Have the sweatshops found us?

Yep. This is why I usually spell check. Tonight, however, I had no time. Had to get out of work and on the road.

Thanks for catching it though

I bumped into Anshe and the girl in question while they were speaking, and though they were indeed chatting in Chinese (which was odd to see, even though I sometimes try out my pidgen Japanese) Anshe seemed to have no more idea what the real story was than any of us.

The girl didn't seem to speak much English, at least not while I was around. And while she had taken the time to make herself a pair of shorts and a red party hat, it didn't seem like she had a lot of previous SL experience (i.e., I didn't get the impression she was an alt). At one point she went into Appearance and briefly made herself about 8 feet tall before realizing what she'd done and settling down again.

Maybe I'm dense, but don't sweatshops work best for mass produced items? The only thing I could think of that would work in SL sweatshop wise would be dwell mining by buying some land and paying for ppl to dwell. Even at 3rd world wages, I'm not sure the math adds up.

That's ridiculous "feel-good" garbage. Poverty is the natural state of humanity. It is only abolished with the creation of wealth. Everyone that has a job, an honest job anyway, does something for someone in their immediate sphere of influence, and probably beyond that. The computer you are typing on now was made by someone, the resources mined by someone, the content created by someone, all these things have been made by people, nearly every single person does something for someone every single day, wheter they want to change the world or not.

Are you saying people outside the west can't have business savy? That poor people, by western standards, are all unskilled?

And lose the competitive edge that allows them to create these jobs in the first place... right...

You are helping no one by subsidizing inneficient domestic businesses.

Unless the "swetshop" uses actual slave labour, their existance does not violate human rights at all.

Good point Seth. What I find most interesting about this discussion is that there's no evidence to support the theory that this girl works under sweatshop conditions. All that's been established is that she was Chinese, had poor English, and was trying to buy land as a condition of her employment. We do not know to what degree she is compensated for her efforts or how it compares to other jobs available to her. It would seem to me that instantly leaping to the "sweatshop" label is rather arrogant.

There may come a time when I am no longer able to provide adequate customer service and would need to hire a real world employee to handle some of the load. Would I automatically be assumed to be running a sweatshop?

I don't think there's anything inherantly wrong with SL's economic opportunities spawing real world employment. I think a more salient issue from this is the exploitation of first land for profit. If there's a real world business in China having people create accounts in order to obtain first land for the sole purpose of reselling it that would be an exploitation of the first land program, not necessarily of the employees hired to go through the motions.

Where's Alby? He should be championing this by now and calling all who oppose, pinko commies. Four pages without him chiming in and cheering this practice on? Maybe he got in a motorcycle accident?

I've read this thread and at first I was going along with the original story, but another possibility popped into my head. Is there any chance that this was simply a newbie who got corralled into a "job" by buying their allocated First Land for their SL boss? It seems as plausible as any other theory, at least in my head.

--BL

Okay, I'm just dumb, but I have to ask. How do two people talk in Chinese over SL when it doesn't yet support the characters for it?

This upsets me to see this, I really hope one she is of age, two she is being treated fair by her boss, but from the looks of it, it dose not look like it

wadegiles or pinyin romanization

Hi Kas

Phonetically I'd imagine....since my Mandarin sucks I"ll use a bit of the smattering of Japanese I got:

konnichi wa
genki desu ka?
watashi wa taihen genki desu!

etc - I'm thinkin it might work the same for Chinese since Japanese characters are for the most part Chinese kanji anyway

SL is essentially slave-shop free.

Why? Because you can't mass-produce anything.

Everything that's made is usually made from the ground up... ie I can't just pull from my Stack o Prims half of a wall, I usually have to rez, position, and texture the prim to suit.

Scripts can't be done with a million monkeys at a million typewriters.

Land selling might be sweatshoppable, but only in the short term... I'm sure Anshe alone could out-perform them anyways.

There is simply no way I can see a bunch of poor folks with broadband make a profit for any business by doing anything en masse in SL that doesn't require massive social, programming, or other content creation skills. In which case, it would negate the point of sweatshop conditions anyways, because then it's obstinately "skilled labor".

LF

Yeah, that's pretty much it. It requires a very strong non transferrable skill set to make good in SL.

You'd have to be brain dead to sweatshop in SL and if you did, you probably wouldn't last very long in business.

Wow, way to put words in my mouth. I never implied either case. Anyone with smarts or creativity can flourish here regardless of nationality. I've never questioned that. Likewise, poor does not equte to unskilled. I never said that either. In the specific context of sweatshops, though, there's a world of diffference between sewing the Nike swoosh onto shoes all day and running a profitable business in SL. That's ALL I'm trying to say.

Seems to me this could work, but in a labor intensive way. Real example: I sold my firstland within hours of listing it at a ~1000% markup (5000L) having paid, of course, 512L for it. 5000L on GOM would put ~20$US in my pocket, less the transaction fees (nominal) & cost of setting up a premium account for one month, $US10. Cancel the account (or even better, downgrade to basic), funnel the funds into a central account and bingo. Someone doublecheck my math. Is this making sense? Not that I ENDORSE it, but strictly speaking this seems possible to do. Unless folks were using one time CCs to register accounts, this would show up rapidly as dozens of accounts registered to one CC, right, so easy to catch?

Seems like this would hurt SL in the long run, moral arguments aside, by inflating population demographics, artificially boosting supply of cheap land, etc.

Wiser heads than mine may be able to answer to the effect on the value of the $L if this land "scam" (not that it necessarily exists, mind you-- let's not flip out) were extrapolated to widespread practice.

We've all read the articles on how if you don't spend your $L inworld, then the net value of your base stipend exceeds the RL cost of the game. Seems to me this might be a way to "game" SL pretty hard when combining it with gaming the firstland offer.

Of course, it's totally dependent on the demand for firstland-resales.

Boy, I hope you and Chip are right. Perhaps I simply jumped to the wrong conclusion (and I certainly hope I did). She seemed quite beaten down to me- apologizing profusely and talking about her worthlessness as a woman in broken English built this picture in my mind. I have to acknowledge, however, that there are plenty of other less sinister scenarios possible. I guess it breaks down like this:

If I'm wrong then great, she's in no danger of exploitation but this thread stimulated some good discussion.
If I'm right then it's good that it was brought to the community's attention and this thread stimulated some good discussion.

Persig

I agree, a fascinating thread. Couple thoughts:

We will make sure to the greatest of our tech abilities that simplistic money-mining (buy account, give stipend to other person, make profit) doesn't work. This is, of course, important. Our ability to restrict accounts by Credit Card + IP + ?? makes that fairly workable. Ditto for laundering, which is sort of a similar case. We should be able to stop/reduce it using the same techniques as other international services, etc.

But as to the broader issue of whether one is 'sweating' in SL... complex and interesting issue. I find it VERY inspiring to think that SL could challenge someone in a faraway country to learn programming or design - if money is their motivation for that learning, who cares? I am often asked in interviews (more and more these days!) whether SL is an 'addiction', etc. I always answer that something is generally thought of as addictive when its use/employment makes you worse off than you were before. I tell them that (at least for me), being in SL a lot is more likely to make you smarter, not dumber or simpler. I'd say the same thing here.

In my opinion, the 'addiction' quality of SL is the thought-to-actualization process that can occur very rapidly, as you know. Something about taking a glimmer of an idea and making it 'real' (as much as you can in SL) that pleases me immensely.

That, and using it to slackoff on the internet being social.

I so agree with the learning aspect Philip. It's the "forced" learning and production under threat of losing ones RL livelyhood within SL that I find a bit disturbing.

Sure, as part of my employment I have to learn and be productive. But to see some poor woman tossed into SL by her boss, who probably has no clue, but thinks it's the land of riches, with an obvious fear of losing her job, and a very low self-esteem, is not a pretty thing. It's a sad situation, and one I hope doesn't become even more prevelant in SL or RL.

I know it is something that is beyond most people's control, and neither you, nor I, can police the world. But sad just the same.

Smacks Schwan upside the back of the head..think about it you goof..LOL

<Quote>But to see some poor woman tossed into SL by her boss, who probably has no clue, but thinks it's the land of riches, with an obvious fear of losing her job, and a very low self-esteem, is not a pretty thing. It's a sad situation, and one I hope doesn't become even more prevelant in SL or RL. <End Quote>


Stupdity on the part of a boss can not be guarded against in SL any more than it can in real life. Classic sweat shops based upon inexpensive means of reproduction can not exist in SL or any purely digital venue because there is no advantage based upon location or pay. Individuals who build in SL as an avocation actually have an economic advantage over the so called sweat shop because they digitally build without any desire for compensation at all in real world terms. As for highly educated low pay prospectors who might wish to mine the possibilities in SL, well, if they are adding value to SL I am not sure in the end we will notice that much or care. For those who are in fact trying to "make a living" in SL, obviously this is potentially a real problem for you, unless you bring creativity to the table that is first protected by copyright and more highly desired than these third world miners can provide. That is simply called competition.

With that said, I have a question to consider here. Are we upset about this woman because she works for someone here at a pay that people who live in first world circumstances would define as "sweat shop", or are we upset because she was clearly in distress?

If it is because she works for "sweat shop" wages, than I am inclined to side with some of the individuals who have come from these circumstances, and believe that SL is actually acting as a way of personal advancement for her. If it is because she was in distress, than such circumstances are common everywhere there is a boss that doesn't know up from down, and is therefore not a product of sweat shop circumstances but rather the result of an employee working in a business with a very bad business model. In my mind there is no saving such a situation whether it be first world or third world.