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The Remote Labor Theory and the Race to the Bottom
Roger Ebert on The Yes Men

There was a movie released last year that I never heard about titled The Yes Men. Here's the preamble to Roger Ebert's review. The entire review is linked below.

From an economic point of view, the Civil War was the least profitable of all our wars, because the destruction of lives and property involved Americans on both sides. In our other wars, most of the lives and property belonged to foreigners. The war was fought to abolish slavery, but slavery would soon have faded away on its own, because it made no economic sense. Think how much it costs to support a slave.

The involuntary servitude of imported labor, which is what slavery amounts to, has been replaced in our times by the much more efficient system of exporting jobs to countries that are poor to begin with, and thus have lower maintenance costs for labor. This "remote labor" is the natural alternative to slavery, and, as a bonus, there is no reason for the worker not to be free. Thus he is responsible for his own housing, feeding and medical care -- which can be at a cost level much lower than a slave owner could safely provide.

The new "remote labor system," enforced by the World Trade Organization through its system of loans and regulations for poor countries, is much more efficient for First World capitalism. It exports manufacturing and assembly jobs to Third World countries where athletic shoes, clothing, home appliances, tools, computers and toys are assembled by labor forces paid only pennies an hour. The use of child labor further reduces the cost, and removing the children from school diminishes the threat of educated opposition to the system.

On the statements above we can all agree, right? Or was there a point at which you realized I was making an outrageous and immoral argument, and you were offended? I ask because when a fake "spokesman" for the World Trade Organization made the same argument before a WTO trade forum in Finland, the audience listened politely, applauded, and had no questions.

"The Yes Men" is a disturbing documentary in which a couple of tricksters named Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum create a fictional WTO spokesman named Hank Hardy Unruh, and a fake WTO Web site where he can be contacted. Real-world groups contact Hank Hardy, and he flies out to their meetings to deliver a speech at which he summarizes the anti-WTO argument in terms the audience, incredibly, absorbs and passively accepts. Apparently (a) no one is really listening, (b) no one is thinking, or (c) the immorality of the WTO's exploitation of cheap foreign labor becomes invisible when it is described in purely economic terms. Answer: All three, which is why the United States and the other nations controlling the WTO can live with the inhuman cost of its policies, and why so many people simply don't understand what the demonstrators at world trade forums are so mad about.


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