[China] Explotation of Chinese workers by American Corporation

Discussion in 'Off Topic Area' started by Durkhrod Chogori, Aug 28, 2006.

  1. AZeitung

    AZeitung The power of Grayskull

    Interesting that you should mention that. One of the people in my (physics) research group last summer had been an organizer of the protest at Tiananmin Square. He's still actively trying to change things in China and is planning on going back there soon, despite the fact that he had been in prison for several years.

    He indicated to me that China post communism was very much the same in many ways as it had been pre-communism. The main problem, at least, as he described it, seemed to be the amount of government and the amount of power given to the government (which on the lower levels sounded more like the mafia than any legitimate organization). IIRC, he said that each street had someone in charge, each small region (like a ward of a large city), then another region on top of that, etc. and that at each level, the officials were fairly wealthy.

    His English wasn't all that good, so I missed quite a bit of what he was saying, but he did seem to enjoy talking about the subject, so I heard quite a bit. I wish I could remember more of it better, though.
     
  2. Matt_Bernius

    Matt_Bernius a student and a teacher

    This is a critical point. Communist China (and the USSR for that matter) quickly became the old structure of control with an new "idological polish."

    I should have been more exact about that in my first posting.

    - Matt
     
  3. cullion

    cullion Valued Member

    Western workers have all the rights we do because our economies can afford them. China will get there, but you can't thwart supply and demand.

    Everybody might feel that electricity and running water are 'basic human rights', but it doesn't matter how emotional you get about it until somebody actually gets round to building the pylons and pipes.

    Most 'third world exploitation' that I hear people worrying about actually represents a moderate improvement in the living standards of the people now working in factories making consumer goods for the west.

    People voluntarily take jobs in these factories because it beats subsistance farming as a way of getting by. No more worrying about droughts and crop failure. You think 60 hours a week, 35% of the time, in an indoor job, is a long working day ?

    Try living in a hut where you have to trek a few miles to fetch dirty water from a well and growing your own food without much in the way of modern agricultural machinery or fertilizer. Imagine spending, say, 10 hours tending to crops and livestock, fetching water, mending fences etc.. and then having to spend several more hours making/mending blankets and clothing.

    Imagine watching a relative literally starve to death because you hadn't been able to grow enough food that year. Or dying of some horrible waterborne disease which never got treated by a doctor because aside from the odd charity-funded visit, your little farming hamlet just doesn't generate enough surplus wealth after feeding (most) of the inhabitants (most of the time), to support a specialist like a properly trained full time doctor.

    You would soon be jealous of the people who had nice factory jobs.

    These people will not suddenly be able to live in a nice western suburb simply by demanding that the government/western corporations give it to them.
    That takes years of pipe and cable laying, the building of roads and schools etc.. It has to be paid for somehow.

    The companies offering these jobs to people in China or elsewhere are not, by and large, the evil empire. They make a profit by offering you something you want at the best price they can do it for, and in the process they are offering some _very_ poor people a choice between subsistance farming and a factory job. It might seem harsh that they can't enjoy the same standard of living as yourself, yet, but you have to think about what their alternatives are, and what it was that got you your standard of living (it had as much to with people working hard in tough conditions to create the wealth and technology you now enjoy as it had to do with social activism).

    Our current labour protection laws are essentially luxuries which our economies can carry precisely because they have been so highly developed by centuries of relatively free trade and technological advance. China has some catching up to do, but they'll get there. The last thing they need is people attempting to impose a wealthier countries standards on their economy right now though.
     
  4. slipthejab

    slipthejab Hark, a vagrant! Supporter


    You very obviously haven't spent much time in China. The poverty is improving but is still astronomical in China. Try getting there sometime... then you might make and informed post. You're facts are nonsense. :rolleyes:
     
  5. Apotheosis

    Apotheosis Valued Member

    He isn't arguing that poverty no longer exists, simply that what you call exploitation they call opportunity....

    Sweat Shops and the like offer those starving to death the opportunity to earn enough money to survive. Getting rid of these types of factories would condemn those in poverty to remain in poverty.
     
  6. leeless

    leeless Handshaker extraordinaire

    Hmmm...when I think of "Third World Exploitation", I think of Coke Cola proclaiming ownership of the water supply of a local village. They use it to make the soft drinks we all love, whilst a community dies of thirst. When I think of exploitation, I think of Shell laying poor quality piping that spills oil over agriculatural land and wildlife habitat, with no system in place to make them responsible or stop them from employing locals to intimidate and murder those that protest. When I think of exploitation, I think of pharmacutical companies claiming ownership of local medicines of third world peoples and making it illegal for them to sell it themselves.

    As I've said before, this is a matter of ethics, morals and principles, not just money.
     
  7. slipthejab

    slipthejab Hark, a vagrant! Supporter

    err... go back and read what he posted. :rolleyes:

    oh wait here it is....
    Like I said... this is simply not true. Either he's a mouthpiece for the CCCP or he's severely misinformed. That whole schtick sounds like it's straight out of the Xinhua Daily - the government paper that does nothing but extoll the virtues of the the CCCP.

    The reality on the ground is far different. I know I live in China. :rolleyes:
     
    Last edited: Sep 3, 2006
  8. Apotheosis

    Apotheosis Valued Member

    Those you listed are of course exploitation, and I agree it is wrong.

    However many people view so called "sweat shops" as exploitation which is something I strongly disagree with.
     
  9. Apotheosis

    Apotheosis Valued Member

    How does that go against what I said?

    I said that he did not say that povery no longer existed in China, and he didn't.

    400 million isn't even half of the population is it?
     
  10. liokault

    liokault Banned Banned

    Um....I dont get it, where did I say poverty no longer existed in china? Unless there are exactly 400 million people in china.

    Not true.....hmmmm:

    This one gives 174 million lifted from poverty 1990-2002
    http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/17500.html


    This one gives 100 million 1985-2005
    http://english.people.com.cn/200608/23/eng20060823_295946.html


    Interesting one here:
    http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6578

    "Between 1987 and 1998, there was only one region of the world that saw a dramatic fall in both the number of people and the proportion of the population living on less than a dollar a day. That region was East Asia," observes economist Martin Wolf. "But this was also the only region to see consistent and rapid growth in real incomes per head."

    High growth allowed East Asia to reduce the share of its poor during this period from 26 to 15 percent and the number of poor from 417 million to 278 million people. With annual growth rates of nearly 9 percent since 1979, when it began introducing market reforms, China alone has pulled more than 100 million people out of poverty.



    http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj26n1/cj26n1-12.pdf
    This one quotes 1 million lifted from poverty every month.


    Interestingly, I cant find anything on Chinese people getting poorer....but I can find quotes of poverty growing in USA as jobs move to Asia....who'd a thunk it.
     
  11. Matt_Bernius

    Matt_Bernius a student and a teacher

    Oh, wait a sec, make no mistake, they are explotative. Sweat shops are all about exploitation and they always have been.

    It's just that said exploitation is part of larger and far more complex social systems to be simplified as being either good or bad/moral or immoral.

    But regardless of simplication or not, the business practices are preditory and exploitative. And recuding it to an "ain't capitalism wonderful 'cause we're modernizing all these backwards yokels and tearing down corrupt social systems arguement because people are earning money" is just as incorrect as "we should shut down the factories and send people back to starving and living on indegenous garbage heaps*." Neither arguement captures the complexities of the whole issues.

    - Matt

    * - note that in many countries, there are whole classes of people who do in fact live on or near garbage heaps and earn a living salvaging for scrap metal in these dangerous environments.
     
  12. Apotheosis

    Apotheosis Valued Member

    How is it exploitative?

    It is not using the workers unfairly to give them jobs....

    Is McDonalds exploiting all of their American employees because they only pay them minimum wage?

    No, they are using them as cheap labour however they are also compensating them fairly for their area(you can't apply a global standard of wages/working conditions).
     
  13. cullion

    cullion Valued Member

    Cite a source for your claim that Coca Cola corporation killed a village by stealing their water.

    Cite an example of Shell spilling oil without being fined. You do understand that Shell has no more interest in losing oil through leaky pipes than you do in watching it spill, right ?

    Cite an example.

    Please give an example of a pharmaceutical company making it illegal for an aboriginal tribe to market a local herb or potion to the west.

    Yes it is a matter of ethics, which is why I don't want these poor people to have their attempts to work themselves out of poverty thwarted by well-intentioned but misguided liberals who live in comfortable modern towns and cities in the western world and don't understand what was involved in reaching that state.
     
  14. firecoins

    firecoins Armchair General

    It is illegal for me to manufacture most medications that have a patent. Even if I had access to the proper ingredients.
     
  15. cullion

    cullion Valued Member

    Only in the country where the patent is granted, and the patent is for an entire industrial process. Patents do not make it illegal to distribute an unrefined herb, or snake venom.
     
  16. Matt_Bernius

    Matt_Bernius a student and a teacher

    I'm going to answer your points in slightly different order:

    No. Didn't suggest it was. Though, trying to compare McDonald's in-country practices to those of multinational businesses operating in the developing world is a ridiculous stretch -- the type of rhetorical argument style that works well on talk radio but doesn't acknowledge the complex realities on the ground.

    Let's be careful with the notion of "fair" compensation, because it takes us down a rather subjective path. Carried to an extreme, you would then have to agree that in the pre-civil war US, slavery wasn't exploitative because it was a legal protected and sanctioned system of labor practices. Personally, I'm not willing to accept that under any rubric slavery isn't inherently exploitive, even if it is legal.

    This is why, pure subjectivity, like pure objectivity, fails in the real world.

    Well first of all, businesses often choose their manufacturing locations based on the lack of established business practices. So they are inherently looking for locations where they can best exploit the existing resource pool (read as both natural and human).

    Further, you need to also consider that in many locations the practices on the ground differ from laws on the books. Look no further than China where you need to be well versed in bribery (especially bureaucratic bribery) in order to do business there – something that has been a huge issue for American corporations to get used to. So often the system that they are operating in is inherently corrupt and given to exploitation – note that I’m not laying all of this at the feet of the companies.

    But anyone who starts to do real research into specific labor practices discovers that in many places they allow the labor pool to be chewed up and spit out without any social protection – this can include no child labor protection, long hours, 7 day a week work, and no allowances for health care (meaning that if you are injured on the job, the company doesn't need to provide any care or support if you are no longer able to work). In some countries, there are forms of indentured servitude practiced that essentially make it nearly impossible for someone to stop working once they begin.

    These exploitive practices can also extend to the intentional or unintentional lack of oversight for local supervisors who can go so far as using physical and mental abuse on workers to help facilitate labor.

    Now, again, I'm not going to paint all multi-nationals as "bad/evil" or suggest that this isn't, at this point, a frustrating and seemingly necessary step in industrialization in these countries. To do either would be guilty of the same generalization or reduction that you seem to be making.

    To deny that any of the above are exploitative practices because "that's the way business is done" is utter BS. Especially in cases where business choose to turn a blind eye to those activities and or choose to locate where regulating bodies are unable or unwilling to enforce standards.

    Like I said, unless you're willing to concede that "slavery wasn't really exploitative as long as it was legal," I can’t buy into the argument that you are making. I just think that ideology is blinding you to realities on the ground.

    - Matt
     
  17. cullion

    cullion Valued Member

    Slavery was immoral because the slaves in question were essentially prisoners of war who were sold as property (and their descendants). There was no freely entered contract. Somebody building a factory in a country like China offering people jobs on more attractive terms than subsistence farming isn't committing the same crime.

    I think emotive terms like 'exploitation' are being used very loosely. Aren't workers 'exploiting' an employer when they quit a job for a better paying one ? Aren't you 'exploiting' supermarkets when you shop around for cheaper steaks and milk ?
     
    Last edited: Sep 3, 2006
  18. Apotheosis

    Apotheosis Valued Member

    ^^Exactly, I agree completely.

    Not sure where you got the idea I was arguing it was right because it was legal....
     
  19. firecoins

    firecoins Armchair General

    What options do the Chinese workers have?
     
  20. Matt_Bernius

    Matt_Bernius a student and a teacher

    I agree, note that I said that I was making a gross generalization to counter a gross generalization.

    No. Inherent in the notion of exploiting is the fact that it's an unequal power situation (expoit: To make use of selfishly or unethically). Shopping around isn't exploitation. Choosing to do business in an area where you know you don't have to comply to existing local labor laws is exploitative. Inherent in there is the practice of bad faith. Likewise it turning a blind eye to local supervisors who break local labor laws.

    - Matt
     

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