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.