After talking about this invisible cycle of oppression manufacturing has developed I wanted to make something a little more visible. When I say the manufacturing cycle of oppression I am referring to all the detrimental and unjust conditions within the whole cycle. For example, from the dirty extraction processes ruining or toxifying people’s homes, to the poor working conditions of production, to the polluting and intensive transportation (to the blind developed countries), and then to the disposal and monstrous waste build up of some peoples trash in other peoples homes!
As a lot of you probably know Nike is a major supporter for the University of Oregon, or some of you may argue for football at least ( I mean they look pretty fly with all the different jerseys). Anyways, I wanted to post some facts about NIke shoes that are mainly produced in Vietnam, China, India and Thailand.
1. Nike produces 78 million shoes/year in China.
2. The labor cost for one $85 shos is only $2.50.
3. Some workers earn as much as .10/ hour and toiled for up to 17hrs per day!
– Indonesia= $2.46/day – Vietnam= $1.60/day – China= $1.75/day
4. Workers can be fired for refusing over-time.
5. Workers are exposed to toxic chemicals. There has been report of compensation for working with hazardous chemicals.
( http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=365&catid=9&subcatid=60#08 )
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
June 1, 2011 at 10:25 am
emingamells
While the workers in rising industrial nations are thoroughly abused by international outsourcers and the providers for America’s consumerism, the trend is starting to change. In today’s NYT business section there was an article about the rising wages for Chinese workers. This is a trend, not only happening in China’s interior, but also on the coast, and in India and Vietnam. Hopefully the domino effect of these wage hikes leads to increased product cost for international consumers and a lowering of per capita consumption in the US and Europe or to more local production. Either way there’s a lot of potential good to be accomplished by raising wages, both for the workers and for the planet.
Here’s a link to the article: