I've thought about that incident a lot. I too am disgusted by how society is organized. When confronted by my own relative wealth and privilege, I felt gross. But in that exact moment, you can't re-engineer the economy. You have to choose whether or not to be generous while respecting that person's dignity. I can only speak for myself here, but too often I'd rather just not encounter hardship in others at all. This is a bad impulse. The world is a terrible broken place, and it's right to be generous in whatever way someone will accept in that moment.
This reasoning is often used to justify poverty wage jobs--people want to work, so let them--and that's definitely not my take. I think work can impart dignity, there's a certain amount of shitty work that can't be avoided, but you can't feed your children with dignity, so let's pay people a lot more.
You do realise that this man is providing for himself, and perhaps others, by this job?
It seems like your issue was being confronted with the "realities of life" which distressed your sensibilities; and your solution appears to be to hide from these. I dont see this as a moral impulse, but a disgust response.
If you wished to do anything, tip.
OP choses not to hire underpaid and overworked labour because it's wrong, even if doing so would provide temporary relief.
That's quite an extreme example you got there, but as a former child worker myself I feel qualified to push back. I did hard physical labor at a warehouse at the age of 13. [1] This was a key opportunity in my life. With the money I earned from this hard labor I bought my first computer that helped solidify my computer science career. I could then spend a lot more time [2] on computer contract work, which meant I moved up the class system significantly with my finances.
So whenever I hear of these think of the children arguments, I think back to my own origins and how these protections are also mechanisms for preserving class hierarchy and making sure that children of less well off parents don't make any progress during their earlier years. To force the children to accept the lifestyle and means of their parents as a reality of their own lives.
That said, normalizing full time working instead of school isn't great either. I personally only worked summers (3 months of school break where I'm from) and so working didn't impede my school education. Thus I think better child labor laws would allow working when it doesn't interrupt school work. Unfortunately the child labor laws that I encounter are always blanket statements based on age.
--
[1] The local child working laws didn't allow this back then already. I was lucky enough to be matched with a warehouse manager who didn't care too much about child working laws.
[2] I had already started my computer contracting work before I ever got my first computer. I used public computers to do this work, e.g. a public free internet point at the local hospital. Not ideal and very limited usage time, but when there aren't other options it's great.
Yes, high walls (like minimum wage, child labour laws, etc.) prevent the most extremely poor from competing with everyone else. Those are probably worth building though, if social welfare programs exist.
The natural tendency of competitive processes is to throw away all values in pursuit of the win; in the end, someone has to set a floor.
It doesn't make it any more obvious to me. That 7 year old Victorian chimney sweep still has to eat. If society doesn't have the infrastructure to take care of them, then the other alternative is to starve, possibly to death.
Refusing to hire these workers only makes things better if doing so also results in a real pressure to provide said infrastructure. It seems unlikely that would be the case both with the chimney sweep and the rickshaw cyclist (at least in the short term).
Yet we no longer have 7 year old chimney sweeps. Refusing to hire one now is one part of the process that changes society so that the missing infrastructure that you mentioned gets provided for future potential 7 year old chimney sweeps.
Child labour ended around the time it wasnt needed, as did all phases of economic labour division (slavery, child labour, gendered labour, etc.).
In economic conditions which require poor quality labour, all you can do is decide whether you punish the poor or not. By refusing their labour, you're punishing them -- as much as refusing an oppressed minority work, on the grounds that their oppression exists.
A very bizarre thought, which I can only imagine stems from some misperceived impression of one's own importance, and confusing the emotional instinct to recoil from poverty with the moral impulse to do something about it.
It ended in England in part because of social pressure and subsequent Parliamentary inquiries [0]
> as did all phases of economic labour division (slavery, ...)
If it ended when it was no longer needed, what do you suppose the second bloodiest war in US history [1] was about?
> A very bizarre thought, which I can only imagine stems from some misperceived impression of one's own importance
Alright then, have a great day.
[0] https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/child-la... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
The american civil war wasnt the end of slavery, Britain ended slavery when as the controlling empire of the world, it made it illegal. It did so, in part, because it couldn't compete with slave-states on their export costs, had no significant dependence on slave labour, and was the heart of the new industrialisation which largely obsoleted it anyway.
France, which owned Haiti, did depend on slave labour -- and despite the French revolution which basically said all the "nice political stuff" --- they still couldn't end slavery. Initially they tried, but as soon as they realised Haiti was a cash cow, suddenly freedom became a French idea.
The US civil war was the american manifestation of those new economic conditions.
All of these systems: slavery, child labour, gendered division of labour -- etc. existed for basically all of human history; and still exist for large numbers of people today.
There were political events at the time of their obsolescence which were costly, sure -- as there will inevitably be when economic systems are obsoleted. The US south wasn't going to be able to compete on impoverished slave labour for very long.
I'm not exactly sure how you think history or economics works, but it has nothing to do with some self-righteous middle class people turning their noses up at chimney sweeps.
As you didn't hire them, presumably your shoes didn't need shining so they were not really performing a necessary function anyway. This suggests that the system continues to exist partly because some people like the idea of paying a pittance to someone to perform a menial job simply because it makes them feel good or superior instead of donating that money to an effort to eliminate the poverty in question.
Seeing kids work is not right by our standards but people have to eat. Luckily I hardly ever see that here. But I see a lot of people that are willing to work, even if the job is unnecessary by your definition: Cleaning windscreens, carrying bags, singing or other artistic presentations, selling candy or water...
I give them money, they are part of this society and most of the time they did not choose this route. I would like to do more but unfortunately my time is very limited.
While you're right that the system needs to change, giving the shoeshine boy a peso might be the best help that someone in GP's position could have given.
Their life is still terrible, but at least they're not hungry for a night.
>Sadly this sometimes only happens when the oppressed party suffers enough to elicit real sympathetic action or in extreme cases an uprising.
That's really dark, man, and I don't think it's true. Plenty of groups have won their rights without being deliberately ground into the dirt by another section of society.
>This suggests that the system continues to exist partly because some people like the idea of paying a pittance to someone to perform a menial job simply because it makes them feel good or superior
I run a retail business, and much of what we sell is like this. Even for things that have utility (e.g. a washing machine), the price you'd pay at a retail store is often (but not always) significantly higher than the value of the good itself sold on, say, Facebook Marketplace. A "$2000 washing machine" is often just a $600 washing machine plus $1400 worth of making the customer feel special.
You can say this is wrong or wasteful, but it's part of human nature and exists across all cultures.
>donating that money to an effort to eliminate the poverty in question.
Steve Hughes argues against this better than I ever could:
You get lots of people who had small businesses, sometimes even engineers and economists.
The last one I talked to had had a small machining shop.
When Uber started to squeeze its drivers, I again felt just like this. I hated hearing drivers complain about their life problems. I hated doing the math and seeing how little these people were making out of this transaction. I hated feeling like a perpetrator of class division.
The common argument in support of Uber’s poor economics is their superior user experience compared to taxis. However, exploitative industry is a terrible “user experience” for the ethically- or morally-conscious. And that’s just the privileged party’s perspective…