Re: Chinese Slave Labor (was Re: say no to urban skydiving Re: AW: Aunti Behringer)

[Suit & Tie Guy <erwill@suitandtieguy.com>]

On Jan 20, 2005, at 9:08 AM, Douglas Baldwin wrote:
> than fill up the LD group with this thread, but... Does anyone know 
> how many
> of China's workers are in fact slaves and how many are willingly 
> seeking

i know nothing about chinese labour other than it's cheap and theres 50 
billion of them.

there are two reasons i have a problem with this:

A) american companies need to stop this offshore factory migration. yes 
i shop at wal-mart thank you for asking, but i'm often in Peoria when 
it is too late to shop anywhere else and they would probably have my 
money if everything cost a bit more. if we had a one-page tax code 
instead of a one-million page tax code maybe these corporations 
wouldn't find tax incentives to move offshore (factories to china, 
"home office" to bermuda ... pretty soon they aren't even in your 
country anymore). this is an international list, i don't really mean to 
sound so US-centric but know nothing about the situation in germany or 
other countries.

B) chinese factories are more likely to use people instead of robots 
because there are plenty of people, even though robots are better for 
alot of things. this is one of the reasons Mackie SR1530s have a 50% 
return rate for lack of functioning from the local Guitar Center.

the other reason is they fill a container up with unpadded tightly 
formed boxes of speakers with no packing material and put them on a 
boat, and then have Gigantor drop-kick the container across the 
dockyard for shits and giggles just to make sure that when Suit & Tie 
Guy opens up his box of brand-new SR1530s the grilles are all bent out 
of shape and the horn drivers don't work. and the cabinet is CRACKED.

> My perception of the media and public voices who use the term "slave
> labor" is 1) They are people who are pissed that we are losing jobs to
> offshore labor, 2) They are right wing and often overtly fundamentalist
> Christian, and/or 3) They equate lower costs with lower quality.

I used the term "slave labor" because someone else did.

if i were to talk about third-world labour i would use the term 
"sweatshop", not "slavery". that doesn't mean i think Nike is a cool 
company.

china doesn't scare me because of sweatshops and walmart.

billions of men who can't get laid and have nuclear weapons scare me.

---
Eric Williamson
www.suitandtieguy.com