As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine? The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.
It's nuanced. If it allows you to find outliers (low performers to manage and high performers to praise), that's fine. If you try to push everyone further and further to their breaking point and make them trade the same amount of money for more of their time and more importantly health, it's certainly not fine.
>As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine?
People in western countries find things like sweatshops to be objectionable.
>The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.
People in western countries are well aware of how their shirts are made, and don't like it, and try to avoid it when possible specifically because they find sweatshop conditions objectionable.
I'm not sure what data you're using to prove this but it seems like many of the largest brands in the US are still using sweatshop labor [1]. Many still have no idea of what's going on in Xinjiang [2]
Are you trying to make the point that people don’t care or aren’t aware of the fact that their clothes are made in sweatshops by linking to a western blog extensively detailing the brands that use sweatshops with the implied point that you should avoid them because they are bad?
Sweatshops are bad. Westerns know this. They don’t want sweatshops.
Seeing YC back a sweatshop management application that uses AI to help managers harass their workers is sad. It would
be similar to them investing in faster slave ships in the 1850s.
I'm saying that people _say_ they have issues with sweatshops but when push comes to shove they're willing to buy the Nikes.
I'm not trying to make a decision here on right vs. wrong just pointing out that most people _say_ they care but they're not really willing to do much about it.
Ah ok, my bad then, it's a perfect product and we shouldn't change anything at all then. Let's continue to treat humans as machines, especially in 3rd world countries, who cares right ? Even they say it's fine.
No, we know, and we're not okay with it either. I understand it's often an improvement over other options for employment. That makes it understandable and even supportable to some extent, not okay.
Here in the US, we spent centuries fighting and dying for better options. Tools like this are used to launder the dismantling of the results of all that work through a fantasy of objective metrics.
I watched my mother spend 30 years building her company...it's hard enough to build a manufacturing company in 3rd world country. Applying Western labour standards would make it impossible.
The way out of poverty is to through. You need to create enough value to be able to afford the airconed offices where everyone sits on an Aeron with a macbook pro.
Enough people have to have enough money to be able to buy the things made in a factory someone's mom spent 30 years on for that factory to exist. These tools are being used to dismantle the "what" people strive for. It's precarity as a service.