Comments on: Belated factory notes

By: edawg

edawg — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:37:48 +0000

This made me think of one of James Fallows’ China pieces in the Atlantic. The story he tells (and I imagine there is more rigorous academic work on this somewhere) is one in which young people are drawn from the countryside to labor in the factories of China’s industrial zones, but that doing such labor for a few years allows them to save enough to “graduate” to a higher standard of living and leave the factories. That’s a simplification, but it was something along those lines.

By: Jurgen

Jurgen — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:48:56 +0000

There must be many better solutions as shipping the bottles to China.
From Addis to Djibouti is 560 km overland and another approx. 10,000 km to Shanghai.

Plastic bottles can be burned cleanly & for example fuel a power plant. Ethiopia also suffers from a chronic shortage of electricity nowadays.

By: Justin Kraus

Justin Kraus — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:48:20 +0000

There are times when we need to get outside of our academic heads. This is one of them. “Drudgery,” as you seem to define it, is how most people even in the developed world choose to earn a living. Bus drivers, factory workers, repairmen, shop managers, and in fact most jobs are ones in which you repeat the same 5 or 6 steps everyday for the rest of your life, or until you get a new job or get promoted at which time you learn to do a different 5 or 6 steps. Sure academics loath such occupations (which is usually why they became academics) but the vast majority of people aren’t nearly so “conflicted.” My brother-in-law manages a Taco Bell and is much more concerned about moving up the corporate ladder than wallowing in philosophical musings about the whether his work is truly “satisfying.”
Moving to the developing world I think this is even more true. Before we starting getting all conflicted about whether or not these people’s jobs are “satisfying” lets concentrate on simply getting them one.. Thats hard enough for now.

By: Michael Kevane

Michael Kevane — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:38:08 +0000

Chris,
I regularly assign Diane Wolf’s nice ethnography Factory Daughters (from her fieldwork in Java in the 1980s) in one of my undergraduate development classes. it covers a lot of this ground. There are, of course lots of excellent similar ethnographies.
M

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:22:26 +0000

I think you suggested a concept to help you measure “drudgery” – bigger plans. Researchers sometimes measure this in a quantitative way with an aspiration ladder…

By: Robert

Robert — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:32:13 +0000

Ah yes. The choice between the evil, yet stable, factory job or the sinister, and fickle, farming job.

Stability is one of the most underrated aspects of development. It allows people to plan whereas instability does not. It allows one to save for their children’s future even if their own will be one of drudgery.

Despite what westerners may think, tedious, boring, and dangerous factory jobs are in many ways better, and preferred by many, over the alternatives (such as being reliant on mother nature) which are usually much worse.

Glad to see you thinking about this.

By: Thorfinn

Thorfinn — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:00:29 +0000

More and more of these jobs are becoming mechanized. Industrialization was the lever out of poverty for Europe and Asia; but will it be labor-intensive enough to make a difference for Africa? Leaving aside whether factory jobs are desirable, how will Africa be competitive for these jobs as long as Asia has relatively low wages and much better infrastructure?