Timbuk2 tried to recycle and reuse plastic shopping bags that were otherwise headed to a landfill but Target sent a cease and desist order.
“Pollution in China”. Wuhai City, Inner Mongolia. April 10, 2005. Workers in the factories have no immunity defenses. They get ill after one or two years on the job. Photo by Lu Guang / Finalist World Understanding Award.
It is labor revolt by text message and video upload, underwritten by the Chinese government.
The 1,700 workers who went on strike at the Honda Lock auto parts factory here are mostly poor migrants with middle-school educations.
But they are surprisingly tech-savvy.
Hours into a strike that began last week, they started posting detailed accounts of the walkout online, spreading word not only among themselves but also to restive and striking workers elsewhere in China.
They fired off cellphone text messages urging colleagues to resist pressure from factory bosses. They logged onto a state-controlled Web site — workercn.cn — that is emerging as a digital hub of the Chinese labor movement. And armed with desktop computers, they uploaded video of Honda Lock’s security guards roughing up employees.
In China, a Labor Movement Aided by Modern Technology - NYTimes.com
Can you believe there are labor strikes going on in China?
… And the times they are a changin’…
(via tedr) (via mikehudack)
His daughter tried to comfort him. “Father, I will keep this pair of pants until I die!” she pledged. He told her the cutting board would be her wedding gift.
“At that moment, I really wanted to kill myself,” he said. He gestured toward the safe-house window and beyond toward nighttime Yanji, brightly lighted and humming with traffic. “It is not like here,” he said. “Here, it is not a big deal to make money. There, it is suffering and suffering; sacrificing and sacrificing.”
He said he lay awake night after night afterward, fixated on the navy track suit his daughter had coveted. She had said it put her thick winter sweater and plain trousers to shame. He had put her off because the cheapest ones were nearly $15. When she brought it up once too often, he had cursed and shouted, “People in this house need to eat first!”
“I cannot describe how terrible I feel that I didn’t buy that for her,” he said, his voice trembling.
The NY Times interviewed eight North Koreans who recently left their country about the increasingly dire conditions there. It seems impossible, but the November currency devaluation has made life worse for what was already essentially a country of slaves. (via kottke)
bbook: Apologies for laughing at all or most spoofs…
Nixon’s Nose by Xiaoda Xiao, June 2010
In Maoist China, a political prisoner feels his way through a Kafkaesque tableau of rumors, betrayal, interrogation, and execution. When I was twenty years old, and a college student, I defaced a portrait of Chairman Mao. For this act, and without a trial, I was declared a political prisoner and sent to a forced labor prison on Taihu Lake, where I served in a labor reform brigade in a stone quarry for seven years: five years in the labor prison and two years as an ex-prisoner laborer. The tales in this book, transformed by memory, imagination, and time, are based on my experiences in this camp, and are not, I believe, unlike experiences suffered by millions of others who did not live to tell their tales. (read the entire article here)
Stunned China Looks Inward After School Attacks →
Mental illness remains a closeted topic in modern China, and neither medication nor modern psychiatric treatment is widely used. An analysis of mental health issues in four Chinese provinces, published in June in the British medical journal The Lancet, estimated that 91 percent of the 173 million Chinese adults that are believed to suffer mental problems never receive professional help. (read the entire article)
