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Written by Alan Flum
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Wednesday, 25 April 2007 |
A Personal Experience
The story I am about to relate affected me deeply. It is about the experience I had while visiting a company that molded plastics parts for consumer electronics products.The company I worked for was looking for a vendor to make the tool for a product that required plastic injection molded parts.This particular tooling can be quite expensive, often costing several hundred thousand dollars. The tool is generally cut from a solid piece of steel and slowly machined using complex and sophisticated equipment driven by computers. Some of the basic machining can still be done by hand.
We were visiting a large factory in Shenzhen China that created both the tools and did the manufacturing of plastic parts. We were considering them as a possible vendor. During this visit I saw many things that disturbed me deeply.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 20 May 2007 )
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Written by Alan Flum
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Wednesday, 25 April 2007 |
What is the "Race to the Bottom"? I recently attended a meeting of The State and Local Government Anti-Sweatshop Consortium in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where a distinguished professor from the University of California at Berkeley, Dara O'Rourke, gave a presentation on the root causes of sweatshops. He used the term the "race to the bottom". He was referring to the price pressures that companies feel from global competition. These pressures motivate them to find suppliers that will give them the lowest price, and fastest manufacturing cycle times; without regard to whether or not the factory is a sweatshop. The term “race to the bottom” was first used by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis back in the 1930s. This phrase describes how nations and states compete for business by dismantling protection and regulation that would otherwise protect the local population.
This, of course, describes what is happening today where countries like China have structured their society to become as they put it, "the world's factory". The result is a society that encourages the proliferation of factories with little regard to the health and safety of workers, or the impact on the local environment. Minimum wages are not living wages. And minimum wage laws are often ignored by local officials.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 20 May 2007 )
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Accessing the Harsh Reality of Sweatshops |
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Written by Alan Flum
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Tuesday, 24 April 2007 |
Harsh Reality Every human being has the right to get paid fairly for the work they do and not be subjected to a dangerous and/or toxic working environment. Yet, the harsh reality is that many of the consumer electronics products we enjoy, whether it's a DVD player, HD television, or an MP3 are made by people who don't earn a living wage. Often they work six and seven days a week, and live in small crowded dormitories. The Downward Slide Brand manufacturers of consumer electronics are in a fiercely competitive market for our dollars. They are driven by: price pressures, narrowing profit margins, investor pressures, and brand perception. These forces motivate brand manufacturers to pressure factories into faster production cycles, higher quality, and lower production costs. Factories, who are already operating on small profit margins find ways to cut costs. Usually, this means that workers in countries like China, Malaysia, and Mexico don't make a living wage and are often subjected to harsh and unsafe working conditions. For example, in China the standard wage in many factories is less than 45 cents per hour (US dollars). A living wage, according to several sources, including the World Bank, is three times that. |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 20 May 2007 )
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Maquiladora Family Living Costs |
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Written by Comite Fronterizo de Obrer@s (CFO)
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Friday, 25 May 2007 |
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This article in our first in a series on dispelling the myth that sweatshop wages are living wages in low income countries. Here will show you what it costs to support a typical familiy if you are an doing assembly work for consumer electronics manufacturers in Mexico.
The text our this article was reprinted with permission from Julia Quiñonez of the Comité Fronterizo de Obrer@s (CFO). Muchas Gracias Julia! Please support our amigos in Mexico, http://www.cfomaquiladoras.org/ . |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 27 May 2007 )
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The Problem 
