People belonging to ethnic, cultural, and religious groups in northwestern China, including Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Hui, are currently the target of the largest organized detention of an ethno-religious minority the world has seen since World War II. Since 2017, over one million have been detained and forced to work under constant surveillance. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), as many as 28 million people are victims of this system and the U.S. has determined that China’s treatment of the Uyghurs is genocide.
China treats Uyghues and others in the Xinjiang region of that country as less than human. Not to be redundant but they are subjected to forced disappearances and labor, yes but also forced sterilization and organ harvesting, too.
The VW connection
In a shocking report, Driving Force; Automotive Supply Chains and Forced Labor in the Uyghur Region, Sheffield Hallam University exposes the global auto industry’s complicity in the exploitation of millions of Uyghurs in China. Car tires, windows, the frame, axles, interiors, electronics, and even the hood decal are all made by Uyghur forced labor.
According to the report, Volkswagen is the first car company to open a plant in the Uyghur region of China and “by far the most significant auto manufacturer in the region.” Volkswagen is the largest car manufacturer on the planet. If the company stops using Uyghur forced labor, other companies will take note.
Click here to tell Volkswagen to stop profiting from #UyghurForcedLabor.
VW and the Nazis
VW was founded in 1937 with the goal of making affordable cars for Germans. The name, “Volkswagenwerk,” means “the people’s car company.” The business was originally run by Nazis. The German Labor Front, a Nazi organization, ran it.
The Fuhrer had plans to create a national highway system and to develop cars that anyone, well the chosen ones, could afford. This was part of his, “strength through joy” plan. Therefore it only makes sense that the car manufacturer would play a large role in the Holocaust.
When World War II broke out, VW had labor issues. They were already understaffed but with able-bodied men leaving to fight, the company did what any company would do; they used forced labor. That is sarcasm if you weren’t sure.
They started with Soviet prisoners of war. More and more they relied on concentration camp prisoners including Jewish people. The company first relied on existing camps such as Auschwitz but they would go on to operate four of their own and another eight forced labor camps. So much for “strength through joy.”
According to the Holocaust Museum:
The company actively sought out forced labor from the concentration camp system. One VW plant engineer traveled to Auschwitz and selected 300 skilled metalworkers from the massive transports of Hungarian Jews in 1944. In addition, 650 Jewish women were transferred to assemble military munitions. The official relationship between the Nazi concentration camps and Volkswagen was cemented when the Fallersleben facility officially became a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp. Overall, the Volkswagen plant contained four concentration camps and eight forced-labor camps.
Click here to tell Volkswagen to stop profiting from #UyghurForcedLabor.
VW and Brazil
VW didn’t stop using forced labor after World War II. In Brazil they bought a lot of land in Santana do Araguaia, south Pará. This land would not be used for building cars but would be a cattle ranch. They planned to use earnings from auto sales to create a new breed of cattle.
To do that, they needed labor. Lucky for them, the area was full of poor people who would want jobs so that’s what VW offered. They promised things like good wages but instead paid them almost nothing AND made them buy everything they needed from stores run by VW. This created a debt cycle that has created problems that the area has not recovered from yet. Keep in mind this ranch was opened in 1973 and operated until 1986, when VW sold it. In 1983, three workers escaped and told authorities about the conditions on the ranch.
According to Nacla:
“The workers were punished, they received false promises in some of the poorest municipalities of Brazil and were trafficked into the farm, and when they got there, they were faced with an extremely brutal and violent reality,” says Rafael Garcia, the prosecutor leading the current investigation into Volkswagen’s human rights violations.
This reality included poor sanitary conditions, exposure to health dangers like malaria, exhausting working conditions carried out under armed supervision, and “all kinds of physical and psychological torture,” says Garcia.
Keep in mind, to develop the ranch, VW had to bulldoze a decent chunk of the Amazon rain forest, which has implications far beyond Brazil. Just another example of the automaker putting profits before people.
Click here to tell Volkswagen to stop profiting from #UyghurForcedLabor.
Back to China
Truth be told, every household in America (and the world) has something that passed through Uyghur hands. They process 80 percent of Chinese cotton, which equals 20 percent of the world’s supply. But they process more than cotton. Examples of other goods include tomatoes, sugar, parts for electric vehicles and solar panels.
But VW’s pattern of using slave labor for their products go back to the company’s inception which puts them in a league of their own in terms of fostering genocide and other mass atrocities. It is way past time that we held them accountable.
Click here to tell Volkswagen to stop profiting from #UyghurForcedLabor.
