starvation or work, are you saying they would be better off dead than employed in conditions you disapprove of?

Dear Mr. Right!

I really care about the workers in the third world!
I think people should be careful when they buy things... I always try to buy at shops, where I know that they don't have third world workers!
.. but to do this is very difficult in our country!

Diocletian, forced labour is not legal as far as I am aware, taxation is so I don't have any trouble differentiating the two in terms of their ethics. Your post does make one consider what logical link there is between taxation and slavery.

If a country taxes people without providing anything in return that seems like a breach of human rights and reminds me of totalitarian regimes. I think the human rights conventions do place responsibility on government to be answerable to their citizens.

Where countries tax to provide public health, infrastructure, education and housing then we have our modern democratic nations. Without such public spending it is difficult to increase productivity and it also creates the situations which you appear believe justify child slavery.

Taxation, along with political enfranchisement plays a very important role in creating the difference between first and third world countries.

Rhian, thanks for the url although I find the ILO paper, Strategies for Eliminating Child Labour: Prevention, Removal and Rehabilitation at
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/comp/child/conf/oslo/syn.htm an easier read.

It is difficult to paraphrase such an extensive report as there is so much pertinant information it is difficult to decide which points are more important to quote. I expect to look further into the issue of trade boycott/consumer blacklist as opposed to other measures for future articles. I was aware of the issue previously and it is acknowledged in the ILO and UNICEF documents however I believe that raising awareness among consumers is an important link in raising the kind of political (or personal) will to address these concerns for both governments and individuals.

My view is that public debate is one way to tease out the issues, to inform and that dissenting or clarifying voices can lead to better policy positions on these matters.

Rosie,

These are complex issues, and I agree that debate and discussion are useful both to raise awareness and tease out solutions.

Dealing with child labour will probably require a number of approaches including changing (and enforcing) legislation, addressing cultural issues and making real alternatives available.

Most importantly it requires addressing the kind of poverty that makes working in factories making goods for export the best option available for kids in some countries. This is why I’m concerned about measures such as trade boycotts, which can actually make things worse.

You are right that rich countries tend to have better public infrastructure and social services and more generous welfare safety nets than poor ones, but I wonder what is cause and what is effect. At earlier stages in their economic development, taxation and government spending relative to GDP were much lower in most now-rich countries, including Australia. I suspect that rich countries have these now thing because they can afford them; in poor countries workers cannot sustain the tax levels necessary to provide first-world benefits and services.

That said, appropriate public investment in productive infrastructure and human capital can raise productivity in poor countries as well as rich ones, and where countries are too poor to afford this investment loans or aid from rich countries can help to raise living standards. The key thing is to ensure the investment is actually productive – for a host of complex reasons, a large proportion of public spending may not be.

Thanks for that Rhian,

Out of curiosity, what do you think of campaigns such as Chain Store Reaction?
http://chainstorereaction.com/

It is touted as a better alternative to product boycott but it is hard for me to imagine that emails are going to change corporate behaviour. To my mind, the only thing that changes corporate behaviour is the purchasing behaviour of customers?

I am merely inquiring how the ethical basis of taxation can be distinguished from that of forced labour. I have found that as soon as you examine the reasoning, it crumbles.

Legality is not a sufficient answer for the morality. Slavery has been legal in most countries in most times where it has been practised. But that doesn’t make it ethical, that doesn’t make it okay by you, does it? A state can’t satisfy you that slavery is okay by merely legalising it, can it?

Surely we should say the legality of slavery is not an argument in favour of slavery, but against such legality?

What about legitimisation by democracy? Ultimately this pre-supposes legitimacy based on majority opinion. But majority opinion also will not suffice. If 12 men and one woman vote whether to have sex, and the men vote for, and the woman votes against, and they force her, that doesn’t mean
(a) it’s not a rape as a matter of fact, nor
(b) that it’s ethically okay.

The *ethical* position of majority rule is no different. It is only the *legality*, not the ethics of majority rule that distinguish taxation from forced labour.

What about utility? Suppose a state holds a third of its population in slavery, and uses the forced labour or the proceeds to provide a sewerage system, a water supply, and other public works. May the state argue: “This forced labour is necessary and desirable as the basis of a decent society. Without it, the state could not exist. And the people who benefit need these amenities and therefore have a right to them at the expense of the freedom of these slaves.”?

Surely not? Wouldn’t you say, people don’t have a “right” to live at the expense of others under coercion? And if people are not willing to pay for these services voluntarily, they have no right to have them provided by coercion? And if people are willing to pay for them voluntarily, then there is no justification for forced labour? And if an organisation could not exist without forced labour, that is an argument against such an organisation, not in favour of forced labour? And it is a contradiction in terms to say that a decent society requires slavery?

Yet we still have not arrived at an ethical distinction between slavery and taxation that can withstand critical scrutiny. They have in common that they involve the use of force or threats to violate the person’s right to self-ownership, and all the freedoms and dignity that derive therefrom. Their only difference is that one is legal and the other is not, but we have already seen that that does not establish a sufficient ethical difference.

Whether the slaver ‘provides something in return’ is not to the point, which is, whether the other party consents.

Modern states do not forcibly expropriate a hundred percent of the product of one third of the population, but they do forcibly expropriate forty percent of the product of the entire population. Many people face rates of taxation much higher. I have experienced a rate of taxation and other compulsory expropriation of 80 percent. But surely there is no issue that if it was 100 percent it would be slavery properly so-called?

The fact that these conclusions may be inconvenient or radical is no argument against them; any more than it was an argument against slavery being abolished. We may regard it as unthinkable to abolish taxation. So what? So did the slave-owners facing abolition. Surely we have an ethical obligation not to shrink from at least thinking about the issues?

Over to you. Can you provide an ethical distinction between slavery and taxation? And pray spare me the cheap shots

For those interested in human rights issues, the government is holding public consultations around the nation over coming months to hear the views of people who have registered to attend their 'community roundtables'.

"Key Consultation Questions

* Which human rights and responsibilities should be protected and promoted?
* Are human rights sufficiently protected and promoted?
* How could Australia better protect and promote human rights?"

The public can make submissions and get further info here (by May 29, 2009):
http://www.humanrightsconsultation.gov.au/www/nhrcc/nhrcc.nsf/Page/Share_Your_Views

regards
Rosie Williams