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And Now for Some Good News
We'll never know the names of all the people who paid with their limbs, their lungs or their lives for the goodies in my home and yours
At first, this isn't going to sound like a good news story, never mind one of the most inspiring stories in the world today. But trust me: it is. Yan Li spent his life tweaking tiny bolts, on a production line, for the gadgets that make our lives zing and bling. He might have pushed a crucial component of the laptop I am writing this article on, or the mobile phone that will interrupt your reading of it. He was a typical 27-year-old worker at the gigantic Foxconn factory in Shenzen, Southern China, which manufactures i-Pads and Playstations and mobile-phone batteries.
Li was known to the company by his ID number: F3839667. He stood at a whirring line all day, every day, making the same tiny mechanical motion with his wrist, for 20p an hour. According to his family, sometimes his shifts lasted for 24 hours; sometimes they stretched to 35. If he had tried to form a free trade union to change these practices, he would have been imprisoned for 12 years. On the night of 27 May, after yet another marathon-shift, Li dropped dead.
Deaths from overwork are so common in Chinese factories that they have a word for it: guolaosi. China Daily estimates that 600,000 people are killed this way every year, mostly making goods for us. Li had never experienced any health problems, his family says, until he started this work schedule; Foxconn say he died of asthma and his death had nothing to do with them. The night Li died, yet another Foxconn worker committed suicide -- the tenth this year.
For two decades now, you and I have shopped until Chinese workers dropped. Business has bragged about the joys of the China Price. They have been less keen for us to see the Human Price. KYE Systems Corp run a typical factory in Donguan in southern mainland China, and one of their biggest clients is Microsoft -- so in 2009 the US National Labour Committee sent Chinese investigators undercover there. On the first day a teenage worker whispered to them: "We are like prisoners here."
The staff work and live in giant factory-cities that they almost never leave. Each room sleeps 10 workers, and each dorm houses 5,000. There are no showers; they are given a sponge to clean themselves with. A typical shift begins at 7.45am and ends at 10.55pm. Workers must report to their stations 15 minutes ahead of schedule for a military-style drill: "Everybody, attention! Face left! Face right!" Once they begin, they are strictly forbidden from talking, listening to music, or going to the lavatory. Anybody who breaks this rule is screamed at and made to clean the lavatories as punishment. Then it's back to the dorm.
It's the human equivalent of battery farming. One worker said: "My job is to put rubber pads on the base of each computer mouse ... This is a mind-numbing job. I am basically repeating the same motion over and over for over 12 hours a day." At a nearby Meitai factory, which made keyboards for Microsoft, a worker said: "We're really livestock and shouldn't be called workers." They are even banned from making their own food, or having sex. They live off the gruel and slop they are required to buy from the canteen, except on Fridays, when they are given a small chicken leg and foot "to symbolise their improving life".
Even as their work has propelled China towards being a super-power, these workers got less and less. Wages as a proportion of GDP fell in China every single year from 1983 to 2005.
They can be treated this way because of a very specific kind of politics that has prevailed in China for two decades now. Very rich people are allowed to form into organisations -- corporations -- to ruthlessly advance their interests, but the rest of the population is forbidden by the secret police from banding together to create organisations to protect theirs. The political practices of Maoism were neatly transferred from communism to corporations: both regard human beings as dispensable instruments only there to serve economic ends.
We'll never know the names of all the people who paid with their limbs, their lungs, or their lives for the goodies in my home and yours. Here's just one: think of him as the Unknown Worker, standing for them all. Liu Pan was a 17-year-old operating a machine that made cards and cardboard that were sold on to big-name Western corporations. When he tried to clear its jammed machinery, he got pulled into it. His sister said: "When we got his body, his whole head was crushed. We couldn't even see his eyes."
So you might be thinking -- was it a cruel joke to bill this as a good news story? Not at all. An epic rebellion has now begun in China against this abuse -- and it is beginning to succeed. Across 126,000 Chinese factories, workers have refused to live like this any more. Wildcat unions have sprung up, organised by text message, demanding higher wages, a humane work environment, and the right to organise freely. Millions of young workers across the country are blockading their factories and chanting, "There are no human rights here!" and, "We want freedom!" The suicides were a rebellion of despair; this is a rebellion of hope.
Last year, the Chinese dictatorship was so panicked by the widespread uprisings that it prepared an extraordinary step forward. It drafted a new labour law that would allow workers to form and elect their own trade unions. It would plant seeds of democracy across China's workplaces. Western corporations lobbied very hard against it, saying it would create a "negative investment environment" -- by which they mean smaller profits. Western governments obediently backed the corporations and opposed freedom and democracy for Chinese workers. So the law was whittled down and democracy stripped out.
It wasn't enough. This year Chinese workers have risen even harder to demand a fair share of the prosperity they create. Now company after company is making massive concessions: pay rises of over 60 per cent are being conceded. Even more crucially, officials in Guandong province, the manufacturing heartland of the country, have announced that they are seriously considering allowing workers to elect their own representatives to carry out collective bargaining after all.
Just like last time, Western corporations and governments are lobbying frantically against this -- and to keep the millions of Yan Lis stuck at their assembly lines into the 35th hour.
This isn't a distant struggle: you are at its heart, whether you like it or not. There is an electrical extension cord running from your laptop and mobile and games console to the people like Yan Li and Liu Pan dying to make them. So you have to make a choice. You can passively let the corporations and governments speak for you in trying to beat these people back into semi-servitude -- or you can side with the organisations here that support their cry for freedom, like No Sweat, or the TUC's international wing, by donating to them, or volunteering for their campaigns.
Yes, if this struggle succeeds, it will mean that we will have to pay a little more for some products, in exchange for the freedom and the lives of people like Yan Li and Liu Pan. But previous generations have made that choice. After slavery was abolished in 1833, Britain's GDP fell by 10 percent -- but they knew that cheap goods and fat profits made from flogging people until they broke were not worth having. Do we?
To join No Sweat's campaigns go to www.nosweat.org.uk
- Posted in
58 Comments so far
Show AllI agree, in an absolute sense. Worker uprisings: good. Corporations: bad.
But c'mon.
The author either engages in poorly-veiled subterfuge, or simply can't understand the facts he himself presents.
On the tree level, he cites corporate "concessions" of allowing unions and a 60% pay rise. Well, yipee. If my math skills hold, then these poor tortured humans have gone from being paid roughly 20p per hour to 32p per hour.
This does not, even when combined with alleged unionization, even approach improvement beyond what the article claims to lament: modern day slavery.
At the forest level, the author himself fails to look beyond the structure imposed by the corporations for a solution. Just browbeat the corporate thugs, he implies, and they will concede.
What poppycock.
Corporations are inherently amoral--that is, Evil. Their structure can provide benefits to society, but if, and only if, their charter is revoked for lawbreaking or other bad behavior.
That has not been the law in these United States for a very long time.
If such were the case, the BP "spill" would never have happened, and any US company doing business with Chinese slavers would already be dissolved, with their board members chilling in our own prisons.
In other words, to posit unions as a solution to corporate hegemony is silly, unless and until their control of our--and apparently most--governments at multiple levels worldwide--is wrested from them.
Of course, the article also assumes that materialism--Ipads, cell phones and so on--are perfectly wonderful and worth the environmental damage they do.
Maybe we could have the material culture crammed with gizmos and wonderful worker relations and a healthy environment and have corporations and heavy industry too...
But the evidence suggests otherwise.
Pull back from the keyhole, mate. We are all happy if the Chinese workers' lot improves, even a little.
The days of baby steps within the arena they created (and rule at every level) is quixotic at best.
I disagree with your conclusion ("quixotic"). The first step is for the workers (or slaves) to find their voice and get mad. That is a huge, and crucial step, even if at first it only gets them a tiny raise. Don't forget, the U.S. once had company towns, with long hours,low pay, and brutal conditions. Blaming consumerism misses the mark-- though he uses the example of workers producing computer equipment, China produces all sorts of stuff, like clothing, tools, etc. If it's not computers, it would be something else. The solution is to bring back punitive tariffs, and other laws which make it easier and more profitable to produce things in the U.S. or at least in places which abide by environmental and worker protection. I agree with you in the sense that corporations have run amok all over the earth and need to be seriously reined in.
I can't see any of that happening
workers will be smashed
and governments are corporatist and have facilitated globalism all teh way
The future looks very bad and things will get worse for ALL of us, we will all be living like our brothers and sisters in China, before there will be any change for the better
That's right. The master plan is to enslave the world.
China is not America. I would not suggest workers get too rambunctious in their protests.
Though fair trade agrteements and fair tariffs would indeed be a giant step in the right direction for American workers, I don't see how it would help Chinese workers.
Remember, they may be using the capitalist economic system to generate wealth, but their political system offers no protections as ours or Europes does. And their workers have nonbe of our protections. Not even our most inefficient ones.
Actually, Chinese enjoy more freedoms than Americans now. And the trend will continue: U.S. Supreme Court gutting the U.S. Constitition, while Chinese enjoying more freedom.
define freedom
They can jump off the dormatory roof without having to go thru a body scanner..
>^^<
Piffle-Diffle once again.
I do not think you have been to China.
"Blaming consumerism misses the mark"
Respectfully disagree with your comment.
I'm all for fair trade, and laws which encourage fair wages and treatment overseas.
We are still a ways from that in the US, so in the meantime, consumers can impact corporations by reading labels and buying fairly made clothing and gadgets, whenever possible.
The windmill at which they--and you--tilt, is the notion that corporations can be reined in by worker resistance.
The workers have found their voice, but they--and we--must find our bloody eyes and look beyond our current forms of corporate-fascism.
The corporation must be backed into a corner and clubbed to death like a rabid possum in a nursery...
Mindless consumerism is part and parcel with corporate control.
Like the snake said to the woman who sat crying, dying in disbelief he would bite her after she gave him a ride and saved his life:
Lady, you knew I was snake when you picked me up.
We know--it has been unequivocally demonstrated for centuries now-- that the corporations--and their puppet governments in China, here, and most everywhere-- don't give a fuck about us.
We go into rooms to talk nice with them, and we'll come out clutching our own entrails that they've wrapped around our necks.
Looks like we just disagree on how bad it is. You say negotiate, I say eliminate.
Cheers.
Excellent analysis of the article. Good on you. The only idea I would add is the future will be Utopian or there won't be one.
Would you like an essay instead? ...........lol
Yes, its' really that simple.
So even in Communist countries, capitalists are the most egregious violators of human rights.
Hari slyly notes that wages as a percentage of GDP declined from 1983 to 2005, neglecting to mention that the wholesale industrialization did not take off until the late 1990s or what has happened since 2005.
He also neglects to mention that these Chinese laborers made the choice to come to these factories and stay in them because their options were severely limited. They were peasant farmers, or the children of such, living on the edge of starvation in extreme poverty and they came to the cities to work in the factories to improve their conditions, which most of them did. For an example of typical conditions in the preceding decades, see:
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/28/world/millions-across-china-said-to-face-starvation.html
In the period of rapid industrialization the predatory well-positioned members of society have taken full advantage of the inevitable chaos and confusion and have taken the lion's share of the benefits, but they still have not, for the most part, captured the Communist Party or the government. So the Party did respond with proposed labor reforms, but retreated when the Western corporations (mainly US) threatened to leave immediately and cause great economic disruptions. As Hari claims, the Party is now again responding to the pressures from the labor unions and the Western corporations are again fighting back.
But it is a fluid situation, and the future evolution of Chinese society is unclear, as communist values are still ingrained in most of the population and it will not be so easy for the Chinese corporatists (even with aid from their fellow predators in foreign corporations) to capture the government as it has been in the US. And as the US descends in power and influence, its corporations will likely become less able to control events across the globe.
Simple math would tell you we can't compete, if their dieing in large numbers as you would expect after 20/30 hour shifts. well they have a billion replacements. Here even using illegals we couldn't match their pace.
So why try? when the boss tells you your not competitive, just smile and say that's true, thank you.
>^^<
In a recent report on another Ciinese coal mine disaster - a methane explosion this time - the victims were described as being in a "dormitory" section of the mine. Apparently, the miners are kept underground even during their off-work time.
Even in the worst of the vicious robber-baron,wage-slave, company-store era of coal mining, workers were at least allowed to ascend to the fresh air, sun (or stars) and a shack with a bed, stove, spouse and kids at the end of the shift.
that is appalling
China is not America which many don't seem to know ass you point out. It is appalling, but they have no worker protections.
You should see how their battery manufacturing workers are treated. It makes the South Korean facilities look heavenly.
China has a long history of worker abuses and an equally long history of smashing attempts at worker empowerment
I used to think they had dickensian work practices but it is obvious it's much worse
think dickens with a 1984 government, worse even
What do you think would have happened to that student in the square if the TV cameras hadn't been there? Tank tread mush.
What you said also describes the U.S. to a tee.
Piffle-Diffle.
Thats right poitou- try working for one of those so-called employee-owned deals. Am I allowed to name a company that was CRUEL to its workers?
Will Burt
Getting Closer, we still have some laws that are obeyed, if only by inertia. We even have a few if corrupt unions, pretending to represent workers(though they have long since worked in partnership with the corporations)
>^^<
We may have worker protections on the books, but, without enough inspectors with corporate-friendly judges, and with fines which are slaps on the wrist, our own corporations continue to kill U.S. workers as well as residents of nearby towns:
Just consider Massey Energy in West Virginia, B.P. in the Gulf of Mexico, and Libby, Montana (see Libby, Montana Declared an Environmental Disaster Area by EPA - Associated Content - associatedcontent.com
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1855979/libby_montana_declared_an_environmental.html)
Since Ronnie "government is the problem" Reagan, budgets to enable various federal agencies to enforce the laws and regulations for worker safety and health have been cut, making those regulations little better than the paper on which they are printed. Then the anti-government sociopaths claim these failures as "proof" that governmnet doesn't work.
We would all be better off if, instead of training young Americans to kill foreigners & then sending them into endless quagmires abroad, we hired and trained them to enforce worker safety laws here. But that would prevent the U.S. Empire from continuing its suicidal expansion as our nation collapses and implodes at home.
Yes, thanks to all those Socialist workers who organized and insisted on workers protections and rights. The ones shot down by the Police and Pinkertons when they went on strike to from Unions.
China is an example of what happens when Capitalism allowed to run amok.
Within a few years we will have you reading the World Socialist Website I am sure.
Wasn't Bill Gates one of the billionaires who recently pledged to donate half of his wealth to charity? Pardon my ignorance or my Utopian vision here, but wouldn't it be better to stop for Microsoft to outsourcing some of the jobs mentioned in this article and open up manufacturing plants in the US, paying fair wages and employing more Americans? We still manufacture weapons and those employees, as far as I know, earn decent wages and benefits.
I can't see how workers dying from overwork is any better than the old overlord/peasant system that Chairman Mao destroyed by chopping off the heads of village elders. China sure has come a long ways since the days of the Revolution.
In the old system they didn't work nearly as hard. They even had holidays and days off,
The Great Leap Forward didn't work either, at least this bizzare form of capitolism is making the Upper Class rich. After so many mistakes in the last 100yrs China is finally starting to get ahead, untill they run out of drones anyhow, I won't demean peasants by using that word to describe them.
>^^<
Hey - maybe the good news is that no matter how bad - they have jobs!
Consider the following two items:
"Federally-backed program aims to help outsourcers in South Asia become more fluent in areas like Java programming—and the English language.
By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
August 3, 2010 01:59 PM
Despite President Obama's pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $36 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia. "
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/integration/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226500202
AND
"Now It's Armenia: USAID Funds IT In Eurasia
After pledging millions to bolster outsourcing in South Asia, federal agency extends largesse to a new recipient.
By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
August 5, 2010 03:09 PM
Even as controversy mounts over its funding of IT outsourcers in South Asia, the U.S. Agency for International Development has announced a program under which it will partner with the government of Armenia—a nation anxious to lure computer work from American shores--to promote the development of the country's information technology industry.
Jonathan Hale, USAID deputy assistant administrator for Europe & Eurasia, is on a four-day trip to Armenia to meet with government and private industry leaders in the country. On his agenda is a meeting with Armenian economic minister Nerses Yeritsyan.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/disaster_recovery/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226600094
What else do you expect when everyone is used to taking outsourcing for cheap to China for granted? Go figure !
I the U.S. of A. wants to manufacture and export goods to wipe out the National Deficit and Federal Deficit; then we need to devalue our currency to be competitive in this world.
Devalue our currency to a point where poor nations can afford our products!
That's how the game is played! That's how "globalization" works! That's why China is getting everybody's business; they eliminated the middle class!
Heck, they haven't had a middle class since the Ming's, if then.
low wages in China not only inflates the profit margins of the owners of businesses in China but serve to subsidise lower wages and higher profit margins in the west as well by facilitating a lower cost of living thus reducing pressure for wage increases
production and pollution go hand-in-hand...
another reason China gets everybody's business...
And because China has reinvented industrial slave labor, then we need to reinstitut it here? Why stop there, lets repeal the 13th amendmendt. Allow all slavery.
Just beause it works for 1% doesen't mean it will work for all.
I try to boycott China at every purchase, but it's hard work to avoid chinese goods. Theres nothing they don't make these days.
The only thing to do is rebel, as the chinese workers are starting to do. Theres no-way we can compete with Fifty-Cents an hour. So why try.
I'd like some private time with these clowns advocating we gut ourselves to try to compete, These scum are the real enemy.
>^^<
gnken
I use a MACBook. One of my hobbies is Electric Trains and my favorite make is Lionel. There is a Chinese Manufacturer called Sanda Kan which manufactures for Lionel, Mikes Train House, K-Line, Atlas Model Railroad. Well a few years ago one of the Hobby Magazines "OGauge Railroading" did a story on a Tour of Sanda Kan. I asked there Reps. at the TCA Train Convention what conditions were like for workers making our Trains. Well the response was how great workers are treated and why Sanda Kan is a great place to work. When the article was published a few months later I was amazed at how the tour was so controlled by the Corporation and how it was routed from Departing Hong Kong to the Plant and return. It seemed like a Red Cross Tour of the Paradise Getto of WW2. I would have like to see the areas that were not on the tour.
Ken Berg
China's rapid industrialization has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty and has created an enormous middle class in what was once one of the most desperately poor nations on earth. I certainly did not expect a balanced account of China's changes from this dithering idiot.
Nice non-sequitir, Suhail. Did Johann Hari say we need to turn back industrialization and growth in China? If so, your point may have some merit. I did not take any such thing away from the article. Also, do you deny that these sweatshops and working conditions exist? That would be the only other way to refute anything Hari wrote.
Or do you just like taking cheap shots with no substance? If so, then admit it openly and stop expecting anyone to take you seriously.
Not in so many words.
If somebody is going to write an article on China's economic development, then it has to be balanced, and the above artice, predictably, did not come anywhere even close.
You must have missed the part about people living under slave conditions and dropping dead and our corporations and government pushing to continue that for their profit. Do you think the middle class cannot rise if things are fair to others, as they once did in the US when there were good wages and strong unions?
Ray Berthiaume
I live in a Catholic retirement home of about 260 seniors. We have a weekly bus ride to Walmart. Walmart is so contrary to Catholic social principles. At least 90% of their inventory comes from China.
Can you object to their going there, describing what is going on (using this article) and Walmart's part in it?
The title of this article was tricky. For a minute there, I thought that this would be a briefer on Obamacare. I cannot believe that there is nothing on health care yesterday or today unless I missed it somewhere. Well, here's some good news. Remember Obamacare? We Missourans voted our hearts out 71% against it and I'm proud that my niece, her parents, and I were part of that 71% !
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn
/content/article/2010/08/04/AR2010080407158.html
As for this article, it is still very bad news !
Stan? Go have sex with yourself- and make sure its painful.
I was giving some really good news. Are you saying that you like having the government forcing citizens to the insurance wolves by making them purchase defective insurance? The author couldn't even give some true good news. The title of this article is totally wrong.
I'm with Stanley and the 71% from Missouri. There's no way that the government should force us to buy healthcare from insurance companies.