Re:BBC: The cost of speaking up against China (Uyghurs)
by pas on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @07:10AM
(#26645768)
Sorry, I wasn't detailed enough. Sanctions help other countries', so let's say the Vietnamese cotton producers.
> dedicated inspection teams
That would be a very welcome development in international labor/human rights.
Re:BBC: The cost of speaking up against China (Uyghurs)
by yorwba on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @05:46PM
(#26653557)
Helping other countries may be a good thing (although the Vietnamese government's human rights record isn't that great) but it doesn't offer a way out to current victims of forced labor, who can't just move to another country to benefit from the improved conditions there. Do you think they'd just get released once exploiting them becomes unprofitable? That would put a bunch of angry unemployed people on the streets, so the security services are unlikely to be in favor. The most likely path forward would be gradually transferring them into regular work, which works best if such work is available, i.e. there's no blanket ban making everything equally unprofitable.
Re:BBC: The cost of speaking up against China (Uyghurs)
by pas on Thursday April 01, 2021 @09:27PM
(#26668281)
Usually sanctioned countries have quite a lot of room for domestic economic growth, most obstacles are internal inefficiencies (like human rights abuses, inefficient ideology based policies), and naturally since the sanctions are a direct result of some alleged problem, as the problem is getting addressed the sanctions can be too. Diplomacy never rests.
That only works if sanctions apply to slave labor, but not to comparable non-slave-labor. Sanctions based on geographic region ("Made in China"/"Made in Xinjiang") ethnicity ("Made by Uyghurs") or product category (cotton) can't achieve that, because they don't apply differential pressure that allows non-enslaving businesses to outcompete enslaving ones (and then hire former slaves as free workers), they affect both equally.
To make differential pressure work, the first step is knowing who you're dealing with, which means having dedicated inspection teams working their way down supply chains to record labor conditions on the ground. Once you do have that information, highly targeted sanctions can be used to force change.