Certain subjects came up over and over - how much money they made, what kind of husband they hope to marry, whether they should jump to another factory or stay where they were. Other subjects came up almost never. Including living conditions, that to me, looked close to prison life. Ten or 15 workers in one room. Fifty people sharing a single bathroom. Days and nights ruled by the factory clock. Everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances and it was still better than the dormitories and homes of rural China. The workers really spoke about the products they made. And they often had great difficulty explaining what exactly they did. When I asked Lu Qing Min - the young woman I got to know best - what exactly she did on the factory floor, she said... [quality control]. Karl Marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism - the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor. But like so many theories that Marx arrived at, sitting in the reading room of the British Museum, he got this one wrong. Just because a person spends her time making a piece of something, does not mean that she becomes that - a piece of something. What she does with the money she earns, what she learns in that place and how it changes her - these are the things that matter. npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=243717512
Posted on: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 01:01:10 +0000
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