| This. I'll just throw in a family anecdote from the northern corner of Europe. About 107 years ago, my grandfather was a twelve-year-old boy and as all boys at that time and his social class did, he went to work in the forest, logging trees with his father and brothers. They were not the poorest, but had to work hard to make a living, and that meant also children. A pile of logs came loose and rolled on his knee, crushing it. My folks were so well-off people in a well-off area that they actually took the boy to a doctor, who said that his knee might never recover and he couldn't work in the forest. "What use do I have for such a boy?" was my great-grandfather's reaction, in a tone of agitation and disbelief. No tears for the boy, no expression of sympathy for the immense pain. It was simply the grief of losing labour, a pair of hands and feet that could work for the family, a family which had for generations made a living in subsistence farming but now could work the forests for the emerging paper and sawmill industries. He had no use for a boy that couldn't work. That might sound totally heartless today, but those days, it was the natural reaction. A kid who couldn't contribute, e.g. in logging trees, was just a useless mouth to feed. My grandfather's knee mended eventually well enough for him to work, and he died of tuberculosis at the age of 56, ten years before I was born. And our family was not at all the poorest of families; they lived in a nation that was at that time ahead in poverty reduction of where much of India is now: there was even a new, universal school system! And there were those industries that were exploiting child labour. How the world has changed. My own father still worked the forest with a horse; in between he went to a world war and then again worked the forest with a leg that was shot to pieces and did not mend well. His hands were rough with calluses. But mine are soft. Beside school I got a job at cemetery digging graves, earned money to buy a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, became a software engineer. Even if logging and debugging MySQL slow queries is a bit tedious, it's so vastly more pleasant and less dangerous work than logging trees and debugging lice from your bedclothes at a lumber cabin, which is what our previous generations did, that it's worth leaning back and thinking of. Still, the development to this status required that people like my folks did this work and eventually built a nation that could produce someone who could produce MySQL. Parts of the world are still the same. Those sweatshops are a step in between miserable subsistence farming and modern welfare. Yes, make them safer so that no one is burned alive because the doors are locked. Count me in as "rabidly pro-globalization". |