Seyitbek Usmanov recently presented another way of looking at the issue of unskilled labour in developing countries (Re: “Made in China,” Dec. 8), in which he questioned my previous statement that these workers are underpaid and mistreated. The basis behind my claim lies in the immense discrepancy between the hours and intensity of their work and the fact that their compensation barely affords them a subsistence living. It is not a uniquely Western notion that if a worker toils for between forty and sixty hours a week at physically demanding labour by which the employer gains a substantial profit, that worker should be entitled to a wage that allows him to provide for himself and his families.
Regarding the claim that these workers are not coerced to work, are the need to provide shelter for one’s family and that burning feeling of hunger in the pit of one’s stomach not indirect forms of coercion? It is insensitive and disrespectful to suggest that Chinese migrant labourers choose to work and thus deserve whatever treatment they receive.
Usmanov writes that the fact that these exploitative positions have ample applicants is evidence of their fairness, but that is a short sighted, facetious argument. He presumes that no worker would choose underpaid work, but the reality is that they do. These workers take up these positions not after a calculated assessment of their fairness, but out of pure desperation.
For evidence that these workers are not actually content one need to look no further than the dramatically increased number of protests that have taken place in China in the past year, particularly the recent protests outside the WTO summit in Hong Kong and the countless uprisings of rural laborers.
The suggestion that the free market economy guarantees equitable treatment for all due to their right to choose is a fallacy. When people have no other options to make a living for themselves, they accept dirty, unfair work because the meagre compensation they receive is better than the nothing at all yielded by unemployment. This situation does not speak to the fairness of these jobs, but rather of the poverty of the situation and the shameful willingness of foreign enterprises to profit from misery.
Usmanov displays the exact type of thinking that I argued in my article is in dire need of change. He claims that the way to help the exploited working class is to feed into the system that oppresses them, under the naive expectation that profits will trickle down. But to craft a truly equitable system, large corporations must cease to put profit ahead of the dignity of human beings.
Instead of leaving their liberation up to the employers who profit from the current situation, I contend that as foreign consumers who live in a position of relative privilege it is up to us to spend our money responsibly and draw attention to the plight of this exploited class of labourers whose suffering has been glossed over by a thin veneer of glamour.
