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When People Power Works.
The other day I was at the ceremony for the conversion of the old New Zealand honors system to the new/old British one (no, I am not a Lady, I am just the daughter of one).
Outside, there was one guy protesting against one of the recipients, who owns a large Wall-Mart style company in New Zealand. The gist was that he’s a bad guy due to getting cheap Chinese slave labour.
Here’s the thing. I totally agree with the protester. I hate slave labour with a passion and I think we all would be horrified if we had to actually watch the people who made the stuff we buy. BUT, it got me wondering what he was trying to achieve.
If he wanted to ruin this guy’s day, then I suppose maybe he had a little success? I’m sure it was embarrassing… But if he actually wanted to make a dent in the amount of cheap Chinese junk we buy, then I’d say he failed 100%.
One thing I’m growing really annoyed with, are people who do more harm than good to the causes they support because they are too busy feeling good about their moral superiority to realise that they are achieving the opposite of what they want. This guys annoyed a bunch of people and was largely ignored by everyone else. Some of New Zealand’s top achievers (including those recognised for their achievements in human rights and community activism) simply saw a guy who clearly didn’t have anything better to do with his day than stand there with a sign. I think the general census was ‘get off your butt and do something’.
One the opposite side of the scale, I just saw a news item about the mass opposition to our biggest chocolate maker adding Palm Oil to their chocolate bars. After a mass campaign of boycotting and spreading the news via Facebook, word of mouth and all the other actions that have earned buzz words in the past few years, they have just announced they will not only be removing it, they will still charge the same amount for their bars (despite their costs increasing).
I talked to Claire a while ago about how a lot of activists secretly don’t want to fix their problem… Because they would lose their entire identity. It strikes me, once again, that in order to really achieve something, we need to take some of these extremists with a pinch of salt and ALL chip in a little bit.
Hello, my name is Natalie, I have a business called 
August 18th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Hi Nat,
Good to have you back on-line (-_-)
While I empathise with you condemnation of “slave labour”, one thing that has come to bother me recently is how to define it. I spent most of last month in Sri Lanka, at my nephew’s wedding, and learned a lot more about the base economy there as we are building a home there to spend half of our retirement at.
My brother-in-law told me that things were getting expensive, and the best rate he could get me for a quality mason (the guys who build the physical structure of the house – aka brickies – was SLR 1,000 per day. (SLR=Sri Lankan Rupees.) I thought about this carefully (doing mental math as quick as I could,) and finally said that $13 per day was fine with me! Then I went out with the maid to do some shopping (something I have never before done over there). We got the basic groceries for the weekend for the 17 people staying in my B-i-L’s house. (Him, his wife and three children, Me, my wife and two of ours, my other B-i-L and his three girls, two ‘maids’, a gardener and a driver.) Total cost excluding meat was SLR720, at the butcher we bought a complete fillet of beef, about three kilos, for SLR37.
My first reaction to $13 a day for a skilled tradesman (he’s built two houses for the family in the last three years, so we know he’s good,) was “slave labour”. But this guy is self employed, and gives employment to three ‘labourers’ that will cost me another SLR650 per day each. He has a good life-style, his children are both in University, he owns his own house and drives a two year old double-cab pickup. He does not live like a slave – I don’t need to feel guilty. But I still wondered about the country’s lower-paid people, so did some finding out about that too.
I bought some locally made Gieves & Hawkes cotton shirts to bring back as Christmas presents, paying SLR350 (about $5.00) each for them, these retail in the UK for £85.00 (about SLR18,000). The shop I bought from was in an up-market city-centre mall, not exactly back-of-the-truck stuff, so I set out to see what the deal for the ‘makers’ was. The answer – SLR525 per day; again, not bad in an environment where food for a weekend is about SLR44 per head. By their standards, they are earning a decent liveable wage. As one of the garment factory workers told me (yes, you can talk to them with no interference from anyone) they do better than the tea-estate leaf-pluckers, who make SLR250 per day – much better!
So what is “Slave Wages”? Should we base our judgement on life here, where a person getting up to $200 per week day on welfare can claim they can’t afford shoes for their children, or Sri Lanka, where there is universal free education to 18, and children attend school in pure white uniforms every day. On here, where university is open to anyone who can get an interest free student loan, or Sri Lanka, where university education is fully subsidised for the top 5% of each year of school leavers and there are no unsubsidised places. On here, where old people are left to their own devices and children are left with ‘carers’ so that parents can go out to slave at work so they can buy things, or Sri Lanka, where children are cared for at home by mothers and grandparents; families look after each other and there is no welfare? I know which environment I find more stimulating – and it’s not the one that contains slave labour!
August 18th, 2009 at 11:24 am
inquisitive minds think alike! While I was in South East Asia, I did a lot of quizzing myself and totally agree. We can’t judge pay rates in other countries the same as we do here. Especially in countries where people grow a lot of their own food and still know how to make their own houses etc.
But all I learned is that this is exactly why slave labour is so appalling.
In a country where $13 a day is a really good wage, and $4 a day is enough to live on, for an international corporation that sells their garments at several hundred percent markup, paying someone less than that is simply not ok.
An example of this is jeans companies. From what I have learned over the years, paying someone a ‘living wage’ (By that I mean, allow them the ability to work an 8-10 hour day and receive a wage that will cover their living costs), will add probably about $1 extra to the cost of your $225 jeans.
In a lot of factories, you have to work a lot longer than that to receive that wage.
‘Salve Labour’ opponents are not concerned that some countries have lower living costs or wage rates, the point is that people should be paid a living wage for a morally acceptable work day (i.e not 15- 18 hours).
January 29th, 2012 at 4:19 am
Fantastic blog post.Really looking forward to read more. Really Cool.