Wenwei and Cecilia, thank you for your comments. Both of you talk about how non-wage factors such as geography and education make jobs likely to stay in China, and both of you clearly care about the cruel conditions in the factories. Your thoughtfulness is a great change from the Washington Consensus that ruled when I was in Students Against Sweatshops 10+ years ago. Few students wanted to devote nuanced thought to how the working lives of our fellow human beings in China and other countries might be improved. Instead we heard a lot about inevitable “sweatshop phases” of national “development.” Organizing for better conditions could only drive factories away and doom workers to lives of prostitution and picking through garbage dumps. Happily, in the real, non-theoretical world, workers often succeed when they pressure their employers. The Honda workers at the first Foshan plant are a good recent example. I particularly like their story because they won without organized support from consumers abroad. Instead, they leveraged their own skills, the labor shortage in South China, and Japan’s unpopularity in China. By adding their courage and solidarity to those factors, they were able to extract significant improvements from Honda.

-- AmandaBell - 04 Jul 2010