> The companies were always trying to get coworkers together and have events (on company time) that got teams mixing and socializing across departments.

Really depends. These are people in the same social class. But I have never seen a cleaning lady that works as a contractor being invited to a corporate party event.

> forcing employees back to the office so they can be less isolated.

They're forcing employees back to office so they can have more control.

> The companies were always trying to get coworkers together

Sure, get together for "team building" to increase productivity. Just don't do anything problematic like discuss your salary or benefits with any of your coworkers.

Union nutting if you may

> Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism

Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism.

Colonialism doesn't mean you make people do back-breaking manual labor; it means you exploit people far away to extract capital from where they are so people nearby can enjoy the fruits of others without having to do the work themselves.

> Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism and it cheapens the word when we call it that.

Definition: Colonialism is the practice by which a state or power extends and maintains political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a foreign territory and its people.

So yes, at scale, a rich country (political domination) employing people en masse in the developing world (economic domination), in this case showing them a slideshow of all the objectionable content westerners share, is colonialism.

The fact that it even exists as an option to simply "export" undesirable tasks to people overseas that you don't see and don't care about is itself an extension of and the maintenance of colonialism.

One thing never changes: class warfare :o

I’m not saying I disagree with the wording of the article. I’m saying that if one does disagree, then framing it in a context that makes more sense to your personal set of morals basically fixes the semantics and you can move on with actually discussing the article’s points.

The fact basically this entire comment section has been downvoted says so much about HN

It's in the interest of your employer to get the greatest amount of value for the smallest wage. That's not a moral statement about your particular employer, that's just a rational actor model of economics. In turn it's in your interest to expand least labor for the greatest pay. The asymmetry is your employer is an institution that can put incalculable resources into imposing its utility on you, from union busting and productivity spyware to lobbying national policy and conspiring to tilt the labor market... An employer can go months without significant fractions of employees, they can hire an entire hidden backup department in case of a strike, but you'll probably quickly starve without ongoing employment.

One side is trying to escape suffering and death, the other is trying to create profit from their work.

"Voluntary" is not a word I would use to describe any agreement where one side is choosing between the deal and physical danger or potential death.

I think the fact we take the temperature of the market and label it as a "strong" or "weak labor force" is a counterfactual to the idea there's equivalent exploitation.

It's mutually beneficial (otherwise one party or the other would terminate the contract), but that a wide window for the balance of benefits to shift.

There are post Soviet countries that still haven't returned to their 1991 GDP.

One can agree to the findings in Das Kapital, and also not agree to the claims of the Communist Manifesto.

And to be fair, quite a few of the findings are basically restatements from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Then again, most 'economists' rarely ever get past page 30 of that treatise, like all the "unseen hands that realllly have to prevent monopolies etc etc etc"

Dude, it worked for a billion people in China, lol.

I grew up under communism. I don't like or don't care for communism, but I can't dispute that China lifted a huge number of people out of a warlord torn mess and misery. To some extent, Soviets did the same to Russian peasants, but of course, it got perverted along the way. But all things considered, I would take communism under soviets to being a serf under the Tsar.

I’ve always wondered if if fate better than most, mentally, at that job - but for $2/hr I’m hardly willing to find out.

Old = good now? I don’t think it’s fruitful to romanticize farming. That’s the same problem with marxists with hammer and sickle

Isn't it kind of patriarchal to say that people in the third world shouldn't do jobs that they choose to do, because people in the first world think it's too exploitative? Give them tools that let them connect to other workers and organize, sure, but I think we should respect their autonomy to take the jobs they want to take.

What are you refuting by saying this? They didn't discount the importance of agriculture.