The Unit of Caring

Anonymous asked: If I find a homeless person, and tell them I'll give them $50 if they crawl around in the street eating dog food that I've tossed down, and they take me up on it to, say, be able to feed their kid, was this a good thing? (Purposefully hyperbolic.)

That is a terrible analogy for hiring people in poor countries because it conflates a bunch of things. If someone does this, we can reasonably conclude that they like humiliating people who they have power over. We think humiliating people who you have power over is bad, so we do (and should) condemn people for doing it for fun. 

Hiring someone in a country where the median wage is $1/day, and paying them $1/day, does not suggest a secret delight in humiliating people. 

Let’s take away that confounder. You offer a homeless person who hangs out on your street fifty dollars to hang out outside your store for a week, because you’ve been having a problem with robbery. You are paying this homeless person wildly less than minimum wage. He takes you up on it. Was this a good thing?

I think that yes, it was. 

So our reaction to the first case is entirely “if you enjoy humiliating people for fun you’re a bad person - we as a society want to condemn humiliating people for fun.” It is not an argument against anything other than humiliating people for fun. 

But, you know, even in that case, I think I am not the person who gets to decide whether this was a good thing. I think the only person who gets to decide whether this was a good person is the homeless person affected. I think it is self centered and condescending for me to decide for him how he feels about it. 

I ask him. Maybe he says “hell yes! that asshole paid me $50 for five minutes of work, that’s more than lawyers make, and he strutted off like he’d done something clever. I love taking money from terrible people.” In that case I think, yes, it was a good thing.

Maybe he says “eh, it was unpleasant, but it wasn’t nearly as dehumanizing as working a day as a dishwasher at McDonalds for the money, and that’s what I was doing before I got fired; unless you’re gonna ban dishwashing at McDonald’s it’d be dumb to ban this.”

Maybe he says “no, I felt horribly exploited and I wish it were illegal to ask people to do that.” In that case I believe him, because he is the one having this experience and he is the one who knows the tradeoffs he is facing and he is the one whose experience matters, not my moral sensibilities which are arrived at from a place of total ignorance about his life. 

So anyone who wants to announce that workers in poor countries are being horribly exploited by unethical companies, and who has never actually spoken to a worker in a poor country, should do that.

(I’ve also seen this conversation play out with sex work. People who aren’t sex workers go ‘but sex work is so obviously dehumanizing that it is clearly coercive and unethical to hire you and your clients are terrible people!’ and sex workers often go ‘…eh, sometimes sex work is dehumanizing but so are other kinds of work and please don’t prosecute our clients it doesn’t help, like, at all’ and people go ‘but it’s so terribly wrong you’re being exploited!’ Witnessing this is part of what convinced me that telling classes of workers they are being exploited without asking them is bad activism.)

• 16 November 2016
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