assessment READ THE ARTICLE AND ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:
1) Find at least two brands based in Europe or America manufacturing in Third World countries
and reflects on the reasons why it is done.
2) What measures do you think should be taken from the First World
to avoid this problem?
3) Do you think if all we knew from which these products and how they have made, continue to act or react the same way?
4) What has this to do with Globalization? Why
only costs "Everything 100" - David Jimenez
work between 14 and 18 hours. Have 15 minutes to four hours to eat and sleep in dens located in the same factories. By nightfall, the workers are registered to ensure that they have not stolen anything. With its metal doors and barred windows, these shops look more like a military barracks. This is how the Chinese are competitive. CHRONIC checks on the spot abuse in Asian factories.
Victims of "Made in China"
Mount, packaging, assembling, packaging, assembling, packing the 600 young people work like robots, without looking up, take a break or talk to them. All have come from the countryside trying to escape poverty and here they are, assembling and packaging plastic dolls, between 14 and 18 hours, 15 minutes to eat, leave to go to the service reduced to four hours to dream that does not really sleeping in the slums are located on the top floor of the factory. A loud siren
them back to reality and announced the new day well before dawn. Employees jump out of bed, put the robes and are in line before running downstairs to their jobs. The giant ship is located on the outskirts of Shenzhen, the most modern city in southern China, surrounded by other stores similar, smaller or larger, some with more than 5,000 employees.
in China are known as dagongmei or working girls. Youth and adolescents are willing to produce, produce and produce without rest for a salary of 15,000 pesetas per month to the heads of discounted food and what they call "housing costs". The hundreds of thousands of factories in cheap labor spread across the country are the other side of that made in China that have invaded the shops around the world, from the articles of stores all at 100 to washing machines or clothes. And for dagongmei, these factories are your home, your family, your cell.
They supervisors are responsible for not rest and that the production never decrease. Each worker is registered at the end of the day to verify that there has been no unity of toys, keychains, hats or anything else that are manufactured within the myriad of manufactured products at bargain prices. If you break the internal rules do not yield the expected level, a penalty system allows commanders to reduce the salary or eight days of vacation are awarded annually. "We have to monitor them and if not, relax," he laughs the pattern of this factory in Shenzhen that produces tiny plastic toys.
Thousands of U.S. and European companies including English fifty factories subcontract similar to the Chinese to bring their products to the West at the best price. "Otherwise, it would not pay and we would go to another country, recognizes an American businessman held about 40 workshops in the delta of Pearl River, they work six million dagongmei.
There are even a tenth of which exist all over the country, around 70 million. Overwhelmed by this reality, Professor of Asian Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong Pun Ngai was decided to stop by a farmer again, sought a factory and spent six months living and working in an electronics factory in Shenzhen to see how exploited live Chinese workers. Pun Ngai's inquiries are not alone. The investigation of a newspaper in Hong Kong discovered last August that the toys that the multinational gave McDonald's burgers in their promotions in China were being produced in China by teenagers between 12 and 17. The children worked tirelessly for seven o'clock to 11 pm, every day of the week. Sometimes the day dragged on until two o'clock in exchange for a salary of 400 pesetas a day and a room of 25 meters square to share with 15 other girls.
The Christian Industrial Committee Hong Kong, an NGO dedicated to rescuing small working is such conditions, sent a team of investigators to the factory contracted by the American restaurant chain. The stories they heard were like all those of Wang Hanhong, 12: "My parents did not want to come. I cried and pleaded to let me because I wanted to see the world. My family has three other children, but all go to school. I want to save money for my parents to survive. "
circle is almost indestructible. On the one hand, American or European multinationals do not have to answer for the conditions of its factories in Third World countries and save labor costs. In addition, local governments are not interested in scaring foreign investors asking too many questions.
And the factories are multiplying. If the company Chun Enterprise, for example, was hired by the largest supermarket chain in the world, Wal-Mart, that makes bags for women at its factory in Zhongshan, in the southern province of Guangdong. More than 900 workers were locked all day except the 60-minute break and lunch provided. The guards used to constantly hit them fined for misconduct as "excessive use of the service." Of the half dozen factories subcontracted by Western companies that have visited CHRONICLE only kept the minimum conditions. The rest were dirty, the employees kept working illegal hours with meager salaries or had been converted into prisons where the windows were blocked with bars and doors locked 24 hours a day.
In an attempt to counter the public relations crisis that had to face increasingly denouncing abuses, the majors began to hire inspection teams more or less independent in the mid 90's. Did not help much. The controls have failed because companies have no sincere intention to change the system, "according to the National Labor Committee (NLC), a U.S. association that focuses its allegations in American companies. Inspectors from Wall-Mart, for example, never found irregularities in its production center in China and only one newspaper report in 1999 did reveal what was happening.
A military barracks at the entrance to the factory of the Nike brand sports Jiaozhou, in the province of Shandong, you can read his famous slogan "Just Do It" (Just do it). Inside, 1,500 young people, always less than 25 years, working 12 hours a day, according to the NLC. This is a small part of the most than 100,000 Chinese who make Nike sportswear throughout the country, which must be added 70,000 people in Indonesia and 45,000 in Vietnam. "With its metal door and bars on the windows, the factory is more like a barracks than a factory," says NLC's report, which he describes as "wet paper" codes of conduct created by the multinationals.
But are the factories of all products at 100, some managed and operated by Chinese companies by foreign businessmen and others, which are worse. The pressure to reduce prices is higher and behind the business are often unknown companies that do not have to look after their name. The motto is to produce much cheaper and faster. Accidents among workers or fire such as occurred recently in a warehouse in Shenzhen in which 80 people lost their lives are daily contingencies.
procurement policy in the workshops of the Whole to 100 is not admitting women over 25 years, but managers sometimes skip his own rule if the candidate has young children ready to join the production line without charging anything change.
mothers do charge, but a predatory system of sanctions tends to reduce his salary to about 5,000 pesetas per month: they cut the pay of one hour for every minute of delay at work, is penalized with another five hours to go absences the service or completely removed monthly to behave incorrectly.
The situation in China is especially frustrating for the victims of abuse because the Communist dictatorship remains the outlawing of trade unions and workers. "Those who seek to unite to defend the rights of workers are imprisoned. People are afraid to say what is happening, but conditions are extremely harsh and have not received a single payment for months, "says Han Dongfeng, editor of the Bulletin of the Worker in China and dissident jailed after the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989 to mobilize workers. "I am in contact with people working in factories I often have the fear they have for heads. I asked them to unite and fight for what is theirs, "says Han
Thus, the dagongmei, stranded with no one to defend them, they work until their bodies endure and then return to their villages with they were wearing. The profile of the "working girls" of China is almost always the same: young people aged between 14 and 25 years without high school and willing to send more than half of their salary to their home villages. Many, increasingly, they end up leaving the factories to prostitution. "It's better than working in the factory," say the girls who have already taken the plunge and offer their bodies openly in the streets of downtown Shenzhen.
Not far away, on the assembly line of dolls, the day ends when it has met the production target set by the supervisors, not before two in the morning.
Although 600 workers have tried to maintain the rate for hours, several have been discovered exhausted, completely unconscious, his head resting on the editing table. This month will have to see how your salary is cut in half.
"There are many girls willing to come here so that it can not work back to people," said the foreman, whose salary also depends on the number of trucks filled with the production achieved. No place best to see to what extent the Chinese people are paying with sweat and tears to clothing, appliances and toys sold in the West buy as cheaply as possible. It sounds like the incessant rattle of law made in China, assembling, packaging, assembling, packaging, assembling, packaging ...
- David JiménezPeriodista.El author wrote this article
as special envoy to Shenzhen (China) by the journal
Chronicle, a weekly newspaper magazine World.
Article published in the magazine 291
Chronicle, corresponding to Sunday, May 13, 2001.
"They denied all rights, they have no residence permit even if they spend 10 years working in the same place. The medical stores or cities where their factories are located they charge more than the rest of the neighbors, "says the professor, who has gathered experience in several reports. 
really did not know a horn jug 
stop and remember you