Ant Farm's 2008 My Dripping Wet Pussy Award

This year’s winner of Ant Farm’s vaunted Dripping Wet Pussy Award is Chinese Labor Watch. Operating out of a New York headquarters, but maintaining an “information bureau” in Beijing that somehow has been allowed past the gates of the city and rolled within the midst of the sleeping and unsuspecting legions of Party bureaucrats’; CLW has remained secreted within, breaking out in a mighty host of lawyers, and letting more in. Not even the crafty Ulysses could perform such a feat, but Ilium was sacked and so have they sacked Beijing, not once but several times in court! Amazing! No, Breathtaking! Homerical! The very stuff of myth and dream! One needs to rub one’s eyes.

Other mere mortals have routinely ended up in Dis for attempting such hubristic political stunts as these in Communist China. Yet, they have marched with Myrmidon force (go ants!) all the way from New York (that’s in America, right?) to meddle in the affairs of the Communist Party, and show them who is the laoban. For this I applaud so hard I fall down from a cerebral stroke as if my skull were stove by the mighty Ajax himself. But come Read for yourself this heroic verse inscribed on their website.

Perhaps their Trojan horse is the fact that they attack foreign companies and not the CCP. How else could they have been let in? But being the legal nemesis of the Communist Party doesn’t come cheap. Where do they get the money for this? Only Tiresias amongst the Dead could say.

I severely doubt that donations from your average Zhou amongst the Chinese diaspora could provide them with the cash that would be needed to mount such an invasion. Could they be CIA backed, as the Ant suspects every prominent Chinese dissident (group) in exile is?

Let me be as Helen to Agamemnon, and provide for you, reader, a viewing from the fortress walls of the heroes before us. The CLW team consists of three Chinese, one of them from Taiwan. Western educated at elite secondary institutions, blah, blah, blah, while reaping the fruits of residing on Western shores and dodging the misery of real day to day life in China and Taiwan, yet all the time playing a charade that is down right manipulative. The Ant has decided to call them on it.

As a strong-minded liberal I know liberal-pabulum-puking-brats when I see them (they must’ve got some of that melamine laced formula recently, and I’m really sorry about that). They play the liberal fiddle to suit their own little dance, and their sonata is called Travesty.

If I am wrong about China Labor Watch, then so be it. They’re receiving one of the highest awards that AF can afford, aren’t they? A wet pussy is nothing to sniff at.

Congratulations, you three clowns. You correctly bathed this dirty cat, but then you didn’t dry it properly. It’s only gotten dirtier.

Part II. China Labor Watch: A Dilemma, but Ultimately a Travesty. Conclusion.

But the dilemma unfolds once more. It is not quite done yet. I question along with CLW, in all fairness to them, just how culpable the multinationals are for all of this. The profits that are being made by them off of cheap labor in China are enormous. The big question for me is just how much are they paying to have their products manufactured in China?. Is it an outrageously low price that the multinationals are demanding? And getting?

One would have to be privy to those contracts, which is definitely proprietary. Most companies operating in China don't make public disclosure of their books. Undoubtedly, the buyers have a clear advantage, and have leveled it from Day One of the opening of China. The multinationals are sure to always bring a razor-sharp pencil to China, but it is the Chinese themselves who maliciously use it to cut their own. In the end, there is not much real transparency about the money on either side of the equation.

Yet, CLW states that this entire problem is as "a result of multinationals' single-minded pursuit of ever-lower prices and neglect of other considerations”, and that the big international firms need to take steps to “pay supplier factories a reasonable price for their products, help the factories correct violations and take responsibility for suppliers' legal infractions”. Further, "Corporate codes of conduct and checklist-auditing are not enough by themselves to strengthen workers' rights if corporations are unwilling to pay the real price it costs to produce a product according to the standards in their codes."

My sense is that the multinationals are paying a “fair” market price, whatever that really is. Yet, I have this terrible hunch that the money that is allotted in the contract is not seeing its way down to the killing floor of the factory because it's getting scooped up at the top of the food chain by party bureaucrats and their cronies in the factory executive suites. I conjecture that it is even possible that the multinationals are actually “getting taken for a ride”. In China, that is a distinct possibility. I will say this, whatever the multi-corps are paying their suppliers, it could be a lot “fairer”. That goes also for what they are paying workers back in their home countries. Big time.

As for CLW’s charge that the multinationals have to “help the factories correct violations and take responsibility for suppliers' legal infractions”; they have responded to these yearly allegations of exploitation coming from CLW and a handful of other watchdog groups.

The multinationals have been regularly dispatching human resources teams to their supplier factories in order to assess practices and conditions, yet, only to find that after a major heads-up predicting their arrival nothing is particularly amiss. What they meet upon arrival are employees who have been coached on how to answer questions during these inspections, and the “second set” of books. I suspect that these cookbooks portray a much more benign level of payment to the workers. Also, the books contain fake contracts for the workers; the real contracts are said to be kept by the factory and not given to the workers, this despite the fact that a contract for each worker is required by law. Further, industry experts say that some manufacturers show off clean, inspection-passing facilities to international clients when they visit, but secretly subcontract some of the work to hidden, substandard production lines that are cheaper to run so as to fool the auditors.

Thence, the auditors return home, report to H.R. that everything is fine in the state of Denmark, and a handsome brochure celebrating the occasion is printed and distributed floridly praising Happy-Happy Corp. for its “corporately responsible behavior”. But it’s all disinformation and propaganda.

What goes on before and after is a human, capitalist nightmare. Given the stupid, little human, capitalist shell game that we are playing here, in which the Chinese management (PRC heads) needs to pawn itself off as being decent (despite signs posted on the killing floors that actually say things as snide and cynical as “Be thankful you have a job. If you’re not, consider the alternative of trying to find another. Someone else would be glad to take your place”), let alone their chincy weiguoren buyer’s needs for the same decent reputation, everyone is left the stupider. The pea, a handsome little lump ultimately amounting to multi-millions of dollars, is subsequently divided up in secret amongst the buyers and sellers

Returning to CLW’s notion that the multi-corps must “take responsibility for suppliers' legal infractions”I have to say, fills me with ambivalence. Though each has a tremendous and abiding responsibility to make certain that exploitation is not occurring in these factories, all the same, another part of me responds that this is absurd. Why should a western company manufacturing out of China have to go so far out of its way to make sure that Chinese companies are acting like big boys and girls, and treating their employees nicely? Why should it need to do this? This is, first and foremost, a Chinese responsibility. Chinese management has to oversee company ethics, not a foreign company that is merely contracting the manufacturer. These aren’t “their factories”. They’re Chinese factories. Or are foreign companies the Great White Father in China that have to carry the white man's burden for the yellow race? I'm not sure I want to know the answer to this question because I have a sense that the answer is a resounding, "yes": the Chinese are too corrupt, incompetent and humanly negligent to attend to it otherwise, and have no qualms about exploiting their own because this is the "Chinese way".

Never in my life could I ever imagine that I would find myself defending the affairs of the multi-nationals, but I just think CLW is way out of line here and out of integrity with the real truth. And please accept my reference to the “white man’s burden” with the sense of its intended irony.

Finally, consider this: the only thing that companies like Adidas and Foxx Conn can do is to complain to the officials of the Chinese factories, and insist that they mend their ways or otherwise they will find another supplier: this approach may be successful and beneficial, it may not. The option of finding a different supplier only places them in a position of entering into a new agreement with an equally exploitive Chinese manufacturing firm. This is clear. Really, what can the international corporations actually do to change this? Given that many foreign companies and experts in Chinese manufacturing say it can be "hard" to verify whether or not a supplier is living up to "commitments", one gathers that certain ethical obligations are placed upon the Chinese in contractual terms to uphold. If so, they're not. So what are the multicorps supposed to do then? Sue? Bring in gunboats? What? And if they pay more to the suppliers, is this money actually going to reach the workers? Ha ha ha.

I want to make clear that I am not an apologist for the multinationals nor Capitalism. I despise both, actually. The entire global Capitalist system is rotten in the teeth and has fed on human exploitation forever. It looks lousier with every new day. But in summation, this is, ultimately, pure and simply a "Chinese problem", and only penultimately a Western multinational one. The abominable worker conditions that exist at the aforesaid factories are ones orchestrated by an exploitation class in China, not so much the West, although one would be horribly naive to not understand that both are laughing all the way to the bank.

The final step of my vast dilemma is that global Capitalism is venal, which raises the question of what, ultimately, is to be done to end worker exploitation, both in China and globally. Yet, and I’ll say it one last time, in this case the Chinese themselves, and only off-handedly the multi-nationals, perpetrate this major effrontery to human dignity. The workers are carrion, the multinationals carrion-eaters, but the Chinese “orficials” the killers. Have no doubt about that.

China Labor Watch is a travesty.

Part I: Chinese Labor Watch; A Dilemma, but ultimately a travesty

I have been a member of a Yahoo newsgroup letter from China Labor Watch for a few weeks now. During that time I’ve received two emails detailing evidence of massive worker exploitation occurring in factories contracted by Adidas Corp. and Foxconn Corp. to manufacture their products. These and other accounts contained on the CLW site need to be read in order to fully understand the severity of the situation, but to summarize the conditions for you, gentle reader, universally throughout the sweatshops of China, of which the above are but a drop in the bucket, are to be found huge factories that employ thousands of workers, often as many as 15,000 at a time. They are sheltered in crude, cold-water dormitories on the campuses of the factories, and cramped by dozens into rooms that are often theft-ridden as a consequence of low-morale and alienation. The company makes them pay for a meager, lousy breakfast, along with all of their meals. That’s how the day begins.

Work is routinely deleterious and poisonous, and workers are, at best, poorly protected. Toxic fumes are a constant of production. Hands and arms are lost everyday to the factories of China. Pay is dingier than the dormitories, and the normative rate of 750 rmb per month, if he or she is so lucky (about a hundred and ten bucks a month) comes only after toiling up to 14 hours a day, almost every day. Many are allowed just one day off a month. Overtime is virtually mandatory and is compensated at an average of less than 5 rmb per hour (< $0.75), if at all. Production quotas are strict and are to be met unless one should suffer unpaid overtime or a fine. Fines are rampant for a long list of petty indiscretions, both on the line and in the dorms, and the shadow of infraction is essentially inescapable. It is the praxis of the management of these factories to psychologically intimidate and humiliate their workers at every turn. Workers are run ragged and are completely exploited. Of all of this occurs in breach of Chinese law and International Labor Organization rules. Dickens wouldn’t have known where to begin. These workers barely make $3.50 per day. That’s optimistic.

Given that the vast majority of these workers migrate from villages where they were going to make but a dollar a day, they hold these jobs as best they can. This is China for hundreds of millions of Chinese, really.

Yet, all of this said, in the course of scouring the CLW web page I have been confronted by an enormous dilemma: on one hand, the facts revealed about the sweatshops utilized by these corps are infuriating and elicit intense indignation, but very significantly on the other, CLW prefers to place the onus for their existence on the international corporations rather than where it rightfully belongs; squarely on the shoulders of the CCP bureaucrats and their cronies in the executive suites of these Chinese manufacturing firms. Coming more to the point, directly in the lap of the Chinese mentality and reality responsible for instituting and enforcing these conditions. That is where the real problem resides, and only secondarily with the Western Multinationals taking advantage of it.

The dilemma unfolds in a second direction. Again, on one hand CLW are noble tribunes for performing this hard-ball investigative work that dearly needs to be done, and yeoman journalists for the manner in which they provide clearly presented and thorough details of the conditions on the killing floors of these factories. On the other they are guilty, guilty, damn guilty of playing the Chinese victim of foreign oppression.

Yet, I take a step back. The dilemma unfolds in a third direction: CLW, in naming names (Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Disney, Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Puma, Hasbro, et al.) and chronicling a litany abuses carried out in these contracted factories spewing out goods on the cheap for the above, in a very definite sense has no real choice but to go after these Big Names and bring to the attention of its Western readership the injustices carried out on behalf of the aforesaid corporations. On the other, they take the easy road of an adopted and nauseous Western liberal slant that allows them to view the multinational corporations as the first and foremost sponsors of this Capitalist venality, which is, for once, simply not the case here. However, do not think for a moment, reader, that I applaud the multi-corps complicity in this. I want nothing to do with this. In my heart, I only pray for its relent.

Behind all of this is a Chinese exploitation class, and one exceedingly important point needs to be added to this. This exploitation of Chinese workers has Taiwan’s name written all over it. Foxconn is a Taiwanese corp. , though they have apparently moved HQ to Yantai, Shandong - a hot development zone. So is Pou Chen Corp (Chinese name: BaoCheng Group). It has 150,000 Chinese workers in its shoe industry producing shoes for Nike, Adidas, and New Balance. (see CLW report). Stella International is based in Hong Kong, but has connections with Taiwan. (See CLW report). In fact, a very significant portion of the sweatshops operating in the Main land and cited by CLW are the result of Taiwanese FDI companies that take their orders from HQ’s in the R.O.C., or Raked Over the Coals, as I like to call it. It makes you wonder who won the war. One thing is quite certain: no one in the executive suites of these Taiwanese firms is suffering financially or emotionally because of their involvement with the Western multinationals.

The disconcerting fact is, you don’t hear a single word about this on the CLW website. It seems CLW feels it’s a lot sexier to go after the western multinationals, but doesn't have any bullets to fire at the Chinese management. It's absurd. It's a travesty.

Keep one last thing clearly in mind; if these workers aren’t being bled to death by the Taiwanese, they are definitely being bled to death by the management of the S.O.E.s (state owned enterprises) who contract out to the multi-corps. The party bureaucrats and the factory execs are reaping enormous profits from all of this, such that they can no doubt drive to work in a BMW from their new Western-style gated villa and back to it each day without a whisper of guilt on their conscience. Ah, China’s new exploit…, ehem, I mean prosperity class. Recent figures indicate that the top executive to worker pay disparity in China is higher by about 20% or more than their American counterparts, who make 265 times more than the average American worker.

Yet, CLW says little or nothing about this.

To be continued...