I wonder what effect there would be on the electronics industry if all iPhones in the EU had to be sold with a prominent sticker 'Produced with slave labour' ? I honestly think that regulations can nudge the behaviour and expectations of 'the masses' through this kind of labelling.

(1) http://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/farm/layinghens/far...

Which criteria should we label for that are meaningful in other countries across the world?

Made by workers:

Receiving Minimum wage (which one)?

Receiving Free healthcare?

Working a maximum of 8 hours / day?

Over the age of 16? 18?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, but defining what is acceptable is not easy. Don't forget that in most western countries no access to free healthcare would be defined as unacceptable. Also in some poor countries 14 year old "kids" have fought against anti-child labour laws because they were the only provider for their family and there is no help from the government regardless of your condition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_26000

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA8000

Lots of time "free range" is the same as caged, just... without the cages. The hens are too fat to go anywhere anyways.

The problem isn't trying to define meaningful labels, but to record the most salient facts. For starters: record and disseminate the human hours exerted and wage paid for each manufactured item.

2 Assemblers @ 1 hr/each @ $2/hr

1 Packager @ 1 minute @ $1/hr

etc

Consumers may then dynamically choose based on their current preferences. I don't think it's an ideal system, but it would be a significant improvement over the current situation.

Love it.

Daylighting externalities is key to changing behavior. Enough of us vote with our dollars to move the needle.

I stopped eating chocolate (cold turkey) when I first learned about the plantations using slave labor, children, etc.

I resumed buying chocolate when I learned about the Fair Trade program.

http://fairtradeusa.org/products-partners/cocoa

http://www.geek.com/apple/apple-approves-then-removes-app-hi...

It's impossible to prove that the entire supply chain for any electronic device is 100% free of exploitative labour conditions. Metals are fundamentally untraceable and a modern device contains components from hundreds or even thousands of suppliers, sub-contractors and second sources. All it takes is one manager twenty steps down in the supply chain to lose a piece of paper and your chain of custody is broken for a sizeable batch of devices.

In practice, every electronic device would be required to carry such a warning label simply as a precaution, rendering it meaningless.

[1] http://oehha.ca.gov/prop65/background/p65plain.html

For this to work, there has to be an ethical alternative available (if at slightly higher cost).

The same society whose middle and lower classes are demanding ever lower prices at the cost of inhumane treatment of workers is the same society which produces the upper class you hold that hope for. I think you must be living in a different world than I am, because the upper class I'm familiar with is just as happy as everyone else to have their goods produced by the not-quite-but-almost-slave labor described in the article.

I agree that this will require a cultural change, but at all levels. The upper class isn't going to jump on that any sooner than the rest of us without a major shift.

The upper class I'm familiar with consumes products by people like Brunello Cucinelli who goes to great lengths to verify the ethical sourcing of his products. They eat localvorically, and in general buy ulta-high end goods that they research a bit before purchasing (because they are finicky about many aspects). This new hobby is a ultra-status conversation piece that can be traded at parties. You should be able to name the region your boat deck's teak came from, and then drop that the hunting rifle you just had hand crafted has a recovered Lebanese cedar stock that came from an old chest of drawers.

That doesn't mean it's wrong.

Food in particular is a source for this controversy. Over the past fifty years, the population of the planet has doubled, but food cost as a proportion of the economy has halved. This is due to the techological advances of "green revolution" agriculture - tractors, transportation, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Cheap food comes at the price of health and environmental damage, among other things. (want slavery? Check out the chocolate supply chain.) And it's not a huge luxury to eat more ethical foods. Middle class people can afford it.

The true middle class is focusing on critical value trade offs (getting more for your money) and family unit stability. This narrows their energy away from the broader problems and closer to matters of survival. Consider how even Whole Foods or "Goop" is seen by your average middle class individual -- a spot for dilettantes to overpay for apples rather than a representation of hope for working farmers and healthy children.

I think the upper-class must steer away from the concerns of themselves and shoring up their wealth and towards a reinvestment on society, something the recession in the US and depots in Russia and China have set back as members now fear assets could disappear at any time. A portion of the super-class (Gates, Buffet etc) have already tried to evangelize this with some progress -- whilst facing opponents like the Kochs and others who seem to have a more socially adverse ideology.

The real cost of quality food isn't so much money as time. My daughter does most of the cooking for the household, because she loves it. She spends a couple of hours a day at it. I love to cook too, but I don't spend hours a day cooking, because it's not a good tradeoff in my life.

Also, a googler complaining about slave-labor prices is rich with irony.

Current failings of our world are not excuses not to improve it, or to be better people.

On another note, a personal attack is not appreciated here, regardless of where I work. Your comment history is rich with these types of things. We are happy to have you here, but please think about contributing more constructively.

Concretely, if an iPhone is replaced on average every other year but goes up 30% to the the ePhone (ethical phone) it is now only replaced every 3 years. This means fewer ephones are produced, which means that roughly 1/3 of the workforce is no longer required. What are those 1/3 to do?

Almost everyone in America is a descendant of immigrants, for that matter. In many cases, those immigrants were fleeing violence and persecution, their passage paid by overlords who felt it was very decent and moral of them to ship the people overseas rather than just killing them off (i.e. the Irish in America).

Now, in the long run, that will be better than just keeping the status quo. But we should remember that a quick change can be significantly worse in the short term, especially one where the focus is incorrectly applied (in these cases, the focus is on goods being produced by a child labor instead of the conditions that result in children working to begin with; ending the child labor does not end the conditions and will sometimes make things much worse).

It's one thing if the situation was a matter of children being forced to work. If a kid finds work on purpose to help himself or his family eat and you suddenly make it illegal without removing the NEED for him to have to work to help his family then you've made the situation worse while instituting a policy to make yourself feel better.

My view on politics as I've gotten old has gone squarely to the singular point: No complaints. No rules. Solutions or shut up.

But in these "We must keep the slaves so they don't starve" arguments, there's always a nasty whiff of condescension - the implication that they cannot care for themselves, without handouts. Given freedom and sufficient resources, most people will choose to better their circumstances. Humans fed themselves for a long time before they were enslaved. Getting back to feeding themselves may not be easy, but it's certainly not impossible.

In my reply, I said if they were being forced to work (aka - slaves) it was not okay but if they went out and choose to work it was another story.

In your response you cited a "we must keep the slaves so they don't starve" argument...which is not at all what I said. That's the logical disconnect that happens in many political discussions of these types. You're arguing with something I didn't say unless I'm misreading you, because it partially looks like you're agreeing with me as well regarding people choosing to better their circumstances.

To better themselves, they need to be able to make something where they're at, or be able to go somewhere else. If they're sitting on ruined land, unable to leave, that's a problem that can't be solved with mere hard work. But that's a problem that would not have happened without the slavery in the first place.

This is a really good way to make sure that important things aren't talked about (and, it should go without saying, disproportionately hurts already marginalized people even further). Complaints about a situation are step one of finding a collaborative solution. It may take time to get there, and the process might be annoying (heaven forfend). But I would suggest considering the circumstances you find yourself in that allows you to find them annoying, and being charitable about the search for a solution instead of decreeing from on high.

I expect people who are campaigning on the basis of those complaints to be able to explain why the problem is a problem and exactly how they plan to solve it along with the expected ramifications of their solution.

Campaigning on complaints without being able to extrapolate those details is essentially nothing more than pandering.

Can parties opt-out of your definition of a collaborative solution, or does your definition of collaborative include forcing people to participate, whether they wish to do so or not?

Can I choose not to leave, if I respect other people's natural rights?

My issue about leaving is that if I have done nothing wrong, I shouldn't have to flee from others who wish to violate my rights. Instead, they should respect my right to be unmolested.

Interested in your thoughts, if you wish to expand on this topic.

To that end, there is no "right to be unmolested", and I would underline that particularly for--given the context of this thread--conceived-of rights that effectively serve to provide legal supremacy over other people. (Of which we have many.) "Done nothing wrong" can mean very different things to very different people, and while I am not in favor of ex post facto convictions or anything of the like, I am in favor of amending the rules to the game to be more equitable and, I hold, thus better for the aggregate of humanity--and enforcing them to that end.

So, no. The general will sets the rules of the road, and dissenters can comply (and seek to change that general will if they so choose; part of the societal privilege to try to change that general will is the societal responsibility to obey it when it breaks against you), accept the consequences of civil disobedience (the abrogation of the aforementioned responsibility in hopes of demonstrating injustice to encourage a change in that general will), or leave (fold your hand). As it happens, there are cases where I'd do the second and a couple where I'd do the third.

How does this fix the problem of solutions not actually solving things?

In other words focusing on "conditions" misses the whole point: child labor is anticompetitive because it's all about lowering prices by exploiting the weak and the defenseless. Thinking about the "conditions" won't move the needle, not as long as child labor remains competitive. Child labor would happen near you if the law would allow it, because it makes economic sense to hire children instead of adults for half the price and there are always poor people to exploit.

Also, have you ever considered that some of those exploited children were born because child labor is a possibility?

One should not forget that an economy is a very complex beast, any changes have far reaching consequences and that doing the right thing is never easy.

I am reminded of Joseph Campbell:

“Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order."

No, there is not going to be pure and blameless system of production and consumption.

Older forms of oppression have always existed. Look at other species to see that even without a culture or society, the weak are exploited.

The point, though, is that Roman slavery wasn't very different from modern slavery. They had all the key elements we do - the tools to both imprison humans en masse and exploit natural resources, a standardized transportation network to move both troops to where the exploitation happened and and remove goods from where the exploitation happened, literacy and bureaucracy to manage large-scale, ongoing enterprises, etc. And of course, they had their moral rationalizations for brutality, especially brutality that happened somewhere out of sight.

Without metal, without roads, without heavy transport, without structured military units, without literacy, the tools for mass enslavement really don't exist.

Has there ever been a time in human history where slavery wasn't the fundamental backbone of a prosperous society?

You can't depend on people to do the right thing. That's why we have laws. International labor laws will hopefully one day become a thing. In the meantime we have trade agreements. We shouldn't allow import of slave produced goods to western societies. IMHOP.

Maybe we'd make more progress if we stopped denigrating people for trying to do what they can. It may not be enough, but at least some people are trying to do _something_. But when you put people down this way, it makes them less likely to do anything, because no one wants to be labeled as vacuous and superficial (AKA "hipster").

I've been surprised, at times, that others can interpret this personal decision about my own behavior and beliefs as some "social cudgel" that I am wielding against them. I guess it doesn't take much to leap from "oh, are you a vegetarian?" to "you must think eating meat is unethical," to "you must think I'm evil for eating this burger," to "annoying snobby vegetarians, always acting superior and rubbing it in your nose."

Anyway. That hipster buying his fair-trade coffee might not be doing it to insult you. It might be something he's read about, thought about, and decided he cares about. He might figure that mostly it's an empty gesture, but maybe it'll do some good. If you want to buy some other coffee, he might be totally OK with that. Of course, YMMV.

That said, I think the "socially-conscious hipster" is less likely to be vegetarian or vegan and more likely to buy "free range" eggs and eat "happy meat". The thing that makes them hipsters is their lack of commitment and their willingness to abandon the position once something more hip comes along.

Some people do care. Enough for an ever-growing range of products that are part of the Fairtrade scheme.

In the UK, the Fairtrade logo is almost universally recognised by consumers because you can find fair trade products in just about every supermarket (obviously the number of products varies by supermarket, but even discount Supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi stock a few items).

One major supermarket in the UK (Sainsbury's) sources all it's bananas under the fair trade scheme.

Fair trade has its critics and perhaps the scheme fails at times to live up to its ideals, but it's still a scheme worthy of support. And I'm glad it's going strong (at least in the UK - I think other countries have their own versions).

Here's an excellent blog post from the Fairtrade foundation on some common misconceptions about fair trade

http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/en/media-centre/blog/2015/july/d...

The same regulatory policy regularly subverted by small bribes in the article?

Also, couldn't small bribes also be a problem in things like fair trade certification?

well, except that in a way.. regulation comes from the government, which is the collective us. I prefer that the government spends some money to work out what regulation would be useful so that the collective us can spend our money on fairly traded goods (as an example) rather than every person in the collective having to do that research constantly to overcome the hard sell and marketing lies that are produced to facilitate somebody making a quick buck and externalising costs which I wouldn't otherwise wish to pay.

As an example, if the government says that in truth, gravestones imported from India are largely produced by slave labor and then it refuses to admit them into the country. That means, that when my relative died and I am not really in a frame of mind to research the supply chain of the headstones and the sellers lay on the hard sell, I can still be assured that I am not funding this terrible system. I would welcome that..