Please, won’t someone think of the profits?Via
Fourteen years ago yesterday, the Kader Toy Factory in Bangkok burned down. 188 factory workers died, over 500 more sustained injuries. Most of these workers were women.
I don’t even know what to say in the face of this. We could call it a tragedy, but it’s not. Tragedies are things like dying from cancer or hydroplaning on a puddle and ending up in the hospital with grievous injuries. This wasn’t a tragedy.
It was an atrocity.
What else can you call the deaths of 188 people and the injuries of over 500 more, all in the name of cheap product to sell in the US? It’s a level of entitlement that is breathtaking on our part. We want those dolls, dammit. And those motherboards, and those pants, and that furniture, at cut rate prices. Or we want those things sold for a huge profit, so executive management and board members can make a nice, fat profit on their stock options. The spin of these policies are rife with myths.
Our way of life. Our way of life. We will fight and defend our way of life. And we will make damn sure other people pay for our way of life.
Now, I realize that pointing out injustices and entitled thinking is seen as victim-tripping in some camps. Because those girls could have bootstrapped themselves into a better job, dammit! And besides, didn’t you all know that naming the problem, speaking the truth, is unforgivable? How very grim.
I bring this up because the Triangle Shirtwaist fire usually gets all kinds of attention, as it should. This fire, I learned about a few years ago. If it made the news in a big way, I missed it. And that’s the point. It’s easier, much easier to not see and forget and refuse to question our own privilege. For instance: it sure is nice that I don’t work in a firetrap. That I don’t have to put up with sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions or lose my one source of income. That I don’t work for a contractor, and therefore there’s nothing the large multinational company that pays my employer can do. Conveniently, these companies are so terribly helpless. There’s not a thing they can do substantively–oh, they can spot check and be good corporate citizen and put guidelines into place–but they want low labor rates and high productivity and low, low overhead. And those they will get.
At a price, yes. But we’re not the ones paying the price.
25 Responses to “Would you die for cheap toys?”
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“What else can you call the deaths of 188 people and the injuries of over 500 more, all in the name of cheap product to sell in the US?”
Another step closer to the nirvana of the Bush/Cheney junta?…
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, more in regards to food than products, but it all comes down to the same thing. I’m doing more to buy locally and support neighboring businesses, but that takes money — it is simply more expensive in the here-and-now to buy local than it is to get cheap stuff at the supermarket or the like. It’s a “luxury” I can afford, but there are plenty of people living in (relative) poverty in the US who have no choice but to shop at WalMart and their ilk, and while we can go on about how it’s short sighted and just makes everyone poorer in the end, that doesn’t help while they’re staring at a paycheck that’s too small to cover what they need.
I wish I knew what the solutions were.
great post.
jan i’m with you. we need to yank the consumerism out of our lives and teachings. hand made gifts why not? time to know the materials and invest energy in them. its not just about not feeding the stinking, snarling, retching machine, its bout coming back to ourselves. yes, more locally bought, grown, made. so many problems are solved by this, i think. and a thumb stuck in the eye of greed and inertia. more in this direction….
Personally, when it comes to globalization issues, I take heart. There’s a lot of reasons to be optimistic. The agressive anti-globalization movement (which is what got me into politics) has more or less killed the WTO, and the World Bank has started changing it’s rules and reforming. There’s a ton of international connections between activists that were formed during the intense summit-hopping period that are still being nurtured. More yuppified responses to unethical trade are also growing - things like the fair trade movement and the organic food movement. There’s a growing pan-indigenous conciousness in Latin America that’s articulating a clear and serious challenge to the maintenance of imperialist power relations.
Things could be a lot worse than they are right now but there are some people who put their bodies on the line in Seattle, in Hong Kong, in Genoa, in Quebec City and in a hundred other cities around the world and they managed to do some serious hurt to the neoliberal machine. In the process of that, some were beaten, some were arrested, some were murdered by police or by militias. There’s no pretending anymore - for people who are aware of this recent history - that we’re in anything less than a war against a system of exploitation. And it’s a war in which we’ve made significant gains. It’s a war I believe we can win.
Although it was quickly forgotten by most in North America after sept 11 “changed everything” the anti-globalization movement was the first really significant challenge to capitalism in American society since the New Left. And unlike a lot of previous critiques, this one agknowledged the people who really pay the cost of American prosperity -not the worst off Americans, but workers who mights as well be slaves in countries that are kept poor by the muscle of American foreign policy.
And of course, this is coming back to bite us anyway…I read parentdish.com every day, and almost every day there’s a recall for lead in chinese-made children’s toys. We get them so cheap, and the reason is that they don’t monitor and regulate toxic substances. We’re gambling with our children’s, our pets’ (as with the melamine recalls), and our own lives, not just those of the Chinese forced to work in appalling conditions, when we let “the market” self-regulate. We can’t easily control what conditions people in other countries work in; unless we only do business with countries that share our laws and enforce them, bribery and corruption will insure these practices persist.
Oh, we’re paying the price once in a while. See the NYT article From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine. Cost-cutting in this case led to Chinese suppliers replacing glycerine with diethylene glycol as the bulk of various commercial drugs and OTC products–toothpaste, cough syrup, etc.
In reality, when you sub jobs out you really don’t have much leeway once the contract is signed. So, American company X signs a contract with Indonesian company Y. Y abuses its workers, and then we get mad at X–but at this point they can’t walk away from the contract or they won’t be able to land another one. So they’re stuck trying to police Y, and X is not in the policing business.
One solution might be to just pass legislation so that X and all like companies will be held fully liable under American laws for abuses among their subcontractors.
So if a guy 3 subs down from Bechtel tortures an Iraqi citizen, it’s Bechtel held responsible.
Thoughts?
it is simply more expensive in the here-and-now to buy local than it is to get cheap stuff at the supermarket or the like.
How is this a sensible way to organize things? I don’t mean at the consumer level—most consumers will go where the goods are cheaper, and I’m not going to tell people how they should spend their money. But as a society, how can it possibly make sense for, for example, fruit trucked across the country to cost the consumer less than the same kind of fruit trucked from across town?
I suggest that we look at what’s making the prices cheaper? I submit that it has something to do with current U.S. laws making transportation tax-deductible for big farmers, the availability of cheap (legal and illegal) migrant labour to these farmers, and other concessions won by big-agro from the government cutting down on their overhead and enabling them to bring the same fruit and veggies to you cheaper than your local guys can do it.
What to do? My suggestion would be to investigate food production and transportation and lobby your representatives to cut the tax cuts for transportation of food across the country, as a policy that is harmful to the environment, to local growers, and in nobody’s best interest save those of big-agro.
I laugh when people tell me to eat local food. What local food? Where I’m from the growing season is too short and the soil is too crappy. Our diet would consist primarily of cranberries, venison, and cheese. And lutefisk.
Jenny - A lot of it also has to do with straight-up subsidies to big agribusiness. It’s a big deal for the US government not just because the farming lobby is powerful but also because the US controlling most food trade globally gives things like the sanctions regime that was imposed on Iraq after the Gulf war or the one in Cuba teeth. The overall result of subsidies is a ridiculous food surplus which means farmers need to be export-focused to stay in business. The system as it is keeps the price of US grain artificially low which means poorer countries are dependant on it. Few people can afford to grow food as cheaply as American farmers both because American farmers have access to more technology but especially government subsidies.
If the US cut it’s farm subsidies completely, What would happen would be an immediate worldwide food crisis, I’m pretty sure, but if the US phased them out gradually what we’d see would be a lot more third world farmers producing food instead of cash crops, and American farmers forced to either adopt more sustainable farming techniques or sell to those who will.
Petey- I think that sort of law has promise, but it might be hard constitutionally to work, since it involves charging companies for crimes commited outside of the country. Perhaps a more general law that forbids the import of goods that aren’t made up to some ethical standard, and requires companies to demonstrate proof they’re up to the standard with external auditors. Sort of like reporting and accounting laws but more focused on labour standards. The other advantage to this is that transnationals from outside the US can also be targetted.
I have to question the notion that the key point her is what they were making. The problem is any factory working being exploited and exposed to unsafe working conditions. The problem wasn’t that they were making toys. Would it have been better if they were manufacturing medical equippment? Do we set rules about what products are okay to exploit workers for? I’m sorry, but making such a big deal about the fact that this was a toy factory seems like an unfair rhetorical ploy that just belittles some people’s line of work. Making toys isn’t trivial. Its not the product of the labor, but the exploitation of the Labor.
I wasn’t “making a big deal” out of the fact that they made toys. Read the post. I also said the following:
Bold mine. The key point was the exploitation of the labor. I brought up the fact that it was a toy factory because, well, it was a freaking toy factory.
Jan and Nezua, I agree that more mindful consumer choices are important, as is buying locally. I also think that we need to seriously organize and agitate around this issue (and Labyrus, thanks for pointing out the work of the anti-globalization activists). My feelings on this are quite complicated–the system and the issues can feel huge, but we can do it.
I had an interesting revelation once.
You hear that a slave society can’t compete with a free market, right? What you might not understand is why that is.
Tell a slave to pick fruit, and the slave will pick fruit quickly enough to keep from being beaten.
Tell a free person that they get X amount per bushel, and they’ll pick as many bushels as they can… unless X isn’t enough money for the working conditions.
If X isn’t enough (given the working conditions), then X must go up, or the business owner loses all profit-making opportunity.
A fair-minded business owner makes sure the business can make enough to pay a healthy X. An unfair-minded one wants power, power over the employees, so that they really don’t have a choice.
In short, the unfair-minded employer wants slaves, in all but name.
Morally, it’s not just “sweatshop” labor… morally, it’s slave labor. Oh, it might be the “involuntary manslaughter” of slave labor (where actual traffic in human flesh is “murder”), but the moral principle that is violated is the same. As the old joke goes, “we’ve already determined what kind of person you are, now we’re just haggling over the price”.
And while it’s true that wage-slavery is nowhere near as horrible as ownership-slavery, a victim of involuntary manslaughter is just as dead, even if the killer was nowhere near as evilly-minded as another victim’s murderer.
And because I’m weird and talky today (as opposed to merely weird), the other idea that’s run through my head with this is, you know, we all own the world. I mean, there’s no one out there who could sell the world to an alien race and say “sorry, you other human chumps are now trespassing”. We have two choices, either all of humanity, collectively, owns the world, or might makes right.
While it might be necessary to say “this person owns this factory, because otherwise, how can the factory be run efficiently?” or “this person has the right to mine this ore, because otherwise, we can’t count on anyone investing the resources to mine it”, we can also insist “but because it doesn’t belong to this person, those who work in the factory, or mine the ore, must be paid fair wages, and work in good conditions, because the earth belongs to us all”.
One of the myths of using cheap labor, whether oversees or illegal immigrants, is that it makes the products cheaper. Well, as someone once said, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
We are the primary safety valve for the world. As along as we accept products manufactured by subsitance level workers they at least have jobs. If we stop taking the products they won’t have jobs and maybe they’ll have a revolution of some sort and actually install a decent government. Economic development should be about producing goods and services that the producers can afford.
In true capitalism one should pay the workers as much as you possibly can because they are afterall not just workers but consumers. Even robber baron Henry Ford understood this.
As far as the illegals go, they are costing the system (taxpayers) seven dollars for every dollar they contribute. And of course the business owners just love someone else to subsidize their labor costs.
We cannot reasonably expect American businesses to provide safe, clean workplaces and manufacture in an environmentally friendly manner and provide decent wages and benefits when their competitors can go overseas and get away with murder. This isn’t so much business’ fault as it is the government. That’s means its our fault.
The appropriate question is not if Americans are willing to die for cheap toys, but how many people they are willing to kill to obtain them. The answer is a lot. One reads comments all the time that some Americans think we should kill for oil. We have killed for bananas.
Cite? Rush doesn’t count. This statistic seems impossible to compute, so to me it is suspect.
The business owners want cheap labor, period. Whether that comes from subsidized costs, or their employees going without proper shelter, food, medical care, etc. makes little difference to them.
It’s strange that you feel the need to impart wicked motives on the actions of the business owners such as “lov(ing) someone else to subsidize their labor costs”, when the reality is actually so much more cold and cruel. They don’t care if their workers have a living wage and they don’t care if the government subsidizes the difference.
JP/LHW, I want to bang my head on the desk for not remembering the oodles of reading I did five years ago (for an aborted PhD) on the end of British slavery, but it was very much tied up with the explosion of capitalism. There was a capitalist discourse about the superiority of “free labor,” based on changing (religious and worker-led) popular morality as well as the fact that you had to feed, clothe, house, etc the slaves for their whole lives.
A lot of workers didn’t buy it, however, and recognized that while they were free (technically), they and the slaves were both exploited by the ruling classes. Sadly, this did not result in a big happy anarchist revolution.
I’m sorry that this is so vague and sketchy — it’s been a while since I read the materials, and I was on heavy medication at the time, but there is a huge amount of literature out there on capitalism and its relation to the end of chattel slavery.
It’s an interesting question: How much should we hold a corporation responsible for abuses committed by its suppliers overseas (or here, for that matter)?
My own thinking is that the governments of the individual countries are the ones who have to carry the ball here. If a Thai factory is unsafe, it’s up to Thai authorities to do something about it, whether the factory is making things for local consumption or for Americans.
Bitter Scribe:
To some degree, you’re right. At the same time, if we say “we can’t help it if the Thai government lets people work in such terrible conditions” then that opens the doors towards enabling companies and governments to let people work in such terrible conditions. If we refused to purchase products made in countries that allowed such conditions, then there’d be more incentive for them to change.
It’s an interesting question: How much should we hold a corporation responsible for abuses committed by its suppliers overseas (or here, for that matter)?
Right now, I’m long-term temping for A Very Large Family Entertainment Company (you know, the REALLY BIG one) and they have a very, very strict policy about who you can buy from. If, say, my department wanted to make a t-shirt and give it away only to the people in our department, we still have a bunch of hoops that you have to go through to find an approved supplier of ALL elements of the giveaway (shirt and silkscreening/embroidery) that has signed certain binding pledges regarding work conditions and wages in order to get a contract with our company.
Are they doing this out of the kindness of their hearts because they’re wonderful, wonderful people? Of course not. They’re doing this because it would be very bad for their domestic business if The Very Large Family Entertainment Company was using sweatshops and slave labor.
So one strategy is to make it as embarrassing as possible for companies to be caught using shady suppliers. It is working, at least with companies that have a vested interest in appearing to be as ethical and family-friendly as possible.
At first I tried to avoid buying anything Made In China, in spite or especially because I’m Chinese.
“Well, don’t you want to help the Chinese workers get paid?”
Here’s the thing though, the Chinese factory workers, in addition to working in conditions that violate that human rights, sees very, very, very little of the profit they generate.
“But at least they get something right?”
Karl Marx says, capital generates capital. Capital is a social power, the more we buy products Made In China, under these circumstances, the more we enrich the factory owners and the American corporations, giving them more power to spread their oppression. If the rich people leave, at first the country would have less money, but if the minimum wage is kept up, eventually it will recover, and the rich-poor gap will stay small, as nobody would get more /richer/ than others enough to really oppress them. Take this, if Walmart couldn’t out-compete local stores and individual workers because Walmart couldn’t get away with paying less, than Walmart wouldn’t dominate.
Unfortunately, Made In China goods are now everywhere, and as a poor student I can’t afford to avoid goods that are not humanely made, so my new policy is; I’ll buy my /necessities/ as low as I can get them, food, basic clothing, etc. For luxuries, this means, toys/figurines, accessories, fancy brandname clothes, I don’t NEED them, I can afford to save up and wait until I find something not made with inhumane labour so I don’t /unnecessarily/ contribute to the inhumane machine.
Published on Thursday, May 3, 2007 by The Independent/UK
We Shop Until Chinese Workers Drop
She Was Expected To Work 360 Days a Year From 7.30am to 9.30pm With Only a Half-Hour Break
by Johann Hari
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/03/936/
Over the past decade, an old word once used in the Maoist gulags has come back to China. It is “gulaosi� - and it is used to describe the men and women who are literally being worked to death producing clothes, electronics and toys for you and me.
Wie Meiren was a standard-issue gulaosi, the kind you can find in every Chinese town. She was a 32-year-old woman with three kids who left her hungry village and travelled to Dongkeng, where she got a job assembling the toy cars for the British kids’ market….
…..
The dissident-killing Chinese Communist Party didn’t propose this change out of a sudden flush of benevolence. They did it because the Chinese people have in increasing numbers been refusing to be tethered serfs for the benefit of Western corporations. Last year, there were 300,000 illegal industrial actions in China, a huge spate of “factory kidnappings� of managers, and more than 85,000 protests.
The Chinese people were showing they did not want to leap from a Maoist gulag to a market-fundamentalists’ sweatshop. They demanded a sensible compromise: strong trade and markets to generate wealth, matched by strong trade unions to stop markets devouring them. They want an end to grinding poverty, but one that doesn’t kill them as they get there.
But they bumped into a huge obstacle. Groups representing Western corporations with factories in China sent armies of lobbyists to Beijing to cajole and threaten the dictatorship into abandoning these new workers’ protections.
The American Chamber of Commerce - representing Microsoft, Nike, Ford, Dell and others - listed 42 pages of objections. The laws were “unaffordable� and “dangerous�, they declared. The European Chamber of Commerce backed them up.
….
Wow, what a thread for me to comment on. Sadly I have little time now, or I’d cite particular comments and answer point by point.
There’s a lot of discussion of how capitalists must be cheating here. Actually if you understand how capitalism works, exploitation takes place automatically if everyone accepts the capitalist worldview without question. Government intervening to socialize this or that expense capitalists “ought” to bear is just gravy.
But if you understand how capitalism was brought into being historically and how it is maintained, huge categories of government intervention go on all the time, are essential to keeping it working–but we are taught to accept this as “natural” and self-evidently necessary.
Basically the “free labor market” exists if and only if the workers are prevented from having the alternative of direct access to the means of production. When they have this, they freely choose to walk away from capitalist employment and fend for themselves, individually or more normally, collectively. It doesn’t matter to them that objectively, their labor is generally far less productive than if they allow themselves to be organized into the dictated cooperation that characterizes capitalist enterprises, because they receive only a small share of the latter, whereas they capture all of what surplus value they can manage to create working for themselves.
In order to have a capitalist economy, it has been historically necessary to forcibly separate people from traditional modes of production. Only then does the “free” labor force that is utterly dependent on finding some capitalist or other to hire them so they can purchase necessities from the market exist.
On the colonial frontiers, this meant that slavery was rational from the point of view of capitalists, since plantations there were largely profitable because they were exploiting “virgin” land unsustainably, and this “virgin” land bordered uncontrolled territory that “free” workers could run away to–and did when not forcibly restrained. Hence slavery on the frontiers. Once a given island or territory was brought fully under the control of the capitalist states, access to “free” land cut off or reduced to extremely marginal and policable regions, it became more rational to “free” the slaves and let them shift for themselves in the competitive capitalist labor market. Hence Britain’s “enlightened” about-face from being the premier slave-trading empire in the late 18th century to being the crusading liberators of the 19th–at that point the majority of sugar islands that had been the backbone of British industry in the 18th century were filled up and brought under full territorial control, and interfering with the slave trade was a good way to inhibit their potential rivals. I am well aware of course that there was a tremendous humanitarian movement and that the sentiment was real, and insofar as driven by actual slaves and freedmen very sincere. But there were cold economic reasons these pleas to humanity fell on mostly deaf (if sometimes uncomfortable) ears the previous century and suddenly became an overriding moral imperative the next.
As for wracking our brains about what sneaky subsidies big agra must be getting under the table to account for the irrationalities of a global market that ships food around the globe–capitalist economies in general are full of irrationalities and absurdities and unsustainable “economies.” We don’t see it because we are trapped in a faith-based view of economics that has a dismal track record of intelligibly accounting for or predicting real economic phenomena, but is fantastic at justifying the rule of the current powers that be. That’s all mainstream marginalist economics exists to accomplish; real businessmen never consult economists and real governments only do so to concoct ex post facto rationalizations.
To be sure there is a lot of visible subsidizing going on over the table, if we can see it. Michael Harrington characterized modern industrial capitalist society as operating on the principle of “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor” about half a century ago.
Here’s a relevant concrete example. The character of the governments of Third World nations being discussed here did not arise by accident. Since the Cold War began (in some regions, long before) the USA has taken over from the British and other former colonial powers in imposing regimes everywhere we can that answer first of all to First World capitalists, and never if we can help it to their own people. We all are aware of some spectacular examples, I think, and if we look more closely at less spectactular countries we can see that there is an Invisble Hand at work all right, but it’s not the Magic of the Marketplace, but rather covert action. Sometimes our covert action is embarrasingly overt, but it’s all plausibly deniable–or at least until recently that’s how we generally operated. This is your tax dollars at work, guaranteeing that the governments of nations like Thailand stay light-years away from policies that are rational for ordinary Thai people but offer great deals to Western capitalists. This is another instance of separating people from the means of production so that they are forced to operate in the capitalist labor market.
In order to discuss whether or not people are better off participating in the capitalist system versus some other alternative, we need a different framework than the one offered by marginalist “economic” theory. In a pure market economy as defined by such theorists, whatever the market does must be optimal by definition, or if you like you can identify this or that “distortion” or “impediment” of the “free market” to account for any evil you care to identify. It’s basically a religious theory equivalent to the idea that God in His inscrutable wisdom providentially is doing good, no matter how awful things may look. Realistically, capitalism is a social mechanism, no less, no more, and to judge it we need to step outside its framework. It might be that no practical alternative is better in this or that time and place, but from within the framework it is unthinkable that there could be any improvement.
Mmh, I think the name of this post should be “would you kill for cheap toys” ‘cause that is what we are doing really.
No big surprise there, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire occured on 25 March 1911. I think even my grandparents were too young to see the news about it.
Let’s see, how does that saying go “those who ignore the past, etc. etc.?”
For all the conservitards much-stated admiration of past times, they really do live too much in the present: programs that were put in place 20, 50, 100 years ago to solve real problems get denigrated, because, hey! the problem isn’t around anymore! So let’s get rid of the program, it’s just a waste! Without a thought that perhaps the reason that we don’t have that problem any more is because the steps put in place ‘way back then were actually effective.
For more examples, look up “Social Security, Reform (so called)”
William Greider, in One World, Ready or Not and in his journalism that preceded it, covered this fire and explicitly compared it to the Triangle Shirtwaist one. I compare Greider and Subcomandante Marcos over here.