A field guide to China's "low cost" factories
13 March 2008If you really want to know why your DVD player costs just US$30, and that T-shirt retails at under US$3, you should read The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage by former Financial Times journalist Alexandra Harney.
Ms Harney has written a detailed and precisely structured guidebook for American consumers, which reveals the real cost – low wages, hazardous working conditions and environmental degradation - of the products that line the shelves of Wal-Mart and just about every other retail outlet in the United States. The book blends macro-economic and geo-political analysis with touching profiles of ordinary Chinese workers and labour activists to create a comprehensive and accessible picture of life in China’s factories, and asks how long this situation can last.
China Labour Bulletin is quoted extensively throughout the book, and Ms Harney draws many of the same conclusions as we have done over the last few years. She notes how migrant workers, particularly the second generation of migrant workers now entering the workforce, are far more aware of their legal rights and more determined to stand up for those rights. She cites the case of Deng Wenping, a victim of the silicosis epidemic in the gemstone industry, who CLB helped to claim compensation, as an example of both the health hazards faced by China’s workers, and the determination those workers to seek redress for their injuries. The book also profiles a young labour activist who lost his hand soon after beginning work at a plastics factory and went on to become a self-taught legal aid worker dedicated to helping other victims of work-related injury and illness. Ms Harney describes the stirrings of a nascent labour movement in China.
Today, Chinese workers are more likely to shun factories with poor conditions, more prone to protest or strike, and more willing to sue their employers than in the past… By the standards of labor rights movements in the rest of the world, the shift underway in China is subtle. There is no national labour movement, no nationally coordinated strikes or sit-ins, no collective consciousness of the daily struggle of a Chinese factory worker. There is not even a charismatic leader… And yet, the stirrings of activism among Chinese workers are already creating challenges for the country’s manufacturing sector.
The book also examines in detail the corporate social responsibility (CSR) and anti-sweatshop movements in the United States that are increasingly influencing the behaviour of trans-national companies, and the effect that is having on their Chinese supplier companies. It focuses on the auditing and compliance work of Wal-Mart and suggests that all too often American companies are more concerned with removing the stigma of “sweatshop” than actually protecting workers’ rights. The book details the role of the “five star factories” which conform to the codes of conduct laid down by the major brands, and the “shadow factories” used by suppliers to make sure they can meet the cost and time demands made by those brands.
The inspector asked the manager to retrieve payroll and other records and choose 15 assembly-line workers she could interview later that morning. “Do it as fast as you can,” she said. “I have to finish by one P.M. at the latest… The factory managers watched her warily, afraid of what she might find. At the end of the tour, she pronounced the factory “pretty good”… A ten minute drive away, another factory owned by the same manager was humming away. This factory was making the same products for Wal-Mart as the factory the auditor saw, but under wholly different conditions and a cloak of secrecy… No one from Wal-Mart has ever seen this factory, though Wal-Mart buys much of the factory’s output, according to its owner. Officially, this factory does not even exist.
However, the situation in China’s factories remains fluid, and Ms Harney suggests one way forward for American brands and their Chinese suppliers is to encourage the election of workers’ representatives to negotiate directly with management, and for managers to appreciate that a contented workforce is a more productive and efficient workforce. Moreover, she says, the Chinese government needs to more effectively implement its own labour and environmental legislation, and:
Create an organization that truly represents workers, particularly migrants, in their negotiations with government agencies, the judicial system and employers. It’s not unthinkable that this organization could be the ACFTU, but the state-backed union would need to undergo substantial reform in order to serve workers more effectively.
Finally, Ms Harney suggests that if the government:
Applied the same elbow grease to policing its factories that it does to policing political debate on the internet, it would improve the standard of its manufacturing base, reduce the caseload of lawsuits and protests by disgruntled workers and ease tensions with its trading partners.
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