Secrets, Lies and Sweatshops Summary
Secrets, Lies, and Sweatshops summary
The article Secrets, Lies, and Sweatshops written by Dexter Roberts and Pete Engardio talks about sweatshops in China and how the auditors to lie about and have labor ethics concealed from them. With China being the number one importer for the United States, it should be important that they obey some labor laws to an extent. They obviously aren’t doing that. One specific case is that of the company Ningbo Beifa, which is the top supplier for pencils and such utilities to Wal-Mart, in which a former employee, Tang, of the company told the writers his story. Tang was the administrator for one of the Beifa plants on the shoreline of China and a Wal-Mart auditor was coming to inspect the factory. His factory had already failed inspection three times. He had gotten a call from a man to help him conceal the labor laws that weren’t being passed. It had worked and the factory passed the inspection. Chinese workers work a tremendous amount of overtime and only make a few dollars a day if they are lucky. Many Chinese companies submit false documentation to cover up the breach in ethics in their factories and towards their workforce. The Chinese government isn’t really doing much to help out the workers either. The economic principles that apply are number 8(a country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services) and number 1(people face trade offs). The reason is the low wages lower the standard of living and employer’s face the trade off of having bad working conditions and lying about it and potentially being caught or following the rules and keeping American companies coming to them to buy their products. I think that the factories should be put under further review if have had past inspection failures. They also shouldn’t get so many shots at trying to make it better. You only get so many second chances in this world. It isn’t fair to the workers and their families that have to
The article Secrets, Lies, and Sweatshops written by Dexter Roberts and Pete Engardio talks about sweatshops in China and how the auditors to lie about and have labor ethics concealed from them. With China being the number one importer for the United States, it should be important that they obey some labor laws to an extent. They obviously aren’t doing that. One specific case is that of the company Ningbo Beifa, which is the top supplier for pencils and such utilities to Wal-Mart, in which a former employee, Tang, of the company told the writers his story. Tang was the administrator for one of the Beifa plants on the shoreline of China and a Wal-Mart auditor was coming to inspect the factory. His factory had already failed inspection three times. He had gotten a call from a man to help him conceal the labor laws that weren’t being passed. It had worked and the factory passed the inspection. Chinese workers work a tremendous amount of overtime and only make a few dollars a day if they are lucky. Many Chinese companies submit false documentation to cover up the breach in ethics in their factories and towards their workforce. The Chinese government isn’t really doing much to help out the workers either. The economic principles that apply are number 8(a country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services) and number 1(people face trade offs). The reason is the low wages lower the standard of living and employer’s face the trade off of having bad working conditions and lying about it and potentially being caught or following the rules and keeping American companies coming to them to buy their products. I think that the factories should be put under further review if have had past inspection failures. They also shouldn’t get so many shots at trying to make it better. You only get so many second chances in this world. It isn’t fair to the workers and their families that have to