[Eauz]

Police raids on factories in the Indian capital revealed dozens of migrant kids hard at work Tuesday despite laws against child labour.

Police rounded up 26 children from three textiles factories and a metal processing plant, but dozens more are believed to have escaped. Those captured had all come to New Delhi from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

"Some of them were working in acid and metal," with the task of breaking down metals and mixing alloys, said Kailash Satyarthi of India's charity Save the Child.

Some were embroidering women's clothing including saris and had been coached to deflect questions from authorities about their work.

"I have just come from my village. I have come here to study," said 11-year-old Samshad, explaining that he was choosing to work during a "holiday." His 10-year-old colleague Samthu, however, admitted he did intricate needlework for the plant.

There are at least hundreds of thousands of children toiling in hidden and hazardous corners of India, including brick kilns, pesticide-laden fields or chemical factories.

In New Delhi alone, about 50,000 children are believed to be working in factories, with thousands more begging on the streets and sorting garbage.

India recently passed a law aimed at fighting child labour by making education compulsory up to age 14.

But grinding poverty still leads many kids to work, and certain industries that involve intricate machinery or delicate handiwork prefer their smaller hands.

Sometimes, the factories promise the children only food and a place to sleep. Sometimes, they pay for the children's work in advance to their parents when the kids are taken for work — a situation that Satyarthi said essentially amounts to child slavery.

The charity said it rescued 1,300 children last year from work in Delhi factories.

During Tuesday's raids, five men were arrested on charges of employing the children.

The kids, some of them crying at being taken from their jobs, were registered at an officials' office in Seelampur slum district of east Delhi before going to a state welfare home for children.

Link

Ah, the Indian state, which is apparently a glowing sign of how democracy and liberalism can help create prosperity and progress. Good to know that I may be helping the children find employment and feed themselves, while India continues down the neoliberal economic policy of failure. India is North Korea of Liberal-Capitalism.

Now, I'll await the lolbertarians and neoliberals to defend these policies of employment because at least they are helping corporate profits & shareholde... err, I mean their families.

[houndred]

Now, I'll await the lolbertarians and neoliberals to defend these policies of employment

Policies? The government has passed laws against child labour and has recently passed more.

Child labour was endemic under the old socialist system.

[Daktoria]

India isn't libertarian. It's a dump. The people have no respect for any rule of law whatsoever.

In any case, I agree. You can't bribe people to recognize due process. They have to believe in it from within. Otherwise, they just take it for granted, exploit it while it lasts, and go back to their spoiled ways.

It's no different from paying an alcoholic to stop drinking.

[Eauz]

Policies? The government has passed laws against child labour and has recently passed more.

And it is not working, as can be seen from the article.

Child labour was endemic under the old socialist system.

And the culture continues to exist today. You'd think, with the change towards liberal-democracy and adoption of free market economy, that the conditions for children would improve. It appears that this is not the case. I guess, no matter what economic system is in place, India continues to fail.

India isn't libertarian. It's a dump. The people have no respect for any rule of law whatsoever.

No, it's not, but it is a liberal-democracy. It should be capable of eliminating these forms of labour from its society and create better conditions for the social welfare of the child.

[Soixante-Retard]

For people reading this thread who want to understand the topic raised here, i.e. "cheap labor", I'll point you to two articles by Paul Krugman (they are best read in their entirety, but I've picked out some highlights):

1. In Praise of Cheap Labor

Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all...The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through... [They] are not entitled to their self-righteousness. They have not thought the matter through. And when the hopes of hundreds of millions are at stake, thinking things through is not just good intellectual practice. It is a moral duty.

2. Ricardo's Difficult Idea

Wages are determined in a national labor market: The basic Ricardian model envisages a single factor, labor, which can move freely between industries. When one tries to talk about trade with laymen, however, one at least sometimes realizes that they do not think about things that way at all. They think about steelworkers, textile workers, and so on; there is no such thing as a national labor market. It does not occur to them that the wages earned in one industry are largely determined by the wages similar workers are earning in other industries. This has several consequences. First, unless it is carefully explained, the standard demonstration of the gains from trade in a Ricardian model -- workers can earn more by moving into the industries in which you have a comparative advantage -- simply fails to register with lay intellectuals. Their picture is of aircraft workers gaining and textile workers losing, and the idea that it is useful even for the sake of argument to imagine that workers can move from one industry to the other is foreign to them. Second, the link between productivity and wages is thoroughly misunderstood. Non-economists typically think that wages should reflect productivity at the level of the individual company. So if Xerox manages to increase its productivity 20 percent, it should raise the wages it pays by the same amount; if overall manufacturing productivity has risen 30 percent, the real wages of manufacturing workers should have risen 30 percent, even if service productivity has been stagnant; if this doesn't happen, it is a sign that something has gone wrong. In other words, my criticism of Michael Lind would baffle many non-economists.

Associated with this problem is the misunderstanding of what international trade should do to wage rates. It is a fact that some Bangladeshi apparel factories manage to achieve labor productivity close to half those of comparable installations in the United States, although overall Bangladeshi manufacturing productivity is probably only about 5 percent of the US level. Non-economists find it extremely disturbing and puzzling that wages in those productive factories are only 10 percent of US standards.

Finally, and most importantly, it is not obvious to non-economists that wages are endogenous. Someone like Goldsmith looks at Vietnam and asks, “what would happen if people who work for such low wages manage to achieve Western productivity?” The economist’s answer is, “if they achieve Western productivity, they will be paid Western wages” — as has in fact happened in Japan. But to the non-economist this conclusion is neither natural nor plausible. (And he is likely to offer those Bangladeshi factories as a counterexample, missing the distinction between factory-level and national-level productivity).

[Daktoria]

No, it's not, but it is a liberal-democracy. It should be capable of eliminating these forms of labour from its society and create better conditions for the social welfare of the child.

Can you explain where you got this idea from?

Social democracy, maybe, but liberal democracy? Indians have no respect for freedom of assembly whatsoever. They're constantly talking on top of each other, and insist on expecting people to assume the risk of learning right and wrong the hard way, putting structure before agency.

[Eauz]

Can you explain where you got this idea from?

Social democracy, maybe, but liberal democracy? Indians have no respect for freedom of assembly whatsoever. They're constantly talking on top of each other, and insist on expecting people to assume the risk of learning right and wrong the hard way, putting structure before agency.

Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive. Political pluralism is usually defined as the presence of multiple and distinct political parties.

A liberal democracy may take various constitutional forms: it may be a constitutional republic, such as France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, or the United States, or a constitutional monarchy, such as Japan, Spain, or the United Kingdom. It may have a presidential system (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, the United States), a semi-presidential system (Finland, France, Taiwan), or a parliamentary system (Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Poland, the United Kingdom).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy

Enough squabbling over trivial definitions.

[Daktoria]

I suppose we should believe North Korea is a Democratic People's Republic too.

Liberal democracy is a mindset, not an institution.