Working from the assumption that slave-traders are in it for the money? Yeah. Slavery stops happening when it becomes more cost-effective to pay the workers directly, than to pay guards to coerce them.
The main use of slave labor is agriculture, because it’s easy to have a large group within a single overseer’s line of sight, and output is easy to measure. Child labor has historically succeeded there because of the low skill requirement, and because an individual child’s lower productivity was matched by lower housing and food costs. If a child costs more to acquire than an adult—specifically if that difference in up-front costs outweighs the net present value of that slim productivity-per-upkeep-cost advantage—anyone who keeps using children for unpaid ag labor will simply be driven out of the market by competitors willing to do the math.
The app people worry about is sex. Police and prosecuting attorneys (in the US, at least) are already willing to resort to extremely dubious tactics to score a pedophile conviction; this would give them a legitimate audit trail to follow. Someone seeking to purchase a child for such purposes would not dare attract so much official attention… unless they were suicidally stupid, which is the sort of problem that solves itself.
Slavery stops happening when it becomes more cost-effective to pay the workers directly, than to pay guards to coerce them.
Hell no, it does not; only the label might change. If the only employers are would-be slavers with no financial, public or moral pressure to look to their workers’ welfare, then wage slavery is little better than traditional slavery—in fact it’s often worse because a capitalist employer, unlike a slaver, has zero investment in a slave, drawing from a huge pool of unskilled manpower with no acquisition cost. You don’t need any guards if a person has no choice but work for you, work for another employer like you or starve!
I said “slavery stops,” not “quality of life improves.” Getting employers to compete in a way that benefits workers is a different problem, and obtaining for the workers the freedom to choose to starve (rather than, say, being executed as an example to others) is only the first step.
Quality of life for workers is also a very different problem from quality of life for open-market-adopted children, which was the original topic.
The ultimate slavery counter: red tape!
Working from the assumption that slave-traders are in it for the money? Yeah. Slavery stops happening when it becomes more cost-effective to pay the workers directly, than to pay guards to coerce them.
The main use of slave labor is agriculture, because it’s easy to have a large group within a single overseer’s line of sight, and output is easy to measure. Child labor has historically succeeded there because of the low skill requirement, and because an individual child’s lower productivity was matched by lower housing and food costs. If a child costs more to acquire than an adult—specifically if that difference in up-front costs outweighs the net present value of that slim productivity-per-upkeep-cost advantage—anyone who keeps using children for unpaid ag labor will simply be driven out of the market by competitors willing to do the math.
The app people worry about is sex. Police and prosecuting attorneys (in the US, at least) are already willing to resort to extremely dubious tactics to score a pedophile conviction; this would give them a legitimate audit trail to follow. Someone seeking to purchase a child for such purposes would not dare attract so much official attention… unless they were suicidally stupid, which is the sort of problem that solves itself.
Hell no, it does not; only the label might change. If the only employers are would-be slavers with no financial, public or moral pressure to look to their workers’ welfare, then wage slavery is little better than traditional slavery—in fact it’s often worse because a capitalist employer, unlike a slaver, has zero investment in a slave, drawing from a huge pool of unskilled manpower with no acquisition cost. You don’t need any guards if a person has no choice but work for you, work for another employer like you or starve!
Picture related.
I said “slavery stops,” not “quality of life improves.” Getting employers to compete in a way that benefits workers is a different problem, and obtaining for the workers the freedom to choose to starve (rather than, say, being executed as an example to others) is only the first step.
Quality of life for workers is also a very different problem from quality of life for open-market-adopted children, which was the original topic.
Link broken.
Better now?
no, still broken.
Changed the URL.
It works for me.