Diminishing Mental Health: Violations of workers’ rights and expectations to follow policies demanding inhumane mistreatment of children

Abstract

In this article, the author provides an analysis of the likely negative impacts on the mental health of children being held as undocumented immigrants in detention centers in the United States. Their psychological trauma involves isolation, separation anxiety, scopophobia, and fear of abandonment called “abandonment neurosis.” Children are being forcefully separated from their parents at borders. Parents are placed in different centers than their children. They do not know where their children are and where their parents are or if they are alive, in many cases. Interviews being broadcasted in the United States and abroad are provided and give first-hand accounts of people working with the children undergoing traumatic experiences, being separated from their siblings. The author argues that the mental health problems, from which the children will struggle to recover, are symptomatic of the ways a society with declining mental health mistreats people. Several causes for this in the American society are discussed, including frequent occurrences of violations of workers’ rights, vast and increasing income and wealth inequality, corporations that promote destruction (weapon manufacturers for wars), and excessive and increasing assault, suicide, drug overdose, and homicide rates.

(A Spanish version that is similar to this article has been published through the University of Guadalajara within the Departamento de Clínicas de Salud Mental del Centro Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud in Mexico)

Brant, W.  (2018).  “Disminución de la salud mental: ansiedad en niños inmigrantes en la frontera del sur de los Estados Unidos de América.”  Metodología, Instrumentación, Lógica, Estadística, Evidencias y Epistmología en Salud.  1: 69-89.

 

Introduction

One way of viewing a major problem that negatively impacts thousands of families being separated at the border is that workers at the border are sacrificing professionalism for bureaucratic rules and inhumane mistreatments of families.  However, this way of viewing the situation is misguided.  It is actually the view espoused by corporate spokespeople and corporations that hire and frequently dismiss workers.

Frequent dismissals happen to disgruntled workers who refuse to mistreat people during their most legally vulnerable status, namely, directly after an international border crossing.  Directly after an international border crossing, an individual’s rights are rescinded (i.e., citizens and non-citizens).  Without cause, he or she may be searched internally (i.e., the mouth and anus), and all of his or her belongings can be searched as well.  All of these factors play enormous roles with the mental health of masses of people.  The mental health of workers is naturally impacted negatively, which means that these workers work under conditions for organizations that are responsible for their workers’ rights being violated, too.

Numerous factors influence mental health, especially the lack of sleep, physical exercise and other practical routines. It should be a known fact that humans lack knowledge about ourselves, including concepts of mental health and measurements of it. For example, no human being has ever been observed in such a way that his or her entire life has been recorded for scientific purposes. We still do not have that level of analysis or that level of observation (Brant, 2018, Ch. 2). With new practices and the use of technology and surveillance in the main cities of the world, especially in China, this will probably change in the near future affecting the scope of our knowledge.

There are numerous levels of social influence on mental health, including social groups (e.g., families and friends) and other groups (e.g., groups that are broadcasted through the media). However, in some cases, institutions and social systems have tremendous impacts on mental health. Policies can be implemented or ignored, making their approval difficult and complicating the processes to make new laws.

On the United States-Mexico border, in many states and cities, thousands of children are being placed in detention centers. They are separated from their parents. They are kept separate from their parents and siblings. After the separation between the children, parents and siblings, the children are kept isolated in the institutions. According to reports, children are being punished if they touch or hug their siblings. Some are sedated and threatened, and some are having their saliva samples taken to extract their DNA.

However, none of these reports is considered as evidence in the investigations of the detention centers. The companies that own the detention centers are given a large amount of time and warnings before they have to face any legal consequences. This is according to data reported by workers and undocumented children. In some cases, children have been returned to their parents, but the time to achieve these reunions is alarmingly long.

 

Exposure of mental health problems and corporate and bureaucratic responses

After visiting one of the child detention centers in Texas, the president of The Academy of American Pediatricians, Dr. Colleen Kraft, said,

“As a pediatrician, I know what it takes to build child health. I know what is needed to interrupt children’s health, and I am seeing in front of me that the health of these children is interrupted, by the elimination of the only figure in their lives that can help protect them in times of crisis and judgment. They were very young children. We know that the brain has most of its development between birth and three years of age, so a day of separation is like a week or a month apart when we get older. So, the worst that has happened to these younger children, most of them mentally, happens in that age group. ”

Anxiety about separation often causes fear of abandonment. In her article, “For Some Families, a Second Separation Awaits,” for The Immigration, Renée Feltz (DemocracyNow!, 2018c) argues that the legal bureaucracy for immigrants who request asylum for violence in their home countries is leading to traumatic and prolonged separations from the parents of their children.  According to Renée Feltz in DemocracyNow! (2018c) on July 13^th,

“These are parents whose children think they abandon them.  We’ve heard reports that the children can’t even remember what their parents look like, and now, once that parent is reunited, if they’re able to be reunited, they’re going to have to face a second separation.”

Mental health experts who work with children claim that the traumatic separations of some 3,500 children since October 2017 (Armentrout, 2018), involve children clinging desperately to their parents and refusing to leave them out of reach. Children are anxious, have trouble sleeping, recurrent nightmares and cry uncontrollably and inconsolably. Many have trouble building confidence after meeting their parents, have problems controlling their anger and have developed eating disorders.

In Chicago, children report that at a Heartland Alliance detention center, “Casa Guadalupe,” adults shouted, dragged and threatened them. Threats include telling children that they will have to stay at the center until they are eighteen and that they will have to remain there forever (Miller, 2018a, Telez, 2018). According to reports, threats are used to prevent children from embracing their siblings. The children also report that the surveillance included several cameras pointing at them at all times. This can cause scopophobia. The complaints in Chicago have reached the senator from Illinois, Dick Durban, who has requested an investigation.

However, the corporation, Heartland Alliance, has responded by asking its public relations experts to maintain that the allegations go against their values.  The corporation claims that it accepts the investigation and claims that it dismisses any staff member who breaks the protocol or puts any child in danger. As expected, spokeswoman Mailee Garcia of the Heartland Alliance defends the good intentions and practices of her company.

What is surprising is that the descriptions of children’s experiences and behaviors, after submitting to the institutional practices of immigrant detention centers, are insufficient for bureaucrats to recognize the problem and implement the changes to create ethical and legal policies.  In my opinion, the so-called “zero tolerance immigration policy” of the US president’s administration in 2018 seems to be experimenting with strategies to systematically dissuade immigrants from entering the United States for fear of inhumane treatment.  Children have described detention centers as “prisons.”

Since November 2016, ICE in the United States maintains 65% of immigrants in private prisons (Pauly, 2017). Most of the prisons are owned by GEO Group and CoreCivic. Corporations make money from the government of the United States for every day and night that immigrants stay. The conditions are questionable for children and parents who are separated. Private prisons have terrible stories of human rights violations. The current administration is overlooking some of the inhuman conditions for detainees and signing new contracts to detain even more immigrants (Pauly, 2017). Medical treatments are poor in many detention centers. Many of the children leave the centers with scabies and lice (DemocracyNow!, 2018b).

In the Heartland Alliance, reports say that one child was not treated for a broken arm and another five-year-old was repeatedly injected with drugs that cause drowsiness (Miller, 2018b). Several have reported that they have witnessed injections in younger children and that has led to nightmares. They reported that they live in fear of being injected.  Many of the children have acted erratically and cried after seeing the police officers even after meeting their parents. Because they fear that their parents will be detained by the authorities and separated from them. From the interviews of parents and children, we can observe the abandonment neurosis many months after their experiences in the corporate centers.

 

Four very common types of cases where abandonment neurosis is expressed in adulthood

Some ways in which the personalities of children separated from their parents are being formed are extremely maladaptive and will affect them for the rest of their lives, especially if they do not undergo professional treatment for their mental health. According to the psychoanalyst, Germaine Geux (1950/2015, 6), the following examples serve as a common horizon that psychoanalysts have observed in their practices over the years,

“Example 1 : Mrs X, married, a mother, who lives in terror of losing her family and finding herself alone. A friend of hers lost both parents just a few days apart. Mrs X, in the grip of a dark and intense anxiety, found slight relief by requiring her mother, father, and husband to be by her side day and night.

Example 2 : Miss N, throughout childhood, felt her mother’s rejection; she was a woman of little time and sentiment who greeted all expressions of affection with sarcasm. As a child, Miss N once brought a friend home, and, while witnessing her mother treat the little girl similarly, felt her own throat tighten, until she could not swallow. She began to tremble, broke into a cold sweat, and, finally, without explanation, stormed off in an affective eruption she could not control.

Example 3 : Mr Z was materially pampered throughout childhood but totally neglected psychologically. He presented with intense anxiety and an apparent abandonment neurosis. His parents, staunch altruists, lavished attention on associates and strangers at the expense of their children. Now married, Mr Z cannot bear his wife meeting friends. Agreeing to attend a dinner party with her, on the evening in question, invariably an ill-tempered Mr Z, complaining of feeling unwell, returned home suffering insurmountable fatigue and anxiety. On good days he can cope until evening, but after dinner will ask to be excused and retire to bed, but when the anxiety is too intense, no words from his wife can induce him to remain: his  pain  having returned, he retires to bed, sulking like a child, clutching her to his side for extended periods.

Example 4 : Mrs V, who usually speaks with ease, arrived at one session in the grip of an anxiety so fierce she was unable to utter a word; her anguished silence continued until finally Mrs V managed to say, “I heard you laugh.” She then burst into tears and continued to sob inconsolably. Little by little, I learnt she had arrived early that day, and heard the session preceding hers conclude with laughter, which immediately revived memories from her past: “My mother would laugh with my older brothers and sisters, they were all much smarter than me and my mother preferred them. I was the littlest, a nuisance, and only good for telling off. So here it’s the same, I bore you, I’m stupid . . . etc.” Hence, feelings of inferiority and fear of being cast out, heightening despair and anxiety.”

We must consider that the impacts on the personalities of separated children will resemble these four examples of abandonment neurosis. We need to consider how the constant mistreatments will negatively impact large portions of the American workforce, to0. Continually undergoing the experiences of mistreatments of children at work are certainly violations of workers’ rights and human rights.

In addition, reactive aggression and other antisocial behaviors are likely to occur, such as reported cases of separated children violently pushing younger children who are trying to hug them after undergoing these experiences in detention centers where they are not allowed to touch anyone. The separations between children and their parents at the borders transform the personalities of the children, making them more neurotic. All suffer more and seem to have chronic anxiety, although the intensity of their anxiety varies from being bearable to anguish, suicidal thoughts, homicidal thoughts and so on. Threats of separation and frustration can create a crisis in which the person ceases his or her acts of love and behaviorally tends towards isolation.

 

Interview of a conscientious objector who resigned

A corporation directly involved in the detention of children is: Southwest Key. It operates 27 facilities in California, Texas and Arizona. The Southwest Key facility in Brownsville, Texas has the capacity for 1,500 children. In some cases where children have reunited with their parents, they have difficulty recognizing that they have been reunited with their families because the time for this to happen is alarmingly long. Generally, the separation of the parents happens clandestinely on the corporate property.

These children are being isolated from each other with rules implemented by corporate employees that establish, that children are not allowed to touch each other, and hugs are especially forbidden, this includes hugging between siblings. An employee, Mr. Antar Davidson (DemocracyNow!, 2018a) in Arizona, who resigned commented:

“Well, it was pretty much a day of being shown a very uncompassionate organization claiming to be a humanitarian nonprofit.  The children were separated from their mother.  And the next day, at two in the morning, they left.  I believe it was a facility in Texas.  They arrived at the Tucson facility at 9:30 in the morning, having not had slept the entire night.  They were showered, fed.  They went through the intake process.  My shift started at 1:30.  So, I was eventually able to start talking to them.

The oldest brother as soon as I started speaking Portuguese, burst out crying.  And he explained to me that he thought that his mom had disappeared.  In Brazil, when the government tells you that someone has disappeared, it has a very different connotation than it does here, that essentially means that they are dead.  So, I had to affirm to him first that his mom was not in fact dead, and then basically proceed to try to explain to him, with no clear answers, kind of where his mom was, what kind of facility.  We had no idea.  The case managers had no idea.  So then, after that, I was told to supervise them in a classroom.  It was a brother who was 16, his sister who was 10, and their younger brother who was 8, along with a 5-year-old Guatemalan girl who came with them from Texas and had made friends with the sister.  They had begun asking me—This was about 4:00 in the afternoon.

They had begun asking me to sleep in a bed.  They were very tired.  They hadn’t slept the whole night.  They had just been separated from their mom.  I requested… beds for them so that they could sleep.  They told me, “Negative,” didn’t even really give me a reason.  And essentially, I was forced to offer to sweep the floor to make a space for them to sleep on the floor, to which I felt extremely disgusted.  And that was only the beginning.  So, after having asked them to sleep on the floor and sweeping the floor, I went on to teach my capoeira class, which I had been doing at Southwest Key.  And then, later on in the evening, it was not until 8:00 that the kids were assigned rooms.

In Spanish and English, they were all trying to explain to the kids that they would all then be separated, the brother, both—all three of the siblings in separate rooms.  So, they responded to this by basically clinging to each other and crying.  So, then I was called on the radio, and I was told over the radio, “Antar, come over here.  You need to tell them that they cannot hug.  They can’t hug.”  So, I said, “I don’t know that I’m going to that, but I’m on my way.”  So, I arrived to the scene, and the three siblings were clutching each other for dear life, tears streaming down their face.  I approached the oldest brother, and I said, “bro, you’ve gotta be strong.”  And he turns to me with tears streaming down his face, and he says, “How?  How can I be strong?  Look at my brother.  Look at my sister.  They’re trying to separate us again.”  And I didn’t know—I just put my head down. I did not know what to respond to him.

So, at that moment, the shift leader ran up to me and very aggressively told me “!Diles que no pueden abrazar! Tell them that they can’t hug!”  Now, this is also in front of other children, other employees, who are watching this.  And so she screams at me to tell them not to hug, that they’re not allowed to hug.  That’s the rule at Southwest Key.  And meanwhile, I’m looking at these kids. It’s the two little—the two little siblings just, you know, thinking they are going to be ripped now from their brother’s arms, and the brother crying because he can’t do anything, necessarily.  And I told her at that point, when she told me to do that—I told her, “I’m sorry, but as a human being, that’s not something that I can do. You’re welcome to do it yourself,” to which she replied, first, that she would report me to the supervisor, and then she went directly to them and said, “no puedes abrazar, You are not allowed to hug.” And he looks at me, with tears streaming down his face, in utter disbelief that that would happen.  It was at that moment that I realized that if I were to continue with Southwest Key, at least here in this facility, that I’d be told to do things that were against what I’m now seeing, from the response of the world, is against the code of all humans’ morality.”

Antar Davidson reported this and resigned from Southwest Key after several days of filing complaints against the corporation. Mr. Davidson also informs us that the executive director, Dr. Juan Sanchez, used questionable business tactics to distract workers from the trauma they experienced in working with children separated from their parents. One of the tactics involved corporate employees focusing on a child with acne. After telling the employees the sad story about the child with acne, the executive director asked the employees to donate 240 dollars to the child or $ 10 per month of their paychecks.

In such a situation, workers are likely to believe that it is possible to be fired if they refuse to donate. Such tactics can work as a way to prove your allegiance to the corporation. The managers passed forms so that all workers would agree to participate in the donation. This fraudulent tactic probably aims to reduce labor costs and, to make matters worse, makes it more likely that the executive director receives a salary of more than one million dollars per year.

 

Immigration policies in the United States

Torrie Hester (Bankston, 2010, p.275) writes that deportation is a legal process in which a government expels non-citizens from the nation.  The United States has used this scheme to deport more than 40,000,000 immigrants from 1892 to 2000. Hester (ibid., P 275) writes:

“In the Immigration Act of 1997, however, Congress and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) stopped using the term “deportation.”  In the early twenty-first century, U.S. immigration officials deport immigrants through formal processes, officially called removals, and returns, when immigrants “voluntarily” depart the country after being detained by immigration officials.  The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the Department of Homeland Security administers immigrants returns and removals.”

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE of the Department of Homeland Security administers the deportations of immigrants.  In mid-December 2017, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement of the Department of Homeland Security stated:

“While the total removals declined from 240,255 in FY2016 to 226,119 in FY2017, the proportion resulting from ICE arrests increased from 65,332 or 27 percent of total removals in FY2016 to 81,603, or 36 percent of total removals in FY2017.”

In the Encyclopedia of American Immigration, R. Baird Shuman (Bankston, 2010, p 179) argues that there were approximately five million immigrant children living in the United States during the first decade of this century. Shuman (ibid.) writes:

“Although most legislation on immigration professes respect for family unification, significant problems arise for the children of undocumented aliens.  Under US law, all children born within the United States or in its territories are automatically U.S. citizens.  Their birth certificates are proof of their citizenship, even if they are born while their parents are in the United States illegally.  If that is the case, their parents remain viewed as undocumented aliens and are, if apprehended, subject to deportation.  The citizenship of children thus has little bearing on the parents’ status as illegals.  Although these children frequently have lived much of their lives within the United States, they are often deported as illegals and returned to countries whose languages they do not speak and whose customs they do not know.”

In an interview on June 29^th of William Clinton, the interviewer, Trevor Noah, and former US President Clinton said:

Noah: “As a president, how do you balance keeping your borders intact while also treating people who have come into the country undocumented in a humane manner?

Clinton: Well, first of all, every country is entitled to protect its borders.  We have two border threats today.  Fentanyl coming in from China is killing a lot of Americans, and heroine coming over the southern border is causing a lot of trouble, but there’s been almost no net in migration from Mexico since 2010.  It’s a made-up problem.  As the mayor of Brownsville, Texas said the other day, these people are from Central America.  They’re fleeing narcotraffickers.  The law says that those who have a legitimate fear can be given asylum in our country, and those who are disappointed that their countries are interrupted by narcotraffickers and who can’t make a living are ineligible.  That’s the law now.  There is a humane way to do that without taking the kids away from their parents.  There is nothing in the law that says they have to do this.”

One could rightfully claim that it seems a few people who have power (financial, political, etc.) compete to acquire all the resources they can before they run out, which would leave the majority dying of hunger. There are notorious religious ideas about the end of the world, and many people feel that their generation is special. They believe that the same sorts of believers will go up to heaven and the earth will no longer be their home. In each of these demented views, destructiveness has no consequences.

 

The directions of imperialism and the insane society

We have reason to believe that most institutions in the American society are losing the faces of their moral integrity. The traumatic events faced by migrant workers and immigrants can also be viewed as distractions from the millions who will die in Yemen in 2018 through weapons manufactured in the United States and the actions of Saudi Arabia and many neighboring countries. The United States attacked Yemen 105 times in 2017 with drones and has been involved in raids on the ground with the United Arab Emirates. Several deaths of civilians and children have been reported, including a school bus with several dozen children. It is estimated that there are 8 million people at the peak of starvation and one million with cholera in Yemen as a result of the war led by Saudi Arabia (Human Rights Watch, 2018).

Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Niger, Somalia, Yemen are countries where the United States uses weapons of war in 2018 (Liautaud, 2018; De Luce & Naylor, 2018). The United States has been conducting devastating military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively since 2001 and 2003. The war in Afghanistan is longer than every war in US history. In addition, Pakistan has been attacked by unmanned aircraft since 2004 (De Luce & Naylor, 2018). According to the former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis (2018, 134:48 min.):

“The most important part of your civil society’s mechanism is the industrial military complex.  When Boeing gets a contract to build the new generation of hydro-jets (quadrillions, yeah?), depending on the system, but you are going to have to build the system on a new site in Missouri, in the deficit places, the spare parts of this and that, there and so on.  To keep this going, you need some wars.

I’m not proposing that this is how it should be.  I’m just describing it.  In 1991, the Treasury Department of (USA) this country had a major, major headache.  The Cold War had finished.  So, they could no longer pass through congress, on the basis of national security, the bills that were necessary in order to keep replacing the cruise and Pershing missiles.  So, they had to clear the stock.  So, you had a war, the first war, in Iraq.  And they cleared it, and I remember the war had finished and they were going to the desert to fire all the Cruise and Pershing missiles to get rid of them so that they could order new ones in order to maintain.

So, capitalism is just a very irrational system because…it’s a very simple reason why it’s so irrational because it has a productive capacity.  Its capacity to produce far exceeds its capacity to consume.  So, something has to make up this difference, and war is a result.”

In commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama (2018, 35:47) declared:

“Strong man politics are ascended, suddenly, whereby elections and some pretense of democracy are maintained, the form of it, but those in power seek to undermine every institution or norm that gives democracy meaning.”

Some thinkers have said that the rates of suicide, homicide, war and violent crimes in a country determine that it is an insane society (Fromm, 1955). In 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control (2018a) of the United States, approximately 45,000 people who were more than ten years old died of suicide. In addition, more than half of the suicides were committed by people who did not have a mental health disorder or were not diagnosed with one.

Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the United States of America. Suicide rates increased by 25.4% from 1999 to 2016. From 2012 to 2016, naloxone administration events in emergency medical services increased at a rate of 75.1%. Administrations increased from 573.6 to 1004.4 administrations per 100,000 events of emergency medical services, and statistics are reflecting the increase of 79.7% in mortality from opioid overdoses. Overdoses increased from 7.4 deaths per 100,000 people to 13.3 (Cash et al., 2018).

In the United States, the Center for Disease Control (2018b) stated that the weekly amount of violence in the workplace has been averaging 20 homicides and 18,000 assaults.  It has therefore become increasingly more dangerous to work in the United States. One million workers are attacked annually at work, for instance. Homicide has become the second leading cause of death at work in the US. The main cause of death comes from the deaths of motor vehicles.

Some people have argued that the growing inequality between the extremely wealthy and the poor in America as well as the decrease in wages (i.e., when inflation is considered) is a major cause of many of the social problems and deserves much attention. Former presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (2018, 1:28) asked:

“How does it happen that these very same companies are owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country?  Jeff Bezos, worth $150 billion, places many of his workers’ wages so low that they are forced to go on government programs, like Medicaid or Food Stamps.  The CEO of Disney, Bob Iger, makes $400 million over a four-year period, and yet there are people who are working for Disney Land who are forced to sleep in their cars and literally don’t have enough money for the nutrition that they need to survive.  Those are the kinds of issues that we as a nation have to address. I’m sorry that the national media is not interested in those issues, but I am interested in those issues.  And we’re going to continue to focus on issues of wealth and income inequality and the struggles that many working people face in America.”

Mr. Torsten Sløk is the chief international economist at Deutsche Bank. He sent a recent chart to clients that show the proportion of wealth of American households by income level. The top 0.1% of households have approximately the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90% (Holodny, 2016). The last time that the top 0.1% had the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90% was directly before the Great Depression (ibid.).

American society has been aimed at generating great wealth for the business class and, in turn, poverty for workers, increases in destructive behaviors, belligerent tendencies, degradation of environments and uncertainty about the future. It has never been as close in history to nuclear obliteration as we are now. The corporate cultures of greed are playing leading roles in the orientation of society, and a risky marriage has been established between financial power, military power and political power with a billionaire who has conducted business on a regular basis in the gray area of the law, doing what is legal but also unethical.

 

Conclusion

The moral integrity of many sorts of American institutions have been thoroughly undermined by the incidents of undocumented and intentionally separated children at the US border.  Workers’ rights have been violated regularly, and workers’ perceptions of their own power to create changes is at a low point, especially at borders and in child detention centers for immigrants.

Workers are competing to get jobs where people are regularly mistreated.  The workers sacrifice their mental health while working for corporations that lie directly when they claim that they value their workers.  The conscientious objectors, like Antar Davidson, are fortunate because they realize they can quit and find other jobs.  Others are placed in the unfortunate positions of having to work extra hours to support their families.  They feel obligated to handle their massive credit card debts (about 5,000 dollars on average in the USA) and other debts.

Immigrant children have been placed in life-altering positions of facing overly strict political policies enforced at the American borders.  Many have undergone tragic experiences in detention centers.  Children are surrounded by people who dislike their jobs.  They have had to face workers who acquiesce and workers who have no trouble enforcing inhumane policies on children who are not their own.

There have been Americans protesting at the detention centers, immigration lawyers donating their services and other types of support.  However, the status of the democracy has been undermined.  The news organizations broadcast the crimes as merely “alleged” ones.  There is shamelessness that coincides with publications of people’s names who are in the positions, as workers but especially managers and CEOs, who should be held morally and legally responsible.

The talk of investigating these places with horrid practices by politicians is used to grant the perpetrators more time and money.  Prof. Porfirio Parra (1921, p. 563) wrote that “in the practical sciences, on the contrary, the concept of morality is inseparable from the pieces of knowledge.”  What counts as “evidence” for politicians, who are acquiescing, is so far removed from the moral realm and any practical science that it has become “evidence in a corrupted bureaucratic system.”

Something more needs to be accomplished instead of waiting patiently for these managers in the corporate culture to begin treating people humanely.  Teach these workers who are struggling to forget about humanity.  Write letters, emails, and send goods to the workers and children.  Show these people how adults without personality disorders behave.  Let them know that their workers’ rights are being violated, people’s lives are at stake, and the “pursuit of happiness” and freedoms are being stifled in a society that has such a vast amount of wasted potential right now, and share your hope with your resistance and reasonable demands.

 

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