Isn't it great that there is a "class" of people who are just poor enough to find motivation in the returned deposits from these recyclables, yet not so poor as to be totally disabled? Aren't they "just right" to do our recycling for us?We would complain bitterly if an American based multinational company paid their overseas workers just enough to sustain them in deep poverty some place overseas. We would complain that these workers were being exploited. But no-one seems to say anything about our own recycle workers.
After all, no-one hired them, right? They are just taking advantage of a convenient situation that just happens to be there - it's no-one's fault that their lives are balanced at just the right point of poverty to make them our effective collectors, is it?
Years ago Californians passed a law mandating deposits on beverage containers in order to reduce litter. The law declared that we would monitor the number of containers littered about, and continue to raise the deposit on returned containers until most disappeared from the landscape.
Thus we effectively automated a system to pay our recycle workers the very minimum they would accept for the trouble of rounding up our containers for us. We did this probably unconsciously, as if we believed no connection existed between economic decisions and the lives of people.
The beverage container law appears to be one of a number of things that our society does to create and maintain a highly convenient and useful source of ultra cheap workers.
Where, for instance, does our army of "volunteers" performing community service as an alternative to criminal sentences come from - and as we come to depend on them, what forces in our society will almost unconsciously act to maintain a steady source of them? Where do our plasma donors come from? How do we manage to deliver a force of just enough (illegal) farm laborers, at just the right seasons, willing to work for the lowest pay and no benefits to keep our vegetable prices down, even though no individual or organization is in charge of orchestrating it all?
How can all this just work so conveniently? Is this what we call "market efficiency"?
Joseph Petulla comments:
The trouble is, that there are so many places we look at society and
see
such a situation. But I'm always shocked when someone interviews
a bunch
of these people because their own view of themselves is less critical
than
the critics. What I mean is we rarely read the picture from the
way they
see themselves. I can't even tell you what that is. It
just never seems
to be what we liberals think. I think we have the right take
on society,
that it assumes that there will be an underclass to take care of these
things, that there always will be immigrants or downandouts to do the
dirty
work, and we are right to be disgusted. But I have stopped trying
to
figure out why they accept these jobs the way they do because I'm never
right. It's like the people in southeast asia looking at tv beside
their
cars [where the car is their only source of electricity]. Who
knows what they are thinking?