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table of contents
Minimum Wage…Minimum Life
by Christopher Charles Morin
Our politicians and business tycoons should spend a month on minimum wage
All Kidding Aside
by Chelsea Jones
The “wish book” should have a chapter about child labour in toy factories
International Buy Nothing Day
by Theresa Wolfwood
By Chelsea Jones
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2004
In celebration of the spirit of the season, people around the world exchange gifts. With generous, joyful intentions the year’s largest shopping frenzy is initiated so gifts can be exchanged, with a certain focus on giving presents to children.
This is when most of us sink into an ignorant, holiday bliss where the effects of consumerism are often underestimated. As consumers, we are barely aware of the product’s origin as we become part of the Christmas rush; frantic to buy the best stuffed animal, game or action figure for a certain someone. The bottom line is that we know very little about where toys come from, who makes them or how they are made. But even though we don’t know the specific production details of any given toy, we have all seen that common “made in China” label. And many of us do know that, according to Statistics Canada, China has become Canada’s second largest source of imported goods from any single country–topped only by the United States. Toys make up a large part of imported consumer goods, and 60 percent of all toys sold in Canada are being made in China.
As a whole, the toy industry is worth nearly $2 billion a year with Mattel being the largest toy tycoon of them all. As a result of our ever-changing society, many children are receiving more and more gifts as their grandparents acquire more disposable income, as more children live in two homes as a result of split families, and as the bombardment of advertising intensifies, pressuring everyone into spending more and more each year.
Behind the Scenes
Over the last few years, fires at Asian toy factories have killed hundreds of workers and injured plenty more. In February 1997, the Asia Monitor Resource Centre (a Hong Kong based human rights organization) revealed that 220 Vietnamese workers had been poisoned by acetone, a dangerous chemical used to manufacture plastic goods, while putting together McDonald’s Happy Meal toys for as little as six cents per hour.
Employees at these kinds of factories are frequently children. According to UNICEF’s 2004 State of the World’s Children report, 246 million children are engaged in what Canadians would consider to be “adult” occupations, including positions in toy factories producing Christmas presents for consumers in our country.
This is the kind of child labour that most Canadians are directly connected to. Indeed, the toys we purchase have a direct connection with labour issues around the world.
Children are hired by manufactures because they lack the information and motivation to form unions and demand reasonable working conditions. Also, if these children are illegally employed some companies are able to avoid paying for government programs, such as social security. And most notably, recruiting children to work maximizes profit for employers because they get away with paying the children less than the legal minimum wage within the area.
Many children worldwide have to work to help support their families because the low wages paid to adult workers ensures poverty despite back breaking and spirit deadening labour. Impoverished parents cannot afford child-care or education for their children and the cycle of poverty continues, from one generation to the next.
These children often end up working in dangerous, abusive and even deadly environments such as sweatshops and factories that produce goods purchased around the world.
It is difficult for researchers or toy-coalition members to approach many of these young workers. Can Ka Wai, executive director of the Hong Kong-based Christian Industrial Committee says the soft-toy industry is a small scale industry without heavy security, making it easy to talk to workers. “But for plastics,” he continues, “it’s a huge, complex factory and it’s very difficult.”
Toy companies such as Mattel hold back names of their suppliers. This means that any toy made by Mattel could have been manufactured by any one of about 50 Chinese factories contracted by the company, or in a factory Mattel may own with private investors. Or it could be that parts of the toy, including it’s packaging, have been made in one of many factories jointly owned by the company and contractors small enough not to be named or legally acknowledged.
In 1998, George Irwin, the president of Irwin Toy Ltd. said that the reason for the strict confidentiality surrounding toy factories is due to the competitiveness within the industry. “We guard very jealously our vendors,” Irwin says, “because we don’t want any of our competitors to get an advantage by knowing who they are.” Sixty percent of Irwin’s toys are produced overseas, primarily in China and Malaysia.
In some cases, governments try to keep the issue from reaching the media in order to maintain their countries’ reputation of conforming to international labour laws. As a result, the names of people who make toys, what they are paid, how often they work, and the conditions under which they work are usually not discovered until it’s too late. Accidents in toy factories that take people’s lives catch the eyes of the media, rather than the ongoing labour conditions endured by workers that lead up to such accidents.
For example, on May 13, 2002, the Washington Post ran a powerful article about a 19 year old woman who was worked to death in the Bainan Toy Factory, in the south of China. The managers of the factory refused to tell Washington Post reporter Philip Pan which companies the toys were being produced for. The Child Labour watch, however, made a follow up visit the same year and heard testimonials from young workers at the Bainan Toy Factory who said they were producing Disney products, specifically stuffed Mickey Mouse toys for less than ten cents per toy.
Sarah Cox wrote about the Kader Industrial Toy Company, near Bangkok, Thailand in her report titled The Secret Life of Toys. “There are no sprinkler systems, no fire exits,” she says, “The company’s 3,000 workers have never had a fire drill.” In 1989 a fire in a Kader toy factory killed one worker and injured 30 others when polyester fabric used to make dolls ignited in a sewing machine. An International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) report said that Kader employed girls as young as 13, and paid them as little as $2.40 (USA) a day–which was about half of the minimum wage for Bangkok and surrounding areas.
Six months later, another fire in a Zhili Handicraft factory in China’s Shenzhen region killed 87 workers; they were manufacturing stuffed toys for export to Canada and Italy.
Despite the light shed on labour conditions by sporadic media coverage of these avoidable tragedies, the reality still remains that workers who die in fires will earn more publicity than the many left behind to suffer the long term effects of unsafe working conditions.
In 1997, the Asia Monitor Resource Centre worked with the Coalition for the Charter on the Safe Production of Toys (another human rights organization) and released a report on 10 Chinese factories that manufacture plastic toys for export. The report says that workers are poorly compensated for industrial accidents which may result in the loss of fingers and parts of their palms, earn less than legal wages, and are likely to suffer from long term health issues due to the constant exposure to chemicals within the working environment. And again, a number of child workers are suspected to be engaged in this toy production.
Production methods that involve child labour and unfair working conditions have long term effects on these workers, whether consumers realize this or not. This is why it is so important to question the source of consumer goods.
The Maquila Solidarity Network (MSN) is a Canadian network that works with many organizations across Canada in an attempt to support worker’s efforts to improve working conditions around the world. It believes in holding retailers accountable for the production of their garments and other products.
It is a myth that the only way to prevent child labour, or unfair working conditions is to boycott companies. Boycotting has the potential to affect export patterns, but not much else. An alternative to boycotting is accessing organizations such as the MSN, which can provide links to other groups working to strategically eliminate unfair working conditions and child labour. It can also provide names of companies which produce goods made by child labour.
The MSN suggests that rather than refusing to purchase products made by certain companies, the following approaches can be taken to encourage better working conditions for everyone, including children:
It is certainly disturbing to think, especially during the holiday season, that we may be buying toys for our children that are made by other children who may suffer from serious health related issues due to poor working environments.
Unfortunately, too many consumers buy into the massive, seasonal media campaigns without realizing the effects their purchases may have on children around the world. It is important that we are conscious of what we are buying and how those items are produced because all children should be considered during this holiday season–not just those for whom we buy gifts.
Chelsea Jones is a Regina student and freelance writer working towards a career in journalism.
By Joyce Green
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2004
This article is written to invite people (especially those marked by race privilege) to think reflectively about racism, and about how we are all positioned in relation to structural and cultural racism. Then, we can move to the important task of naming the evil of racism where it occurs throughout society, and to destabilizing it. Only through this kind of critical, self-reflective and political work can thoroughgoing structural and cultural racism be rooted out of our society.
“Nations,” said Edward Said, “are narrations.” By this he meant that nations are acts of imagination and also of articulation. In this process, some voices are dominant, others silenced.
Project Canada is a narration, a willing into being on the part of an exclusively white male politico-economic elite. Subsequently, this vision retains much of its original character even while new and more diverse players in more recent eras add their voices to the narration. The cultural corpus of Project Canada is part of its narration–and it’s primary means of conveying this vision intergenerationally. It’s what we all know to be true, without knowing quite how we came to this understanding.
I propose that colonialism is the progenitor of Project Canada. Colonialism is an imposed relationship implying dominance, exploitation and subordination, and it justifies it’s practices with racist ideology that normalizes racist policies and behaviours. That is, some of us are privileged because of the racism encoded in and practiced by the Canadian state. All of this forms an invisible foundation to our country, and the evil of racism is diffused throughout civil society in our political culture. It takes on banal forms in bureaucratic regulation of public policy, in tainted or preferential education, and in popular or entertainment culture. In this way it becomes insidious. Knowing our history is a prerequisite for understanding our present and envisioning our future. As American legal scholar Patricia Williams writes, “a refusal to talk about the past disguises a refusal to talk about the present.”
Some examples of institutionalized and bureaucratized racism include historic and contemporary policies through the Department of Indian Affairs, the office of Indian Agent, education curricula, residential school policy, citizenship status, popular depictions of Indians in movies and literature, popular depictions of Canadian life with no Aboriginal people, and the popular misconception that “cultural differences” exist, but not white racism.
Racism and sexism are moral wrongs. But they are also practices that violate fundamental human rights–rights that Canada has committed itself to in international law, and that are reiterated in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Patricia Williams calls rights “islands of empowerment.” When we object to racism, we defend human rights. We need to consider how eliminating racism–not only the egregious forms of repugnant personal behaviour that most of us understand as racism, but the more diffuse, normalized and effective practices that sustain race privilege–is essential for some of us to have our full entitlement of human rights.
Consider that Canada has recently been gently chided by a United Nations committee, and urged to consider compensation in two cases of evident state-sponsored human rights violations based on racism: the razing of the primarily Black community Africville in Halifax 30 years ago; and the exclusionary and discriminatory head tax levied on Chinese immigrants for some decades in the first part of the last century. Will we support the acknowledgment of these racist violations of human rights, or will we argue that the events are long ago so can’t be judged by contemporary values and, after all, “We Weren’t There” and so can’t be collectively held accountable?
However, the injuries of those policies still exist in the communities affected. More tellingly, the privilege accrued by white citizens as a consequence of racist actions continues as well. Are some of us prepared to relinquish our race privilege, in the interest of supporting human rights and justice? Or will we argue that we have benefitted solely because of our merit?
If race privilege is to be destabilized, we must also think about how some of us enjoy an “unearned dividend,” which exists not because of merit but because of the convergence of chance with cultural preference. It marks us as invisible, normative, meritorious, believable, and so on. All of this holds true for gender privilege as well, where masculinity is marked as more valuable, meritorious, and credible than femininity. Legal scholar Richard Falk writes that “human rights cannot be solely concerned with substantive standards, but must be attentive to process” such as participation of marginalized communities in the creation of rights frameworks and regulatory regimes and all the policies implied by this. Consider our premier process–electoral democracy–and the gross under-representation of Aboriginal peoples, all categories of women, and other marginalized communities. Our political and electoral systems are deeply racist and sexist.
Education, too, is racist. It is partial in both senses of the word: it is incomplete, and preferential. This is so even in the ivory towers of elite university education. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, associate professor of Maori and Indigenous Education in New Zealand, writes: “The form that racism takes inside a university is related to the ways in which academic knowledge is structured, as well as to the organizational structures which govern a university. The insulation of disciplines, the culture of the institution which supports disciplines, and the systems of management and governance all work in ways which protect the privileges already in place.”
In this way, what we as experts know as “the canon,” and what we teach to our students, emerges from bodies of thought, ways of knowing and methodologies, all of which are themselves products of implicit assumptions about who is authoritative, what kinds of phenomena are worthy of study, and what knowledge is. And hence, our students study, for example, John Locke on questions of the nature of private property and state sovereignty, seldom considering how sexist and racist Locke’s thought is, and how thoroughly it services western assumptions about capitalist property relations. That is, Locke is seldom taught critically, or contrapuntally–what Edward Said called the information available in historical and theoretical silences as well as in the text. The consequence is that Locke is invested with too much authority, while other kinds of theory and knowledge, such as indigenous concepts of property and political legitimacy, are ignored while our courts rely upon Lockean philosophy in considering indigenous claims against the colonial state.
So what can we do to contest racist and other forms of intellectual hegemony? What should we do, and can we do, to destabilize systems of power and privilege, such as white skin privilege, colonial privilege, and male privilege? Here’s my recipe:
Dr. Joyce Green is an associate professor in the departments of political science and women’s studies at the University of Regina.
By Tyler McCreary & Suzanne Mills
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2004
On September 22, 2004, the RCMP raided the camp of the Skwelkwekwelt Protection Center, arresting three people. These activists were defending Aboriginal title and rights in the interior of British Columbia, contesting the expansion of the Sun Peaks Ski Resort on the traditional territory of the Secwepemc Neskonlith and Adams Lake bands. The Secwepemc never relinquished this territory to either the provincial or the federal governments by either land claim or treaty.
Since purchasing the resort in 1992, Nippon Cable has expanded on-site accommodation from 100 beds to over 5,800. In 1997 the BC government approved a $70 million expansion, which will eventually cut ski runs on the previously undeveloped Mt. Morrisey and further increase capacity to 20,000 beds. A 2002 Sun Peaks press release boasts that new “facilities line the streets, construction crews abound and a massive new 220 room Delta hotel sits right in the midst of the village.” This encroaching development was further boosted with Vancouver’s recent Olympic bid, and the expansion was again increased in scope, now totaling $285 million.
The Secwepemc assert that the current expansion of Sun Peaks Ski Resort will undermine their ability to exercise their inherent rights to land-use and occupancy and thus their Aboriginal title to the land. The federal and provincial governments have refused to acknowledge Aboriginal title and enter negotiations to establish co-jurisdiction. Moreover, the government has not upheld its fiduciary obligation to consult the Secwepemc. The government disregarded environmental and cultural impact studies performed by the Adams Lake and Neskonlith Indian Bands and refused to engage in consultation and meaningful discussion with the bands about the development. Dispite the lack of consultation, the $70 million development plan, expanding the ski resort to previously undisturbed Mt. Morrisey, has already begun.
In BC, treaty-making was abandoned early on. Throughout the colonial period the government created reserves for the Aboriginal population. However, with the exception of the Douglas treaties on Vancouver Island and the territory east of the Rockies under Treaty 8, these reserves were designated by executive acts unrelated to treaties. Thus, the majority of BC was never “acquired” from its Aboriginal owners before being distributed by the government.
The impetus to begin negotiating to resolve land claims came not from any moral integrity of the federal and provincial governments but from the courts. The governments of Canada and BC long maintained the non-existence of Aboriginal rights and title. In 1973, the Calder decision recognized that at the time of contact Aboriginal title existed. Following this decision, the federal government established its Comprehensive Claims Policy, and began negotiating with the Nisga’a. BC, however, did not begin negotiating with the Nisga’a until 1990, after further legal challenges by Aboriginal peoples, such as Sparrow and Delgamuukw. It was not until 1993 that the province began to accept other First Nations into the treaty negotiation process. Yet, from the perspective of many Aboriginal groups, the purpose of these negotiations was to eliminate Aboriginal title and to solidify the provincial government as the sole authority in the province. For this and other reasons, the majority of land claims east of the Rockies remain unresolved in BC.
The Delgamuukw decision affirmed inherent Aboriginal title in the courts defining it as “the exclusive use and occupation of the land held pursuant to that title for a variety of purposes.” According to Delgamuukw, to prove Aboriginal title an Aboriginal group must be able to show that they occupied the lands in question at the time that the Crown asserted sovereignty and that this occupation was exclusive. Proof of historical occupancy may be established by providing historical evidence of dwellings, cultivation, or regular use of land for hunting, fishing or other resource use. Present occupation may also be used as proof of pre-sovereignty occupation if a continuous connection to the land between present and pre-sovereignty occupation is demonstrated.
The Delgamuukw decision also stated that the Crown has a fiduciary obligation to recognize the Aboriginal interests, until the dispute over ownership can be resolved. This requirement consists of consulting with aboriginal people and in some instances obtaining consent from Aboriginal people every time that there are potential infringements of Aboriginal title.
The BC government refuses to acknowledge Aboriginal title to groups who have not entered the land claims process. This contradicts the court’s recognition that Aboriginal title is inherent to original peoples and not a function of colonial statute or process. Thus many Aboriginal peoples in BC (approximately 30 percent), who are not involved in land claims talks are not considered to possess Aboriginal Title.
Comprehensive land claims are akin to modern day treaties, whereby the Aboriginal nations concede Aboriginal title and rights to the Canadian government for a specific subset of their traditional rights and lands plus compensation. The intent is to extinguish Aboriginal title, expressed in the Canadian Government’s Comprehensive Land Claims Policy establishing “the certainty of ownership over land and resources.” Thus, through comprehensive land claim agreements Aboriginal groups have obtained: title to a defined amount of land; subsurface rights to a fraction of this land; monetary compensation in various forms; exclusive rights to hunt and fish over a certain area of land; preferential hunting and fishing rights over a larger area; and participation in resource management decisions over the land.
However, land claims in BC are further restricted by the British Columbia Treaty Process. Operating under the Comprehensive Claims Policy, the process is guided by the principles determined by BC Treaty Referendum. Referendum principles state that “Hunting, fishing and recreational opportunities on Crown land should be ensured for all British Columbians; that Parks and protected areas should be maintained for the use and benefit of all British Columbians; and that Province-wide standards of resource management and environmental protection should continue to apply.”
These principles directly conflict with the maintenance of Aboriginal title as recognized in the Supreme Court’s Delgamuukw, decision. Disregarding Aboriginal title and rights, the government is placing a foreign corporation’s profits before the well-being of Canada’s first peoples. Chief Edward John of the First Nations Summit of British Columbia explains, “When government asks us to agree to surrender our title and agree to its extinguishment, they ask us to do away with our most basic sense of ourselves, and of our relationship to our Creator, our territory and the other peoples of the world. We could no longer do that without agreeing that we no longer wish to exist as a distinct people.”
The government’s disregard for the rights of the Secwepemc people has prompted the United Nations to investigate the dispute; however, to ensure a just resolution to the conflict continued pressure is necessary.
You can help by taking the following actions:
Tyler McCreary and Suzanne Mills live in Saskatoon, SK where they are active in the community and at the University of Saskatchewan. Suzanne is completing a PhD in Geography, while Tyler is preparing for graduate school next year. For more information check out the website at www.apc.resist.ca/skwelkwekwelt.
