Moral Dilemma: Personal Poverty or International Social Justice?

[Peace]

@Peace: Is the only option for a company either to keep wages low or to shut down?

In some cases that might be the only option. It depends on the particular circumstances of the companies involved. You see everything across the spectrum, from CEO salaries getting lowered, to employee salaries getting cut, to lay-offs or bankruptcy.

Because that's what you seem to assume. In fact, the wage gap between the lowest-earning employee and the highest-earning executive in most companies is outrageously unjust. Why must all cost increases come at the expense of the lowest-earning? It doesn't always have to come down to laying people off. Sometimes—oftentimes—it could come down to lowering outrageous salaries. But that doesn't happen—because of greed.

Some of the salaries that corporate executives make seem excessive to me as well. And I do think that greed often comes into play. I would guess that there are many cases where the salaries or jobs of lower earning workers are sacrificed, where the salaries of higher paid employees could have been cut instead.

In some situations cutting CEO salaries might be the solution. In some cases I think it is pretty clear that would not be a viable solution to the problems that some companies face. Do you remember that huge auto-bailout that we had a few years back? There were a lot of reasons why the US companies were on the brink of bankruptcy while foreign auto-makers fared much better. One of the reasons for that had to do with the employee contracts that most of the US companies were bound to, while their competitors in Japan were not. Lets say that the salary of the CEO of Ford was $50 million dollars. If you need to save money you can cut that down to $1 million and save $49 million dollars. But the price disadvantage the US companies faced was far greater than that. I think that after the bail-out the union contracts were redone such that the average US worker made about $10 more per hour than the average Japanese worker. Before the bailout the difference was much greater from what I understand. So if you lowball the math it looks something like:

200,000 employees x 40 hours / week x 48 weeks/year x $10 per hour = 3.84 billion dollars / year extra in labor costs.

That is just a rough estimate, but it is very tough for a company to stay afloat if you are paying that much more in labor costs than your competitors. I think Toyota had a cost advantage of something like $500 dollars per vehicle when salary differences, benefits, etc. were all taken into account. You can cut the $50 million CEO salary and some other high salaries but you are tying to make up a deficit that is much greater than that. So it is no surprise that they were about to go belly-up until the government bailed them out. I think in this case they had to cut the worker salaries, which is what they ultimately did.

I think there is also another way of looking at the difference in salaries between executives and regular employees though. Must it always be just or right to cut higher salaries first? I mean - I can kind of take myself as an example. My family was pretty poor as a child. I think the year I graduated high school my mom brought in about $15k a year in income and that was for 3 kids. We received welfare benefits and other forms of assistance at times. The neighborhood that I grew up in was extremely violent. It still is. I had to work my butt off and make a huge number of sacrifices to be where I am at today. There were years where I barely even saw the light of day I was studying so much. On top of that I worked during college, and I had to take out a loan of about $150,000 to pay for law school. I am not even half way done paying it off today and I graduated over 10 years ago. Right now I make a lot more than the staff at the law firm that I work at. If the firm was not doing well and salaries need to get cut, my initial reaction is not going to be "Well, because I make more my salary should get cut first." Is it really wrong or greed for me to think that way? There is a reason I make more. Part that is because of what you might call luck or the opportunities that I was blessed with. But part of the difference is also that I was diligent and worked much harder than some other people (such as my siblings, for example). One day I would like to send my children to a good school. I like to help my family out. I like to take vacations and other things. I don't think it would be an act of pure greed on my part if I were to not be happy at the idea of my salary getting cut. I don't think anybody is particularly happy at the idea of their salary getting cut and we each have our own circumstances that factor into the salaries that we have. . .

I don't think that believing that my salary should be higher must necessarily translate into greed, so I would be a bit reluctant to label someone else as greedy for not wanting their salary cut either, unless I knew their particular circumstances and motivations . . .

Edited November 12, 2015 by Peace

[tinytherese]

Where do we find products that aren't made in sweatshops and the like anyway?

[Gabriela]

Where do we find products that aren't made in sweatshops and the like anyway?

'Murica. Or Europe.

Cost top-dollar, though.

(And 'Murica has sweatshops, too, so you still have to be careful.)

[Ice_nine]

very cool discussion guys. I wish I was able to participate more, but I've at least read it all. I really wish I had the time to respond more personally because despite the recent kvetching about how "there are no more good threads on phatmass" I'd like to see and be involved in more discussions like these.

I will say I'm glad that God judges the heart and I believe love is a real force that, while cannot be measured by economists, has the power to transform things. I'm disheartened by globalization mainly because it creates too many moving pieces and it is far, far too complicated to offer viable solutions. A change in one part of the contraption might hurt this part over there, it might help this part which in turn combines with another part to cause problems for something else. I can get really overwhelmed with the enormity of it all and wind up freezing, staying up late, and being too beaver dam tired to do anything. Then I'm back at square one.

So I've pretty much resolved to try to do things with a pure heart and hope God will bless my efforts in some mystical way that I may not even realize. Kind of like when I give a bum some dollars. Maybe it's just going to his crack fund, or maybe he'll use it to kill the hunger pangs. Maybe it would be better to do other things (donate to a homeless shelter e.g.) but to offer the man nothing seems inadequate and my small gesture is all I'm capable of. I realize to people who do not believe in God will find this philosophy worthless, and maybe believers will too, but it's all I got. The alternative is worrying and then proceeding to do nothing. Like Peace had mentioned, "doing something" may actually do more harm than good, but this is where faith enters the equation.

Like peace I also ask myself "how much do I need," and "can I be a good Christian and still buy this, or live this particular way." I recently started a full time job and right now I'm trying to throw most of my money at the government to pay off my debts (can one really be considered to have surplus wealth when they are indebted? Is debt a reality of modern life? Has it always been so?) but I do spend money on things I don't particularly need and on activities that I enjoy. Is this ok? Even now I wonder if perhaps I'm rationalizing and seeking validation for my choices. It's vexing. Again I try to still give something  and hope God will have mercy on me if I'm not giving enough.

While greed has been here since the beginning I find many aspects of modernity present a unique challenge. The collapse of the community and isolationalism are particularly concerning for me. It's like subsidiarity is a thing of the past, and while it may make things easier (responsibilty is shifted to centralized power away from us plebes) it's also decimated the systems we need to maintain our humanity and social health. Also the fact that what you buy determines who you are. I guess signs of wealth have always been important, but I think it's fairly recent history where the solution to our problems is "go shopping!" Remember after 9/11 we were told we must keep shopping, by God, to show the terrorists they haven't won! What about grieving and taking a break from commerce for a hot minute? Even so much of the discussion here revolves around how to buy things, what to buy, and from whom we should buy.

That's all I got for now, I hope the discussion continues.

Edited November 14, 2015 by Ice_nine

[Era Might]

I recently started a full time job and right now I'm trying to throw most of my money at the government to pay off my debts (can one really be considered to have surplus wealth when they are indebted? Is debt a reality of modern life? Has it always been so?) but I do spend money on things I don't particularly need and on activities that I enjoy. Is this ok? Even now I wonder if perhaps I'm rationalizing and seeking validation for my choices. It's vexing. Again I try to still give something  and hope God will have mercy on me if I'm not giving enough.

It's become a trope in the media that the "Millennial" generation is unable to grow up and enter adult life. What I find interesting about this argument is the assumption that adult life is worth growing up into. David Foster Wallace, a writer who I really like (not a Millennial but generations are just shorthand here), was really insightful on this. He said, "I think that if there is a sort of sadness for people under 45, it has something to do with pleasure, and achievement, and entertainment—like a sort of emptiness at the heart of what they thought was going on." Wallace killed himself a few years back at the age of 46. He has another essay on our inability to understand Kafka's humor, he writes:

 

"A crude way to put the whole thing is that our present culture is, both developmentally and historically, adolescent. And since adolescence is acknowledged to the be the single most stressful and frightening period of human development--the stage when the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations (taxes, death), and when we yearn inside for a return to the same childish oblivion we pretend to scorn--it's not difficult to see why we as a culture are so susceptible to art and entertainment whose primary function is escape, i.e., fantasy, adrenaline, spectacle, romance, etc.

What is really at stake in the "Millennials won't grow up" narrative is the very legitimacy of the American way of life...the careerism, the commercialism, the automatism, the institutionalization, etc. This isn't new...Herman Melville's famous story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" is subtitled "A Story of Wall Street"...Bartleby decides one day that he would prefer not to work...he doesn't leave the office, doesn't respond to threats of firing, doesn't react when they tell him to leave...he just drops out of life. He baffles the people he works with...how can a man refuse to work? Doesn't he have debts, hobbies, etc. that he needs to finance? Family to take care of?...the real scandal here is not that he refuses to work, but that in doing so he questions the legitimacy of the society he lives in...whether the things he is supposed to be working to uphold is worth upholding.

One of the fascinating things about the Catholic Worker was that its heyday was during the Great Depression, when people had nothing to give. The Catholic Worker wasn't just a relief society, but a different way of life that challenged the entire American system, economic, political, social, intellectual, historical. If Millennials refuse to grow into the society they've been given...who stands to lose the most? The older generations that bought wholeheartedly into that society, and for whom the Millennials represent the possibility that they gave their hearts to a false dream, like a wife who can't even consider the possibility the possibility that her husband has been cheating on her for years. The possibility is too hurtful, not for the marriage, but because it shatters the entire illusion of the wife's life. That was part of the fear of Occupy Wall Street, the questioning of a system where we become indentured servants of loans, institutions, etc. in order to prop up that system and keep it running.

But, as you hint at, this is nothing new in America...Thoreau was a real-life Bartleby:

 

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

Or, as Paul Goodman was writing in the 50's about young men in the organized system, who either become Organization Men, Beats, or Delinquents:

In our society, bright lively children, with the potentiality for knowledge, noble ideals, honest effort, and some kind of worthwhile achievement, are transformed into useless and cynical bipeds, or decent young men trapped or early resigned, whether in or out of the organized system. My purpose is a simple one: to show how it is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system of society does not want men. They are not safe. They do not suit.[/quote

Here's a recent interview/article with an updating of Goodman's thesis for contemporary times:

http://www.thestraddler.com/201412/piece7.php

 

Instead, most education is determined by the problem of discipline in schools. How do you make people do homework? How do you make people be there in a way that you can control them? Most of the paraphernalia of school is just to keep people in line. That’s good training for the job market. It’s very close to prison, because there’s so much make-work in it. But if you see kids who aren’t trained that way, and you see how lit up they are most of the time, that’s a lesson, too.

The whole idea of the perfect liberal education is no longer the classics, it’s knowing something about computers. It’s having all your rough edges rubbed off so that you’ll fit in your next job when you move, or when they move you.[13] Today, when kids are baffled by what the teacher is telling them, it’s because they haven’t got a framework to put it in, it doesn’t relate to anything in their world. To learn something about your culture you need some basis in your actual experience. Goodman used to like to quote a study that said the average ten-year-old boy in Harlem had never been more than three blocks away from home. But that didn’t mean that boy had a neighborhood. It just meant he had no experience of nature, or of how food comes to exist, for example. Such a circumstance kills the sense that, as human beings, every one of us ought to have: a sense of confidence in ourselves that we will be able to survive without services—that we could do what needed to be done.

Edited November 14, 2015 by Era Might

[Ice_nine]

Era where do you get all this time to read all these books? I have trouble finding the energy to read much between the hours of indentured servitude to the system and being a "contributing member of society"

Also Bartleby sounds like the dude from Office Space.

[Era Might]

Era where do you get all this time to read all these books? I have trouble finding the energy to read much between the hours of indentured servitude to the system and being a "contributing member of society"

Also Bartleby sounds like the dude from Office Space.

For the moment I've become Bartleby myself...I've more or less dropped out of the system, and am not sure whether I intend to go back, so I spend my days in the library reading lol.

[Ice_nine]

good for you. Pretty sure I don't have the spine or nerve to do that but props to those who do.

[Gabriela]

For the moment I've become Bartleby myself...I've more or less dropped out of the system, and am not sure whether I intend to go back, so I spend my days in the library reading lol.

Era, have you considered writing your ideas down and sending them to publications? You have a lot of outstanding insights. You could make some money that way—on your own terms. Or would that be "living too much in the system"?

I was freelance for a while, and I hated it, but I need to feel financially secure. You seem fine without it. Maybe it would be a good arrangement for you. You certainly have the brain for it.

[Credo in Deum]

Are all Christians called to be (materially) poor?

Nope. All Catholics are called to be saints.  Not every saint was a poor monk, nun, or priest.  There have been saints who were rich lords, princes, and kings. Wealth itself is not evil, however, an attachment to wealth is evil.  Pray to be detached from wealth, so if God's will says "Peace, go and give all you have to the poor and follow me" you will say "Amen!"

[Credo in Deum]

@Gabriela

Hope this helps. It doesn't deal with sweatshops, but it does deal with purchasing products from companies that support things which are unethical, working for companies which support unethical practices, and etc.