Tiger Woods, Nike and Slave Labour In Thailand. Your Actions, Their Freedom

How much do you value your employment rights cialis online? Pretty highly would be my guess. You have a contract of employment and you get paid each week/month. Even if you are in the lowest bracket for income, you will still have enough money to live on and you will still have basic employment rights viagra pills online.

You get a lunch break, you get a tea break, you have hours of work. If your employer breaks these rules you can take them to court. All of this is due to the employment law that western countries enjoy. These laws create a basic framework that ensure your basic freedoms from your employer, unlike a hundred or so years ago when you were the worker and you boss was god.

Many of the reasons for these laws are quite simple: unions. The collectivisation of workers to form a body that represents their interests as a whole. As a larger body that would usually represent whole sectors, rights and practices were established to create security and freedom. Some unions may well go beyond this and become political, but fundamentally they are about getting a better deal for the employee from the employer.

Now imagine a country where none of these rights exist. It's not hard, because Thailand is just one example.

The link to Tiger 'Eldrick' Woods struck me this morning. He is a quarter Thai through his mother and has a huge contract with Nike, which has made him the richest sportsman in the world. Nike employ an estimated 70,000 people in Thailand at practically slave labour levels. Tiger Woods, therefore, is a very rich man because, in effect, his own relatives work for almost nothing with no rights to give the huge mark ups that allow Nike to make huge profits. Woods earns $55,000 a day from his deal with Nike.

Workers are actively stopped from organising, that is, forming a union. In fact production is being put through a series of subcontractors that do not allow unions.

That $55,000 a day is estimated to be worth the daily wage of 14,000 Thai Nike workers. To make that easy for you that means they are earning about $4 a day. But that isn't all, the factories are being closed and moved to more rural locations with even lower pay that results in earnings being more like $7 a week.

There you are, working away with no breaks and no social contact hoping your practically powerless union can help, then one day that's it. Factory closed, moved a few hundred miles away and your job given to a person that will do it for even less money and even worse conditions with zero union representation. You now have nothing and the person who now has your job is utterly powerless.

But a survey by the Global Alliance for Workers Communities covered 3,800 Nike workers in Vietnam and Thailand and that found that Nike workers in foreign factories feel safe and believe they are paid fairly though they want better health care and more training.

Nike paid for the study.

Here is a site that covers a series of cases about Nike in Thailand. Workers are not allowed to talk, conditions are poor. If a woman becomes pregnant she can be fired, something that is resolved in the Honduras plants by giving them contraceptive jabs.

The only reason these conditions exist is because companies like Nike allow it to and people like Tiger Woods sit back and take the cash without thinking about how that cash is generated. Of course, wages are going to be relative, but conditions don't have to be. Why is it okay for a 12 year old in Thailand or Vietnam to work 14 hour days in a locked windowless room with no ventilation, sitting on a block and churning out endless numbers of trainers and if they talk they get fired, but not in the West?

Freedom may be under threat in western countries with an ever expanding state and restrictions being placed upon what people can do, but in places like Thailand that freedom can only be dreamed of.

A huge amount is made of Woods' recent private problems, which when all is said and done has no effect on anyone other than his family, yet nobody raises the question of why he is so prepared to sit back and accept the dollars without standing up for the people that create them, many of which are from the same country as his mother.

It is when conditions like this are considered that the value of unions becomes clear. When you remove the rights of people to come together and broker better pay and conditions, the results can be disgraceful. Which is why unions were formed here in the first place.

People who argue that if better pay and conditions were allowed in these countries the prices in the West would become higher are deluding themselves. This isn't just Nike and other sportswear companies, it is the entire clothing industry, from Wal-Mart to LVMH.

The high street price is set at the profit they want to make, not the production cost. That pair of £100 trainers has probably cost no more that £1 to make, with research and development and publicity costs added on top. If the production cost were to be £3, the price of the trainers would still come out at £100.

In turn these corporations are propping up ruthless states. It is the employment of the masses at slave rates that produces the economic power of countries like China. It is what gives the poor of Vietnam and Thailand employment, without which they would probably rise up in revolt. In short, those jobs are creating a false society.

The campaign for greater freedom is not limited to our own borders. The goods hat we consume and the companies that make them operate far outside of them in places that have no freedoms at all. We can help those that cannot help themselves by fighting their fight as part of our own.

Think about what you are buying and by doing so what you are propping up. Because it is hypocritical to demand freedom here when your own economic activity ensures the removal of liberty for others.