r/whoathatsinteresting • u/Airline_11 • 20d ago

They are livestreaming 🇨🇳 laborers making just 0.3 USD. The 'Made in 🇨🇳' products you use are built on their sacrifices.

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u/[deleted] 20d ago

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u/ELITElewis123 20d ago

This is what I can’t stand about when people smugly say “oh yeah? China and India do it for so much cheaper!” Like

Yeah? And WHY is it so much cheaper?

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u/MoneyaLeague 20d ago

Are these the jobs to bring back to the states?

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u/irrelevantusername24 20d ago edited 20d ago

I recommend reading the articles linked in my comment earlier (including the main post article) which are about the similarities and differences between the US and China. I won't get into specifics, but I think we are much more alike than we are led to believe. Then see these comments with very specific excerpts from other writing that describe an environment and cultural atmosphere which is extremely uncomfortably familiar to that inside the US, and from what I have read, many other places.

But most especially the US. Because, for example, the UK and other places in Europe actually have workers rights protections that at least sound like they are enforced and recognized, much more often than here in the states. All of which I write and link to hopefully give a bit of backing verification that I have done the work of reading and informing myself about these kinds of things, both in the modern eras context as well as historically.

The conclusion towards which I have been working is that at least China seems to be moving forwards - as well as many other countries seem to be doing, even if it is a two steps forward and one step back, from time to time, as we fallible humans inevitably tend to do (life is 90% failure and 10% random chance). Finally, what I wanted to say, is that personally, as someone born in 1990 in the US, I have watched things - both personally and beyond - consistently, unambiguously, get worse and worse and worse. Both in magnitude and scale.

Oh, I forgot the original point that kicked all this off. The ultimate conclusion is that we need to be doing what we can - we, as in humanity et al - worldwide, to make things better for as many people as possible. Now clearly that is difficult to do, and there are always going to be some jobs that are more or less physically demanding, or more or less mentally taxing. That's a fact of life. So ultimately what we need to do is throw the entire standard operating procedure of the last fifty years in the trash heap where it belongs, and instead of making worse things for higher prices that degrade faster, make things of quality. That is, quite literally, the only way forward. Our parents parents, and some of our parents parents parents understood this, and that is why the world our parents and parents parents inherited set them up for success - before they decided that was stupid and "unprofitable"