Fair Labor Solutions

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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Video on Youtube




Here's a link to a video taken at a factory in China that makes hats for many American Brands. I post this today to remind people that every worker with a mobile phone is an investgative reporter and that conditions in your supply chain are only a youtube or facebook away.
http://youtu.be/QzNYY001Z_A

The video is of poor quality but it gets its point across.
For the full report, go here;
http://chinalaborwatch.org/pro/proshow-161.html

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Labor unrest in Shenzhen

With the labor and raw material costs all increasing, and the factories ability to raise the prices blocked by brands desperate to keep retail price points unchanged, it is often the workers who suffer. No one wants to raise the retail prices in a down economy. However, it is unreasonable to expect the factories to absorb these higher costs without something snapping. With workers taking matters into their own hands, we can expect to see more of this type of action in the future.
This from China labor Watch
New York, November 22nd, 2011 -- On November 21st, more than 400 workers went on strike at the Shenzhen Top Form Underwear Co., Limited factory in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province. The motivation behind the strike was rooted in worker unrest over the factory’s unfair piece-rate wage system and workers’ unachievable daily production quotas. Despite the long work hours and high pressure that workers toil under to complete their work quotas, the factory does not pay its workers overtime wages. During the peak season when the factory receives many orders, employees work approximately 300 hours per month. Regardless of these excessive work hours, workers are still only able to earn around 2,000 RMB per month ($314 USD). Workers are regularly reprimanded and verbally abused by factory management, further amplifying the pressure felt by the factory workers.Li Qiang, Executive Director of China Labor Watch, has said in a statement that factory workers have become increasingly conscious of their rights as workers and ways to protect these rights. Despite this belief, many factories still employ old-fashioned coercive-style management structures instead of a more fair and human-oriented system. Li believes that there is a growing sense of social justice among factory workers; this will lead to many more strikes in Chinese factories in the future.

 

Friday, November 11, 2011

Human trafficking in the supply chain



Seven years ago, David Arkless took a call from the first lady of an African state. She wanted to know what his company was doing about human trafficking. His answer was blunt: "What human trafficking?" The question prompted him to investigate. The figures proved startling. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, more than 2.4 million people are being exploited by traffickers at any one time. Some campaign groups suggest the annual number of victims could be as high as 27 million. 

 
"There are more slaves today than in any time in human history", says Arkless, who heads up corporate and government affairs for Manpower, a global employment services firm. He's become something of an evangelist on the subject. As board president of the campaign group End Human Trafficking Now, he helped push through the Athens Ethical Principles - a seven-step charter designed to stamp out the use of trafficked labour by companies and other organisations. Arkless' attempts to win over other senior executives are met with mixed responses, however. While most companies lament the problem, he says, they fail to see what it has to do with them. They're wrong, the Manpower executive maintains. And he tells them as much: "At some point in your supply chain or partner's supply chain, it's likely that you are using products, supplies or services that involve people who have been trafficked."
  
To read the full article by Oliver Balch, please click on this link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/blog/human-traficking-rights-business?newsfeed=true 

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Monday, November 7, 2011

Technology for the masses

I heard in a BBC World Service report that a Chinese entrepreneur has developed an app called "Mobile Job Hunting", that will connect workers to the factories that have jobs available. It will give them information on wage rates, overtime rates etc and will allow thm to check out other factories while still in employment. With over 800m mobile phones in China, and over 300m migrant workers, this has the possibility of creating a huge change in working conditions for the better. As factories have to compete with each other for available workers, conditions will have to improve in order to retain their workers.
here's a link to the report.