My sons, both working as engineers for separate companies, have just returned from China. Their experiences with the factories that their American companies contract with were very different. Though I cannot speak for them, they have relayed that conditions in these factories were extremely variable, with some having a large degree of occupational safety procedures in place and others with no such precautions. Overall though, they were surprised that conditions were not worse. However, with so many consumer products coming from China and other Asian factories which have been documented as profiting from slave labor and other exploitative conditions, I do think that such exploitation is a human rights issue. I question why we, as a country fought a civil war to ostensibly do away with slavery, and now see no problem with buying goods which may have been produced using slave labor. And how do we tell? At Bill McKibben's talk at Colgate last week questions were raised about how we, on a personal level, can ethically address some of these issues in our own lives both philosophically and in practice as consumers.
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My sons, both working as engineers for separate companies, have just returned from China. Their experiences with the factories that their American companies contract with were very different. Though I cannot speak for them, they have relayed that conditions in these factories were extremely variable, with some having a large degree of occupational safety procedures in place and others with no such precautions. Overall though, they were surprised that conditions were not worse.
However, with so many consumer products coming from China and other Asian factories which have been documented as profiting from slave labor and other exploitative conditions, I do think that such exploitation is a human rights issue. I question why we, as a country fought a civil war to ostensibly do away with slavery, and now see no problem with buying goods which may have been produced using slave labor. And how do we tell? At Bill McKibben's talk at Colgate last week questions were raised about how we, on a personal level, can ethically address some of these issues in our own lives both philosophically and in practice as consumers.
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