TinyWages

I had an idea. Maybe it's not a new idea, but it's an idea, and I don't get them all that often, or at least ones I think are worthy of sharing with the entire nation of the United States of America, or even those who might read a given newspaper's editorial pages. There are lots of people who have a bigger audience than I do (I have no doubt of that, nor would even my Mom, though I know nobody speaks anymore to the entire Nation, certainly not even the current President), but I thought I'd throw this bone by y'all. If it was your idea before I told it to you (like perhaps you had this same idea in the shower this morning but hadn't had a chance to write about it, or you had the idea years ago — when you were still young — and simply hadn't written anything about it publicly), I don't mind if you claim it for your own. We both know what's happened to concepts of "intellectual property" over the past decade or so, and I've all but given up that fight. I'm not even sure I want to be an intellectual anymore — look what it's done for W.

The idea is a coupling of the "tiny URL" idea and those garment labels that tell you what country the shirt was sweatshopped in. This would also possibly apply to other products, but that might alone kill the idea, so I'm just sticking to clothing (but knowing how much the Chinese worker who made that toaster is making would be of the same order of information as that of that Northern Mariana Islander who sewed the garment).

The tinyURL idea is that one can use a short code as a proxy for a longer URL, in this case a record in a US government database. E.g.,

     http://tinyurl.com/olzcv

This would be a proposal for a Congressional bill to require that right underneath the "Made in Guatemala" or "Made in China" on the label would additionally be a small URL (probably about 15-20 characters), a code that you could type into your browser to display a Web page hosted by an appropriate branch of the US government that would look up the code in a database and return back the average wage (converted into current US dollars) of the workers who made that specific garment. This average would include that of the cutters, seamstresses, etc. but not any management, as that would inflate the average. This data would be updated every business quarter, perhaps, or whatever is a typical business reporting cycle.

The cost of this programme would be borne by the corporations who pay these low wages (they can assuredly afford this additional reporting cost), and would amount to a reporting of worker wages of all products sold in the US to an appropriate government branch, the branch that would then take that information and use it to provide the online access to the database. They can be exempted from the requirement (and get to display a "living wage" marker) if they pay their workers above some reasonable measure of a living wage. This would be a tough one to determine — what is a real living wage in Indonesia?

The computer side of this project is simple — the large part of the project would be the organization, accumulation, and management of the data.

The one big benefit would be to make transparent the actual wages of workers worldwide, even if few people went to the trouble of looking up their products' worker wages. But there might be fall-on effects, such as causing people to begin buying from countries who paid their workers more reasonable wages (which might cause wage competition, though I'm perhaps being overly optimistic here). It would certainly let Americans know that there are hidden costs being borne by somebody, that those cheap Chinese products are cheap for at least one well known reason.

When I've had an opportunity to buy-local or buy-China, the former is almost always more expensive than the latter, but I know that at least where I live the labour laws demand that people get paid fairly. I'm probably an oddball but I'm often willing to pay more for fair pay. What I'd like to do is narrow the gap between the two so that the decision is harder for conscientious people to make. I'm not sure how to reach the non-conscientious, though letting them know that somebody got paid 35 cents to make their shirt might have an impact on some.

Last year I had the opportunity to buy a bed made in the north of England for 800 pounds, or a Malasian import for $600. The latter was of nice teakwood but had poorly-mortised joints and visible glue fill everywhere (I mean, how much can one expect when the carpenters are paid $2 a day?); the former was obviously made by proud British craftsmen (when they were sober, anyway). I ended up buying a relatively expensive (and really beautiful) bed made of native but sustainable woods, and the bed was made within a few hundred miles of where I live. I sleep well at night now, though I'm still paying off the cost of the bed.