Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops [4x]
Look for China to implode medium term: Signs of overheating are unmistakable: an explosion of credit; rampant overcapacity (nine tenths of manufacturing goods are in oversupply); and the return of inflation (2.8% in the first quarter of 2004). President Hu Jintao, and his prime minister, Wen Jiabao, have assured financial markets that 'resolute' measures are being taken to rein in excessive investment and engineer a 'soft landing' for the economy but, so far, with no discernible impact. China is in a situation of severe over-investment, noted Credit Suisse First Boston's Hong Kong office. What's more, this investment is chasing diminishing returns. According to The Economist, China currently needs $4 of investment to generate each additional dollar of annual output, compared with $2-3 in the 1980s and 1990s. Ominously, China displays many features of Asia's 'tiger economies' in the period leading up to their spectacular crash in the summer and autumn of 1997. Last year, fixed asset investment accounted for an unprecedented 47% of China's GDP, with the construction sector accounting for half this figure. By comparison, in 1992-96 fixed asset investment in South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia averaged 40% of GDP, still extremely high by international standards. In the same period, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines experienced money and credit growth rates of 25-30% a year. China's money supply grew by 20% last year, and bank credit (new loans) by 56%. snip 16 million manufacturing jobs have actually disappeared since 1995, as Chinese industry has upgraded its technology. Shanghai Baosteel Group, for example, the world's sixth largest steel producer, cut its workforce to 100,000 from 176,000 five years ago. snip While average per capita incomes have risen rapidly in the last 20 years, the gap between rich and poor is now the biggest in the world. This has been a largely urban boom, with average incomes in the cities six times those of rural ones. from: http://www.socialismtoday.org/84/china.html --- The workers got screwed, ala the Soviet Union. Of course China is not exactly the same, but they are headed for trouble as the realization that sacrifices for socialism have not delivered a better life AND NOW the country must swing back towards a market economy to keep investments of hard cash flowing. I think manufacturing jobs flow there because labor is so cheap. But it is cheap in India as well and India does not have the historical baggage China does. I think baring a nuclear exchange with Pak., India will continue to be the main recipient of outsourced tech jobs. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
Joy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: *Some US firms prefer cons to Indians* USA Today Ontario, July 8 [http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5922_873417,00150022.htm] But the convicted workforce elicits as much dread as interest. Companies flinch at the prospect of a public-relations backlash should news leak out that they employ hardened criminals. LOL! I was naive enough to believe, after reading the beginning of that sentence, that it would end with something like, should news leak out that they employ sub-sub-sub-minimum-wage slave-labor in prisons to do work that people should be getting real salaries and benefits for. Honestly. But, damn, it probably would be the hardened criminal aspect that would get my fellow Americans all riled up. What a country. --Dave. -- Dave Mandl [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wfmu.org/~davem # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
coco fusco wrote: Here is some data to replace idle speculation... Lets me define what i mean by wage before we launch too much into positioning games. (well it seems one need to explain one's temerity to compare the so-called incommensurables!) Wage is a monetary equivalent of the value required to materially reproduce the worker. Importantly Worker can here mean a cohabitational unit or an individual. What i was asking was is the wage in Europe and US, enough to sustain a cohabitational unit or it can only maintain one person.. Most of this so-called third world countries wages support a cohabitational units (which in some cases includes older members also ). Lets see a case in Bangalore. A monthly wage of $500 for a programmer in a software production enterprise, means that she has a decent three room apartment, with a domestic help. She can support her family with some resource, like contributing to her siblings education, paying housing loan of parents etc . She can save enough for a 30 to 45 days holiday. Get a personal transport if needed and can support a cohabitational partner. Now, what would a comparable wage mean in US and Europe, in this scenario. Secondly, what surprises me is the confidence with which exchange rate is used to generate analytical clarity. A secretary (the top level bureaucrat) in Indian State administration earns about $1000 a month. What does this figure say? He is poor and going to just fall of the ladder. I would seriously urge the third world saviours with Alexanderian zeal, to seriously look into their own worlds and see what kind of social arrangement are they so confident off. This confidence is giving rise a whole new politics of contempt that is under pinned is so many of the categories and assumptions about so called third world. US and Europe are based on massive exploitation and extraction of surplus from its working population. Its population is made to work hard and very very intensely. This population have very little say in how this surplus is deployed. (`Rivethead` just give a tip of the iceberg.) The wage to surplus ratio is absurdly skewed in these spaces. And, these spaces have emerged from one of the most violent periods in all of human history. It expelled a major section of its population in one century and then killed major section in another century. In the same dreadful period the worker's cohabitational unit has been reduced in size dramatically. Today to materially reproduce a unit of four atleast two wages are required. Besides, in US these days things have taken another turn. The biggest employer of workers are temp agencies and in the process the wage contract arrived at after centuries of struggle is being re-negotiated at a different power equations. The problem, is that this exploitation and this reality is just not there in discussions. It seems, as if there is no exploitation inside the production units in these spaces. 420 billion dollars on defense expenditures of US state does not materialise from thin air. Come on. Now we can have to coin a new term a post-exploitative society! The deafening silence on intensity and exploitation of labour allows on one hand the packaging of the social ideal and exported to all of the world. One the other hand buffers great moral outcry on aesthetics of productions in `bad capitalism` spaces from any serious reflection on categories. The disparity in absolute terms that is presented in the wage rates between so called first world and third world is more to do with sustainence of and recuperation from the intense exploitation of labour. The day that intensity is generalised here, the disparity will narrow down. Sitting in a smallish bar cum food joint, with a old friend from US, I realised that a similar enterprise in US would require only one person, working with high degree of efficiency and precision. Here, there was 4 people manning the services. It is high time that the category of intensive exploitation is understood, used and analyzed. Further, one needs to seriously rethink the social arrangements that distributes and deploys the extracted surplus. Life in many many parts of the world is not great. But, the categories that takes implicitly and uncritically the conditions of labour of so called advanced spaces within a pervasive state apparatus as desirable cannot offer any fresh insight or imaginaries to our common futures. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops [4x]
Table of Contents: Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops Carl Guderian [EMAIL PROTECTED] Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops Joy [EMAIL PROTECTED] Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops porculus [EMAIL PROTECTED] Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops Morlock Elloi [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 04:12:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Carl Guderian [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops - --- Jeebesh Bagchi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: US and Europe are based on massive exploitation and extraction of surplus from its working population. Its population is made to work hard and very very intensely. This population have very little say in how this surplus is deployed. (`Rivethead` just give a tip of the iceberg.) Close enough, with the US leading the pack in that respect, the UK not far behind and continental Europe in the peloton but catching up thanks to center-right, corporate-friendly politicians, all singing the same hymn of flexibility as the way to the heaven of a US-style economic long boom (yes, racing, choir dogs). Industry demands being inflexible, it means longer working hours for less pay (there's a UK initiative to count bank holidays as part of the four weeks' paid holiday), and easier and cheaper ways to fire workers. The goad is the threat that companies will decamp to Eastern Europe (en route to China) sooner rather than later. Come on. Now we can have to coin a new term a post-exploitative society! The deafening silence on intensity and exploitation of labour allows on one hand the packaging of the social ideal and exported to all of the world. One the other hand buffers great moral outcry on aesthetics of productions in `bad capitalism` spaces from any serious reflection on categories. Exactly, but the promise of a US-style economic heaven, even shown in soft-focus as good capitalism is a shuck anyway. It doesn't have to stand up to close scrutiny as long as it's too far away to show much details. When the dogs catch up with the mechanical rabbit near the US finish line, the backdrop is whipped away and the new finish line is much farther away, in China. By then it's harder to stop and turn back than it is now, and nobody will have time off from work to closely examine anything. The bosses will be the Sons of Heaven in a global Middle Kingdom. Fear, and tremblingly obey! Carl whose hair is almost long enough to make a decent queue Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2004 08:33:41 +0530 From: Joy [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops I find the series of posting very interesting. I want I would like to say three things. 1. Why jobs are moving out of US? Is it due to cost of labour? Or due to cost of infrastructure? My observation is, till now I have seen cheap labour as a reason in all newspapers or magazine. If there is any other reason I don't know. 2. We can not equate salaries as Jeebesh has said. I think this gap is actually helpful for the managements to handle worker relations. It helps them to maintain low cost and relatively higher worker satisfaction than traditional workspaces. 3. An interesting news. *Some US firms prefer cons to Indians* USA Today Ontario, July 8 [http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5922_873417,00150022.htm] Call centre employees in India, say hello to competition from convicts in US prisons. About a dozen US states Oregon, Arizona, California and Iowa, among others have call centres in state and federal prisons, underscoring a push to employ inmates in telemarketing jobs that might otherwise go to low-wage countries such as India and the Philippines. At least 2,000 inmates in the US work in call centres, and that number is rising as companies seek cheap labour without incurring the wrath of politicians and unions. David Day is one of 85 inmates who arrange business meetings from a call centre at the Snake River Correctional Institution, a state penitentiary. I'm grateful for the opportunity, says the 43-year-old. He and his cellmates wouldn't be making $200 a monthe from behind bars if not for consulting firm Perry Johnson's aversion to moving jobs offshore. Prisons are prime candidates for low-skill jobs, says Sasha Costanza-Chock, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who last year completed a thesis on call centres at US prisons. Market conditions seem to favour prisons. After declining for years, call-centre jobs in the US increased several hundred, to about 360,000, last year. At the same time, more white-collar jobs are going offshore than
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
Even Mexico, where the minimum wage is not enough to feed a family of four, is losing maquiladoras weekly to China. Is one persons wage sufficient to maintain a family in Europe and US? Just, curious. My own travel in the US and Europe amongst professionals, makes it clear that two persons wages are critical to maintain a smallish domestic unit. If you include, the taking care of out of productive years lifes, then the wages are really absysmal. I would think, the category of `cheap labour` is used more as a rhetorical device. Its like the earlier images of `free labour` versus `bonded labour`. If we try, to use these categories to understand todays corporate work contracts, very little can be explained about the new work regimes. Capital always moved to spaces of lower variable capital. Either it intensified the labour process, or extended the working day. It reaches its limit in a location and then searches for new locations. The intensity of labour in US and Europe, is very high. People there work very fast and hard. Yet it is not very lucrative to Mr.Capital. What would constitute `wage`? Interestingly, cheap labour narrative somehow displaces very little curosity about it. Here, a call center worker has a much greater wage than other sectors of manufacturing or services. The `spatial fix` of describing capitalism as `good spaces` (North) and `bad spaces` (South) has very little to offer in describing the experience of labour or labouring under global capitalism. The terms industry uses - `cheap labour` or `out-sourcing`- have now become explanatory categories. Weird. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
Here is some data to replace idle speculation... Mexico has three minimum wages, which vary according to the cost of living in different areas. In 2004 the minimum wage in Mexico City and along the US border is 45.24 pesos (about US$4.10) per day. In smaller urban centers, the minimum wage will be 43.73 pesos, and 42.11 pesos in rural areas. Many Mexican salaries are pegged to some small multiple of the minimum wage, making it an important standard in setting wages throughout the country. While it may well be that wages are low in Europe and the US (Federal minimum wage in the US is $5.15/hour but many states set the minimum higher), the situation in Mexico is far more dire, making the suggestion that one might consider comparing the situations absolutely ridiculous. So please, don't even try to suggest that Europeans or Americans face a comparable situation - that is pure fantasy, nourished by a kneejerk desire to obfuscate harsh polarities of wealth and resources between the first and third world. The percentage of Mexicans earning minimum wage OR LESS is much higher than in the US and Europe. A very large portion of the workforce falls into the category of informal or sub-employment, thus receiving no social security or benefits, as well as less than minimum wage. Furthermore the cost of many essential goods is proportionately higher than in the US. Third, the limited safety net of social services does not extend in Mexico to the majority of the country's poor In Mexico it is common to analyse the wage structure on the basis of the minimum wage. It is also common to refer to la canasta which is a hypothetical basket with basic foodstuffs considered to be the daily diet of the poor - ie. rice, beans, tortillas, etc. Reference to feeding a family of four only refers to those basic foodstuffs. Ranges are built around multipliers of the general minimum wage, for example workers earning up to one minimum wage, from one to two minimum wages, etc. Following this framework, in 1976 almost 50 per cent of formal sector workers earned a minimum wage. In 1996 only 19 per cent of the formal sector workers (defined as those who made contributions to social security) earned up to one minimum wage. The majority of minimum wage earners work in manufacturing (34.5%), personal services (26.4%) and trade (14.4%), sectors in which 80% of the formal workforce is concentrated. According to a report from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, ...Mexican workers now have salaries equivalent to 0.01 percent of what their counterparts earn in the United States. This disparity has helped transform Mexico into a major exporter to its northern neighbour, to which it sells more than 84 billion dollars' worth of goods and services a year, with 40 percent coming from companies in its export-processing zones. Coco Fusco --- Jeebesh Bagchi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Even Mexico, where the minimum wage is not enough to feed a family of four, is losing maquiladoras weekly to China. Is one persons wage sufficient to maintain a family in Europe and US? Just, curious. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
We should make an analysis of the term minimum wage, as it is not a living wage. Minimize wage, lower labour costs and increase production- the traditional mantra of profit... Since we are describing wage sufficiency for the domesticity of a European/US family vs. a family indigenous to another culture, we may want to consider the necessary level of waste built into the system (consumerism) or dependency (supermarket shopping vs. growing you own food) under capitalist structures.And should we then also attribute work not usually tied to capital in the support of this domesticity (care-giving, domestic maintenance, food production, etc. and other communal projects) that go uncalculated and may be culturally particular? Family/domestic unit may also not be so narrowly defined cross culturally as well. This is a problematic of power- The U.S. and Europe like the world's gated communities? Even Mexico, where the minimum wage is not enough to feed a family of four, is losing maquiladoras weekly to China. Is one persons wage sufficient to maintain a family in Europe and US? Just, curious. My own travel in the US and Europe amongst professionals, makes it clear that two persons wages are critical to maintain a smallish domestic unit. If you include, the taking care of out of productive years lifes, then the wages are really absysmal. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
Dear All Have not been able to reply to this thread for some time. Some thoughts on what is past. I don't think etymologies of the sort offered earlier about the word sweatshop prove anything. Quite obviously there is nothing about the word itself which implies a particular geographical location. Usage does not defer, however, to etymology; and I would stand by my earlier speculations on how this word is used. The reason this is significant is pointed out well in Keith's final paragraph: I doubt if China could account for 40% of world economic growth last year by sweatshop methods alone, any more than Britain could in Marx's day. The sweatshop cannot become the metonym for the contemporary Chinese economy without a great loss of meaning. (A) Because it involves great underestimation, and assumes that the Chinese economy's current dynamism is limited by its supposedly feudal techniques. It implies that China's growth will stop far short of the kind of global economic might exerted by Britain and then America. That there is some kind of cultural necessity to the [American] status quo. (B) Because it fails to engage with the extent to which even non-legal businesses such as the copying of pharmaceuticals, media content, software, fashion items, etc are organised on corporate lines with the same internal structure, product standards, manufacturing and distribution techniques and marketing strategies as the legal businesses with which they compete. It is difficult to understand anything of the contemporary, therefore, if we do not reconsider some of these images of new economic powers. The epistemological shock produced by the idea that Vermeers or Monets or portraits of one's grandmother could be painted by talented artists in China and shipped at a relatively small cost to homes in Seattle or Stuttgart is only so, as Felix concedes, if you have a particular conception of the artist, or a particular idea of intimate vs global space. It is precisely by the accumulation of such little shocks as these that the genome of western thought will find itself progressively altered in the coming years. R -- Original Message -- From: Dan S. Wang [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Dan S. Wang [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 11:44:56 -0500 I always thought of sweatshops as a creation of the American South. Maybe that's because I grew up in the seventies with the film Norma Rae being my first introduction to the world of textile mills. But according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the term is derived from the verb to sweat, used as a descriptive management technique in the factories of 1850s England. Sweating the workers became common in the US, the entry goes on to say, in the 1880s with the arrival of large numbers of eastern and southern European immigrants. Talking about Manhatten garment shops, probably. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
I doubt if China could account for 40% of world economic growth last year by sweatshop methods alone, any more than Britain could in Marx's day. I'm all for discussions of labor exploitation in the global economy but it seems to me that there is a bit of disingenuousness going on here... I agree with those who pointed out that there is a tendency, even among nettimers, to conflate sweatshops with any factory production in non-western countries and/or factories employing non-white laborers that are located in the US and Europe. But sweatshops are factories that rely on extracting higher profit by means of exploitative labor practices - i.e., low wages, hazardous working conditions, overcrowding, and open disregard for humane labor standards. And they exist just about everywhere in the world, and often employ white workers, as is the case of many Eastern European countries. Even in New York, Russian and Polish entrepreneurs are famous for their sweatshops employing thousands of undocumented immigrants from Eastern Europe, some of whom travel here on tourist visas and toil away for a few months in order to take some cash back to the motherland. As for the comment about China, while I am sure there are many factors that contribute to China's explosive economic growth, the fact that China offers cheap labor to the rest of the world should not be downplayed as the central factor. Even Mexico, where the minimum wage is not enough to feed a family of four, is losing maquiladoras weekly to China. As for the assertion that cheap labor wasn't key to Britain's success ...I would dispute that as well. What we now call sweatshop conditions were the status quo in the 19th century. Britain became a world power on the backs of exploited laborers who spent a century fighting for decent work conditions and the right to unionize, as did American laborers who were murdered, harassed and fired once upon a time, in the same way that trade unionists are now in the third world. There is, however, another factor that was not taken in to account. Britain, like the US, became a world power not only because of its 19th century sweatshops but because of SLAVERY, a labor condition that ensured the financial gain garnered from colonialism and that rested ideologically on the institution of racism. Coco Fusco # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
It's funny how some threads run past their sell-by date, especially in summer time. I know it's old-fashioned, but we can do better than dictionaries, anecdotes and introspection. Karl Marx has a theory of sweatshops which he lays out in a long section of Capital Volume 1 on 'absolute and relative surplus value' which contains the famous chapter on machines. It's a rollicking read, but also a few hundred pages. One of his reasons for making surplus value the focal point of his analysis was to show that capitalism is really feudalism in drag. Under feudalism, surplus labour is extracted from rural workers in a naked way -- they toil for nothing on the lord's estate or they hand over a big chunk of their harvest. The system is geared to extracting rent on threat of force, without any thought to the well-being of the peasants who work long hours for a miserable and precarious livelihood. Capitalism looks to be different, since workers are paid a money wage for producing commodities that can be represented as fair exchange. But Marx aimed to show that they were handing over an unfair portion of the value of their labour, under a similar threat of coercion, just like the serfs. The point of his analysis is that 'absolute surplus value' is a primitive form of capitalist extraction, as naked in its own way as feudal rent. The capitalist squeezes as much profit as possible from the workers, by paying them less, making them work longer hours, imposing hard and dangerous work conditions on them -- without worrying much about the efficiency of their labour which is often performed on outdated equipment. Anyone can see what is going on in this 'sweatshop capitalism' and it is easy to denigrate capitalism as a whole by reference to such examples. But this was not Marx's main point. There is a more progressive route to expanded profits and that is by 'relative surplus value'. There are three ways of raising the productivity of workers -- economies of scale, division of labour and deployment of machines. Of these by far the most important is the last and Marx was the first major economist to notice this. When labour is made more efficient by substituting machines for human effort, it is possible to raise their pay, education and work conditions while still making super-profits. Indeed he believed that this was the progressive route for capitalism, since more surplus value could be squeezed out of workers this way than by the sweatshop route. Higher paid workers are often exploited more in the technical sense of the ratio of proftis to wages, even as they may feel superior to the victims of sweatshops and organize themselves to resist being undercut by competition with them. Of course the process appears to be more benevolent. But Marx looked to mobilize the high productvity workforce, not to the emiserated peasants in the sweatshops, through a revolutionary critique of capitalism. That is why he wrote to the book. This dialectic has played on and on through all the phases of modern capitalism. I doubt if China could account for 40% of world economic growth last year by sweatshop methods alone, any more than Britain could in Marx's day. The principal moral of the story for me is that a focus on sweatshop conditions elsewhere diverts attention away from the exploitation of the higher paid workers producing relative surplus value in the so-called privileged centres of capitalism. Emphasizing sweatshop conditions in poorer countries is usually a way of cranking up support for more protectionism at home. Maybe artists are not immune to this tendency. Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops [3x]
Table of Contents: Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshop Andrew Ross [EMAIL PROTECTED] Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops Felix Stalder [EMAIL PROTECTED] Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops John [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2004 15:22:28 -0400 From: Andrew Ross [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshop Felix, Fair enough, I accept the analysis, though would add the following. Not everything that comes out of China is outsourced. Most Chinese service firms stand on their own two feet (as Mao used to say). They may not have finessed their marketing pitch, hence the awkward language of this spam ( as I recall it). On the other hand, the awkward language may well have been ventriloquized by some canny Western scamster who wants prospective customers to think they can take advantage of an underwitting Asian shop. As with so much Internet flotsam, we will never know, but our interpretations do say a lot about our assumptions. AR/ Andrew, Rana, I know nothing about this particular outfit other than its email advertisement, so calling it a 'sweatshop' was more an act of parody a la 'spam kr!it!k' rather one of analysis. The subject line 'business' seemed rather bland. Yet, it was also not random, as the message struck me for several reasons. First, paintings are treated like any other commodity whose costs can be lowered by outsourcing production into a low-wage country. So also for art, Southern China becomes the 'low cost manufacturing base.' Second, like many other low-end businesses, this proposition is spewed about randomly as spam. In fact, nettime got it several time (that's why I noticed it). Third, it contains some rather untrustworthy claims such as the painting being done by 'famous artists', though they remain unspecified. Most importantly, though, it introduces an extreme separation -- extreme in the context of Western art, more common in the textile industry -- between ordering and producing. While made-to-order art has never entirely gone out of fashion with the artist becoming an autonomous subject (so the story line) it has been transformed into an intimate process ( as in having your portrait painted). As such, it's based on a supposedly deep relationship between the person doing the ordering and the one doing the execution. Now, this email indicates that two things are happening. The made- to-order relationship is reappearing with all the loss of status that entails for the artists (a 'famous artist' yet anonymous, like the great medieval artists/artisans). Yet, at the same time, this relationship has been broken under the cost-imperative. This allows to enjoy the product which, like a brand, has a status value much higher than its use value, without any regard to the context of its production. While this is not a sufficient cause to assume sweatshop production conditions, it's a necessary step to establish them for the production of high-value objects. Felix On Sunday 01 August 2004 18:03, Andrew Ross wrote: Re: the subject line. Just a matter of interest, why do you assume this is a sweatshop operation? Simply because it is in China? Or is it impossible to imagine the condition of Chinese artisans as comparing favorably with their Western counterparts? ... -- +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 16:15:36 +0200 From: Felix Stalder [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops Andrew, as far as I know, 'outsourcing' doesn't imply some kind of dependent relationship. In fact, the whole thing about outsourcing is that services which were previously provided in-house are now provided by an external company. This does not fit precisely to the service producing oil paintings, but the general logic still applies: something that used to be provided close to the consumer of the service is now produced somewhere else, distance, managed in real time by IT. The imperative is cost reduction by reducing labour costs at the expense of increased transportation costs. I agree, it's not impossible that his a fair business posing as a sweatshop to take advantage of stereotypes
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
I always thought of sweatshops as a creation of the American South. Maybe that's because I grew up in the seventies with the film Norma Rae being my first introduction to the world of textile mills. But according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the term is derived from the verb to sweat, used as a descriptive management technique in the factories of 1850s England. Sweating the workers became common in the US, the entry goes on to say, in the 1880s with the arrival of large numbers of eastern and southern European immigrants. Talking about Manhatten garment shops, probably. So I think you're right, John. The term doesn't seem to have any particular geographical or national identity embedded within it. Rather, it seems that it is a term that becomes applicable whenever and wherever the conditions of industrialization and the power of employers together make the super exploitation of laborers possible. I think I even remember some sound byte from a radio show or some media piece somewhere asking the question of whether China is now the world's sweatshop. Which right away implies, even in popular usage, that sweatshops are not new, and haven't always been Asian or even Third World. Dan w. Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 17:11:51 -0700 From: John [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops A sweatshop is a factory, usually in a developing or Third World country and especially in Asia, where people work for a very small wage, producing products such as clothes, toys, shoes, and other consumer goods. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
Yes thank you. 'Sweatshop' seems to be an epithet of race and geography, not an analytical category. Chinese production houses, whether in Shenzhen or Manhattan, are always 'sweatshops'. 'White' production, on the other hand, is rarely carried out in 'sweatshops' (although sometimes the word is used for effect, as in the title of that recent book, White Collar Sweatshop). The word therefore seems to fuse racial or geographical characteristics with a particular mode of production and an implied set of political and ethical values - or the absence of them. I am often surprised by the way this word is thrown at situations without any real justification for its melodramatic connotations - and without any critical reaction. (Perhaps the clammy, tropical feel of the word helps all this...) R Rana Dasgupta www.ranadasgupta.com -- Original Message -- From: Andrew Ross [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Andrew Ross [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 01 Aug 2004 12:03:09 -0400 Re: the subject line. Just a matter of interest, why do you assume this is a sweatshop operation? Simply because it is in China? Or is it impossible to imagine the condition of Chinese artisans as comparing favorably with their Western counterparts? ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
Re: the subject line. Just a matter of interest, why do you assume this is a sweatshop operation? Simply because it is in China? Or is it impossible to imagine the condition of Chinese artisans as comparing favorably with their Western counterparts? Andrew Ross Professor of American Studies New York University 285 Mercer St. 8th Floor NY, NY 10003 - Original Message - From: nettime's spam kr!t!k [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sunday, August 1, 2004 9:08 am Subject: nettime The Art of Sweatshops [In the context of the recent 'painting web pages' discussion ... The original subject line was simply 'business'. Felix] Hello, Dear No matter you are an oil painting dealer, an art gallery owner or a fancier of painting, now it is really a good chance for us to build up such a business relationship. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
