AZspot

So it is not a question of imposing American standards on the Chinese. We have a right to hold the Chinese to their own standard, just as other countries have a right to hold us Americans to the standard of our laws and Constitution.

How could this be done? Congress could enact a law empowering the U.S. Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration to impose penalty tariffs on imports of products made under conditions that violate international labor standards and the domestic laws of the country of origin.

The U.S. government could adopt a policy of only purchasing electronics equipment, especially for the military, with U.S.-made components. This would be wise on national security grounds. If the U.S. has a military confrontation with China, we don’t want the Chinese to be in a position to cut off supplies vital to our military.

Labor and consumer organizations could recognize companies that obey the law and refrain from fraud, and we the people could patronize these companies.

Over the past half century, these global oligopolies have been offshoring whole sectors of production from the rich/high-wage to the poor/low-wage countries, transforming global labor conditions in their search for global low-cost position, and in a divide and rule approach to world labor. Leading U.S. multinationals, such as General Electric, Exxon, Chevron, Ford, General Motors, Proctor and Gamble, IBM, Hewlett Packard, United Technologies, Johnson and Johnson, Alcoa, Kraft, and Coca Cola now employ more workers abroad than they do in the United States—even without considering the vast number of workers they employ through subcontractors. Some major corporations, such as Nike and Reebok, rely on third world subcontractors for 100 percent of their production workforce—with domestic employees confined simply to managerial, product development, marketing, and distribution activities. The result has been the proletarianization, often under precarious conditions, of much of the population of the underdeveloped countries, working in massive export zones under conditions dictated by foreign multinationals.

Two realities dominate labor at the world level today. One is global labor arbitrage or the system of imperial rent. The other is the existence of a massive global reserve army, which makes this world system of extreme exploitation possible. “Labour arbitrage” is defined quite simply by The Economist as “taking advantage of lower wages abroad, especially in poor countries.” It is thus an unequal exchange process in which one country, as Marx said, is able to “cheat” another due to the much higher exploitation of labor in the poorer country. A study of production in China’s industrialized Pearl River Delta region (encompassing Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong) found in 2005 that some workers were compelled to work up to sixteen hours continuously, and that corporal punishment was routinely employed as a means of worker discipline. Some 200 million Chinese are said to work in hazardous conditions, claiming over a 100,000 lives a year.

It turns out the story is much worse. Researchers with the Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) say that legions of vocational and university students, some as young as 16, are forced to take months’-long “internships” in Foxconn’s mainland China factories assembling Apple products. The details of the internship program paint a far more disturbing picture than the Times does of how Foxconn, “the Chinese hell factory,” treats its workers, relying on public humiliation, military discipline, forced labor and physical abuse as management tools to hold down costs and extract maximum profits for Apple.

To supply enough employees for Foxconn, the 60th largest corporation globally, government officials are serving as lead recruiters at the cost of pushing teenage students into harsh work environments. The scale is astonishing with the Henan provincial government having announced in both 2010 and 2011 that it would send 100,000 vocational and university students to work at Foxconn, according to SACOM.

Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation, told AlterNet that “Foxconn is conspiring with government officials and universities in China to run what may be the world’s single largest internship program – and one of the most exploitative. Students at vocational schools – including those whose studies have nothing to do with consumer electronics – are literally forced to move far from home to work for Foxconn, threatened that otherwise they won’t be allowed to graduate. Assembling our iPhones and Kindles for meager wages, they work under the same conditions, or worse, as other workers in the Foxconn sweatshops.”

The state involvement shows Foxconn and Apple depend on tax breaks, repression of labor, subsidies and Chinese government aid, including housing, infrastructure, transportation and recruitment, to fatten their corporate treasuries. As the students function as seasonal employees to meet increased demand for new product rollouts, Apple is directly dependent on forced labor.

The real story of the Apple-Foxconn behemoth, then, is far from being John Galt incarnate. Their global dominance is forged in the crucible of China’s state-managed authoritarian capitalism. Since the 1980s China has starved rural areas to accelerate the industrialization of coastal cities like Shenzhen, where Foxconn first set up shop in 1988. Scholars who study China’s economy and labor market link rural underdevelopment to the creation of a massive migrant work force that serves as the foundation of the country’s industrialization. Deprived of many rights, migrants are recruited to work in Foxconn’s city-sized complexes by government employees with false promises of good-paying jobs that will help them escape rural poverty. A large percentage of migrant workers are student interns as they are recruited from poor rural regions like Henan and sent to work in coastal metropolises like Shenzhen.

Rather than investing in state of the art facilities, corporations found that the opening of China offered them something that exceeded the cost performance of the best automation: an infinite supply of human hands available so cheaply that for the first time in a century the price of labor was a negligible fraction of the cost of goods. Why build complex and expensive factories, when you can rent sheds full of people? And hey, you can even get someone else to pay for the shed.

You could—you can—rent people to use without regard for safety laws, pollution laws, health care costs, or any danger of legal recourse. People you can use without concern over discrimination and without compensation for workplace injuries. People who have never heard of a pension. People who will perform the most tedious, repetitious, injurious processes right up until the day they can’t.

In fact, you can rent people wholesale and use them as an excuse against ever paying retail. You can rent disposable, untrained kids, work them to destruction for peanuts, and use their very availability as proof that other workers should be willing to accept the same terms. You know, American workers, the most capable, most productive workers on the planet. The people whose efforts and partnership made the corporations possible. Former workers. You can use desperation as proof that the workers who took the wages you paid them and lived under the agreements you offered, were overpaid bums. It’s a win-win.

It doesn’t stop with the workers. You can produce your goods in a place where environment is not even an afterthought, and justice barely a rumor, then argue the same should be true everywhere. You can drink from the firehouse of statist dictatorship, and use it to declare that the burdens of democracy are too great to be tolerated. You can eat your cake… and a billion other people’s too.

China was the weapon that corporations wielded against not just Japan, but American government and American workers. And why not? The business of corporations is to make money. They are obligated by law to maximize profit for shareholders. They’re not there to help workers. They’re not there to hurt workers. They are agnostic to the concerns of workers. Ditto America. Protecting the nation and workers is the business of government not corporations.

But that can only happen when the government is focused on the welfare of it’s citizens rather than the panacea of being “business friendly.” Under the motto of being business friendly deregulation in the United States accelerated the outsourcing of jobs, driving up income inequality and destroying our manufacturing base in a way that didn’t happen in places that didn’t buy into the farce of corporate rights. Because a business friendly government rather than a worker friendly government is a pointless government, an anti-government, a poor quality cartoon of a government only without the helpful robots and the automatic shaving machine.

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Now, read the last three paragraphs again and think about what it implies for the future of the American worker. Please do read the whole article. It is important that you do, because this is Tea Party future. This is the future if the only emphasis is on jobs and maximizing profits, with little emphasis on caring for others. Look again carefully at the last three paragraphs. Workers at a Chinese factory were living in company dormitories. They were roused and given but little food. They were told to work 12 hour shifts. By the way, this is in a Communist country, which means that when you buy Apple, you are supporting not just socialism, but Marxist socialism. Oops, did you notice that there is no family emphasis? The workers were in dormitories, not in family housing. Oh, and should Father Orthoduck mention that when we buy cheap goods from China (not Taiwan) we are buying goods from a country with forced abortions? More than that, many supporters of the Tea Party are busily running campaigns against anyone who supports abortion in an even indirect way while they have no trouble buying good from a country which openly forces abortions upon people. Hmm, Father Orthoduck guesses that economic policy trumps pro-life policy because Father Orthoduck certainly does not see pro-life organizations running campaigns to stop us from buying from communist China. That is, Tea Party supporters are against what they call socialism in the USA while stronly supporting it with their economic policies and buying habits.

Yes, this is a rant by Father Orthoduck about both the Tea Party and those who say they are against socialism while inappropriately supporting employee mistreatment in countries such as China and other countries that have oppressive child labor, etc. This is what it means to be a Tea Party supporter. It means that in the USA they hoist signs that claim that Obama is leading us to socialism at the same time that they have no problems with worker wages being lowered or with products being sold in the USA that are produced by Marxist-oppressed overseas workers. It means that Tea Party supporters have no problem with a slow return to workers having to live in company housing and buying at the company store. For those of you who do not know history, I would suggest that you read the history of company towns and company stores, particularly in mining regions in the Appalachian areas of the USA, and what it took to have a decent life as a miner in the USA.

All too many Tea Party supporters claim the moral high ground while they are in fact supporting Marxism (by their buying habits) and having no problem with wages being cut and families being torn apart so that the husbands (or single women) are available 24/7 in worker dormitories to do whatever is necessary so that profits might be maximized. When profits become all that is important, then families take a much lower place. When profits become all important, then even life (whether infant or adult) takes a much lower place. This is what it means to be a supporter of laissez faire capitalism. This is what it means to be a secular Tea Party supporter. Let Father Orthoduck strongly state that if one is a Christian Tea Party supporter, then while one may support conservative economic policies, one ought to also support boycotts of any country that has strongly anti-life policies. To say that one is against President Obama for socialism while buying Marxist Chinese goods without a protest is a contradiction. One must, as a Christian Tea Party member, be concerned not simply about profits but about any working conditions that will be destructive to families (such as worker dormitories). To say that one is a Christian Tea Party member without making any mention of boycotts against China is only to show either a total uneducated ignorance of reality or to show just how shallow one’s understanding is, or to broadcast to the world that profits are more important than babies. Sadly, most Christian Tea Party members are all about slogans rather than about consequent stances. Most Christian Tea Party supporters do not even think about who their buying policies are supporting and what their policies mean to employee wages and benefits.

…The official work day in China is eight hours long, and that’s a joke. I never met anyone who had even heard of an eight-hour shift. Everyone I talked to worked 12-hour shifts standard, and often much longer than that, 14 hours a day, 15 hours a day. Sometimes when there’s a hot new gadget coming out– you know what the [BLEEP] I’m talking about– sometimes it pegs up to 16 hours a day. And it just sits there for weeks and months at a time, month after month after month, straight 16′s, sometimes longer than that.

While I’m in-country, a worker at Foxconn dies after working a 34-hour shift. I wish I could say that’s exceptional, but it’s happened before. I only mention it because it actually happened while I was there.

And I go to the dormitories. I’m a valuable potential future customer. They will show me anything I ask to see. The dormitories are cement cubes, 12-foot by 12-foot. And in that space there are 13 beds, 14 beds. I count 15 beds. They’re stacked up like Jenga puzzle pieces all the way up to the ceiling. The space between them is so narrow, none of us would actually fit in them. They have to slide into them like coffins.

There are cameras in the rooms. There are cameras in the hallways. There are cameras everywhere. And why wouldn’t there be? You know, when we dream of a future where the regulations are washed away and the corporations are finally free to sail above us, you don’t have to dream about some sci-fi dystopian Blade Runner/1984 bull [BLEEP]. You can go to Shenzhen tomorrow. They’re making your crap that way today.

But it’s not cheaper, or better, or more efficient. Firing your teachers isn’t exactly “winning the future”. And outsourcing manufacturing, as Boeing found out, is often a good way to increase coordination costs, create more operational risk, and destroy value. However, the system is good at maintaining the power of oligarch-style control of cultural institutions. If no one but the kids of rich people can read, only the kids of rich people will be able to organize society’s resources. Outsourcing work to China means that workers are scared and have no leverage, so they do what management wants. Again, this isn’t efficient; the UAW sought to make small cars in the 1940s, but was rebuffed by management. Workers are closest to production; treating them terribly is a good way to degrade product quality. Silicon Valley companies give their engineers free snacks and frisbees because happy employees that take ownership over their work create good quality products. Treating people terribly scares them, and makes them more pliable. Again, it’s about control.

It seems to me a place where the worst of western capitalism and the worst of Gulf Arab racism meet in a horrible vortex. The most pervasive feeling is of a lack of compassion, where the commoditisation of everything and the disdain for certain nationalities thickens the skin to the tragic plight of fellow human beings.

Psychologically, these workers are isolated and alienated; practically, they are trapped by draconian sponsorship laws in the UAE, and in debt to agents back home. This is exacerbated by the fact that there is such little enforceable employment law in these markets. Such economies have developed so rapidly that social and civic attitudes have not kept pace, and the sponsorship system is open to abuse and still victimises migrant workers throughout the Gulf.

Dubai is considered an emirate under a popular, liberal, benevolent and forward-looking ruling family that has managed to develop the economy and extend its hands to the outside world without compromising its culture or values. Nobody is naive enough to claim that capitalism does not claim casualties and create classes, or that expatriates from the sub-continent have not made happy and relatively lucrative lives in the region, but Dubai’s name is becoming stained by the blood of migrant workers.