Corvée labour

Past and present. You can't make this stuff up.
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Apollonius
Posts: 1065
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 5:32 pm

Corvée labour

Post by Apollonius »

This is something you mostly find in history books. The Egyptians, the Incas, the Chinese, and similarly run empires built and maintained their irrigation systems, canals, roads, and walls using conscripted labour from the general population. Haiti faced a similar problem once the slaves were freed. Who will work in the sugar cane fields? They resorted forced labour policies in order to insure that the country could continue to export the only product that the world wanted from them.




Doctors and nurses forced to pick cotton - Ibrat Safo and William Kremer, BBC News, 15 October 2012
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19931639
Malvina, a nurse at a clinic in Tashkent, is angry.

"I am almost 50 years old and I've got asthma. We had to pick a lot of cotton, all by hand - and we were not paid anything!"

She has just returned from a 15-day stint picking cotton with other health professionals in rural Uzbekistan. It was hard toil and no-one was spared, whatever their seniority.

"Some people phoned our surgeon, who was with us in the fields.

"They would say things like: 'You operated on me a week ago. I've got a temperature - what shall I do?'"

Uzbekistan is one of the world's main producers of cotton and the crop is a mainstay of its economy. The government controls production and enforces Soviet-style quotas to get the harvest off the fields as quickly as possible. ...
Farcus

Re: Corvée labour

Post by Farcus »

Apollonius wrote:This is something you mostly find in history books. The Egyptians, the Incas, the Chinese, and similarly run empires built and maintained their irrigation systems, canals, roads, and walls using conscripted labour from the general population. Haiti faced a similar problem once the slaves were freed. Who will work in the sugar cane fields? They resorted forced labour policies in order to insure that the country could continue to export the only product that the world wanted from them.




Doctors and nurses forced to pick cotton - Ibrat Safo and William Kremer, BBC News, 15 October 2012
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19931639
Malvina, a nurse at a clinic in Tashkent, is angry.

"I am almost 50 years old and I've got asthma. We had to pick a lot of cotton, all by hand - and we were not paid anything!"

She has just returned from a 15-day stint picking cotton with other health professionals in rural Uzbekistan. It was hard toil and no-one was spared, whatever their seniority.

"Some people phoned our surgeon, who was with us in the fields.

"They would say things like: 'You operated on me a week ago. I've got a temperature - what shall I do?'"

Uzbekistan is one of the world's main producers of cotton and the crop is a mainstay of its economy. The government controls production and enforces Soviet-style quotas to get the harvest off the fields as quickly as possible. ...

Sounds like a 15% tax.

xTnw_MmVptQ
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Marcus
Posts: 2409
Joined: Tue Dec 27, 2011 2:23 pm
Location: Alaska

Socialism strikes again . . .

Post by Marcus »

Apollonius wrote:This is something you mostly find in . . .
It's something you nearly always find in socialist systems, Ap:
Uzbekistan is one of the world's main producers of cotton and the crop is a mainstay of its economy. The government controls production and enforces Soviet-style quotas to get the harvest off the fields as quickly as possible.

—from the link
"The jawbone of an ass is just as dangerous a weapon today as in Sampson's time."
--- Richard Nixon
******************
"I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels."
—John Calvin
Farcus

Re: Socialism strikes again . . .

Post by Farcus »

Marcus wrote:
Apollonius wrote:This is something you mostly find in . . .
It's something you nearly always find in socialist systems, Ap:
Uzbekistan is one of the world's main producers of cotton and the crop is a mainstay of its economy. The government controls production and enforces Soviet-style quotas to get the harvest off the fields as quickly as possible.

—from the link

Not as bad as being drafted for 4 years.

nSTp-EAkCcs
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