The next time you buy a cheap China-made product...

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Think about the Chinese workers who made them:

American Imports, Chinese Deaths

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Think about the Chinese workers who made them:

American Imports, Chinese Deaths

[Jason Dunn]

Wow. Quite an eye-opening article. We all want things to be as inexpensive as possible, but we forget that there's a reason why it's so inexpensive - safety costs money (though probably not all that much in reality), and that would eat away at the profit margin of the factory making the products. Everyone's to blame in some way here: us for buying the products, the big companies who are not caring enough about the workers making the product (even if it's an outsourced company), the factory owners who don't care about their workers, and even the Chinese government for turning a blind eye to the whole thing out of their desperate desire to modernize China and make it an economic superpower.

It's all quite sad. :?

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

It really is, isn't it? And I don't claim to have a quick and easy solution. All I can say is that we should try to make the right choices, but even then it isn't easy. Don't buy Made in China products? That's just not possible in the current climate, unless you want to live like a hermit. Do research on which companies extend their safety procedures to their Chinese factories? As reflected in the article, that's plain impossible. If you read the article's comments thread, it took someone living there for over a decade to know where all the 3rd to 15th tier outsourced-outsourced factories are. What are we going to do? Even auditor's reports aren't always reliable, and having studied financial reporting, I'm not sure if anyone wants to...

PS. While looking up this thread, I saw the rant by Damion's wife again. I think it rings true. I think if we focus on buying less but better goods we might see the model change. Or maybe not. After all, hey, cheap workers = greater profits.

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by Lee Yuan Sheng

All I can say is that we should try to make the right choices, but even then it isn't easy. Don't buy Made in China products? That's just not possible in the current climate, unless you want to live like a hermit.

Indeed, that's the root of the problem - it's next to impossible to not buy things made in China, especially when it comes to technology and clothing.