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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
12/01/08
11/30/08
11/30/08
11/30/08
These people get paid a severely substandard wage to bring our gadgets, gizmos, and toys to us for unsustainably cheap prices, and here they are getting stiffed on those same insufficient wages.
Nerf (Hasbro) could easily end this, even in these tough economic times. But, because they have farmed out the labor to a chinese factory, they will wash their hands of this just as they washed their hands of the substandard wages and working conditions in the first place.
Let's have a little respect for the workers, denied the money they are owed when they need it most.
11/30/08
+ 1
11/30/08
OTOH:
1) "Substandard wage." Below *what* standard? If the workers at the factory elected to work there, that suggests it was a better option than the alternatives available to them.
FTA: "Kader's executive director Ivan Ting said the workers were compensated beyond what is required by Chinese labor law, but did not give a figure."
2) How would Hasbro "easily end this"? What are they going to do, donate money to their suppliers out of the kindness of their hearts? They don't employ those workers. Kader does.
Hasbro could maybe take their business elsewhere (or threaten to), but that will only help if Kader's executives are *electing* to withhold pay (vs. lacking the funds). It's not clear from the article that that's the case. They may just be financially screwed like so many other companies right now.
FTA: "[Riots are] a major concern in major industrial zones in Guangdong, which has been hit hard by a series of factors: rising costs of wages and raw materials along with currency fluctuations and the global financial crisis. More than 7,000 companies in Guangdong have gone bust or moved elsewhere in the first nine months of the year, the official China Daily newspaper recently reported."
(OTOH, it's not clear if the layoffs are because of dire financial straits or just because they hired extra workers for the holiday hump.)
11/30/08
Also, I agree with the comments that it is a bit offputting to see a situation like this trivialized simply because it involves Nerf toys.