Christmas: Brought to you by chinese slave labor

http://owni.eu/2011/12/21/christmas-brought-to-you-by-chinese-slave-labor-mattel-disney-china/

by meadhikari • 15 years ago

12 7 15 years ago

mwhooker• 15 years ago

Surely China is more culpable than Amercan consumers and corporations?

sp332• 15 years ago

If SOPA is getting this much flack for supporting a bill that threatens free speech, I think corporations that fund slave labor should be taken to task as well.

fragsworth• 15 years ago

There is a major flaw in economic logic here. Yes - Chinese labor conditions are bad. Unfortunately, if we boycott companies that use Chinese subcontractors, there will be less demand for Chinese labor, which will reduce the number of available jobs, thus reducing their salaries, and making their labor conditions even worse. A shitty job is better than no job.

If we spend more money on foreign-made goods, we provide more demand for their labor, and effectively increase the available labor options for foreigners, which improves their labor conditions.

seagaia• 15 years ago

Hm, this sounds tough then. So what would be a more viable mode of action? What do people currently do to work on improving these labor conditions?

I'll admit my first thought was "I'm just never going to buy these toys for so-and-so ever!", but unsurprisingly it's more complex than that.

DanielN• 15 years ago

To be clear, from what I could tell nothing described in this article is honest to goodness slave labor.

usaar333• 15 years ago

I really dislike these hyperbolic titles.

Yes, there are labor rights abuses in China, but nowhere does it come close to slave labor.

"According to him “the workers can not earn more than 154 euros a month, so they need those extra hours.""

Tossing around numbers means nothing. Chinese is a middle income country. 154 euros per month works out to be roughly half of China's GDP per capita, which is a pretty reasonable number. No you aren't going to be getting your own apartment on that, but it is a lot higher than say working on a farm.

If anything, the developing world's outsourcing so much low-end factory work to China has resulted in more people getting out of poverty faster than ever before in history.

That's not to say there aren't plenty of violations, which should be corrected, but I would hardly consider these workers to be systematically exploited.

Mz• 15 years ago

I am reminded of discussions I have had on health lists about errors being made in US hospitals which can lead to patients dying. One of the things I noted: I think more mistakes get made where I work during crunch times, when more work is coming in than we can handle in a timely manner with only working regular hours, so we get pressured to work faster, put in overtime, etc. Of course, no one is likely to die if someone in my department makes a mistake. I've had a class on workplace hazards, eons ago. Even at my job, where I work for a company with an excellent reputation as a fantastic place to work, people bitch about overtime, there is risk of winding up with carpal tunnel from doing your job, and so on.

I'm not saying there aren't real problems here, but a) almost everyone bitches about their job (and would bitch more if unemployed)and b) work will always entail health hazards (and not working is generally worse). I do think there is room for improvement in these things and I don't want to discourage people from discussing that, but vilifying employers like this makes no sense to me. Just like the factory workers take these awful jobs because it's better than the alternative (starvation and homelessness), the employers are also working within the constraints of real world limits.

At my job, we get asked to produce more during crunch times (and work overtime and all that) because a) turn around time impacts customer satisfaction, so not meeting the expected turn around time is a threat to the company health and welfare b) high demand is periodic/seasonal, so it does not make business sense to hire more people (hiring more people would hurt the bottom line, shorten turn around time further during non-peak times, thus raising customer expectation to this newer shorter turn around time, thus leaving the company in the same boat during certain seasons when demand is high but with increased overhead), c) when we get backed up, things snowball because more customers call in to complain about the turn around time, so rush requests and the like get sent over and so on which results in even more work and urgency and all that. Ironically, rush requests take more time and slow down production even more and in many cases if they left us alone, they would get it about as fast because we would get more done generally but the customers neither know that nor care, they just want their own needs met. The best way to deal with all this is try to keep things within the expected turn around time -- which means crunch times happen, like it or not, and it's not because the company is run by evil overlords or some crap.

I did write a proposal at work with intent to try to resolve some of the systemic issues and improve both company performance and the quality of the work experience for the people in production. It got met with excited enthusiasm and then promptly butchered and bastardized into something unrelated to the analysis I wrote. So if someone can come up with a better answer, a path forward to more humane conditions in these factories, and also find some means to effectively get the word out so people will, in fact, implement it, I am all for that. It's easy to bitch and criticize. It's hard to come up with real solutions that genuinely improve things -- which is exactly why the people running these factories aren't doing a better job of treating people more humanely and all that. And even if you can do the analysis and come up with an idea with potential, you still face challenges in "selling" it, in getting the word out so it actually gets done. Conversations like this tend to be long on vilifying people and short on exploring "what would actually work to improve things?" That never goes over all that well with me (not that anyone here is obligated to care what I feel about it, just sayin').

Christmas: Brought to you by chinese slave labor

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