Child Labor Alleged at Factory
An investigation by RFA found that underage Uighur workers are being employed by the Taiwanese-owned Longfa Shoe Factory, which supplies shoes for Nike:
While the legal working age in China is 16, Nike’s code of conduct states that its contractors do not “employ any person below the age of 18 to produce footwear.”
Spokesmen for Nike and for Longfa Shoe Factory denied the allegation and said hiring underage workers would violate company policies.
But some workers at the factory say they were sent to work at age 15 or 16. They were supplied with fake identification papers showing earlier birthdates, they said.
Sawut and Abide, Uyghurs originally from China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), said that most of the girls were brought to Longfa at age 16 or 17 in three separate groups during March, April, and September of 2008.
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POSTED COMMENTS: 2 Responses
Radio Free Asia???
Since when is Radio Free asia a credible new source?
chinadigitaltimes doesn’t have to quote any news report from China, does it?
The report from RFA makes it looks like another minority group being oppressed by the big bad CPP, while it;s not. It has nothing to do with them being minority or not. Do you agree with me, Sophie?
Cheng,
My understanding of the situation is that people from the Western parts of China (whether the program is specifically targeted at Uyghurs or in letter or in fact, I don’t know) are being encouraged to work on the coast, just as people from non-Western parts of China (coast and elsewhere in the interior) are being encouraged to take jobs in the West. There are a few different reports of abuses of this policy in terms of Xinjiang.
In some ways, it seems familiar to America’s “guest worker” programs in that the workers–the ones going West to East in China, not to my knowledge the ones going the other way—are stuck with their employers for good or ill once they have a job set up. A little like indentured servitude.
In both countries, I think the blame lies with a faulty national policy (assuming that the central government in the U.S. or China isn’t intentionally trying to screw over workers, something which isn’t, of course, a given) AND greedy / brutal local officials and businesspeople. Of course, in China there’s the added accusation that the country is simply trying to dilute a minority’s culture.
Interestingly there are parallels in China with “work study” or “internship” programs run through some Han high schools, whereby the students are sent elsewhere to work in a factory and their school earns some much-needed cash. Again, such programs can result in cruelty.
As to quoting RFA… I’d say they are no more biased than Xinhua. And China Digital Times will sometimes carry Xinhua articles without an extra article from, say, the NY Times to corroborate the story. Anyway, CDT is just supposed to pass along others’ stories and translate stuff, as I understand it—not provide a complete picture of each article reported by someone else.
Maybe I’ve got this last part wrong—correct me if so.