ich1990 wrote:yes, yes I do support child labor.
Eh, I don't classify that as child labor, but I guess it technically would be from a legal sense. I wasn't talking so much about 14 or 15 year olds getting jobs...to me, that isn't child labor. Nor would things like a kid who wanted to mow people's lawns or walk their dogs or something (I think those are allowed anyway?).
I was talking about like 7 or 8 year olds. I would at least hope everyone here can agree that if it was somehow discovered that employing 7 or 8 year olds at factories and warehouses was more efficient for some bizarre reason, that no one would support it.
Could you provide an example of this? I don't know as though I have ever encountered anyone who thinks this way.
"Drill baby drill." And that's just from two years ago.
I can't think of any specific examples. I would normally say something like "BP OIL SPILL" but that was more a problem of negligent mishandling than willful maliciousness (the net effect on the environment is the same in the end, but I'm not going to call them evil for it).
However, the very fact that things like the FDA exist is proof enough that MOST companies are not going to go out of their way to make things better than they have to. If companies could get away with marketing sugar pills as magic weight loss pills and charge a hundred bucks a bottle you can bet if the FDA wasn't around that some of them would definitely do it.
Not all companies are evil. I'm not going to make that claim. Nor am I going to say if standards didn't exist, that every company would throw away their standards. The problem I am going to say is that if the FDA and the EPA didn't exist, and an unscrupulous company was able to make money hand over fist by polluting and lying, they would do it. At that point, if you don't have government intervention to stop it, then they can make tons of money and the "good" companies that would spend extra money to make things better would go out of business, because the unscrupulous company would be able to take more losses (since they're spending less) and the public would likely never know (or even care) about their lack of principles.
I mean there could be like a hundred sexual harassment lawsuits filed at Nabisco every year and I wouldn't know anything about it. Some companies, if they could get away with secretly polluting in shady dealings, would totally do it. Bobby Kotick is one of those people...we should be "thankful" he's in the video game industry instead of somewhere that could do real harm.
But that's where I stand on it. There's always
The Jungle which admittedly is fiction. It's also more about the poor treatment of workers in general than the unsanitary conditions of meat packers of the time, although the latter is what everybody remembers it for. Also to be fair, when it was published, meat packers tripped over themselves to ask the government to create standards and inspections to assure the public their meat was safe and clean. Though, as far as I'm concerned, it was only because the book made them look bad. If the book had never been published, would meat packers have been clamoring for the government to establish these bureaus or create these regulations? nope.avi
Sure, probably a decent amount of those meat packers were actually clean and sanitary. Great! But, there were sleazy unclean meat packers that totally would have kept doing what they were doing if the book had never been published. And the public never would have known. So, that's why I'm a bit critical, because businesses have already proven willing to cut corners when it comes to sanitation and health, and if there weren't environmental legislation on the books there'd be a few who would cut corners there too. And as I said before, if it turns out to be more profitable to pollute than to be green, it only takes one or two companies to really do massive amounts of damage.
Man this post was longer than I thought it would be.
!". I dunno.
