(Editor’s note: From the perspective of Western nations, workers in China and India toil under miserable conditions for slave wages. Things are not quite as bad as that, says Shanghai correspondent and frequent Rick’s Picks contributor Mario Cavolo, and conditions can only continue to improve. In the essay below, drawing on his own experience as a cruise-ship worker, he explains why. RA)
It is no secret that Europe and America were built on slave labor. As the appalling details of Foxconn, Apple Computer’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) supplier, have recently made clear, China and India are being built on slave labor’s modern equivalent. The details of the story vary, but in the end, human beings work 12-16 hour days, six to seven days per week. They are given a place to sleep at night, a place to occasionally wash, three basic meals per day and no wage or a very low wage, such as today’s equivalent of $6 per day. If a worker gets sick, his or her medical expenses are typically paid for. Before we continue, think about that wage for a moment: $6 per day.
Let’s switch gears for a moment, considering the case of a well-established, international industry where people also work like slaves for 12 hours per day, seven days per week. What industry am I referring to? The cruise-ship vacation industry. However, there is an enormous difference between the intense labor demands of cruise-ship workers and factory workers in China or India – namely, the monthly wage. A typical kitchen crew-member is hired from the Philippines or Central America. With more and more ships sailing Asian waters, more and more Chinese are filling these jobs. As part of a cruise ship’s hotel operation, they will work, on a contractual basis, 12 to 16 hours per day, seven days per week for six months, with a six-week rest between contracts and round-trip flight home paid. They are provided a decent shared-cabin bunk, plenty of good food and full medical coverage. When they are not working, they are sleeping because they are exhausted. During my contract providing entertainment services last year with Royal Caribbean Cruise line, I realized that while ship’s crew were permitted to disembark for several hours to visit the ports, they were simply too tired and needed to sleep instead; they rarely got off the ship.
$180 Per Month
However, the typical ship’s kitchen crew or housekeeping crew earned around USD $1200 per month or more, paid in cash. For comparison, Chinese and Indian factory workers – i.e., the workers involved in the FoxConn factory controversy — were being paid about five times less than that, or about USD $180 per month. With a recent sharp increase in worker suicides, FoxConn’s CEO, who has become a billionaire on the backs of his slaving workers, increased wages by 30%. It needs to be mentioned that FoxConn’s workers are not allowed to speak to one another during their standing-only, 12-hour daily shifts.
Let me ask you this: Does a 30% wage increase remedy the problem? Pretend it is your job: standing for 12 hours, performing a monotonous assembly-line task, during which time you are not allowed to speak to fellow workers. Sounds like the kind of misery that might make some of us think about jumping off a tenth-story ledge. At first blush it is the working conditions that seem intolerable and not the low wage. Looking more closely at the low wage of USD $180 per month, considering living costs in China, it is the equivalent of around USD $720 back in the United States. That is my personal estimate, based on my having lived in China for the last 11 years. And let me mention that last week, I had a terrible headache for which I went to the local hospital and had a CT scan for USD $20. So please believe me when I tell you that the daily cost of living in China reflects typical expenses that are three to ten times lower than in North America or continental Europe. A 500ml bottle of water at the local mart is $1 or more in the West. Here its only $0.20.
Socking It Away
It is more than obvious to me that the worker’s misery lies mainly in their daily working conditions. How does a $50 monthly raise help my daily misery? On a cruise ship, the kitchen crew is also working 12-15 hours per day, seven days per week. If they are fortunate, they are moving around from task to task, breaking up the boredom and monotonous routine, rather than say, peeling carrots for 12 hours. And at the end of the month, the ship’s crew are paid relatively generously in cash and benefits. Think about how many typical middle-class American employees can put USD $1000 per month directly in the bank each month after expenses. Very few. And so, even though the daily life of a cruise ship crew is long and tough, and even though their quality of life leaves much to be desired, their progress in real wage earnings — in providing for their families back home, in saving for their future — is clearly meaningful and significant. The savings rate of a cruise ship’s crew is typically 70-80%!
So why is China rising? Two key reasons. With the Western economies facing distress and potential disaster in one form or another due to the growing sovereign-debt problem, we easily see that China’s private and public debt is far less leveraged. Even if the economy dips, even if the property bubble deflates by 20%-30%, the reaction will be far more muted because 50% to 60% of homeowners in China don’t even have mortgages. I am not referring to the 20% who are speculators, but rather to working-class Chinese who own the vast majority of homes in China. Secondly, corporate and state profits are plentiful, with hundreds of millions of lower- and middle-class employees taking home slave wages. The country’s infrastructure is being magnificently and broadly built out. Combine these two factors and you begin to see the current window in which China and, similarly, India, are able to make rapid economic progress and increase their economic power.
Today, across the globe, the fury and frustration is growing, is becoming more and more visible on a daily basis. As this applies to the labor situation in China, the tide is turning. As occurred long ago in the Western economies, over the coming years, the economic evolution of societies that are modernizing will be inflationary, with steadily rising wages and better working conditions contributing to a rising standard of living. As in Europe and America, slave labor in China and India will soon enough come to an end.
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“As for banana and apple peels, those go in my compost and then back into my garden.”
Oh, of course… those are organic. We all know paper and styro don’t break down. At least not “fast enough”.
But if people did go more “green” and “sustainable”, I wonder how unsustainably filthy and smelly those compost heaps would become. It’s like the meat vs vegetarian argument. No animals would be killed? Bull. More farming for more veggies would destroy more habit and kill more critters in the harvest. You might say that you look so good because I allow you to. And it’s not that I have anything against people gardening and choosing whatever they do. When they get preachy and lament “evils”, though, I remind them they’re being foolish.
That said, things are always in a state of flux, and at times things will be messier and at times cleaner. And yes, China (or any country) IS entitled, nay, _obligated_ to make a mess if it means the difference between a better and cleaner future or a dreadful, dirtier one in which poverty creates even more environmental problems than would otherwise exist (see my post to Mario above… if the worst did happen, we can be reasonably certain medical costs would rise because generally speaking, poverty causes more sickness. Same is true for poverty and pollution).
And today, the North Americas has never BEEN cleaner. But I read an article the other day about Toronto’s so-called “air pollution” problem. Trouble with that is, I’ve been to Toronto several times. Clean everything! It’s almost surreal how clean the city is! And when I commented on that, an old-timer was kind enough to verify it for me. Toronto used to be much worse off, but then you still have people yammering on about it, as if ANY amount of dirt is an offense of the worst sort.
And people want to know why China is so dirty. Well, aside from making progress, mentalities in the West have become such that we aren’t willing to tolerate anything less than unattainable perfection (now there’s a term I would not argue… unattainable living, not sustainable living. At least we can use honest terminology). So we make their dirt-for-progress worse. So the same preachers of the unattainable then complain about that worse pollution, even though it’s their damn fault for complaining about it so much in the first place!
China is not the problem. Nor is materialism. WE are the problem. WE need to grow up and accept the facts of life. Case in point, as if China was not enough, is the BP incident. Forbid drilling in the interior, and they’ll go where things are rubber-stamped. It’s just like poaching in Africa was… tear down farming on the spurious grounds of infinite pesticide pollution (along with real abuses at the hands of colonialism), and people hunt to endanger beautiful creatures, and themselves suffer the whole “merry” way.