>Third, the employers chose laborers located “predominantly … in East Africa, Venezuela, Pakistan, India, and the Philippines” for this work because that’s where they can pay the least in labor costs while still extracting value.
But that's also where some of the poorest people live! You know, the people who would benefit the most from having jobs like this.
>The reason your analysis doesn’t lead you to thinking this is a raw deal for the children involved is because in a sense, it’s not. Given the economics of their lives, this is, relatively speaking, a good deal.
It is! In the 90s senator Tom Harkin proposed the Child Labor Deterrence Act:
>According to Harkin's website, "This bill would prohibit the importation of products that have been produced by child labor, and included civil and criminal penalties for violators."
This was a bill that never got anywhere, but simply talking about it had this impact:
>In 1993 employers in Bangladesh' ready-made garment (RMG) industry dismissed 50,000 children (c. 75 percent of child workers in the textile industry) out of fear of economic reprisals of the imminent passage of the Child Labor Deterrence Act.
>UNICEF sent a team of investigators into Bangladesh to learn what came of the children who were dismissed from their factory jobs. UNICEF's 1997 State of the World's Children report confirmed that most of the children found themselves in much more deplorable situations, such as crushing stones, scavenging through trash dumps, and begging on the streets. Many of the girls eventually ended up in prostitution.
When the minimum wage is a quarter and a job is offering 4-8 times that AND you can do it part time, this is a great deal for the kids. Impoverished kids have plenty of free time, what they don't have is money, if you ensure they have more free time and less money you are dooming them not saving them. If you wanted to help them you would pressure OpenAI to raise the compensation, or you would just send direct aid to the children.
Unfortunately people are more motivated by optics and their sense of embarrassment than the interest of children worldwide. A lot of the people who also pass laws around this sort of stuff grew up middle-upper class at worst and simply can't understand why these children aren't spending their free time travelling around with their youth groups and sports teams and going on vacation and presume they just don't have enough time due to all this child labour.
But that's also where some of the poorest people live! You know, the people who would benefit the most from having jobs like this.
>The reason your analysis doesn’t lead you to thinking this is a raw deal for the children involved is because in a sense, it’s not. Given the economics of their lives, this is, relatively speaking, a good deal.
It is! In the 90s senator Tom Harkin proposed the Child Labor Deterrence Act:
>According to Harkin's website, "This bill would prohibit the importation of products that have been produced by child labor, and included civil and criminal penalties for violators."
This was a bill that never got anywhere, but simply talking about it had this impact:
>In 1993 employers in Bangladesh' ready-made garment (RMG) industry dismissed 50,000 children (c. 75 percent of child workers in the textile industry) out of fear of economic reprisals of the imminent passage of the Child Labor Deterrence Act.
>UNICEF sent a team of investigators into Bangladesh to learn what came of the children who were dismissed from their factory jobs. UNICEF's 1997 State of the World's Children report confirmed that most of the children found themselves in much more deplorable situations, such as crushing stones, scavenging through trash dumps, and begging on the streets. Many of the girls eventually ended up in prostitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Labor_Deterrence_Act
Things might be different nowadays, but people from poor countries don't have as many opportunities. Taking some away, might be taking all they have.