A story in today’s New York Times examines the failures of foreign governments — and the American companies that have chosen to do business in those countries — to look out for the well being of workers.
Focusing on the corporate hand-wringing that has followed the building collapse last week in Bangladesh that killed more than 400 factory workers, the story recounts efforts by Western companies who have contracted with third-party producers there to “to address public concerns about working conditions.”
Benetton repeatedly revised its accounts of goods produced at one of the factories, while officials at Gap, the Children’s Place and other retailers huddled to figure out how to improve conditions, and some debated whether to remain in Bangladesh at all.
And the Walt Disney Company — perhaps the most symbolically American firm in the world — in the process of leaving Bangladesh and creating a set of guidelines for choosing the countries to which it will outsource its factory work.
These efforts are important. As The Times points out,
Bangladesh has some of the lowest wages in the world, its government is eager to lure Western companies and their jobs, and many labor groups want those big corporations to stay to improve conditions, not cut their losses and run.
The question, according to the story, is how to balance the need for cheaper foreign labor and the ability to provide jobs in the Third World with the moral imperative to ensure that workers are not putting lives on the line to produce licensed sweatshirts and baseball hats. There are ongoing efforts, for instance, to certify working conditions to assure businesses and consumers that they are not doing business with the bad actors. And to the degree that these efforts are — or can be — successful, they deserve praise.
The problem is that there will always be a ceiling on how successful these efforts can be. Capitalism — especially its American corporate variant — is designed structurally to thwart these voluntary efforts. The structural focus of corporate capitalism is on profit. We get there simply by finding ways to maximize our resources — to slash our costs as much as possible to keep prices down while also generating profit.
The logic of this system, therefore, drives corporations to push costs down — which has traditionally meant fending off unions and shifting factories from higher-wage locations with strong regulations and union representation to areas without. Initially, that meant shipping jobs from cities like Trenton, Paterson and Newark south to Alabama, Mississippi and other states with environments more conducive to unregulated corporate behavior.
These initial moves, made possible by a counter-productive competition among states, lowered wages and saved companies money. But they were not permanent. Corporate leaders quickly realized that they could pay workers in Mexico far less than they could pay even the low-wage workers in Alabama — and then that the workers in Bangladesh could be paid even less. This has created two major problems — a brutal race to the bottom for wages for all workers and a complete disregard by these companies for the impacts of their actions.
As I said, there have been campaigns — often successful — to get corporations to change their behavior. McDonalds did away with Styrofoam containers and Disney is tightening its rules on contracting, but these campaigns only nibble at the edge of the larger problem, which is a lack of a globalized union movement strong enough to beat back globalized corporate capitalism.
Workers need to be empowered not only to negotiate wages, but to engage head on the damaging behavior of the world’s corporate culture. The playing field is tilted badly now in favor of the investor class. Workers need to balance this out.
Workers of the world unite, as the saying goes. It is the only chance we have.
Hank Kalet 