The International outsourced Garment Industry which spans Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia is rapidly being extended into Myanmar with Chinese investment but not without new heightened and violent responses from workers there as their employers and the supporting state seeks to compete with it's other S.E.Asian neighbours to more fully exploit the local labour! See here for instance:
www.uk.reuters.com/article/uk-myanmar-factory-idUKKBN16E1RM?il=0
The garment industry will
The garment industry will continue to seek the cheapest sources of labor, as it historically has done (sadly).
syndicalist wrote: The
syndicalist
I don't think that's sad, that's just a fact of capitalism.
syndicalist wrote: Quote: The
syndicalist wrote:
It's always been the case, hence why the historical garment sectors in western cities are now pretty defunct. However it's got to the point now where the garment industry is now only second to the oil industry in terms of industrial polluters, far outstripping agriculture, the manufacture of cotton being particularly bad, not only in the vast amount of water it needs to produce cotton, the pesticides poisoning the earth but also as another mechanism for keeping poor farmers in the global south impoverished and in debt.
The exploitation of workers across the industry is universal and very moveable. The actual sewing of the clothes can easily be transferred to other locations, there have been struggles and concessions won in Bangladesh and Vietnam, in terms of pay, health and safety etc, which is why companies have been moving their production to Myanmar.
Little bit of a rant and there's not much to do about it, it is a fact of capitalism although I do think that's sad because it causes so much human misery as well as taking a devastating toll on the environment. The industry has got so much worse over the last few decades and it's something I get really angry about.
When I said sadly, it was
When I said sadly, it was meant for the workers who will always struggle in that industry under sweatshop conditions and poor wages. Just like my immigrant grandparents did when they arrived in America so many decades ago.
I didn't mean it as a dig,
I didn't mean it as a dig, sometimes I feel that the sanguine attitude that we can't do anything about these things under capitalism (which is true) is dispiriting. Ever more cycles of things never getting any better.
Sorry I couldn't get that
Sorry I couldn't get that link to work but you could find it through the LabourStart site. It demonstrates workers fighting back over failure to respond to wage demands and harassment of a local union militant with other useful background information.