This community surely includes many who are engaged in the effort to figure out how to use the internet to raise awareness of issues that don't fit standard media formats. I ask for your thoughts on this message and on what might push it out into more networks, circles and in front of more eyeballs.
Below is a website link that tells the story of one person's plight who worked making the backs of flat screen monitors, possibly the one you are seeing this on or perhaps your TV set.
This is what offshoring looks like. This is what moving manufacturing away from American laws that protect workers looks like. This is Wall Street escaping from the responsibilities represented by union contracts and benefits and better pay. This takes us back all the way to the era of Upton Sinclair, a hundred years ago.
This isn't abstract. There is a place that is real and real people's lives are affected.
Welcome to Romneytopia or perhaps Romneyville. Hundreds of people like him are collectively responsible for creating these places. The large amount of money involved - and our own lack of awareness as consumers - are also a big reason why this condition is out of sight and out of mind in the media and our public consciousness.
Perhaps we can begin dealing with this by spreading awareness virally, so that the activists and advocates at the local level can have better traction in gaining reforms.
Please share this website URL widely. Needed: eyeballs!
Once Upon A Time...a year and a half ago actually, just over the border in Mexico where something like 1 million people are working in factories under NAFTA, one woman suffered an accident. This is a webpage describing this in quick strokes, on a website showcasing the work of photographer Alan Pogue, of Austin, Tx:
http://www.documentaryphotographs.com/...
Now, in Washington State, where I live, there are many layers of protection in place that would either prevent a serious malfunction of equipment that could result in injury, or take care of an injured worker.
Had this plant been operating in this state, the company would be required to call 911 and there would be no question of this worker having to master her pain and stay lucid long enough argue to be taken to the hospital. They could not deny her the ambulance to force her into going against her interests. There would be no question of this being reported and there would be an investigation.
The Washington Department of Labor and Industries enforces a group of laws that govern just this sort of circumstance, stemming from a history involving heavy industry from logging to ship building to airplane manufacturing.
If the investigation revealed that the company refused to take machines like this off line for routine maintenance, and then removed safety guards in order to speed up production, if it were found that they allowed a jury rigged temporary fix that failed at the crucial moment, there would be fines that would be very heavy. There also would be a hell of a hullabaloo through every media outlet. Every activist and advocate in the state would call a press conference and there would be a line of personal injury attorneys with business card in hand, out the door and around the block.
Under workman's comp insurance, there would no question that adequate medical care would be available and there would be no cheapskating over prosthetics, the necessary rehabilitation and re-training.
In Washington State, workman's comp is a state administered pool of funds that the companies all pay into, so it is a well funded insurance program.
There would be several funds that would come into play that would help with living expenses and assistance in the home.
In Mexico, this worker lives in housing the Mexican government built for maquiladora workers and she paid rent. Now, she can't pay rent. But for the time being the Mexican government isn't showing signs of being interested in collecting. That could change at any time.
If this happened, most likely there would be the streets, where many beggars hope for miniscule handouts from passersby. Homelessness in such a circumstance probably would lead to dying in the streets of hunger and disease.
That is what used to happen to people in the United States before we adopted Social Security and before Unemployment Insurance and before Workman's Compensation.
What Romney and his class of coldly cynical investors are doing by locating manufacturing plants away from the protective environment of American laws that have been built up over the last century, is re-building the society that Upton Sinclair and Charles Dickens wrote about. The money not spent on safety, adequate medical care, prosthetics and retraining is going into the pockets of CEOs and the already wealthy.
We may think that, since this only affects poor people in Mexico, that it is too strange and alien and there is no way that this connects to us.
But it does.
Connect the dots. Multinational financing has displaced a lot of people from home communities throughout Mexico, and Central and South America in favor of large scale agribusiness or other industries. These people are politically disempowered, so they have to abandon the life in those communities and walk north with little more than the shirt on their backs, not knowing what lies ahead. As consumers, we in the US benefit from cheaper avocados, bananas, coffee, etc.
The reason that the maquiladora plants are full of women workers is that the men tend to move on into the United States to work in construction labor or farmwork or to find other types of jobs that women might not find so easily. Left alone to face life in the facories by themselves, they are more prone to being pressured into unsafe conditions and overtime without pay. If they become pregnant, they are fired. In this case, the husband worked in a maquiladora where he encountered some type of toxic chemicals and he lost brain function. He had to leave because he was a drag on his family.
There are some brave souls who try to advocate for the women in this circumstance. The Comite de Apoyo, started by Ed Krueger the retired minister, is a group of factory workers who are willing to go talk to other women and help them become educated about their rights. They have actually succeeded a time or two in getting monetary settlements out of companies for unpaid time worked and some other injustices.
But at present, there appears to not be any attorneys in Mexico who will touch this case with a ten foot pole. So there does not appear to be any real hope for prosthetics, for medical rehabilitation or worker re-training.
It seems to me that if there is any justice in the world, then maybe in the larger consumer electronics environment, perhaps among those who have flat screens, there could a miracle for someone who helped make these miracles.
People have been able to raise fairly decent amounts of money online for various causes. Why not this one?
Got any thoughts as to why not or how to get this to more eyeballs?