LABOUR MARKETS & TECH

3 reasons for high suicide rate in apple sweatshops

1. No community due to overload of working hours > no friends/family connection

2. No hope because jobs are not temporary and there’s not opportunity for advancements

3. Alienation

Alienation

Karl Marx’s concept: estrangement from human’s essential nature (use their creative potential). Being deprived of it causes unhappiness.

Special economic zones

Foreign-trade zones & free-trade zones. Designated area of a country declared to be symbolically ‘outside’ of the country in where regular laws, duties, taxes, or other policies do not apply.

Power Definition by Weber

Ability to achieve one’s goals when other are trying to prevent them from being realized

Gross domestic product GDP

Total monetary value of goods/services produced within a country’s border during specific period of time

Colonization

Action of appropriating a place or domain for one’s own use

Economic globalization

Trade in goods, services, diversity of trade partnerships like countries, foreign direct investment, international debts, international reserves, international income payments.

Political globalization

Embassies, UN peacekeeping missions, international NGO’s present.

Social globalization

International telephone calls, money transfer, tourism, students, immigration, emigration, patent, McDonald stores, etc.

Bretton Woods conference

After WWII, the 44 nations allied against Germany gathered in Bretton Woods, USA with the purpose of making international trade easier. Idea that the more interconnected economically countries were, less likely they would go to war.

Uruguay rounds

Countries sought to protect the interest of their multinational corporations because their national economies relied on them.

3 ways we rely on the economy

1. Jobs

2. Pensions

3. Maintaining hone value

Free market/Laissez-faire economics

Unregulated system of economics exchange in which forms of centralized economic interventions by the government like taxes do not exist or are minimal

Supply and demand

Law that state that the more something is in demand and the lower its in supply, the more expensive will be and vice versa.

Progressive tax rates

Rates where the more one makes in income, the more tax they pay

Free trade agreement

Pact between 2 or more countries that makes it easier to trade goods across national boundaries.

By reducing/eliminating tariffs on imported goods, restrictions on exports and by protecting intellectual property rights,

Non-tariff barriers

Way to restrict trade using trade barriers in a form other than a tariff, like quotas, embargos, sanctions and levies

Quota

Limits number of goods or its monetary value that a country can import or export during particular period

Embargo

Ban on trade with a particular country

Sanctions

Laws passed to partially restrict trade with certain countries

Levies

Taxing authority or bank can seize property or the payment of a debt

Bourgeoisie and Proletariat

B: own the means of productions like business and factories

P: those that must sell their labour in order to sustain themselves

Surplus value

Workers producing more value in terms of products and being paired in wages

Labour union

Organization formed by workers in particular trade/industry/company for the purpose of improving pay/benefits/working conditions