Victims of the Tazreen Factory Fire in Bangladesh Continue to Suffer

by Paul Garver

The factory caught fire about 6 p.m. After the fire, they did not allow us to go out,” says Nazma. “They locked the gate. The workers were screaming together.” Nazma is among the survivors of the Tazreen Fashion factory fire in Bangladesh that killed 112 workers in November. Nazma and others describe the unsafe and deadly working conditions at Tazreen—conditions similar to those many Bangladesh garment workers face every day. Solidarity Center staff in Dhaka, Bangladesh, compiled this report.

Five months later, more than 300 garment workers were killed and 2000 injured by the collapse of the Rana Plaza building near Dhaka that housed five garment factories producing for American and European markets. This man-made tragedy only underscores the futility of “corporate social responsibility” initiatives that merely provide fig leafs for global corporations who disdain responsibility for the atrocious conditions under which their profitable goods are produced.

Hundreds of Bangladeshi garment workers die in man-made tragedy

IndustriALL Global Union

 

 

The worst ever industrial accident in Bangladesh has killed more than 200 garment workers with fears of a final death toll reaching 1,000 as hundreds remain injured and trapped in the debris.

 “Cut off my hand, save my life!” screams a woman trapped under the collapsed eight-story Rana Plaza building in Savar, 30 kilometres outside Dhaka. The same request is shouted by trapped Aftab, while other screams in the rubble demand oxygen. 200,000 local people have assembled in Savar offering to donate blood to the rescue effort, as hospitals are gravely under supplied.

The mass industrial manslaughter occurred at 9am, 24 April. The collapsed building, illegally constructed, contained five garment factories with 2,500 workers. Those five factories are Ether Tex, New Wave Bottoms, New Wave Style, Phantom Apparels and Phantom-TAC. These factories are believed to have produced for several well-known western brands including Mango, Primark, C&A, KIK, Wal-Mart, Children’s Place, Cato Fashions, Benetton, Matalan and Bon Marché.

Hong Kong Dockworkers Strike Attracts Huge Solidarity

by Ellen David Friedman

Five hundred dockworkers are facing down the richest man in Hong Kong (and, according to Forbes, eighth-richest in the world) in a strike that has entered its third week and brought transport in the world’s third-busiest port to a virtual halt.

Li Ka-shing, the billionaire behind Hongkong International Terminals (HIT), controls more than 70 percent of Hong Kong’s port container traffic and oversees a vast transnational network of enterprises including the oil and gas giant Husky.

Arrayed against this financial titan often referred to as “Superman” are dockworkers exhausted by 12-hours shifts lacking even toilet breaks, surviving in one of the world’s most expensive cities on wages that haven’t risen in 15 years, and now waging a labor battle that observers are calling pivotal.

The confrontation appears to have tapped a vein of indignation against the “greed economy” and its glaring inequalities, bringing the workers broad public support.

Good Trade Policy: Three ‘Thought Experiments’

by Stan Sorscher

Stan Sorscher

The U.S. and 10 other countries are negotiating our next big trade agreement, called TPP. It’s time to re-examine what works and what doesn’t work.

Imagine a thought experiment, where we put environmentalists in each country in charge of negotiating the next trade agreement. Preposterous! I know. Stick with me. This is a thought experiment.

So, in this thought experiment our environmental negotiators would prioritize their interests — CO₂ in the atmosphere, deforestation, endangered species, renewable energy, safe food, clean air and clean water.

Trade that Hurts

by Leo Gerard

USW President Leo Gerard

“Uncertainty” is the pitchfork that corporations now effectively wield to prod politicians into action. It’s a threat, as in, if Congress doesn’t do this or that, such as avoid the fiscal cliff or raise the debt ceiling, then corporations will suffer the unbearable pain of “uncertainty.”

Uncertainty is really, really bad, business lobbyists lament. It’s a terrible thing to do to corporations, business commentators contend on talk shows.

They’re unconcerned, however, when the American middle class suffers uncertainty. Or when government action shifts uncertainty to the middle class. Trade is the perfect example of that. In 2000, Congress ended China’s uncertainty about trade with the United States by transferring that pain to America’s middle class. It was an excruciating loss of certainty for American workers because over the next seven years, millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs disappeared. That’s trade that hurts.

What If We Did Trade Right?

Stan Sorscher

by Stan Sorscher

Everyone I know is in favor of trade done right.

Recently, I heard a congressman explain how investors interpret that.

From that perspective, trade is done right when the investor’s property is protected from capricious foreign governments who might snatch property. I think he meant Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro — China, or maybe Peru. I got the impression that in 1917, Bolsheviks left a deep, traumatic scar on the collective investor psyche. But let’s walk through this, because I think it has a strong streak of truth.

Our congressman put this into context, saying it took America 200 years to act in the public interest while protecting business and property rights. When we build a freeway, we seize private property for the public good, then pay owners fair compensation. We regulate cigarettes, set emissions standards for automobiles and power generating stations, and we want assurance that drugs are safe and effective.

Our 200-year process found a balance between public and private interests. How? We had a strong civil society — an active free press, public advocacy, and political power in the hands of organized workers, environmental groups, and public health advocates. Our political process held elected officials accountable, at least from time to time.

Trade was sleeper issue in Senate wins

Public Citizen

WASHINGTON, D.C. – An analysis of the 2012 election reveals a bipartisan race to align campaign positions with the American public’s opposition to current U.S. trade policies and the job offshoring they cause. Over the course of the past three months, a wave of ads focused mainly on job offshoring and secondarily on trade with China, has spotlighted the damage caused by current U.S. trade policies, fueling transpartisan expectations for reform and further complicating the path for the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “free trade” pact that is slated for completion in 2013, Public Citizen said today.

The presidential race featured more than three times as many trade-themed ads as in 2008, creating a trade-reform-is-urgently-needed narrative that reinforces the majority position of the U.S. public. Following this trend, congressional candidates across 30 states deployed more than 125 ads criticizing the economic fallout of status quo trade policy.

Romney Creates Jobs at Chinese Sweatshop

by Paul Garver

Who says that Mitt Romney’s private equity investments never created jobs? We now have proof that one of those investments has created thousands of jobs.

But before we rush to elect Romney as U.S. President based on his record in job creation, we might inquire what kind of jobs these were, where they are, and what jobs were lost as a result of his investment.

Romney boasted to his donors in his speech to his donors in Boca Raton:

“When I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there. It employed about 20,000 people. And they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23…. And they work in these huge factories, they made various small appliances. And as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with  little bathrooms at the end of maybe 10 rooms. And the rooms they have 12 girls per room. Three bunk beds on top of each other…. And around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire and guard towers.”

Thanks to a detailed investigative report by the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, we now know that Romney’s wholly-controlled private equity Brookside Fund (an associate of Bain Capital) invested $23 million from April 1998 through August 2000 in the Global Tech Appliances factory in the Galaxy Industrial Area in Dongguan, China. The factory then produced and still produces small electrical appliances almost exclusively for the U.S. market (Sun Beam, Hamilton Beach, Mr. Coffee, Proctor Silex, Revlon and Vidal Sassoon).

In 1998-2000 those 20,000 young Chinese girls earned between 24 cents and 31 cents an hour. The American workers in the electrical appliances industry whom they displaced would have earned between $12.51 and $13.23 an hour. Mr. Romney’s private equity investment helped create tens of thousands of poorly paid sweatshop jobs in China and thereby displaced thousands of modestly paid jobs under decent conditions that American workers had once held.

The Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, directed by Charles Kernaghan, has just investigated current conditions at the Global-Tech Appliances factory in Dongguan. Low pay, brutal working conditions, excessive overtime hours of work, and filthy crowded dorm rooms remain unchanged. Mitt Romney, whose initial visit to the factory in 1998 left such a strong impression on him that he spoke of it fourteen years later, had evidently made no effort whatsoever to improve conditions at the factory in which he invested $23 million.

Read the entire report. Below the line I have sampled a few photos and excerpts, all available from the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights under a Creative Commons license. If you were planning to sit out this presidential election, you might want to reconsider whether the USA can abide a President as morally callous and/or oblivious as Mitt Romney at its helm.

Large-Scale Strike Paralyzes Production of Apple iPhone5 at Zhengzhou Factory

by Li Qiang, Executive Director
China Labor Watch

October 5, 2012

Breaking News:

Photograph: Ye Fudao/ Foxconn worker

(New York) China Labor Watch (CLW) announced that at 1:00PM on October 5 (Beijing time), a strike occurred at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou factory that, according to workers, involved three to four thousand production workers. In addition to demanding that workers work during the holiday, Foxconn raised overly strict demands on product quality without providing worker training for the corresponding skills. This led to workers turning out products that did not meet standards and ultimately put a tremendous amount of pressure on workers. Additionally, quality control inspectors fell into to conflicts with workers and were beat up multiple times by workers. Factory management turned a deaf ear to complaints about these conflicts and took no corrective measures. The result of both of these circumstances was a widespread work stoppage on the factory floor among workers and inspectors.

The majority of workers who participated in this strike were workers from the OQC (onsite quality control) line. According to workers, multiple iPhone 5 production lines from various factory buildings were in a state of paralysis for the entire day.  It was reported that factory management and Apple, despite design defects, raised strict quality demands on workers, including indentations standards of 0.02mm and demands related to scratches on frames and back covers. With such demands, employees could not even turn out iPhones that met the standard. This led to a tremendous amount of pressure on workers. On top of this, they were not permitted to have a vacation during the holiday. This combination of factors led to the strike.

That quality control inspectors would also strike is of no surprise. According to workers, there was a fight between workers and quality control inspectors in area K that led to the damage in inspection room CA, the injury of some people, and the hospitalization of others. After this, another similar incident occurred in area K, once again leading to quality control inspectors getting beaten up. Yesterday, inspectors in area L received physical threats. When inspectors reported these issues to factory management, the management simply ignored and turned their back on the issue. For these reasons, all day and night shift inspectors carried out a work stoppage today that paralyzed the production lines.

This strike is simply because these workers just have too much pressure.

A recent article in Talking Union documents, based on investigative research by China Labor Watch and by SACOM, the extremely harsh working conditions under which the Apple iPhone5 has been rushed into massive production at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou factory, where the strike just occurred.  An article posted earlier today reports on the causes of a major riot at another Foxconn factory in Taiyuan where the iPhone5 is also being produced.  Talking Union has also recently posted a background article on how Chinese workers and students are confronting global capitalism at Foxconn, the major link in Apple’s global supply chain.

About China Labor Watch:

Founded in 2000, China Labor Watch is an independent not-for-profit organization. In the past ten years, CLW has collaborated with labor organizations and the media to conduct a series of in-depth assessments of factories in China that produce toys, bikes, shoes, furniture, clothing, and electronics for some of the largest companies. CLW’s New York office creates reports from these investigations, educates the international community on supply chain labor issues, and pressures corporations to improve conditions for workers.

Why Foxconn Workers Rioted in Taiyuan

by Paul Garver

Militarized Security at Taiyuan Foxconn Plant Provokes Riot

During the night of 23-24 September, several thousand assembly workers outfought security guards, overturned police vehicles and damaged company property outside a giant Foxconn factory producing the Apple iPhone5 at Taiyuan in north central China.

Foxconn claimed the riot was a mere dormitory scuffle between workers from two different provinces, but hundreds of photos showing the dramatic actions in the streets outside the factory flooded Chinese Internet sites (most subsequently deleted by government censors).  It required the intervention of some 5000 armed paramilitary forces to put down the rebellion.

The dormitory incident that triggered the riot led to the severe beating of workers by Foxconn security guards (sub-contracted thugs), prompting fellow workers to resist and eventually send the guards into flight.  The militaristic security guards are universally detested by Foxconn workers, who demolished security posts and vehicles during the riot.

Rioting is not the most sophisticated or organized form of collective worker resistance.  But it represents a major step forward from the wave of individual worker suicides of Foxconn workers in 2010.  Workers from other Foxconn plants in Henan, Shandong and Shenzhen provinces posted letters on China’s online forms praising the Taiyuan workers for their courage.