A sweatshop in Lungcheong

Yesterday, Blake Gilson published an article in The Daily Cougar entitled "Child Labor is not Exploitation". Besides being a terrible article with poor arguments and shoddy sources, he is a person in need of some love.

Blake made some inane comments like "How can it be exploitation if someone voluntarily agrees?".
Or better yet, "If all transactions are voluntary, why can't we assume that the transactions would be beneficial for both employer and employee?".

Well, you get the gist of it.

Even better, a Harvard economist, Jeffrey Sachs made an even more inane comment. "My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops, but too few." Now, I will not address this statement yet, although it should be quite apparent how asinine it is. In the near future I will analyze it, along with his argument. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to write it tonight.

Besides, the main point of this post is to display just how "unexploited" sweatshop workers are.

A December 2005 report detailing four years of investigations of a factory in Luncheong, China where RC cars and trucks were created for Mattel, Wal-Mart, MGA and others exposed the following:


The official report can be viewed here.
-Workers were denied government mandated pregnancy leave.
-Workers were illegally denied health care.
-Work injuries resulted in termination of job.
-Workers used toxic paints and were given neither gloves nor respiratory masks. If a worker became ill from the fumes and collapsed, he/she was paid a small fee and asked to leave the factory (termination of job).
-Shifts were 13 hours, six or seven days a week with mandatory overtime.
-Overtime exceeds China's legal limit by 300 percent. China also mandates that overtime be voluntary.
-Workers had to card out at 10pm and the mandatory overtime was paid in cash.
-Saturday overtime (mandated by the Chinese government to be double pay on the weekends)
was paid as 1.5 pay.
-When a minimum wage increase occurred in the province, the factory responded with an increase of production lines and higher quotas.
-Fees for food and dorm increased with the higher minimum wage
-Bonuses were retracted after the higher minimum wage was enacted.
-Many of the employees were girls younger than 16 years.
-Workers must paint 2,000 parts a day (including the body of the truck).
-Monitoring visits are known over a week in advance.
-Employees are told how to answer questions, in case they are interviewed during an inspection, and are given a week and a half pay for correct responses.
-Employees that cannot be trusted and new employees are not permitted to work on inspection day (and are not given pay).
-The Lungcheong factory subcontracts to factories in Guangzhou and Xingyue, with even worse conditions.
-Workers in Xingyue endured 19 hour days, seven days a week and received $0.21/hr (below the province's legal minimum).
-Some Lungcheong subcontractors paid workers as low as $0.13/hr.

The "Big Foot Ragin' Monster Truck", which comes from this factory, sales for $29.97 at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart makes $14.40 per truck (after all costs, including shipment and profit to the factory in China).


Ok, well should I even have to type it? Why the fuck is Wal-Mart's mark up $14.40? Why don't they pay the workers more and mark it up only $5?

Oh, Wal-Mart must pay its employees? Well, fine, then give the CEO a pay cut. It's a sad fact of our world that (in 1999, so imagine now!) the assets of the world's 358 billionaires were greater than the combined incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people (about 3 billion human beings).

It's time for a radical change, before capitalism wrecks this world.