In 1990, Dana Meadows gathered some information about the population of the world and famously turned it into the “State of the Village Report“. Meadows used the image of a community of 1,000 people to help us understand both the demographic makeup of our global population and some of the economic and environmental implications of how we live our lives.
The “global village” concept works because it’s easier for us understand personal relationships than impersonal ones and it’s easier to comprehend the effects of our actions on a local scale than it is on a global scale.
What would we see if we looked at work the same way? We all (well, most of us) work. It is one of the great unifying experiences that define us as people.
In this view, we are a village of 1,000 people and there is but one employer for whom we all work. That one employer embodies all of the labor of all humanity; it is a true multi-national corporation. For better or worse, it has its hand in all sorts of business dealings.
Here’s the employment report for World-Wide Global, Inc. and it’s not a pretty picture.
1,000 people live in our global village
• 60 people in the village control 59% of its total wealth (which means that 940 people survive with the remaining 41% of the wealth)
• 430 people in our village lack basic sanitation
• 147 are always hungry
• 22 are children living on the streets
In our village:
• 461 are working
• 61 are unemployed
Of those who work,
• 185 work in agriculture
• 95 work in industry, and
• 181 work by providing some kind of service
• 187 people in our village earn less than US$2.00 per day
• and 95 earn less than US$1.25 per day
However,
• 32 children under the age of 17 are required to work
• 19 of these children work under terrible conditions (that’s one in every six) such as working in mines, with chemicals and pesticides or with dangerous machinery
• 2 of our fellow villagers are slaves (2 out of every 3 slaves is a child)
When we start talking about child labor and slavery, the “world village” model breaks down. Some really important numbers just don’t translate well:
- 2 slaves? That’s not so bad, is it? The real number is closer to 12,300,000.
- Just 19 children required by life circumstance or force to work under extraordinarily dangerous conditions? Try 126,000,000. No, even that number doesn’t get the picture across. How about one of these:
o One hundred twenty-six million.
o Nearly four times the entire population of Canada.
o More than twice the population of France.
o Almost half the population of the United States.
The CIA estimates that about 800,000 people are trafficked annually across national borders (by way of comparison, San Francisco has a population of about 800,000). Even the word “trafficked” diminishes the reality of the situation: Trafficking , according to the CIA definition, involves transporting people away from the communities in which they live, by the threat or use of violence, deception, or coercion so they can be exploited as forced or enslaved workers for sex or labor. This number includes just those people who are moved across national borders; the CIA estimates that millions more are trafficked within their own countries. The vast majority (640,000) is female and up to 50% (400,000) are minors; 75% of all victims (600,000) are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation.
Who in their right mind would want to have anything to do with this outfit? Apparently, most of us don’t seem to mind.
