by Konstantinos Poulis
An inmate working at a Chinese factory/concentration camp slips into a box full of Halloween decorations a letter describing his living conditions. A woman from Oregon rifles through the box of decorations, which she bought at Kmart, and is faced with a story that has been doubted, yet which is both true and as devastating as it is common. The workers at that factory work for 15 hours a day, enduring verbal and physical abuse, for a daily wage of $1.61. When this scandal was exposed, the annual revenue for that particular labour camp was 16 million dollars. Kmart offered the standard answer; they didn’t know the production conditions were so bad. At the Jixi labour camp in China, after breaking rocks and digging trenches throughout the day, inmates were forced to play computer games in order to build up “credits.” The credits were then sold over the internet by the prison guards. The inmates were forced to play until they were completely exhausted, and were abused when they failed. This means that when some young gamer in Texas is playing a game and wants to skip to another level, an exhausted inmate in China is offering him the opportunity to do it. Or is supplying him with his party decorations.
Nestle has faced prosecution because the cocoa fields of the Ivory Coast, and the Thai sea food industry is exploiting children who are the victims of trafficking and who work 14 hours a day for next to no wages. There are 2.12 millions kids working in those fields, three times more than last year. Naturally, the big companies are well aware of the situation. At first they express their shock, then they pledge to put things right, and then they do nothing. Oh, no sorry— it’s not nothing; Nestle also collaborates with dozens of NGOs for nutrition programs such as Nestle Healthy Kids, since there’s also another scandal over baby milk. The Ivory Coast Prime Minister had informed the big companies that they would have to pay ten times as much if they wanted production in conditions not akin to slavery. This is the milk that we drink and the chocolate that we eat.
We also desire fashionable clothes that are cheap, that carry a recognizable fashion label and sometimes cost less than $5! The chairman of H&M is the 28th richest man in the world, while the co-founder of Zara is the 4th richest, yet the people who sew those clothes are slaves. John Oliver dedicated an entire show to this subject, in which he presented all this information. He also mentioned that GAP and Nike are perfectly aware of all this, as the scandal first surfaced in 1990, then resurfaced in 2000, and again in 2007, and again in 2010, and then again in 2013. Each and every time, however, GAP appeared to be shocked. Forbes columnist Tim Worstall reacted to the show by explaining that Oliver is basically a moron who just doesn’t get that “That’s pretty much the definition of being poor in fact, that you’re in a poor country where you get lousy wages”. The culprit, Worstall said, was low productivity. (Does this sound familiar to Greek readers?) I will revisit his thoughts further on.
Obviously, this isn’t news. It’s precisely how industrial society has developed. Africans were brought in as slaves after the increase in demand for five products not sufficiently available in the West: coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar and tobacco. In the beginning, these products were out of reach for the poor, then the first 1.5 million slaves were used until sugar became affordable for the lower classes. During the Middle Ages, sugar was a luxury. It took the huge fields of sugar cane in America before Europeans could start enjoying cakes, biscuits, chocolate, and candy regularly. Capitalism developed hand in hand with the slave trade. Since nobody showed any eagerness to work on plantations, 10 million slaves were brought into America from the 16th until the 19th century.
That is how “free market” works. This is inequality that we still tolerate today. The average westerner believes that this is fine. He wants a slave to saw his trousers, one for his coffee, one more for his mobile and his computer, and a fence high enough to keep those slaves from coming over in search of a better life. Why not? It makes perfect sense. To own slaves and to want them to stay within their cages. But they won't stay. They have no reason whatsoever to stay. It also makes perfect sense that people gradually slip into wanting them to be shot at the borders, should the need arise.
Lots of distress and worry has been vocalized lately “exclusively for refugees,” as if immigrants were putting their lives in danger just for kicks. As if people need gunshot wounds on their bodies for us to understand why they are abandoning their homes. The inescapable truth is that, when inequality is so devastating, there will come a moment when, no matter how high the walls, its victim will seek to climb them and look for a better future. As today's main discourse shifts towards these geopolitical developments, this is the question that arises for me: is it morally justifiable that we, as well as our “almost left” government, adopt this division between refugees and immigrants? We do so, supposedly, to offer what protection is legally available to those who come from war zones, but in reality we also undervalue the reasons for which some people migrate even if they have no right to seek asylum. In other words, when we consider all those people, we are only touched by those who have shrapnel in their skulls. And that is the new normal.
The point is not how many immigrants from such poor countries (i.e. Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Philippines) have come to Greece. The deeper problem is inequality pure and simple. I find it completely natural and understandable that, in conditions of such extreme, inhumane injustice, the damned have every right to seek a better life. Thus my answer to the Forbes' columnist is that there is no reason whatsoever “why poor people with lousy wages” have to live worse lives than he does. He enjoys the privilege of wearing silk ties, while he explains why he deserves his wealth from a long tradition of inequality that originated in slavery and which is still benefitting from it.
It is completely comprehensible that the drama of the refugees touches us so. Yet there is not only war, there is also inequality. Such unbelievable disparity that at some point the fence will collapse. And then, at some point, no matter how many fences the West puts up, it will have to deal with the real problem.