Why, when better treatment of workers has shown to improve productivity, do factory bosses treat laborers like shit? Not only today, but throughout history - I don't see how raping employees in 19th-century England or working natives to death in Mexican colonies could be at all profitable.
Which is why competition improves labor conditions.
>>845935
I don't really get what you're saying m8, we've had free trade with Mexico for a decade and it's not like their factories are shining examples of workers rights.
>>845894
You must understand, these working conditions, by standerds of the country beforehand (19th century england, modern east asia, mexico ect) are coming off working conditions already at a sub-human level. The working conditions of the workers in sweatshops, are equally bad, or arguably better to the slaving farm labor they would do other.
>>845960
I guess I should extend it further than just sweatshops, then - why are laborers in general treated poorly by their bosses?
>>845935
If by competition you mean unions...
>>845966
Laborers are treated as poorly as the general will of the workers wish. If a job is more high-stress, high-danger, and just uncomfortable, the boss will slowly pay his workers more and more. As time goes on, he must improve working conditions to keep a reasonable amount of workers.
>>845945
NAFTA is not free trade.
>>846031
>As time goes on, he must improve working conditions to keep a reasonable amount of workers.
To use the American coal mining as an example, conditions for workers in the 1980s were much better than current conditions, even though weakened regulations have made the job more dangerous with longer hours.
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/12/363058646/coal-mines-keep-operating-despite-injuries-violations-and-millions-in-fines
>>846057
The workers their eat any shit thrown at them by their higher ups and are glad for it Stockholm syndrome style
>>846077
wew, old war is old. The US government attempted to bomb coal miners right after WW1 to quell a workers rebellion. It was cloudy and 2 bombers turned back but intention was there, on behalf of coal tycoons?
>>845894
You're not considering the social requirement to
a) create
b) discipline
c) immediately reproduce
d) permanently reproduce
a proletariat.
The first factories in Europe were female children, because they were cheap to buy and easy to discipline through sex and violence. Because men and boys and adult women did not wish to become proletarians.
Hammond & Hammond: Village Labourer; Town Labourer; Skilled Labourer
Thompson: Making of the English Working Class
Additionally, violence and vileness is used to reduce proletarian control over the production process, in order to make the factory "readable" to the capitalist, and to reduce the political power of the proletariat in the factory by reducing their latent control over the point of production.
Braverman: Labor & Monopoly Capitalism (ie: deskilling)
Taylor on Taylorism
Finally, violence and vileness are used in low profitability industries, the declining industries, in order to make up for the lower average profits in that industry by sweating workers harder.
You are disregarding quite a few factors. Shit is relative, firstly. Secondly factory workers are expensable af and "good" only has to be better than the alternatives. In china, good is getting paid 7 ents a year for a 12 hour shift so long as you give your boss a blowjob.
>>846174
Traditional commie who reads his own literature without economic consideration.
"Of course, from our viewpoint, the workers’ standard of living was extremely low; conditions under early capitalism were absolutely shocking, but not because the newly developed capitalistic industries had harmed the workers. The people hired to work in factories had already been existing at a virtually subhuman level.
The famous old story, repeated hundreds of times, that the factories employed women and children and that these women and children, before they were working in factories, had lived under satisfactory conditions, is one of the greatest falsehoods of history. The mothers who worked in the factories had nothing to cook with; they did not leave their homes and their kitchens to go into the factories, they went into factories because they had no kitchens, and if they had a kitchen they had no food to cook in those kitchens. And the children did not come from comfortable nurseries. They were starving and dying. And all the talk about the so-called unspeakable horror of early capitalism can be refuted by a single statistic: precisely in these years in which British capitalism developed, precisely in the age called the Industrial Revolution in England, in the years from 1760 to 1830, precisely in those years the population of England doubled, which means that hundreds or thousands of children — who would have died in preceding times — survived and grew to become men and women."~Ludwig Von Mises
>>846193
Mises is wrong in evidence, and had the evidence available to him in Hammond & Hammond. The production of the British proletariat did not occur in the factories, but in the fields. Read more on the decline in standards of living with the enclosure of commoners to alienated rural wage labourers.
>the population of England doubled
Mises mistakes control over your life and society, ie: economic stake, with absolute standard of living. And his attitude towards absolute standard of living paints the reproductive choices of the lower orders as absent.
Life births and period of birthing increased as commoner property was stolen BECAUSE when all you have to sell is your sons you make more sons. When commoners had commoning rights, the right to a quarter of a cow and burning even, they reduced their birth rate by late marriage, abortion, and outercourse IN ORDER to limit their live adult children IN ORDER to transmit property. Remove the property and you remove that need.
Really, this is bad even for Mises. I feel a physical cringe of shame at Mises' absence of reading and poor reading of the enclosures and their relation to the early factory proletariat. I had honestly thought him to be an honest, if misguided, thinker rather than a liar.
>>846240
>Life births
Live births obviously.
>>846240
>>846250
You're not addressing the central problem of your thought process. You assume the enclosure happened because of increasing population driven by industrialization. The exact opposite happened, as the enclosure forced farmers off their land, into cities causing a surplus of labor at a lower cost. This cheap labor+Close by coal reserves drove the industrial revolution in Britain.
>>846294
>You assume the enclosure happened because of increasing population driven by industrialization.
I haven't said that at all. I'm pretty sure I accused the English bourgeoisie
>>846240
>as commoner property was stolen
Yep I did. You might really enjoy reading Hammond & Hammond.
>as the enclosure forced farmers off their land
Farmers is a capitalist industrial category. Farmers benefitted from greater land to rent from landlords, and from cheapened labour subsidised by the poor law rates.
Farmers were and are small capitalists.
You mean commoners and cottagers: people with rights to use the common or the right to a cottage.
>into cities causing a surplus of labor at a lower cost
They mostly attempted to stay in the countryside and work as agricultural proletarians, even despite the poor laws, until the 1850s.
>>846323
Who are you addressing right now?
>>846351
>>846294
I quote myself in >>846240 to them and then continue to lambast them for anachronistic terminology and an absence of awareness of the narrative supportable from documentary evidence.
Most "new factory towns" were agglomerations of older villages with little country wide mobility in labour except for the Irish to 1850.
>>846376
I get your who thought process stems from Hegel, but please don't fall into the pit of obstructionism. You're on a chinese cartoon forum after all.
>>846405
I've been pretty fucking direct mate.
The enclosure of commons rights by the UK bourgeoisie promoted "farming" in closed fields, pauperised the commoners into rural proletarians, cause the poor law system, and helped create a population boom.
The urban proletariat was produced by the former urban mobility ("the mob") as power over traditional trades was eroded by the market and factory.
There's nothing obscuritanist about the history of proletarianisation mate.
>>846422
I fail to see how this is directly a bad thing in comparison to the factory work done by the average worker at the time. Farming for most of human history has been an excessively difficult, dangerous, and backbreaking task. Factory work in comparison was slightly better.
>>845894
Short term profits vs long term investment. Instead of having highly paid, highly productive workers in one sweatshop, why not just make a few other sweatshops with that extra money? Also usually when this is the case there is an overabundance of workers and no incentive to treat them better because they're all replaceable.
>>846458
>I fail to see how this is directly a bad thing in comparison to the factory work done by the average worker at the time.
In 1760, the period Mises is discussing, factory work wasn't done.
I wasn't arguing for "good or bad," but for a change "relative social autonomy"—what we'd call economic or financial independence, and most importantly that Mises was incorrect in his history of proletarianisation, grossly incorrect.
Most historical arguments aren't about "good" or "bad," that's left to politicians, moralists, religious leaders and a few economists who think they know better than we do about choices. Historians deal in what happened.
>Farming for most of human history has been an excessively difficult, dangerous, and backbreaking task.
This is true.
>Factory work in comparison was slightly better.
This is not true.
English and Irish proletarians displayed marked preferences for agricultural or artisanal (home production) labour over factory labour because:
*They controlled the tempo of work
*The tempo of work was naturally set
*They got to see the sun
*The world was naturally humidity controlled
*Horrific agricultural accidents were rare, due to lack of mechanisation
*In the early period, many of them possessed small elements of agricultural property which they would rather have than having nothing
*Rape in an agricultural setting was more traditionally administered, in the factory it involved constant supervision
*Similarly with physical movement, moral control, drunkenness, sleeping in the middle of the day
*Half the year you got short hours because the sun didn't stay up as long.
Seriously, read. Use Hammond & Hammond's trilogy for starters. Then read Thompson on the Frame Knitters.
The same reason why many bosses today are total dickheads.
They're petty tyrants who like to abuse their power for their own satisfaction.
