It is almost impossible not to buy things from China. From products to packaging to the component parts in the stuff of our lives, Chinese products are everywhere. Even when I purposely seek to avoid it, I can't. I recently bought a tea mug and intentionally looked all over the packaging for signs of where it was made. The only indication was the American company. But when I got home and opened the package, the bottom of the mug was stamped in those words that made my heart faint: Made in China.
We are all implicated in the tragic losses we are reading about all too often in Chinese factories.
The Chinese manufacturers we read about adulterate their products, be it food or material; pollute the environment; underpay and mistreat their workers (see yet the latest story below from The Sun), and we are the reason, the enablers and the beneficiaries of their unacceptable, unexcusable, and - if it were in this country - unlawful behavior. But they get to do it because we want cheaper merchandise.
How many Chinese manufacturers do this - we don't know. But clearly enough to have us read about them when grand things go terribly wrong (we don't hear about the wrongs that don't rise to this level of international reporting).
I for one will amp up my diligent avoidance of Chinese products. That is one way we can get the Chinese government to clean up its act toward its commerce, people and the environment.
Two other ways are legislation that requires incoming merchandise to abide by the same ethical standards in manufacturing as ours (that might make ours more competitive price-wise) and banding together with socially responsible shareholder or consumer groups that can magnify our voices and our clout.
If you know of such legislative efforts or organizations (ICCR - Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility), please let me know. I would love to publish such a list here.
Fire at locked poultry plant kills 119 in China
By Barbara Demick Tribune Newspapers
BEIJING — There was a loud bang, survivors said. Then the lights went out, and fire quickly engulfed a poultry plant in northeastern China, killing at least119 workers who were trapped behind locked doors.
The fire Monday, perhaps the deadliest in China’s poultry industry, erupted just past 6 a.m. in Dehui in Jilin province. Authorities said the explosion was caused by leakage in tanks of ammonia used in the poultry industry as a coolant.
At least 54 people were injured in the explosion and blaze.
As flames spread through the factory, panicked workers were unable to escape, survivors told state media, because most of the exits were locked or blocked, forcing them to stampede toward a narrow side door.
“I knew the fire door was blocked, so I went back toward another part of the factory. Everybody was flooding in the same direction in a stampede. I was lucky to crawl out alive,’’ said Guo Yan, a 39-year-old woman who was interviewed by state media in a hospital in Changchun, the nearby provincial capital.
Why there were not more exits is unclear.
Whether processing food or making smart-phones, Chinese workers often endure conditions more akin to military barracks than factories, with restrictions on their freedom of movement.
Guo told the Chinese news service that workers, who made about $325 per month, were “strictly controlled.”
The fire was one in a string of international disasters that have spotlighted poor industrial safety, including the collapse of a garment factory building in Bangladesh in April, an accident that killed 1,127. Employees there had expressed fear that the building was unsafe but were ordered inside to work.
Deadly industrial accidents have accompanied China’s rapid industrial growth in recent decades, despite government efforts to improve safety.
Monday’s factory fire was one of the worst of its kind in China, eclipsing the toll from a 1993 blaze at a toy factory in the southern city of Shenzhen that killed 87 workers.
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