It's not often you get to hear a Nobel Peace Prize winner in the flesh, but today I had the privilege to hear Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the UN, address both houses of Parliament. The occasion was a further event to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the passing of legislation to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
A few things struck me about what he said. First, he pointed out that whilst we should celebrate the fact that the slave trade was abolished, we should also ask why it was tolerated for so long? One answer was that the mass of the public had little or no idea of the conditions in which slaves worked on the plantations or in which they were transported. The triumph of the Abolitionists was partly due to raising public awareness of the reality of the situation. (Incidentally, I was interested to see in the Wilberforce film "Amazing Grace" that the forerunners of the Fair Trade movement were active 200 years ago boycotting bananas from slave plantations!). I suspect the same is still true today when it comes to the conditions of people around the world who work for a pittance to produce the cheap clothes etc. that we stil buy in the UK.
He also had an interesting take on the 'should we apologise for slavery' debate. If I understood his argument correctly, he seemed to say that the best reparations we could make would be to tackle modern day poverty and disease in Africa, which does seem to be a constructive way of taking things forward.
The gist of his message was that where there is injustice the focus must be not so much on working out who to blame but on taking personal responsibility for playing you part in tackling it. Seems like a good principle.
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4 comments:
I think the comparison with slaves and workers in the C21st is unhelpful.
The former were kidnapped and compelled to work against their will; the latter choose to work for wages that we may consider paltry, but which are preferable to whatever alternative existed before they opened up to global trade.
If we artificially raise the wages in Third World factories, we will merely erode their comparative advantage and the factories will locate elsewhere. That is great news for First World protectionists who don't like the competition, but a disaster for Third World workers who will lose their jobs.
On a separate note, the link between slavery and development is also spurious. We should help the developing world because it is the right thing to do, not out of guilt for events that happened hundreds of years ago, over which we have no control.
Appreciate the feedback Tom, but can't agree with you that modern day workers earning a pittance are somehow free participants in a market exchange. If my choice is starvation or earning a tiny wage, and if the local employer is the only person I can work for, that's hardly the free market and competition at work. On that basis, sending children up chimneys would presumably have been fine on the grounds that their wages are "..preferable to whatever alternative existed..".
Surely you would accept that the concept of 'exploitation' has some meaning?
Tom is absolutely correct.
You assume that there's only one employer - that is very unlikely, although anti-globalisation campaigners seem to have that as their aim.
Indeed, most of the time the argument is about multi-nationals setting up factories and having the nerve to offer jobs to people. The multi-nationals set up factories which pay better, and have better facilities than local ones though. How is that bad?
Sending children up chimneys when it was done was acceptable because the other option was to starve. We progressed beyond that through free trade and liberalism which raised the living standards of everyone in this country enormously.
Child labour is wrong when the children have other opportunities, but where they don't, where the levels of poverty are so high that their options are to work, to starve or to go into prostitution then work is the lesser of the evils.
Those who work are engaged in the free market. They are not being forced to work, they can work at different jobs (the arrival of a multinational company in an area brings in money which is then spent on other things, offering new opportunities to others).
The first lesson of economics is to look at the whole economy, not just the few who appear to benefit. You must also look for those things which don't happen due to your policies.
So, enforce wage rises and some get higher wages.
Others however are not hired. If you set wages above the market price then employers will hire less, invest more in capital to do their jobs and demand more of those who have the jobs (leading to a worse work environment).
Those who never got hired because of wage rises suffer. Those who never get hired because companies go elsewhere suffer. The income disparities increase.
You'd object to subsidising or forcing up the price of goods - it distorts the market resulting in a glut or a shortage of said goods. Why is doing the same with wages good? It has the same sort of effect, but far more serious because you're directly affecting people.
Sending small children up chimneys did not end when the free market bought down the cost of cleaning chimneys by other methods. It stopped because it was cruel and was banned by government (in the UK by Disraeli’s Conservatives in 1878).
Tristan, the pure utilitarian approach you advocate is highly unfair. Seeking to reduce the cost of people is not the same as reducing the cost of goods. People are not the same as goods, they have their own intrinsic worth and should have the chance to develop their opportunities to their full worth. The responsibility of us in economically more developed countries should be to increase the life chances of those less fortunate.
But, if you don't have this moral conscience and prefer to simply look after yourself, then you might be pleased to know that economic development which considers all participants is likely to lead to greater growth and development for all, including us in economically developed countries.
Global development is not a one way process of the rich buying from the poor, to maintain wealth the rich must have something to sell back. And it is no use having something to sell that others can’t afford. So for continued economic development in already rich countries, those economically lesser developed must have a real purchasing power, and this can only come them from paying higher prices for what they sell. This equalising of economies is the best prospect for growth for all.
And globalisation is indeed the best way to do this. But business is not an uncomplicated supply and demand diagram; real companies are not driven by just simply pushing down wages, long term success is achieved by creating organisations in which people can thrive.
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