A piece of paper. A report. A passing grade. U.S. retailers who outsource from Chinese factories parade these things in front of investors and workers rights groups in an attempt to show that the products they sell in their stores are produced under internationally recognized reasonable working conditions.
Wal-Mart, Nike, and many other U.S. retailers and manufacturers came under great scrutiny during the 90’s when it became widely known that their products were being produced in sweatshops with atrocious working conditions.
To prevent public outcry, manufacturers and retailers began auditing the factories where their products were being made to ensure reasonable working conditions. In the U.S., we might associate reasonable working conditions with things like a decent wage, safe working environment, and the ability to earn a decent living working around 40 hours a week.
In China, however, these conditions sound like little more than a fantasy. Workers are frequently required to work 80, 90, 100 hour work weeks. Factories have no ventilation systems. Safety measures are either completely non-existent or ignored. Migrant workers are crammed into dorm rooms with 10 to 12 other workers, all of whom must share a communal sink and hole-in-the-ground toilet.
It is dire conditions such as these that allow Chinese factories to manufacture our iPods and Happy Meal toys so cheaply. But cheap labor and despicable working conditions are only a few of the reasons why China has become the dominant manufacturing country in the world. Most of the country still runs on coal, which, while extremely cheap, has devastated the Chinese environment, as well as the rest of the world.
The Chinese government does have laws on the books to combat the problems of worker mistreatment and also has laws governing pollution, but the enforcement of these laws constitutes a major problem.
If China enforces reasonable work weeks, implements safe working environments, demands the use of less environmentally threatening manufacturing processes, and so forth, that all costs money. You might think that since Chinese products cost so little, this extra expense would be negligible.
U.S. retailers don’t seem to think so. When a U.S. retailer takes an order to a Chinese factory, say for 100,000 shirts by the end of two weeks for a price of x cents per shirt, you might think that the factory has a business decision to make. Should they accept or decline the offer?
The problem is, it is not solely a business decision. It is also an ethical decision. No factory in China can produce the products as quickly and at the price U.S. and other companies demand if they follow the worker protection rules the retailers require. So it would seem the company would have to decline the offer, right?
If they do decline it, the retailer will find another factory without so many ethical scruples. Often, these manufacturers will create one “model” factory that they bring all the auditors to judge and secretly produce the items in shadow factories that do not even officially exist.
These shadow factories routinely underpay their workers and require them to work in many of the dangerous conditions mentioned earlier, but they get the product made at the price the retailer wants and on deadline.
Chinese factories that are honest and treat their employees with a modicum of decency get few orders and tend to go out of business. The factories who cheat their workers and their isolated competitors that play by the rules get lots of orders.
While the U.S. and other retailers are well aware that their price demands are impossible to meet without forcing unsafe and unreasonable working conditions, they don’t really care. Most companies will not even tell you what factory produced a given product and if they do, they will not tell you whether that factory meets any sort of international standards for workplace safety or worker’s rights.
Given that the retailers have little incentive financially to improve conditions in Chinese factories, any hope of a manufacturing resurgence in the United States or most other western countries is based solely on wishful thinking.
Americans have heard the politicians cry “protectionism” whenever factories asked for tariffs to help protect American manufacturing jobs as if it is somehow a vice to protect one’s neighbors from economic despair. So now we have companies where executives rake in ungodly amounts of money because free trade policies have allowed them to ship work to wherever it’s cheapest, regardless of any humanitarian costs.
While it is easy to sit and rail against big business and their tacit endorsement of sub-human labor practices, it is much more difficult to examine our own consumption habits. Studies have suggested that even when we have the option to choose between two nearly identical products, one produced under harsh conditions and the other under reasonable conditions, that we will overwhelmingly choose based on price alone.
We, as a people, have to ask ourselves if all these things we possess are really worth the price in human misery that we are paying for them.
If things are to change we, as consumers, will have to accept that some things will be priced beyond our reach. We will have to demand absolute transparency in workplace conditions and not stand for the winking and nodding that routinely goes on between manufacturer and supplier.
Photos taken by Steve Jurvetson:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/
Photo taken by Edwin Lee: http://www.flickr.com/photos/edwinylee/
