Home » Opinion » Opinion Columns
Migrants do our dirty work but don't consume
By Wan Lixin |
August 12, 2010, Thursday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
TWO months ago my wife signed a contract with Shanghai B&Q Decorations Co to have our home remodeled.
B&Q is a renowned name, a subsidiary of UK's retail giant Kingfisher, which is said to be No. 3 globally and No. 1 in Europe. To be doing business with such a name is reassuring and pleases our vanity.
Before long the company produced a thick copy of neatly bound, computer-generated design sheets.
But at that stage, the real players had yet to make their debut. They are, of course, the migrants.
For the next two months, these migrants would be responsible for turning the design into reality, and in the process suffering dust, noise, abysmal heat, and poisons.
When the place begins to look like a home, it is about time the migrants moved to their next stop.
On Sunday morning when I went there to take the keys from them, a young painter was still sound sleep on the bare wood floor.
I never ask how much of the contractual price of the decorating will trickle down to these workers - do they know about Kingfisher's 4.44 billion pounds (US$7.01 billion) revenue, or 161 million pounds net for 2009-10?
The other day I had a chat with a lad from Luzhou, Sichuan Province, the land of the "Heavenly Storehouse" because of its bounty. He has been here for over a decade and remains unmarried. What forces him away from his land of plenty?
One needs not be a China hand to conclude that nearly all dirty, menial or physically challenging labor must be dutifully outsourced to the migrants.
When the furniture we ordered was delivered to us on Monday morning, I noticed the two men carrying 110 pieces of unassembled furniture parts had a Shandong accent.
They were in their late 30s and 40s, too old for Foxconn, but they would still be stigmatized as worthless or unenterprising if they chose to stay on the farmland.
When they finished carrying the items, some nearly three meters tall, they were soaking wet.
In my normal sphere of activity, I have few occasions to come in contact with people who still earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.
In the Metro you sometimes see them traveling holding their luggage, indifferently dressed and carefully avoided by those around them.
Not only do we urbanites, but also the whole world needs to be grateful for the migrants, for they are steadily sharpening China's cutting edge by (over)supplying China's pool of cheap labor.
Many urbanites derive a kind of superiority from the fact that they need not have their hands soiled with work, and yet can still enjoy so many civilized amenities.
The most shiftless, worthless, and downtrodden urban resident expands visibly when he/she has in view a migrant laborer.
The ultimate advantage of having migrants around is that they can be beckoned at will and summarily dismissed after they are exploited.
In the few cases where they linger to assert their rights - usually meaning when they demand their unpaid wages - some bosses would rather hire thugs to beat them up than pay them.
Last week some migrants from Hubei Province suffered cerebral concussions, fractures and facial disfigurement in Fujian Province for demanding their pay.
We are aware of their utility but generally turn a blind eye to their identity as spouses, children, parents.
Some Chinese dismiss India for its slums, because we never tolerate slums. One professor claims that our prime downtown area should be dedicated to expats, and those from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
As schools for migrant children are substandard, they must be closed.
Cheap clinics patronized by migrants are always "black," to be suppressed.
Lack of facilities for the migrants enables migrants to be utilized like disposables.
Concerns
Anyway, the grime, sweat and blood are simply too crass for civilized taste, thus they must be sanitized.
Only when migrants are banished from our consciousness can we appreciate in peace the glamour, the neon lights, the edifices and the chiseled skyline.
Still many zero in on one of migrants' weaknesses: they fail to contribute much as consumers, even though many incentives have been proffered them.
According to professor Zhiwu Chen from Yale University, during the years 1995-2007, in inflation-adjusted terms, government income grew 5.7 times, while per capita income for urban and rural residents grew 1.4 and 1.2 times respectively.
China is desperately making the economy less dependent on exports and more internally driven.
Although some economists are rationalizing the status quo by hinting at the inevitability of "primitive accumulation," Chinese followers of Keynesian style economics need something new to sustain their faith in high wages, high consumption and high investment.
In his article titled "The Wealth of the Government and the Poverty of the People: Worries Behind the Rise of China," columnist Lian Peng points out that "China is subsidizing the whole world with its cheap labor."
"The single-minded pursuit of GDP growth has been achieved at the cost of environment, resources, and in total disregard of people's life and welfare," Lian comments in his article published on Caijing magazine's Website.
Hundreds of thousands of youths in their prime are slaving away at Foxconn on subsistence wages, so that the Apple and Nokia can stun the world with their latest glamour gadgets.
The hard-earned dollars would be used to buy foreign bonds, so as to finance the consumption of cash-strapped Americans.
The past decade has seen China gravitating towards the bottom rung in the global division of labor (dignified as "globalization"), and in the process is showered in such epithets as "rising," "emerging," or "miraculous."
Similarly, the migrant workers at B&Q decorations still dream of working their way up to the senior management of Kingfisher.
B&Q is a renowned name, a subsidiary of UK's retail giant Kingfisher, which is said to be No. 3 globally and No. 1 in Europe. To be doing business with such a name is reassuring and pleases our vanity.
Before long the company produced a thick copy of neatly bound, computer-generated design sheets.
But at that stage, the real players had yet to make their debut. They are, of course, the migrants.
For the next two months, these migrants would be responsible for turning the design into reality, and in the process suffering dust, noise, abysmal heat, and poisons.
When the place begins to look like a home, it is about time the migrants moved to their next stop.
On Sunday morning when I went there to take the keys from them, a young painter was still sound sleep on the bare wood floor.
I never ask how much of the contractual price of the decorating will trickle down to these workers - do they know about Kingfisher's 4.44 billion pounds (US$7.01 billion) revenue, or 161 million pounds net for 2009-10?
The other day I had a chat with a lad from Luzhou, Sichuan Province, the land of the "Heavenly Storehouse" because of its bounty. He has been here for over a decade and remains unmarried. What forces him away from his land of plenty?
One needs not be a China hand to conclude that nearly all dirty, menial or physically challenging labor must be dutifully outsourced to the migrants.
When the furniture we ordered was delivered to us on Monday morning, I noticed the two men carrying 110 pieces of unassembled furniture parts had a Shandong accent.
They were in their late 30s and 40s, too old for Foxconn, but they would still be stigmatized as worthless or unenterprising if they chose to stay on the farmland.
When they finished carrying the items, some nearly three meters tall, they were soaking wet.
In my normal sphere of activity, I have few occasions to come in contact with people who still earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.
In the Metro you sometimes see them traveling holding their luggage, indifferently dressed and carefully avoided by those around them.
Not only do we urbanites, but also the whole world needs to be grateful for the migrants, for they are steadily sharpening China's cutting edge by (over)supplying China's pool of cheap labor.
Many urbanites derive a kind of superiority from the fact that they need not have their hands soiled with work, and yet can still enjoy so many civilized amenities.
The most shiftless, worthless, and downtrodden urban resident expands visibly when he/she has in view a migrant laborer.
The ultimate advantage of having migrants around is that they can be beckoned at will and summarily dismissed after they are exploited.
In the few cases where they linger to assert their rights - usually meaning when they demand their unpaid wages - some bosses would rather hire thugs to beat them up than pay them.
Last week some migrants from Hubei Province suffered cerebral concussions, fractures and facial disfigurement in Fujian Province for demanding their pay.
We are aware of their utility but generally turn a blind eye to their identity as spouses, children, parents.
Some Chinese dismiss India for its slums, because we never tolerate slums. One professor claims that our prime downtown area should be dedicated to expats, and those from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
As schools for migrant children are substandard, they must be closed.
Cheap clinics patronized by migrants are always "black," to be suppressed.
Lack of facilities for the migrants enables migrants to be utilized like disposables.
Concerns
Anyway, the grime, sweat and blood are simply too crass for civilized taste, thus they must be sanitized.
Only when migrants are banished from our consciousness can we appreciate in peace the glamour, the neon lights, the edifices and the chiseled skyline.
Still many zero in on one of migrants' weaknesses: they fail to contribute much as consumers, even though many incentives have been proffered them.
According to professor Zhiwu Chen from Yale University, during the years 1995-2007, in inflation-adjusted terms, government income grew 5.7 times, while per capita income for urban and rural residents grew 1.4 and 1.2 times respectively.
China is desperately making the economy less dependent on exports and more internally driven.
Although some economists are rationalizing the status quo by hinting at the inevitability of "primitive accumulation," Chinese followers of Keynesian style economics need something new to sustain their faith in high wages, high consumption and high investment.
In his article titled "The Wealth of the Government and the Poverty of the People: Worries Behind the Rise of China," columnist Lian Peng points out that "China is subsidizing the whole world with its cheap labor."
"The single-minded pursuit of GDP growth has been achieved at the cost of environment, resources, and in total disregard of people's life and welfare," Lian comments in his article published on Caijing magazine's Website.
Hundreds of thousands of youths in their prime are slaving away at Foxconn on subsistence wages, so that the Apple and Nokia can stun the world with their latest glamour gadgets.
The hard-earned dollars would be used to buy foreign bonds, so as to finance the consumption of cash-strapped Americans.
The past decade has seen China gravitating towards the bottom rung in the global division of labor (dignified as "globalization"), and in the process is showered in such epithets as "rising," "emerging," or "miraculous."
Similarly, the migrant workers at B&Q decorations still dream of working their way up to the senior management of Kingfisher.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
