free trade benefits who?

[Kulapavana]

aaaahh... the glory of free trade... where big money profits handsomely and common people everywhere pay a heavy price... buy chinese and enjoy! /images/graemlins/wink.gif

 

 

Source: /Chicago Tribune

Published: December 27, 2004 Author: Michael A. Lev

 

 

Bai Lin is a sad-faced 19-year-old who seems to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders.

 

She works in a small industrial town for a factory that makes intravenous drip kits for hospitals. Once she lived with her family in a dirt-floored hovel at the end of a mud road in a forgotten hamlet called Two Dragons.

 

 

She left home at age 15 because her father decided she must. The family was poor, but there was an option: Every day, it seemed, more people from the villages were leaving for work in the city.

 

 

Bai Lin remembers clearly the day her father took her to the bus station. He cried. She held in her tears.

 

 

Her stoic nature defines her still. Bai Lin is a factory nun. She lives cloistered in the dreary compound of the medical instruments company, where she works 11 or 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for 11 months straight until the New Year's break. When she returns home for a month, her year's wages in her pocket, it amounts to about $500.

 

 

Bai Lin belongs to one family from one village that represents an infinitesimal piece of a very large story: one of the largest industrial migration trends in human history.

 

 

Over the past decade or so, legions of Chinese have left their farms for cities as China's communist government relaxed the travel and housing restrictions that once kept a strict divide between urban workers and country peasants.

 

 

Without the rise of a flexible migrant labor force, China's economy never would have developed into the formidable international competitor it has become. China's cities today teem with these domestic migrants, some comfortably settled in jobs, others arriving daily, risking everything--though often they have nothing to lose.

 

 

Many of the people working in China's newly established factories are from the countryside.

 

 

The men living and working round-the-clock at construction sites often are migrants.

 

 

The food hawker on a street corner in Nanjing, who rises at 3:30 each morning in his tiny apartment to make the noodles for his stand and doesn't close up and go home until 8:30 at night, is a migrant.

 

 

So, too, are three poorly dressed women, each hoisting over a shoulder a rotund, 80-pound sack stuffed with potential recyclables. They march single-file down a street, bent by the strain, cartoonishly tiny under their heavy, bobbing loads, hoping to earn a few pennies for a full afternoon of rummaging.

 

 

A shifting demographic

 

 

Counting or even defining migrants isn't easy. The Chinese talk about a "floating population," meaning anyone who has left the city in which they are officially registered. At some level, a destitute farmer collecting garbage on the streets can be considered part of the same mobile phenomenon as a lawyer from Beijing living in Shanghai.

 

 

Today there are more than 100 million peasants in the cities, but so many have come and gone through the years that the total number of participants likely is far higher. These migrant workers fit different categories. Some are seasonal workers who go home for the harvest. Others have been living in the city for years but are not recognized as official city dwellers because residency laws are murky and changing.

 

 

China's plunge into migrant-based employment represents capitalism that is basic and unfettered, which can mean exploitative.

 

 

Industrial workers typically put in punishing hours, often for little or no overtime pay, in factories that can rely on antiquated equipment and provide little training. China has one of the world's highest rates of industrial accidents; at least 5,000 workers die each year in the coal-mining industry alone. Stories are common of inadequately trained machine operators who lose limbs in accidents.

 

 

 

 

 

Migrants tend to fare the worst. They're unsophisticated, desperate and thus especially vulnerable to unscrupulous bosses who will work them to the bone and then refuse to pay them.

 

There are national labor laws governing workplace conditions, but oversight and enforcement often are lax or non-existent and there are no minimum-wage rules. There also are no independent unions and no labor activists to defend workers' rights because the Communist Party does not allow challenges to its authority.

 

Sometimes workers revolt, but mostly they endure, surviving lives in the city that are grueling and lonely. But at the end of the year there is money their pockets, where there would be little or none at home on the farm.

 

This is what the Bai family understood.

 

Wrenching sacrifice

 

Bai Lin's father, the second-oldest of the five Bai brothers of Two Dragons, is illiterate and realized he could not make it in the city. So he needed to make a wrenching decision: One of his older daughters would leave home.

 

The obvious girl to send first was the eldest, Bai Li Hua, but she was valuable on the farm and seemed a bit too quiet and insecure. The second daughter, however, responsible student Bai Lin, might handle herself better.

 

So it was decided that Bai Lin should go to Changshu, where an older cousin was employed with her husband. At least there would be someone to look out for her if things went badly.

 

Bai Lin wanted to stay home, but if she went to work in the city, perhaps her younger siblings would have a chance to at least finish middle school. Her dream to go to high school had been dashed years ago when it was clear that the family could not afford it. She had no real plan for her future.

 

"Who would want to marry a poor peasant girl with two younger sisters and a younger brother to support?" she asked.

 

Changshu is a city of 1 million people. On its outskirts is a small industrial suburb built on farming fields. There is no commercial center, no high-rise buildings. At night it's dark along the roads except for the bright fluorescent lights from small factory compounds. These are mainly garmentmakers, along with a few medical instrument companies. This is where Bai Lin found work.

 

Petite and dimpled, she is in her fourth year as a factory drone at Changshu Medical Instruments Ltd. Day after day she sits quietly alone in her factory's "clean room," covered head to toe in surgical garb, carefully snipping and stacking pieces of threadlike rubber hose that will become feed tubes and IV drips for hospitals in Switzerland, France and other countries. An unpleasant odor of glue permeates the room.

 

There is little escape from the drudgery. Bai Lin never ventures outside the walls of the factory and knows little of the real world, having visited no place beyond Two Dragons or Changshu. She has never used the Internet. She doesn't own a cellular phone. She has seen perhaps one or two Hollywood movies on television; she recalls seeing "Titanic." She has never eaten at a McDonald's. In fact, she never has gone to a restaurant in the factory town. She doesn't read newspapers. Or magazines. There is no dating at the factory--there are few males working there--so there is no chance to meet men.

 

She just works.

 

When work is over, Bai Lin walks the few yards to the factory dormitory, a squalid line of concrete rooms that look like connected sheds. They are dusty and foul-smelling. It is cold inside. The walls are peeling. An unframed mirror sits on a bureau. Boxes and discarded luggage are strewn about.

 

The only personal decor Bai Lin has added to her room is a photograph of a pretty woman from a package of socks; she attached it to her bunk bed. The woman on the package smiles out at a view that otherwise is utterly depressing. Outside Bai Lin's door, in the concrete courtyard, sits a jumble of discarded sinks and chairs.

 

When the factory owner wanders into Bai Lin's room, as if for the first time, he acts embarrassed by what he sees and scolds her for not doing more to tidy it.

 

"I'd like to build better housing, maybe with two stories," he offers, but it doesn't seem likely.

 

Yet when Bai Lin's mother and father see photographs of their daughter at work and in her dorm, nothing seems amiss. To them the factory looks clean, and her dorm room seems a step up from home. At least there is a concrete floor.

 

"The conditions seem pretty good," her mother says, satisfied.

 

Bai Lin makes life harder on herself by watching every penny. She rarely buys clothes; her most expensive item is a $7.50 winter coat. She will not eat in the company cafeteria because it charges 40 cents a meal. She prefers to make her own rice and eat it in her room with some vegetables. She doesn't buy meat; she considers it too expensive.

 

She gets about $12 a month for living expenses and $500 a year in annual salary, paid in January just before the New Year's break. If she tries to quit and go home before the end of the year, she risks not getting paid at all. This is the system of migrant laborers in China. They are trapped.

 

Missing home

 

When Bai Lin went home for the last Chinese New Year holiday, she turned over her entire year's earnings to her father. About half went to help pay for the wedding of her older sister, who subsequently left Two Dragons for the first time and moved to the city with her husband. The other half went to help pay for school fees for her two younger sisters and youngest brother.

 

Bai loved being at home at New Year's, helping her mother keep house by pumping well water to wash dishes, stoking the stove fire and chopping vegetables for dinner. Yet her facial expression rarely seemed to change. She looked worried, unable to hide her sadness at being home for so short a time, but also feeling guilty that she could not earn more for her family.

 

She returned in February to start another year at the factory.

 

If she could make one suggestion to the owner, it would be to put a hot water dispenser in the clean room so workers could have tea. But he frets so much about the cost of electricity that she doubts he would agree. He already has tried to ban television from the dorm because of the cost, but at least one of the girls has a small, illicit set.

 

The boss has problems of his own. Sales are booming--up 20 percent in the past year--but the medical supply business is highly competitive and he believes he needs to watch costs like a hawk.

 

He started work at the factory nearly 20 years ago as a painter when it was a government-owned manufacturer of clocks and radios. It switched product lines several times and eventually failed, allowing him to invest in the factory and take it over as a private enterprise.

 

He got the deal because he was ambitious and studied management in night school, but the fact that his father is a local Communist Party chief certainly helped, he admits.

 

Perhaps in an attempt to rectify the incongruity of a party boss' son going capitalist, local officials rewarded him with membership in the party. Chinese citizens are not all members of the Communist Party. Only about 6 percent have this exclusive distinction.

 

Today the government is even more actively recruiting entrepreneurs to join the party as a means of modernizing the image of China's leadership and keeping the party relevant by merging the identities of communism and capitalism.

 

The prevailing philosophy is the statement widely attributed to Deng Xiaoping when he was first trying to engineer China's shift from socialism to modernity: "To get rich is glorious."

 

As Bai Lin sits there, keeping up her little responsibility on an assembly line that employs several dozen women, there is little to think about except how miserable it all seems.

 

"I just want to go home--the sooner the better," Bai Lin often says to herself.

 

[Gauracandra]

At this moment I'm just finishing reading a book titled "The Crisis of Civilization" written by Hilaire Belloc.

 

Belloc, a Frenchman educated in England, was very close friends with G.K. Chesterton and in the early 1900s the two of them developed an economic philosophy called Distributism. The book itself is an introduction to Distributism but they have expanded on the idea in other writings.

 

The book for about two-thirds deals with how modern capitalism came about. Belloc was Catholic and shows how the Reformation especially the philosophy of John Calvin was the starting point of modern competitive capitalism. This confirms something I've noticed. Protestants almost always vote Republican, while Catholics vote Democratic. It always seemed odd, but if you understand that Protestantism lead to modern capitalism it makes more sense. Its not a perfect correlation, but there is definitely a pattern.

 

Anyways, the ideas behind Distributism are essentially small 'c' Capitalism. In fact many of the ideas sound much like Srila Prabhupada's view of Varnashram.

 

The basic pillars are as follows:

1) A better distribution of physical property. There was a point in time when the individual was truly a free man because he produced his own job. Certainly some people worked for others, but there were in fact many small farm communities and trades. Belloc points to Medieval Europe as being the peak of civilization in which there was steady progress but also social stability and unity. He does not pretend that there is no progress today, simply that while we have had more material progress it is top-heavy and can't support itself.

 

2) The elimination of usury, or atleast its restrictions. The idea being that people should invest in future profits of an enterprise if they wish to loan money, but not simply to receive payment with or without some physical backing. That is usury (lending money at interest) leads to a consumer, rather than a producer, driven economy. It causes gambling with the creation of instant wealth and instant poverty. It also enslaves the undisciplined who borrow and become indebted thus losing their economic freedom. This is something I believe in a general sense. I hate debt. If I can't control myself to save up my money before buying something with cash, then I don't buy it.

 

3) Laws that prevent large owners from swallowing up small owners. Essentially he wants many small businesses. Life should be mostly village life in which people work from home with a skill they contribute to the community. However, at one point there were millions of farmers. Now we have Agribusiness, with huge companies who ran out the small farmers out of business. Yes it is more efficient. However, that efficiency has turn a private owner, a man who was his own boss (the small farmer), into a dependent worker, who works for someone else. Another example is department stores. Today the richest Americans are like the 5 Walton siblings (from Walmart). Each is worth like $30 billion, or in total their family is worth like $100 - $150 billion. How did this happen? Well, the company kept putting out of business small town stores. What this means is once upon a time there were many independent business men, who were their own boss in their own community. Lets say they were each worth half a million. This would suggest that perhaps close to 300,000 small owners were put out of business, in order that that wealth be transfered to the 5 Walton siblings who live in Arkansas (in fact its more, since the Walton family don't won all of Walmart).

 

That is before your community had some respectable families that owned a few small stores IN YOUR COMMUNITY. Their kids went to YOUR schools. They voted in YOUR town hall. They went to YOUR same church. Now they are employees not owners. Walmart didn't do anything illegal. However, it is the nature of big 'C' capitalism to ruin the small guy.

 

They were against big 'C' capitalism because it put wealth in the hands of few individuals. They were against Socialism because it put the wealth into the hands of even fewer individuals (government bureaucrats). The only balance between political freedom and economic freedom they saw was to create an ownership driven society. A society of small owners. They give the example that the institution of property no more should allow a man to have unlimited property than the institution of marriage allows one to have more than one spouse. Limits should be set.

 

4) Natural monopolies should be highly regulated for the publics benefit.

 

5) There must be a reintroduction of Guilds. A guild set rules for their members and made sure that while there was competition, no member would seek the ruin of a fellow guild member. Each should be able to earn a living. The guild would facilitate training, set standards of work, etc....

 

Anyways, this is a general outline. Free trade has not necessarily benefited the American consumer. Consider this. Take Nike for instance. Go to the store and your shoes still cost $50 to $150. Yet once there were plants in the U.S. paying Americans good wages to make shoes. Now those plants are in Malaysia where they pay a few dollars per day. Have your prices come down? No. But the company's profit margins have increased. You may think you are getting less expensive products but you aren't. The cost is just transferred. How? How about welfare payments to the unemployed? How about inner cities with unemployment among certain populations of 20%? Because they are unemployed they more likely fall into crime and social disruption. So then we raise taxes to build more prisons. Maybe your T-shirt costs less (and thats a small maybe), but the costs are made up elsewhere.

 

While I don't fully agree with Belloc, he does make a number of good points. The book seems a bit anachronistic in the sense that he was writing this in the great depression. However, everything he wrote then is happening to a greater extent now. His view is the system is top heavy and can't support itself. With a proper diffusion of ownership to the individual level, with people being their own bosses, then society will be more stable. There should be local control, village life, low taxes, and small private ownership. There will never be paradise, not everyone will be a owner (some will work for others), but there will be a greater sense of self-determination, rather than the lack of self-assurance from being a wage earner.

[Kulapavana]

yes these are good points, but I'm afraid the world is already fully controlled by big money and greedy asuras who hold it /images/graemlins/frown.gif

 

perhaps in the future, when (and if...) people are more spiritually aware things may change. right now the escape seems only possible for individuals and small groups.

[Gauracandra]

Hilaire Belloc was certainly a partisan. He believed in the Catholic church and believed the Reformation broke Christian unity which lead to fracturing and regional competition. However, in all of his arguments he doesn't come off as unfair. In other words, he expresses his ideas in an intelligent manner even if he ultimately does take the side of the Catholic church. For instance, he spends much time detailing the abuses of the Catholic heirarchy which assisted in the revolt.

 

However, he does point a strong finger at John Calvin. To him John Calvin was very dangerous precisely because he wasn't a crack or a sentimentalist. Calvin created an entirely complete theology that rivaled Catholicism. The fact that it was a heresy and false did not mean it was unintelligent or poorly conceived. It was so perfectly conceived that it could legitimately challenge the old theology.

 

Now Belloc points out that the way economic and political change occurs is first there is an idea that takes root and from there society changes its economy and politics. Rarely (if ever) does the economic/political system change and then people accept the ideas (there must be some catalyst).

 

Now I don't fully comprehend the Calvinist theology. From what I gather this is the core of it. Essentially Catholic doctrine always accepted that there were two wills. There was God's will and man's will. Man therefore had independence. Calvin said there was only one will - God's will. God knew the future and thus man had no freedom of a separate will. There wasn't even a chance for man to be saved. God had already decided who would and who wouldn't be saved.

 

Now the problem with this idea of predestination and non-existence of the will of man is it results in a sort of glorification of success. A man is successful because he was predestined to succeed. It is God's will that the rich man is rich. It is God's will that the poor man is poor. Money becomes an objective measurement of "the will of God." After all he wouldn't will you to have it if he didn't want you to have it. But the problem is if there is a separate will from God (man's will), then man can choose to be successful and yet violate God's will. He can engage in wordly activities and act contrary to proper principles, but because he is successful we should idolize him.

 

Now this no doubt was not the intended consequence of Calvin's philosophy, but it was the final result. We became a culture that worshipped success (instead of God, or I should say as a sign of God). The old Catholic theology would say that a successful man is not necessarily someone we should emulate. He could just as easily be contrary to God, while the poor man could be abiding by God's will.

 

Again, I haven't studied Calvin's philosophy, but this is what I was able to gather. It was this idea that lead to the economic and political changes in Christian Europe.

[Kulapavana]

Reformation was just one part of the changes brought about by the Renesance Period, begining with Lord Chaitanya's appearance... /images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

Calvin was to Christianity what Buddha was to Vedic tradition - a much needed detour to rectify accumulated problems.