Would aid flourish without religion? | The question | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
If it weren't for organised religions, would there be as much humanitarian aid in the world? If not, why not?
Médecins sans Frontières transformed their Port-Au-Prince offices into a makeshift hospital after the Haiti earthquake. Photograph: Médecins sans Frontières/AFP/GettyWould humanitarian aid flourish without religion? In one sense, the answer is obvious. There are entirely secular organisations, like Médecins sans Frontières, or Oxfam, which function without any religious allegiance at all. Most successful charities in the west, whether they are religious or not, must stress that they are not biased in their giving if they hope to raise funds. Yet it is also true that religious networks are essential to the delivery of aid and education: the Catholic church runs a third of all the schools in Africa.
Organised religions are able to connect congregations in the developed world with their counterparts in the developing world and make both feel that they are part of the same great enterprise. As the (atheist) psychologist Jonathan Haidt has observed:
"In the US, religious believers give more money than secular [even] to secular charities, and to their neighbours. They give more of their time, too, and of their blood. Even if you excuse secular liberals from charity because they vote for government welfare programs, it is awfully hard to explain why secular liberals give so little blood."
Muslims are enjoined by their religion to give 2.5% of their income to charity and many do, while the rich, secular nations of the world struggle to give 0.7% of their GDP to foreign aid.
This isn't a question about whether believers are morally superior. But it does seem they find it easier to translate compassion into action. Is this really true, and if it is, what can the secular charities do to match them?
Showing Chinese sweatshop workers slumped over their desks with exhaustion, it is an image that Microsoft won't want the world to see. Employed for gruelling 15-hour shifts, in appalling conditions and 86f heat, many fall asleep on their stations during their meagre ten-minute breaks.
For as little as 34p an hour, the men and women work six or seven days a week, making computer mice and web cams for the American multinational computer company. This photo and others like it were smuggled out of the KYE Systems factory at Dongguan, China, as part of a three-year investigation by the National Labour Committee, a human rights organisation which campaigns for workers across the globe.
The mostly female workers, aged 18 to 25, work from 7.45am to 10.55pm, sometimes with 1,000 workers crammed into one 105ft by 105ft room. They are not allowed to talk or listen to music, are forced to eat substandard meals from the factory cafeterias, have no bathroom breaks during their shifts and must clean the toilets as discipline, according to the NLC.
The workers also sleep on site, in factory dormitories, with 14 workers to a room. They must buy their own mattresses and bedding, or else sleep on 28in-wide plywood boards. They 'shower' with a sponge and a bucket. And many of the workers, because they are young women, are regularly sexually harassed, the NLC claimed.
The organisation said that one worker was even fined for losing his finger while operating a hole punch press. Microsoft is not the only company to outsource manufacturing to KYE, but it accounts for about 30 per cent of the factory's work, the NLC said. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Foxconn, Acer, Logitech and Asus also use KYE Systems. Microsoft, which exports much of the hardware made at the factory to America, Europe and Japan, said that it is taking the claims seriously and has begun an investigation.
One employee told the NLC: 'We are like prisoners. It seems like we live only to work - we do not work to live. We do not live a life, only work.'The NLC's report included an account from one worker whose job consisted entirely of sticking selfadhesive rubber feet to the bottom of Microsoft computer mice. But the monotony of sitting or standing for 12 hours, applying foot after foot to mouse after mouse, was not the worst of the worker's testimony. It was the militaristic management and sleep deprivation that affected the worker most. 'I know I can choose not to work overtime, but if I don't work overtime then I am stuck with only 770 Chinese yuan (£72.77p) per month in basic wages,' the worker said.
