September 23, 2003
Virtual corporate slavery spreading.
Via
Common Dreams, is an article
The Price of Dignity by Anita Roddick detailing the accelerating spread of virtual slavery around the world. I'm a little skeptical of blaming it entirely on China, but that does seem to be the fastest growing area at the moment.
Multinational companies sourcing production in China are having an enormous impact on the global economy, lowering wages and rolling back labor rights. Workers in China assembling healthcare products for companies such as Viva and Sport-Elec are being forced to work 16 hours a day, seven days a week (with just 12 days off a year) for 16 cents an hour. There is no overtime premium. The workers have no health insurance and no pensions. If they try to organize, they will be fired, perhaps even beaten and imprisoned.
It does not have to be like this. But what happens when workers dare to stand up to ask that their basic rights be respected? When young women in Bangladesh, being paid just five cents for every $17.99 Disney shirt they sewed, asked for one day a week off, the Walt Disney Company responded by pulling its work from the factory. These women needed these jobs, but they also wanted to be treated as human beings. The message Disney is delivering to workers across the developing world is that if you dare to raise your voice, you too will be fired and thrown out on the street with nothing.
One thing is certain in the new global economy: workers struggling for their rights cannot succeed if there is not also simultaneous pressure on the corporations in their marketplaces. I am not talking about a boycott. It must be the very opposite: what is needed are campaigns to keep jobs in the developing world while at the same time working to guarantee respect for worker rights.
This is where the consumer comes in. We in the developed world hold the key to ending child labor and sweatshop abuses. If enough of us care, and if enough of us act, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
While "evil" corporations certainly share a lot of the responsibility, I can't help but feel that American workers and labor unions could be doing a hell of a lot more to organize and fight this. But instead they just want to portray workers in other countries as the enemy, and focus on their own immediate short-term interests. Not just cutting their own throat but that of everybody else's as well. Sad. Ms. Roddick doesn't even mention American unions, but toes the "blame-the-corporate-for-everything" line that so many progressives and liberals use today to avoid accepting responsibility for their mistakes.
One interesting thing the article shows is that jobs are moving from countries such as Mexico to even poorer countries. That should put paid to the notion that NAFTA is to blame for the loss of jobs, since there is no NAFTA with these other countries. But it's a convenient political buzzword in the US, so I guess they'll continue to use it. But repealing won't bring a single job back to the US. Not one. It'll just drive them even further away.
