Facebook status debate on unpaid labour

Iain Marlow... thinks that non-profits are ironic, because they exploit middle and upper middle class first world workers for the peculiarly never-ending poverty of the third world, which they can't figure out how to solve.
Yesterday at 12:17am · Comment · LikeUnlike · View Feedback (17)Hide Feedback (17)

You, Jia Muzhang Muke and Chiara Capraro like this.

Rachel De Lazzer
interesting thought, though they DO at least make a difference by this less than efficient means
Yesterday at 12:33am · Delete


Dariusz Grabka
are you suggesting that middle/upper classes are being impoverished by not-for-profits?
Yesterday at 9:37am · Delete


Iain Marlow
Not really. Merely exploiting. And by doing so, they promote a way of employment that naturally excludes those who can't afford to do unwaged work.
Yesterday at 10:23am · Delete

Chiara Capraro
iain, could not agree more.
Yesterday at 10:25am · Delete

Matthew Beatty
It is unpaid work. So if you can't afford to do it than what does it matter that rich people are promoting it amongst themselves as a way to assuage their guilt for being in that very economic situation which allows them to volunteer? If these positions were paid then it would go to skilled workers (not the poor) and/ or they would be government jobs (Hide! It's socialism!).
Yesterday at 10:58am · Delete

Iain Marlow
Matt, great point. Perhaps the poor, unskilled workers are at least partially unskilled because they never had access to skill-enhancing but unpaid internships? (By this, I don't mean impoverished ghetto residents running Amnesty, but a more lukewarm assertion.)
Yesterday at 11:04am · Delete

Mark Rubenstein
There was an op-ed in the FT about this last week
Yesterday at 11:08am · Delete

Iain Marlow
Yeah, Britain is having a Parliamentary inquiry about the ethics of companies (not just non-profits) using unpaid internships. It's hit the MPs themselves, too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/jan/16/houseofcommons.uk1
Yesterday at 11:21am · Delete

Matthew Beatty
I read about this a bunch while in uni. G.B. Shaw wrote about this quite a bit because he saw all the charity getting in the way of real reform/revolution. All the rich people propped up the glorious inequality just enough to keep it going. In Canada our non-profit sector is huge! Like bigger than manufacturing huge. But I think very little goes to... Read More helping the poor of the developing world. It's more about sewing up some safety net holes -- some might say a job government should be doing. So yes. There's irony all over the place.
Yesterday at 11:23am · Delete

Iain Marlow
From the same article: Some MPs offer a flat fee of £500 a month or pay expenses. One Liberal Democrat, John Hemming, the MP for BirminghamYardley, offered potential interns a bed in his home to ensure students from wider social backgrounds could apply for voluntary posts.

He said that he had since dropped employing interns altogether. "I am aware... Read More that the present system means that only people from wealthy backgrounds or a particular class can take up such offers which is why I offered some accommodation.
Yesterday at 11:23am · Delete

Matthew Beatty
This is the same argument from when they deregulated law school and med school -- goodbye pro bono and medicins sans frontieres.
Yesterday at 11:26am · Delete

Dariusz Grabka
hmm .. i guess i see the mere existence of voluntary labour as quite an advancement of our society. i highly, highly doubt the majority of volunteers are upper-middle-class or higher people. I would suspect the opposite actually: majority of volunteer work is done by the poor, for the poor, to improve conditions of the poor.

in that sense i think it's a myth that these jobs are created to feed our guilt complex - higher awareness, more free time amongst the working class, and capability aren't necessarily responses to guilt ... but a product of better education, higher incomes, etc.

and i'm not too sure that these can be paid positions just by virtue that they're challenging or worthwhile. the value added is very systemically low, but to the poor people that do the volunteering, the local value is very high.... Read More

internships are a different story i guess ... i see them akin to $20k/pa residencies for physicians after med school. :)
Yesterday at 11:33am · Delete

Iain Marlow
Yo Dariusz, You're right that a lot of volunteers within cities, at cook-outs or kitchens or things like that, aren't upper middle class. But we're not really talking about voluntary soup kitchen labour, but the institutionalized habit among NGOs of employing 20-something unwaged workers, who wouldn't be able to afford their internships without some form of inherited wealth.
Yesterday at 12:36pm · Delete

Dariusz Grabka
yeah i'm not familiar with that world at all. though kirsti has been filling me in somewhat. i would guess that if a) they all rely on cheap/free labour b) operating grants from CIDA .. that there are too many NGO's?
Yesterday at 12:58pm · Delete

Iain Marlow
That's, likely, a remarkably accurate assertion.
Yesterday at 1:02pm · Delete

Excerpts from a Xinjiang-dominated diary

August 3, 2006 - between Beijing and Urumqi

...Still sitting on this train. Everyone's legs are starting to swell and the prostitutes across from me have staked out a spot on the floor with newspapers... The Uighur journalist across from me said I have beautiful eyes and should probably shave and that I look like David Beckham -- farcical -- and I have an extremely large Xinjiangnese gentleman looming over me, patting his swelling thighs and telling me to write. Will do...

August 27, 2008 - Lake Karakul, 200km from Pakistan

I wish I could continue on and leave my scheduled life in tatters. Pakistan will have to wait until I am older and possibly wiser. This lake is beautiful. The sun is going down behind rolling ochre and the white-capped Karakoram peaks are bathing in the glow. There is a Tajik graveyard with a pack of wayward camels. Chinese soldiers are building up the local infrastructure. People mill about... This is a border junction reached via a border city with a border province...

Xinjiang Riots

How distant my last post looks from today's Xinjiang. I've been watching the violence with fear -- both for the mainly innocent working class Han Chinese, who were also victimized in Tibet; and for the Uighurs who have been swept up in all of this.

It's probably way too early for analysis. But I do have a worry that the Chinese government is allowing foreign media access in such a way that diminishes the true impact of state repression in Xinjiang. The narrative, which originally was "the Uighurs are protesting in the same way as the Tibetans", has swiveled on a pivot and become "Uighurs perpetrate senseless violence against innocent Han Chinese". It seems the local government is permitting access to hospitals and Han Chinese victims, but there is much less reporting on the impact of the violence -- I won't call it senseless -- on Uighurs.

No Uighur in his right mind would talk to the foreign press about Han Chinese mobs, in front of the journalist's government minders. Nor would any sensible Uighur want to give his full name and location, or a detailed description of their plight, in case they should be tracked down by local agents of the PSB and harassed or jailed or executed.

Adam Minter over at Shanghai Scrap has already mentioned the discrepancies between the Tibetan "protest" coverage and that of the Muslim Uighur "riots", noting that the foreign media has less sympathy for the Uighurs, and a total love-on for the Tibetans. To me, this point seems rather banal -- of course they do, the love on for Tibet and the ignorance of Xinjiang has been utterly complete for years, even during the Olympics.

Because of this, the Chinese state's narrative about Uighurs continues unabated, while we would normally report the shit out of the Chinese government's silly attempts to vilify the "Dalai clique". Sigh.

Good luck Xinjiang. My heart goes out to you.

Xinjiang, August 08

At the end of August, and parts of early September, I took a trip out to Xinjiang, the northwestern-most province in China. It borders Russia in the north, Pakistan in the southwest, Afghanistan and a couple of post-Soviet 'stans to the west, and more or less sits directly north of Tibet. It is a place close to my heart; so close that people often make fun of me for it --- parroting my voice, of course, and elongating the latter syllable like neighbourhood kids used to do my name (Iain) when I was a boy in suburban Ontario.



Nevertheless, it has only became more important to me --- and the way I think about China and its problems --- over the years, despite some of the mundane, travel-related hardships I've occasionally faced there. Originally, when I applied to the School of Oriental and African Studies for my MSc in International Politics, I had proposed to examine how China was interacting, through Xinjiang, with the oil-rich and autocratic Central Asian states to China's west.

Eventually, I decided to extricate myself from that notion. It dawned on me, as any scholar of Xinjiang could tell you, that one needs to speak (and read) numerous languages to do work on the area --- at least Chinese and Russian; Uighur helps, Turkish helps, others help. The area is a confluence of historical civilizations and is hardly Chinese in any case. None of the documents are in English and the first, real academic/general-interest English-language history of Xinjiang was written only in 2007 (by James Millward; it's excellent -- also, Christian Tyler's Wild West China is good, if you're more interested in a more gripping, poetic treatment).

Since I realized I'm not a historian, and that I wouldn't be able to meaningfully advance the debate (as far as any grad student could hope to, anyway), I broadened my interest in I.P. and put forward the idea of a "Chinese cosmopolitanism," based on melding Chinese political history/philosophy and a critical cosmopolitan approach to international political theory (the very, very few who are interested can email me if they want a copy).



I was in Beijing in the summer of 08, staying with gracious friends while researching, conducting interviews, and writing my dissertation. I decided to take a trip out to Xinjiang; I missed the place. My daily dinners of laghman noodles up on Gui Jie food street just weren't cutting it. I managed to get to a few silk road cities, such as Gaochang, that I hadn't had a chance to see (or interest in seeing) the last time I went, when I knew practically nothing about the place.




I also got extremely close to Pakistan (roughly 144 km) on the Karakoram highway, referred to locally (very, very cynically) in CCP parlance as the China-Pakistan Friendship Highway. The views here were exceptionally beautiful: jagged peaks pierced up into the clouds from dry lake beds and there was a general transience about the route that moved me --- literally and emotionally. I want to go back there and cross into Pakistan that way; it's rather romantic, methinks. Also, the region is incredibly important and has stories that need to be told in a different way than we're used to.



That's it for now. I'll try and revamp this blog and keep it as a place of travel and ideas and photography, all as original as possible.

Sarah Palin

I say we nominate Charlie Gibson as John McCain's VP.

Kung Fu Restaurant

They presented our chopsticks like weapons. The food -- including Beggar's duck and steamed pumpkin -- was completely haphazard and made up, but was designed to make us more powerful. Theme songs from 80's Kung Fu TV shows played in the background. We ate beneath plastic weapons tied to the walls' wooden lattice work with red string. We drank beer from ceramic bowls.

Kung Fu restaurant! I love Beijing.

Beijing Opening Ceremonies

----Beijing, Ditan Gong Yuan, PRC.

A bunch of friends and myself sat in Ditan park last night and watched China toast itself into the night with hundreds of fiery explosions; 2,008 drummers in long, red-rimmed white robes; and perhaps most dramatic of all, a tiny, pig-tailed school girl singing in front of 91,000 people.

From where we sat in the park, in central Beijing, we could see the sky turn electric reds and greens above the two jumbotron-ish screens that depicted China's at-times ludicrous festivities.

I'm well aware of the political symbolism inherent in having world leaders show up at the National Stadium as if to pay ancient tribute to China's one-party government. It was a bit unsettling (as James Fallows notes) to have goose-stepping soldiers hoist the flags. (Though: who else; and "Man, did you see how they hoisted the Olympic flag?!") And the camera pans past China's grim-faced leaders (with the notable exception of sparkly-eyed "Grandpa Wen") were an omnipresent reminder of just who has power in China, and what that may mean for the future of all those in this country we love and hold dear.

I was overjoyed, though, to see China celebrate in such a monumental way. For anyone who knows anything about China -- its history, its politics, its heart-warmingly kind people -- and anything of the various diplomatic and military humiliations it has been forced to suffer or forced itself to suffer over the past 100 years, seeing the young Chinese in the park participate in displays of overt nationalism seemed somehow less hollow and jingoistic than I would usually accuse such things of being in the West.

It was amusing, though, to see all the terrible journalism it spawned (though not photojournalism, if you caught The New York Times photographers). Seeing writers try to cram "lavish" and "exuberant" and "extravagant" and "5,000 years of history" and "civilization" and "culture" in a lead sentence with "fireworks" and "despite widespread criticism" and "human rights" was too much for a writer to bear.

Including my second last paragraph, the Games have already birthed some long-winded and polemically subjective passages. Let the Games of overblown prose begin!