3/7/2010: Great story by Richard Read in the Oregonian about what all those exploited Nike sweatshop workers are doing: Saving their paychecks, sending the money home to build houses and finance new businesses.
It turns out that factory workers — not the activists labeled “preachy” by one expert, and not the Nike executives so wounded by criticism — get the last laugh. Villagers who “went out,” as Chinese say, for what critics described as dead-end manufacturing jobs are sending money back and returning with savings, building houses and starting businesses. …
The pay is minuscule by Western measures. But Mon Xijian, a 31-year-old who has worked at Ever Rich since 1996, has saved enough with his wife, who also works there, to buy a six-unit apartment building back home….
“They’re sleeping 12 in a dorm, and it looks like a pretty crappy life,” Chang said. “But you don’t hear workers say, ‘Oh, I have no hope, I’m a slave.’ They say, ‘I want to save some money. My dream is to be Bill Gates or to own a restaurant.'”
Just like people did in the US and have all over the rest of the world ever since the industrial revolution started. If Frohnmayer had taken an economics class or two he could have explained this to those WRC kids, instead of caving in to some shouting and signs and pissing of Phil Knight to the point where he stopped what had been a very generous series of donations to UO academics.
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