How Civil Society Can Help: Sweatshop Workers as Globalization's Consequence
ARTICLE # 32:
How Civil Society Can Help: Sweatshop Workers as Globalization's Consequence
Student: Trang M.Nguyen
Email: trangnm103@gmail.com
Professor: Dr. Syed Tariq Anwar
Seminar in International Business and Marketing Strategy
Spring Semester
Summary of the article
The article "How Civil Society Can Help: Sweatshop Workers as Globalization's Consequence" was wrote by Jeff Ballinger, who is Director of Press for Change. The article starts from Prato in Italia, where has a lot of sweatshops. In there, the workers, almost are Chinese, have to work in long hours with little pay or no pay. The situation in Prato is not only about worker migration, it is also about globalization. The author list some questions and myths which are related to his topic of globalization. For example, the question is: "has globalization turned good companies bad?" The myth is: if the global brands do not strictly monitor their supply chains, conscientious consumers will punish the company for unethical practices at the retail level.
However, in reality, consumers do not care so much about worker's rights, so the company will be safe unless they do something horrible or despicable. Then, the author discusses about globalization. Before globalization, most companies were vertically-integrated, in other words, they design, production, and marketing all took place in one country. Then, the outsourcing created the global supply-chain. The companies do it because they can reduce the cost by paying foreign workers less. Because sending workers abroad to rich country is good for poor country, many countries do it, such as Egypt, the Philippines, Bangladesh, then Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. But there it also establishes an issue which is called "indentured servitude". For example, in Taiwan in 2003, a "perfect storm" has created: fees of contract-labor are triple...