Adam Smith And Karl Marx's Theory Of The E-Waste Trade

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The e-waste trade is an exploitative industry in which electronics, circuit boards, old TV’s and desktops that are of no more value, get dumped into third world countries such as Ghana, Vietnam, Malaysia, Pakistan, Hong Kong, and many others. The people of these third world countries than burn the electronics in order to collect the remains and scraps of copper and iron that can be sold for money. The smell and burning smolder of plastic from the computers and old TV’s are incredibly toxic, slowly killing the children, women, and men that burn these e-waste remains in order to create a living for themselves. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim all have theories that can be applied and related to this trade of e-waste. Adam Smith’s theory …show more content…

Exploitation of workers is when someone purchases a good for a certain price that is just enough to reproduce the commodity, but not enough to compensate the amount of labor power or stress that the worker must undergo in order to create the product. Marx states …show more content…

Forced labor is the idea that everybody has their own specialized job within society that is given to them based off of what they are good at, or the resources that are allocated to them. Durkheim states “the sole cause then determining how labour is divided up is the diversity of abilities” (1933:312). According to Durkheim, these people are forced to complete this dangerous labor because they have the ability to burn the materials and recycle them for profit, where as people in first world countries do not have this ability. The workers that complete the manual labor of burning e-waste are subject to extremely toxic fumes and liquids that are slowly killing them. However, they are forced to work with e-waste because it is their only source of income. Also, since e-waste is constantly being dumped into their water supply, if they do not do the work to extract that materials, not only will they not have a source of income to survive, but the will also not have any source of drinkable water. As Durkheim would state, this labor was forced upon these people because they would not be able to survive without it even though it is slowly killing them. Ultimately, it is easy to see how through Durkheim’s theory of the forced division of labor, these workers are forced to burn e-waste in order to acquire an income and to ensure that their drinking water is as clean as they can possibly

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