I used to live in Latin America and I would avoid hiring shoe-shiner kids in spite of them following me each day. I thought it was sad to see these kids working at such an early age and thought hiring them would be me exploiting them. In hindsight I should’ve just hired them, they need the money. it’s horrible people live in poverty and have to work such jobs, but IMO hiring them helps them more than not hiring them.
I think an additional problem with kids in developing countries is that hiring them (for shoe shining, lawn mowing, ...) gives them an incentive to drop out of school. They might make some extra money in the short term, but lose an education and higher earning potential long term. It's not trivial, certainly for an outsider, to judge what the right course of action is.
No, hiring them to shine your shoes would not have helped, it only perpetuates the system. What is needed is a social change that eliminates the need. Sadly this sometimes only happens when the oppressed party suffers enough to elicit real sympathetic action or in extreme cases an uprising.
As you didn't hire them, presumably your shoes didn't need shining so they were not really performing a necessary function anyway. This suggests that the system continues to exist partly because some people like the idea of paying a pittance to someone to perform a menial job simply because it makes them feel good or superior instead of donating that money to an effort to eliminate the poverty in question.
If they weren't shining shoes for money, they'd be straight begging or stealing. So what should we do with the homeless who only beg for money? Tell them to get a real job? It doesn't work like this, at least not in countries which are less developed. Here we can't create millions of entry-level jobs for people who mostly don't have any type of formal education overnight.
Seeing kids work is not right by our standards but people have to eat. Luckily I hardly ever see that here. But I see a lot of people that are willing to work, even if the job is unnecessary by your definition: Cleaning windscreens, carrying bags, singing or other artistic presentations, selling candy or water...
I give them money, they are part of this society and most of the time they did not choose this route. I would like to do more but unfortunately my time is very limited.
>No, hiring them to shine your shoes would not have helped, it only perpetuates the system. What is needed is a social change that eliminates the need.
While you're right that the system needs to change, giving the shoeshine boy a peso might be the best help that someone in GP's position could have given.
Their life is still terrible, but at least they're not hungry for a night.
>Sadly this sometimes only happens when the oppressed party suffers enough to elicit real sympathetic action or in extreme cases an uprising.
That's really dark, man, and I don't think it's true. Plenty of groups have won their rights without being deliberately ground into the dirt by another section of society.
>This suggests that the system continues to exist partly because some people like the idea of paying a pittance to someone to perform a menial job simply because it makes them feel good or superior
I run a retail business, and much of what we sell is like this. Even for things that have utility (e.g. a washing machine), the price you'd pay at a retail store is often (but not always) significantly higher than the value of the good itself sold on, say, Facebook Marketplace. A "$2000 washing machine" is often just a $600 washing machine plus $1400 worth of making the customer feel special.
You can say this is wrong or wasteful, but it's part of human nature and exists across all cultures.
>donating that money to an effort to eliminate the poverty in question.
Steve Hughes argues against this better than I ever could:
