What's wrong with "free trade"?

[baldguy]

Meitai Plastics & Electronics
Dongguan City, Guangdong
CHINA

* Two thousand workers, mostly young women, produce computer equipment including keyboards and printer cases for Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM.

* Management instructs the workers to “love the company like your home,” “continuously strive for perfection” and to spy on and “actively monitor each other.”

* Workers are prohibited from talking, listening to music, raising their heads, putting their hands in their pockets. Workers are fined for being one minute late, for not trimming their fingernails—which could impede the work, and for stepping on the grass. Workers are searched on the way in and out of the factory. Workers who hand out flyers or discuss factory conditions with outsiders are fired.

* The young workers sit on hard wooden stools twelve hours a day, seven days a week as 500 computer keyboards an hour move down the assembly line or one every 7.2 seconds. Workers are allowed just 1.1 seconds to snap each key into place, repeating the same operation 3,250 times an hour, 35,750 times a day, 250,250 times a week and over one million times a month.

* The workers are paid 1/50th of a cent for each operation.

* The assembly line never stops, and workers needing to use the bathroom must learn to hold it until there is a break.

* All overtime is mandatory, with 12-hour shifts seven days a week and an average of two days off a month. A worker daring to take a Sunday off—which is supposedly their weekly holiday—will be docked 2 ½ days’ wages. Including unpaid overtime, workers are at the factory up to 87 hours a week. On average, they are at the factory 81 hours a week, while toiling 74 hours, including 34 hours of overtime, which exceeds China’s legal limit by 318 percent!

* The workers are paid a base wage of 64 cents an hour, which does not even come close to meeting subsistence level needs. After deductions for primitive room and board, the workers’ take-home wage drops to just 41 cents an hour. A worker toiling 75 hours a week will earn a take-home wage of $57.19, or 76 cents an hour including overtime and bonuses. The workers are routinely cheated of 14 to 19 percent of the wages legally due them.

* Ten to twelve workers share each crowded dorm room, sleeping on narrow metal bunk beds that line the walls. They drape old sheets over their cubicle openings for privacy. In the winter, workers have to walk down several flights of stairs to fetch hot water in a small plastic bucket, which they carry back to their rooms to take a sponge bath. In the summer, dorm temperatures reach into the high 90s.

* Workers are locked in the factory compound four days a week and are prohibited from even taking a walk.

* To symbolize their “improving lives” the workers are served a special treat on Fridays—a small chicken leg and foot. For breakfast, they are given watery rice gruel. The workers say the food has a bad taste and is “hard to swallow.”

* Illegally, workers are not inscribed in the mandatory work injury and health insurance and Social Security maternity leave program. In the Molding department, due to the excessive heat, the workers suffer skin rashes on their faces and arms.

* One worker summed up the general feeling in the factory: “I feel like I am serving a prison sentence.”

more
http://www.nlcnet.org/article.php?id=613

This is what "free trade" has created. Think of the job you have right now. The conditions above are what corporations what to provide to you. Even the corporations who wish to treat their workers well would be forced to cut back to be "competitive".

"Free trade" isn't free.

[readmoreoften]

1. Some mighty fine capitalism they got goin' on there in that "communist" country.

What alotta people don't grasp about China is that most of the pro-democracy activists are actual communists protesting this totalitarian capitalist simulation.

[patrice]

2. It isn't Free. It's ALWAYS been subsidized by tax $$$$Xn and on the Labor of the powerless.

[ThomWV]

3. Did you find that in Reader's Digest?

[baldguy]

5. If you don't go to the link, it's tough to know who it belongs to.

The National Labor Committee

http://www.nlcnet.org/aboutus.php

Mission Statement


Transnational corporations now roam the world to find the cheapest and most vulnerable workers. The people who stitch together our jeans and assemble our CD-players are mostly young women in Central America, Mexico, Bangladesh, China and other poor nations, many working 12 to 14-hour days for pennies an hour. The lack of accountability on the part of our U.S. corporations--now operating all over the world, and the resulting dehumanization of this new global workforce is emerging as the overwhelming moral crisis of the 21st century. The struggle for rule of law in the global economy--to ensure respect for the fundamental rights of the millions of workers producing goods for the U.S. market--has become the great new civil rights movement of our time.

The mission of the National Labor Committee is to help defend the human rights of workers in the global economy. The NLC investigates and exposes human and labor rights abuses committed by U.S. companies producing goods in the developing world. We undertake public education, research and popular campaigns that empower U.S. citizens to support the efforts of workers to learn and defend their rights. As they fight for the right to work in dignity, in healthy and safe workplaces and to earn a living wage, we will work with them to provide international visibility and backing for their efforts--and to press for international legal frameworks with effective enforcement mechanisms that will help create a space where fundamental internationally recognized worker rights can be assured.

The NLC's work is helping to coalesce a new and diverse coalition that includes religious, labor, women's, student, civil rights, solidarity, policy and grassroots groups to catalyze popular campaigns based on our original research to promote worker rights and pressure companies to end human and labor abuses. With a database of over 22,000 organizations and individuals, we serve as an information center, distributing our literature and videos. In just the last few years the NLC has:

* Helped bring massive and widespread media coverage to worker and human rights issues, raising them to a national level of public debate;
* Established groundbreaking models for independent monitoring of factories by local human rights and religious groups;
* Successfully pressured dozens of companies - including the Gap, Kathie Lee Gifford/Wal-Mart, and the Walt Disney Company - to improve conditions in supplier plants and to respect human and worker rights.

The National Labor Committee views worker rights in the global economy as indivisible and inalienable human rights and we believe that now is the time to secure them for all on the planet.

From Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Committee_in_Support_of_Human_and_Worker_Rights

The National Labor Committee in Support of Human and Worker Rights, commonly known as the National Labor Committee or the NLC, is a non-profit non-governmental organization (NGO) founded in 1981 by David Dyson to combat sweatshop labor and United States government policy in El Salvador and Central America. Today the NLC has offices in New York City, Bangladesh, and Central America; when Dyson left to become Executive Minister of Fort Greene's Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, Charles Kernaghan became Executive Director.

The National Labor Committee engages in fact-finding missions throughout the world to expose and document labor and human rights abuses; they then use this information to raise public awareness in an effort to change corporate policy. In addition to targeting stores and manufacturers, they often target celebrities who have clothing lines. Their 1996 discovery that Kathie Lee Gifford's Wal-Mart clothing line was being manufactured in Honduran sweatshops is often cited as the beginning of mainstream media coverage of the sweatshop phenomenon. Since then, the NLC has exposed the conditions under which many celebrity labels are made, including those of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Sean Combs(also known as P Diddy) and, most recently, Thalia Sodi.

They often work with labor unions and other human rights groups; one their closest allies has been United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), who they assisted in forming the Worker Rights Consortium in an effort to fight the use of sweatshops in manufacturing collegiate apparel.

The NLC has also worked with the United Steel Workers of America and Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) to draft the "Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act," which was introduced in both the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate in 2006.

[Liberal In Texas]

4. Gee, if only American workers would work for these wages and conditions then

the Corporations wouldn't have to pay to ship the stuff over here!

[Peace Patriot]

6. Agree. Free trade is fine. Nothing like a colorful marketplace to cheer the human soul.

But what we have are multinational conglomerates MONOPOLIZING trade, fixing prices, writing our laws, even controlling our voting machines, driving down wages, benefits and working conditions worldwide and here, destroying democracy and the sovereignty of the people, and ravaging the planet. These corporate entities--which operate like floating countries--are loyal to no country and no people. They are out-of-control, huge, powerful, financial entities, that buy governments and politicians, and try their damnedest to destroy those they can't buy. Witness the bushwhacks' and Exxon Mobil's relentless efforts to topple the democratically elected government of Venezuela, whose crime is insisting on a better deal on the oil profits for the people of Venezuela. That cannot be tolerated. And the multinational conglomerates--including their 'news' monopolies, and their bought governments like the U.S.--swarm all over this uppity government, with every tactic imaginable--violent coup attempts, assassination plots, a crippling oil professionals' strike, a U.S.-funded recall election, unfriggingbelievable psyops, dirty tricks, lies and propaganda, and on and on and on, to destroy the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people, and turn their democracy into the farce they've turned this one into.

This is not free trade. It is slave labor trade. And there is nothing democratic about it. It is fascism.

What kind of government do these corpo/fascists prefer? They prefer Colombia, where union leaders are routinely tortured and murdered by rightwing death squads with close ties to the narco-fascist rulers.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

7. The problem is that it beats the obvious alternatives.

Clearly, a trade policy that results in conditions in the factory you describe improving will benefit the workers there.

However, a trade policy which results in that factory shutting down will make things even worse for them than they already are (it may benefit some other currently unemployed people somewhere else, but that can't be relied upon).

So any attempt to use trade barriers to improve working conditions has to be carefully calibrated to do more harm than good; it certainly is possible to do so, but it's far less obvious than it looks at first glance.

[baldguy]

10. Here's an idea

How about assembling the keyboards in Green Bay instead of Guangdong? Sure it might add 10% or more to the production cost - but that's about $0.25 at retail. Nobody would notice.

As for the Chinese workers - I don't really care. There's an endless suppy of jobs such as described above. Their country's GDP grew more than 9% last year - which is down from almost 12% in 2007. Meanwhile the US is teetering on a recession - a shinkage in real GDP.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

16. That's not a decision the government gets to make.

Firstly, the Government can't say "you must assemble keyboards in Green Bay".

It *can* say "you can't bring keyboards assembled in Guangdong into the US" and hope that that leads to people assembling keyboards in Green Bay, but it's just as likely to lead to people assembling fewer keyboards, and it will certainly be bad for the people in Guangdong. It will also be a little bit bad for people all over the US who have to pay more for keyboards, and if you do the same thing for all other industries then even the people in Green Bay will lose most if not all of what they gain in employment from price rises.


Secondly, you may not care much about people in Guangdong, but if not then you should acknowledge that your arguments are purely about self-interest rather than ethics, and avoid using words like "should" and "ought" to describe them. The definition of "good" is caring about other people.

Also, if you don't care about people in Guangdong, descriptions of their suffering like the one in the OP are irrelevant.


Incidentally, even from a purely American-centric perspective restricting imports is almost certainly a bad idea. Read up on the effects of the Hawley-Smoot tarriff if you're not already familiar with them.

[AntiFascist]

21. This represents a failure of the Chinese government...

under a true "Communist" system citizens would be treated equally fairly, not where a 'lower working class' is treated as prisoners who are forced to perform labor for foreign corporations in order to survive. China is certainly wealthy enough to treat its workers much better. Unfortunately, what "works" for Chinese authoritarianism will soon be imported to the United States unless we the people rise up and demand real change in what is left of our democracy.

[treestar]

22. Right. It's too common on DU to see blind one dimensional

views of economic activity, and out of that support policies that are obvious on shallow grounds but which could do more harm than good to American workers.

And clearly competing with the Chinese is our lot in life - the more they expect and get, the easier we can do that. Just hoping they will evaporate into dust won't do it.

[Hippo_Tron]

26. China's GDP Per Capita is $5400, the US's is $45,000

And the income disparity in China is far greater than it is in the United States. Half of China's population is barely even at subsistence level even if that. But the half that is above that level is far more than it was during the Mao years, particularly during the Great Leap Forward.

Those jobs in Guangdong don't exist without free trade. Granted it is very good to question whether or not China's development is actually sustainable development since it is dependent on low wages and the United States and other rich nations buying their imports. There are two sides to the story.

[pampango]

8. We don't have "free trade" with China. We just have trade with it. We have "free trade" with 17

countries - Israel, Canada, Mexico, Jordan, Australia, Chile, Singapore, Bahrain, Morocco, Oman, Peru, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduran, and the Dominican Republic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_trade_agreements

The big countries that we have trading issues with, i.e. China, India and Japan aren't among them.

[baldguy]

9. The problems cited in the OP are the result of our existing trade agreements.

The goal of the WTO is free trade, to the advantage of corporations and explicitly at the expanse of workers. The fact that we restrict the sales of nuclear weapons & fighter jets China does not affect their sales of computers & computer components to us.

[pampango]

19. The goal of the WTO is not free trade. China, India and Third World

countries belong to the WTO and are allowed to have much higher tariffs than the "rich" countries. "Free trade" would be when neither country had significant tariffs as is the case with the 17 countries that have "free trade" agreements with us.

If China or India had an FTA with us, they wouldn't be allowed to apply tariffs to imports from us. I suspect that is why they prefer to trade under the rules of the WTO rather than engage in "free trade" with the US.

[Selatius]

11. The working conditions in China are what American conditions used to be before labor unions.

The only difference in China is that China is an authoritarian dictatorship. Unionization and labor reform is much harder when the government is un-elected.

[baldguy]

12. Then why do the Walmarts in China have unions?

[Selatius]

13. As far as I know, the only unions allowed in China are totally controlled by the CCP.

Independent labor unions are outlawed in China. Trying to start an independent union outside the control of the state means jail time.

[baldguy]

14. So, no union at all is *better*?

Try to start an independent union at Walmart in the US you lose your job, and are often black-balled from other jobs as well.

[Selatius]

15. Well, my point is this:

A union dominated by a state that routinely ignores labor abuses and is actively in collusion with the same employers that subjects workers to these stunningly inhumane conditions is essentially useless and unrepresentative of the workers at large. Unions that are controlled by the workers themselves from the bottom-up are preferred.

[MellowDem]

17. Fine, subsidize those companies then...

who are losing out on extra profit and losing to competition with lower labor costs in other countries. Or put tariffs on those products from China, increasing their price here and causing American companies with American workers who must buy those products have to make cuts in their workforce. Basically, protectionism isn't free either. In fact, it's substantially worse.

[Deja Q]

24. Freedom isn't free either.

What is free, anyway?

[MellowDem]

25. Nothing... nt

[struggle4progress]

18. Why should commodities cross borders more easily than people? The "freedom" of"

"free trade" is apparently the freedom to profit from wage and price differentials across borders, and such differentials exist in part because humans cannot move freely across the borders: so some "advantages" of "free trade" result naturally from certain restrictions on human freedom

[treestar]

23. Yes, and the divide and conquer technique the capitalist uses

All too successfully - blame the other workers across the border (or in your country having come from another country) for existing and wanting to live too, and clamor for more restrictions on their own movements in a pointless effort to counter that. The capitalist laughs all the way to the location where they will find the cheapest labor.

All the Chinese and Indians, all the illegals and the H-1bs, it's their fault, not the capitalists!

[annabanana]

20. This so called "free trade" is, in fact, just "free capital"

It translates into "slave labor"

It would only really be free trade if both capital AND labor were equally fluid.