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Low Prices, Widespread Torture
Our new system of global production
By Harold Meyerson
12/10/05 "LA
Weekly" -- -- Whatever its virtues, the United Nations
isn’t the first place you’d turn to if you wanted to expose some
nefarious internal practices of its more powerful member states. So
it came as no small surprise when a U.N. investigator last week
documented the “widespread” use of torture in China. Manfred Nowak,
who is the special rapporteur of the U.N. Commission on Human
Rights, noted that electric shock, sleep deprivation and submersion
in water or sewage are still common practices in China when the
state seeks to obtain confessions and suppress the political dissent
it delicately terms “deviant behavior.”
This is hardly the image of the new, improved capitalist China that
the neo-Communist regime and American business have teamed up to
convey. As they depict it, China is a bustling, modern society that
offers everything a company could possibly want to do business.
They’re right — and that’s just the problem.
Because if China offers anything to the corporations of the world,
it’s a diligent, skilled — and intimidated — work force. Nowak noted
the prevalence of torture in China’s labor camps, where the inmates
have been imprisoned for their political or religious beliefs and
activities. The ultimate crime in China, after all, is to seek to
establish autonomous centers of power — churches, parties, unions —
not under the control of the Communist Party. Workers who have led
strikes or tried to organize unions are still jailed and tortured in
the new-model China, as democracy advocate and union activist Harry
Wu — a veteran of the state’s gulags — can attest.
This is a story that implicates all of us. Torture, and fear of
torture, are factors in holding costs down in our new-age globalized
production system. Take just-in-time delivery, add a touch of
submersion in shit, fear of beating, fear of drowning, and voilą!
You get Wal-Mart’s everyday low prices.
That’s not quite how the story gets conveyed in the business press,
however. When American economists and executives opine about China,
you don’t hear about the jailing and abuse of workers who seek
decent living standards. There’s nothing new in this: Our guys in
the oil business have never said word one about the repressive Saudi
regime, and United Fruit was always the Latin American
banana-republic dictator’s best friend. But China is different. It’s
not just one benighted sector of American capitalism that’s made its
accommodations there. Virtually every major U.S. firm involved in
manufacturing and marketing is beating a path to China’s door — and
surrendering there any political principles they may have brought
with them. Rupert Murdoch’s agreement not to air any officially
disapproved broadcasts over his satellite TV system is just one,
albeit egregious, example.
So the next time China has a Tian An Men Square–like convulsion,
don’t count on American business to support the Chinese democrats
trying to stop the tanks. A more democratic China means workers with
more rights and higher wages. For which reason the U.S. government
is likely to be conflicted as well. Even now, while the Defense
Department views China as a threat, the Commerce Department views it
as a trading partner, or even an extension of the American system of
production. Nor is it a given that a Democratic administration would
be less immune than the Bush administration is to this political
schizophrenia. It was the Clinton White House, after all, that
promoted China’s no-questions-asked admission to the World Trade
Organization.
Suppress unions and you get violence: The Middle Kingdom is home to
more labor unrest than any other place — actually, than every other
place — on the planet. In the factory zones, workers riot and
disrupt when their pay is withheld or their co-workers perish doing
dangerous jobs that no one in power cared to make safer. In the
West, the riot was the normal form of worker protest before unions
were legalized in the 19th and 20th centuries. And destabilizing and
destructive as riots may be, they pose less of a threat to a
quasi-totalitarian regime like China than an orderly strike led by
an autonomous workers’ organization.
China may be the most nominal of socialist states, but its claim to
legitimacy is still rooted in mumbled phrases about empowering
workers. Accordingly, it has its own government-run unions, which
aren’t really unions at all. Controlled by the Communist Party, the
All-China Federation of Trade Unions features locals whose leaders
are often selected by the employer. These unions do not strike —
that would be against the law, and disruptive of the social harmony
and political control that the powers that be seek to maintain. They
cannot bargain aggressively.
It should shock no one, then, that Wal-Mart — a company that closed
down all its meat departments in the U.S. when butchers in one store
voted to unionize — has embraced the government union in China.
“Should associates [the Wal-Mart term for employees] request the
formation of a union,” the company said in a statement released late
last year, “the company would respect their wishes.” In Bentonville
and Beijing, the only good union is a sham union.
What’s curious is why some of America’s most brilliant and dedicated
union leaders should be cozying up to the same sham unionists. At
the first organizing conference of the new Change To Win Federation,
which convened last month in Las Vegas, delegates welcomed invited
guests from the All-China Federation. Ninety-nine times out of 100,
the leaders of the Service Employees International Union (the Change
To Win union most predisposed to the All-China Federation) can smell
a company union a mile away. This time, their noses — well, their
strategic and moral sense — failed them.
But they’re hardly alone. American companies and consumers count on
China; it’s the producer of choice for a nation — ours — where
incomes, on average, no longer rise. Only a spoilsport from the
United Nations would have the gall to disturb us with the news that
our spiffy, 21st-century, integrated global economic system is built
on the barbarism of despots and thugs.
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