When you deal with money-based rewards and sanctions you’re bound to run into issues.
Check these out.
- The Kaum Ho Tire Industrial Company in South Korea, offers incentives for the use of birth control in the form of “priorities for houses and loans (and) paid holiday after a vasectomy.” Company-provided maternity care, on the other hand, is withheld after the birth of a third child, and workers wither large families are not promoted. Employees with more than 4 children must leave the firm.
- This report shows that these employment-based fertility reduction campaigns are becoming common practice in much of the developing world. In the Philippines, for example, workers at the Hawaiian-Philippine Company are visited at home by family planning motivators and are obligated to attend lectures on the “need” for birth control as part of their work schedules. At the same time, the workers are promised paid leave for undergoing permanent surgical sterilization (p. 82).
- Several large companies in India have similar programs. The Alembic Group of Industries, Ltd., in Bombay uses hired promoters to encourage sterilizations among workers, and requires that those refusing to be sterilized attend orientation sessions until they change their minds. And the company pays rewards to those workers to submit to surgical sterilization.
- Another large Bombay employer, Godrej and Boyce Manufacturing, offers both paid leave and bonus money to employees who choose sterilization, while delivering specific punishments to those having three or more children. Disincentives (include) no maternity benefits after 3 children, no housing for those with 3 or more children unless the worker was sterilized, and the fourth child would not be admitted to the company school. This is common for workers at major plants in many parts of India.
- Some projects in other countries put the pressure directly on motivators instead of employees. For example, family planning “field workers” in Bangladesh are given “expected targets” to meet. They receive referral fees for every employee brought to a clinic either for sterilization or for the insertion of an intrauterine contraceptive device (IUCD).
- The Family Planning Association of Sri Lanka works with labor unions to discourage births, employing thirty trained, professional family planning advocates to convince skeptics at participating work sites to undergo sterilization. Employees are required to complete questionnaires and to take part in unspecified “motivational activities,” and companies offer cash awards to those accepting sterilization. According to the World Bank report, the thirty paid motivators are “given 4 days/month to educate their fellow employees.”
“It can be all but impossible for employees to stand up to such pressure. Even those who stubbornly resist an employer’s incessant “motivational” exercises may find the “incentive” payments the only option available to them in a financial emergency.” Sooooo? Annnnnnd the problem is what? India’s population at 1.2 Billion is well on the way to ridiculous when compated against it’s rising poverty. Come on, stemming the tide with economic rewards is par for the course.
Western Involvement
Many of these “private sector” population projects are funded by government “aid” dollars from the West. For instance, the Pathfinder Fund, which masterminded the Bangladesh target-setting activity, is the beneficiary of a five-year contract with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), worth $136 million (U.S.). USAID has also backed a family planning “benefit” package for workers at Lectrol Lima and MIOLPO in Peru and an experimental activity at the Lever Borthoter plant in Nigeria to evaluate the reactions of workers to various tactics for persuading them to undergo sterilization. The U.S. has provided financial assistance to employment-based family planning promotional activities in Bolivia, Indonesia, Brazil, Thailand, Ghana, and the Dominican Republic, among other places.
“On the other hand, pro-natalist “welfare” programs in Europe will probably fail. It is far more difficult to motivate people to have children in an anti-natalist culture than it is to impose birth restrictions on others. The fascist governments in Germany and Italy also attempted to boost fertility in the years before World War II by linking monetary rewards to above-average family size. They found that, while state payments did produce a surge in annual births, they had no impact on completed family size. In other words, the incentives succeeded at getting couples to have children sooner but not in persuading them to have more.
However, even though the Nazis were unable to encourage procreation among Germans, they ran a highly effective population control campaign against Jews and Eastern Europeans.”
