Bearing the Cross in the Global Economy (by Tim Kumfer)
In college, I took a cultural exchange trip (read: vacation) to Rome over spring break. Just around the corner from St. Peter's Square, I bought my father, a minister, a crucifix for his office.
Earlier this week, I saw that same souvenir in a report from The National Labor Committee on crucifixes made in Chinese sweatshops.
The report, titled "Today Workers Bear the Cross", documents the oppressive treatment of the workers in the Junxingye factory in Dongguan, China, who make crucifixes and other religious items to be sold to the faithful in the West.
[The] mostly young women—several just 15 and 16 years old—[are] forced to work routine 14 to 15 ½-hour shifts, from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 or 11:30 p.m., seven days a week … and even monthly all-night 22 ½ to 25-hour shifts before shipments must leave for the U.S. …Workers are paid just 26 and a half cents an hour, which is half of China's legal minimum wage (already set at a below-subsistence level) of 55 cents an hour. After fees deducted for room and board, the workers take-home wage can drop to just nine cents an hour … Workers fear that they may be handling toxic chemicals, but they are not told the names of the chemicals and paints, let alone their potential health hazards.
The products are then sold for upwards of $20 in the U.S., in churches like New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral and chains like Family Christian Stores. If God despises praise songs and offerings presented in the absence of justice, as the Hebrew prophets tell us, then crucifixes and plastic Bible covers made on the cheap at the expense of workers must really make God mad.
The image of women toiling away in sweatshops while handling an icon of the suffering body of Christ is quite striking. It brings to my mind a couple of questions. What might it mean for North American and European Christians to bear the cross—that is, to willingly suffer for the sake of justice—rather than participate in the unjust elements of our global trade system? Is it even possible to practice authentic discipleship within the global economy we're all swept up in? How can we, in even the smallest ways, seek to rid our lives of exploitation and be in solidarity with those who are suffering?
I ask these questions not because I have the answers. (Much of this post was written on a laptop built in, you guessed it, China.) I think I have a small picture, though, of what it might look like:
We'd probably buy more local and union made products, even if they cost more. We'd become pretty comfortable with hand-me-downs, and even looking kind of frumpy sometimes. We'd realize we need less than we thought we did, and go without some things previously thought essential. We'd share a lot more with our neighbors. And we'd demand that unjust structures change. Most of all, we'd need a community—to keep us accountable to countercultural discipleship, to forgive us for the impossibility of living lives free of exploitation, and to remind us it is in God and not the global market that we live, move, and have our being.
I pray that the church would be that sort of community and come together in resistance to our present global economy. Then we could begin to free ourselves (and others, like the women in the Junxingye factory) from its captivity.
Tim Kumfer serves as an assistant at The Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., and is a former Sojourners intern. He writes occasionally at timkumfer.blogspot.com.
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Comments
Is there something inherently more just in a simpler, local economy? Is detachment from the global economy the best strategy to make it just?
The Amish have a fair amount of detachment. If our status towards the world is separation, that might be the way.
Would China be better with no oils or factories?
Just as we cannot wash our hands of the evil to which we are inextricably linked in a complex global society/economy--neither can we abdicate our responsibility to impact that system in its myriad of parts.
Posted by: letjusticerolldown | December 3, 2007 12:04 PM
Tim Kumfer asks us to consider what might happen if we "bore the cross" of foregoing international trade. His answer is revealing for what, or who, it doesn't mention:
We'd probably buy more local and union made products, even if they cost more. We'd become pretty comfortable with hand-me-downs, and even looking kind of frumpy sometimes. We'd realize we need less than we thought we did, and go without some things previously thought essential. We'd share a lot more with our neighbors. And we'd demand that unjust structures change. Most of all, we'd need a community—to keep us accountable to countercultural discipleship, to forgive us for the impossibility of living lives free of exploitation, and to remind us it is in God and not the global market that we live, move, and have our being.
What's missing? The women in China, receiving a pittance in wages while making images of the suffering Christ. What would the effect be on them?
Tim Kumfer likes the idea of a less materially comfortable lifestyle in the west. But by sacrificing foreign-made goods would I do anything to help the poor in China? That's a question Kumfer doesn't even pretend to answer.
If you want to be a humanitarian, it helps to think about the effect your actions have on others. After all, the whole point of the operation is not to impoverish ourselves, but to enrich the lives of poor workers in places like Junxingye.
Wolverine
Posted by: Wolverine | December 3, 2007 1:16 PM
But Wolverine, you have given no answer except to keep buying, in order not to deprive these people of their nine cents per hour.
That argument is like one that not buying cotton from a slave plantation in 1850 would deprive the slaves of the little their owners allowed them.
Personally, I would not be able to hold one of those crucifixes and think of Jesus now in any way worthy of Him.
We have to do more than switch to the other side of the street to avoid uncomfortable choices when we see someone helpless lying in our path.
Too often, a response has been that Adam Smith's invisible hand will somehow make everything come out all right, despite all the misery of human suffering in the interim - the unavoidable collateral damage argument. I think it's no better than Stalin's callous observations about not being able to make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Posted by: N.M. Rod | December 3, 2007 2:05 PM
By not buying from known abusers we help make things better. In a way, if enough people refuse to buy from known labor abusers, economically it will become apparent that being unjust toward labor has (surprise) a cost on the unjust employer in terms of fewer sales. That is why I refuse to shop at Wal-Mart, as a start.
What is being described though points to a bigger problem, and an opportunity at the same time. Namely, the lack of sufficient enforcement in China of Chinese laws. Ever wonder WHY the employers can get away with employing people at less than minimum wage? I believe that the people in China are slowly realizing that there is more to life than making money, and that there is a spiritual hunger there begging to be filled. The Communist regime never has a good reason for why people should obey the laws, especially when it isn't obeying them that well itself. So the dog-eat-dog unfettered (topped off with endemic cronyism) market forces are showing their ugly side. People are starting to notice. And noticing is the first step toward change. Hopefully the atheism there is starting to show how IT is unworkable.
Posted by: Ngchen | December 3, 2007 3:35 PM
Many consumers in the West (and elsewhere) want the cheapest product possible, irrespective of the implications of how these cheap goods (including food) are produced.
A personal look at the ethics of one's consumption means asking and answering questions like from where does my $10 Gap t-shirt come, and will I spend $20 on a fairer trade t-shirt.
Food is not exempt.
My mother-in-law recently bought a 20 pound turkey for 29c a pound - a pure sweatshop, unorganic, antibiotic laden endomorph of a turkey. A fairer trade organic, free range, penicillin free turkey may have cost $30.
This is the moral calculus we face.
Bubba
Posted by: Bubba | December 3, 2007 3:38 PM
That's why it's called a cross, isn't it? We are crucified with Christ. Should we expect to get away with cheap, easy, one-time decisions,or shouldn't we expect to die daily?
Posted by: Ted Voth Jr | December 3, 2007 3:47 PM
Fortunately we don't have to buy those decorative crosses at all. I urge everyone to print this article and deliver it in person to your local Christian store or megachurch mall. Even better, join with some others and present a petition to the owners, your fellow Christians. Accountability to the Body of Christ, which happens to be your customers!
The situation's tougher when it comes to offering to pay more money on essentials to live.
A huge number - millions - of people here in the US have faced drastically curtailed incomes and the elimination of benefits, while costs for basic necessities are rising rapidly.
This is sure to be exacerbated further as we enter the now acknowleged recession in the New Year. If the rhetoric of denial by the administration in the face of the facts of a deteriorating economic situation is any indication, it will not be a minor one.
We are entering a cycle of stagflation. Enormous spending on all things military and totalitarian-style security are sucking the lifeblood out of the normal productive economy. and The enormous costs of war are no longer being able to be hid and are being passed on in the form of dollar devaluation, inflation and credit crunches, along with the shrinking of the non-military domestic manufacturing sector and the implosion of government services.
It simply makes no sense for the many living on the edge to buy what's more expensive when they cannot afford it.
The CEOS and their interests, of course, are so far insulated from these effects.
It certainly isn't just the Chinese government that's failing to enforce labor and wage laws. They are certainly not being enforced within the United States, either.
Cleverly, large economic interests have managed to play off disaffected middle class and blue collar workers against others who were encouraged by them to arrive to take their place at illegal, cheaper wages - instead of against the very ones who unconscionably seek to drive labor costs to unlivable and inhumane levels in the interest of economic efficiency for a few.
Posted by: N.M. Rod | December 3, 2007 5:35 PM
What if we all just lived with less of the world and more with God? What would we gain? A proper perspective.
Sandy Widstrom
Posted by: Sandy Widstrom | December 3, 2007 6:45 PM
"Tim Kumfer likes the idea of a less materially comfortable lifestyle in the west. But by sacrificing foreign-made goods would I do anything to help the poor in China? That's a question Kumfer doesn't even pretend to answer."
Indeed, this is the question that few are able or willing to answer. The problem is that this is one of the major flaws of the capitalist system. Lower costs so that you can undersell the competition, because the consumer makes the ultimate choice when they choose the cheaper product over the "better" choice.
Capitalism requires that there always be a group of workers available to work for the lowest wages possible. Our country outlawed slavery, instituted labor laws, and set environmental policies that made such low-cost, low-restriction labor unavailable here.
Simply put, we as consumers do not really want to pay the price for items produced by those individuals who are receiving a living wage and working in an environment that is not contaminated by their employer. We want it cheap, and we want large quantities of it, and we really do not care if the products are made by slave laborers who work in knee-deep carcinogens.
Wolverine's attitude is hardly unique. We as consumers affirm it every time we make the decision to buy more stuff that, in all honesty, we really do not need.
Posted by: ds0490 | December 3, 2007 7:57 PM
What Wolverine fails to mention is that Adam Smith's hypothesis does nothing to help the workers in the short term or the long term. It wasn't designed to do anything for those who don't have capital to begin with.
Take Cambodia, for example. Almost a decade after they got a market economy, a few got really rich (namely by swindling foreign aid donors and siphoning off cash), while the vast majority are still where they were when they started. Haven't had enough time? They had plenty. Absoutely no progress was made. My wife is from there, and she worked in the sweat shops (making sweaters, as it happens).
For her efforts or 60-80 hours a week (we'll go on the low end to make the numbers more amenable to Wolverine's point of view), she came home with $100 per month. That's a grand total of 24 cents an hour, and that number never once grew while she was working there. Actual cost of living in the city (with or without family help): $150 per month.
The actual cost of the sweater she made, after shipping is included, is around $1. The price in the stores: $40 (25 if it's on sale). Surely, the company could spare a little to make sure their employees can meet the basic needs, right? Wrong. The only thing that matters is profit. As my wife told me, "As for me, is better if I not work for make clothes. Is better stay in home town and not have money, because don't need to lose money like when work in shop for make clothes."
The point I want to stress here is that it would have been better for her to stay in her home town and grow fruit, and live in total poverty that to lose money working to make you all the sweaters you're probably wearing now.
Globalization and free trade are not beneficial to both sides. If we only think about ourselves, are we not neglecting "the least of these"? We need to end this fruitless and selfish mentality that the only thing that matters is us making profit. We need to learn that an economic system is like a pie: the profits are the crust, not the filling. And as with all pies, too much crust and you ruin the pie. Too little, and you have no pie. The ideal crust/fruit ration is 5% crust/95% filling.
Posted by: Christopher Mohr | December 3, 2007 8:08 PM
ds0490 -
The answer IS simple. Learn to make your own goods. In the exaple the article put forward, crosses were never meant to be shiny, flashy bling style extravagances. Learn how to carve wood, and learn how to make your own string (for those with a real knack for it, it's not too hard to make your own little wooden nails, too).
Learn how to knit, and learn how to sew (yes, I say that for us guys, too). It's unbelievably easy to do. Learn how to make your own food, and where possible, grow your own garden.
The way to address the problem you, and Wolverine, stated is not hard at all. They wouldn't be poor if they weren't tricked into thinking they could make money in the city making these things. As in the example I stated before, for the poor there, they'd rather not have any money than be continuously losing it in the cities making things to sell to us. The problem is less them, and more us. We are projecting our notion of poverty on these people, because they would be better off living on a self-sustaining farm than "come into the global free market system". We shouldn't be forcing them from "primitivism" into our "civilized" world.
Maybe we should stop trying to foist ourselves and our notions of what is good, what is rich, what is happiness, etc. on everyone else. There are better economic systems than free market capitalism. Some will work for some people, some will work for others. We need to see that and get over our self-conscious and self-aggrandized concept that our way is the best and only way that works, and everyone else should just bow down to us and do what we tell them, because eventually it will fix itself (it never does).
Posted by: Christopher Mohr | December 3, 2007 8:24 PM
Christopher,
It sounds like you consider the urbanization of the world to be due to rural peoples fleeing for a worse life.
What makes a peasant world any more inherently just than an urban world?
Is this the path you have chosen?
Posted by: letjusticerolldown | December 3, 2007 8:54 PM
I don't think there are "better" economic systems than free market capitlism - but it all depends on what you mean thereby. Parsing it different ways, it could be a euphemism for monopoly cartel crony capitalism, or fascistic capitalism or just "greedy capitalist pigs."
You don't do away with unfairness and the human propensity to abuse power by nationalising industry (even the "commanding heights" of energy and heavy industry) or making all economic life centrally planned - that is, without freedom for any individual. Leaders will abuse their centralized power. Bad ideas can become entrenched and supported at the point of a tank's muzzle against ideas that really work to bring prosperity to more.
And you need a big bad police state to force people to act wholly against their nature, not just what's bad in it.
Malcom Forbes famously called his magazine a "capitalist tool." And that's all any free enterprise system that uses money as its basis - capital, as it were - can be, a means rather than an end in itself.
That's the Biblical view - not that money is the root of all evil, but that the love of it is. One hallmark of maerialist philosophies is that they don't require anyone to actaully be rich to follow them - merely that they idolize wealth, put their trust in it. Like Donald Duck's rich old Unca Scrooge, they would like to go off the deep end into it and swim in it - a fantasy of materialist heaven, whether they ever reach it or no. Ditto the lottery.
When you worship your tools, you become idolatrous. That doesn't mean that a powerful tool that can be used for great good, given the right motivations, is evil, any more than firearms are inherently evil. It's the owner of that finger pulling the trigger who decides whether to feed his family with it through proper use or to commit terrible crimes with it.
So it is with capitalism. As they say, the trouble with socialism is socialism, whereas the trouble with capitalism is not capitalism but capitalists.
Posted by: N.M. Rod | December 3, 2007 9:51 PM
Christopher - I like your ideas of self-sufficiency and getting by on less. It's something we could all do a lot more of.
Be careful though when you talk about "projecting our notion of poverty on these people". One could argue that we do the same thing here in the U.S. Whenever we raise or change the standard of what defines poverty we are defining it up, constantly comparing it with what "others" have. If we aren't to do that for people in the third world we probably shouldn't do it for people here either. If the poor in the third world should be happy on their self-sustaining farm shouldn't the poor here be happy with the same? Why should "our" poor deserve anything more than the poor in the third world?
Posted by: Eric | December 4, 2007 1:29 PM
The question is not whether "our poor" should deserve more than "their poor," but whether YOU and I should deserve any more than either one of those.
Do we? I have found that I don't have any particular claim that will stand up before God to deserve anything more than anyone else on the face of the earth, even the poorest. Note that Jesus said that the Lord causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on both the just and the unjust in the Sermon on the Mount and we are to love our enemies as we love ourselves.
I have a problem with the phrase "our poor" that somehow resonates with the repugnant theory of ownership of human beings by objectifying them.
We would do better when we look at others to consider when we see their faces that we are looking in the mirror, and that what we see is made in the image of God.
Posted by: N.M. Rod | December 4, 2007 1:50 PM
Christopher Mohr,
I think you're missing my point. It isn't that workers never get exploited. My point is simply that Tim Kumfer urges us to take action without even a passing thought as to the effects his suggestion would have on workers themselves. Would a boycott on crucifixes from China help the workers in Junxingye? How?
I'm generally a supporter of free trade; as a general rule free trade benefits both wealthy and poor countries, but I won't say there aren't exceptions and maybe this is one. But I'm not going to call for a boycott of imported goods just so I can feel better about myself. The point is supposed to be the workers in poor countries. How does this help them?
That's the question I would like to have answered. That's a critical point that Kumfer didn't even pretend to address and none of the other posters has taken up. And since you are calling on me to change my purchasing habits -- I never said you couldn't buy a union-made crucifix from Pittsburgh if you like -- I think I'm allowed to ask.
Wolverine
Posted by: Wolverine | December 4, 2007 3:31 PM
"I'm generally a supporter of free trade; as a general rule free trade benefits both wealthy and poor countries, but I won't say there aren't exceptions and maybe this is one."
I think the national discussion on international trade has been reduced to either one is for unfettered free trade or one is an isolationist. However, for decades--centuries, really-- our country has traded with other countries. The difference is we had bilateral trade agreements, allowed tarrifs and restrictions, etc. And this is good. Well-crafted trade policies could help avoid the situation described in this article. And it seems that NAFTA and GATT are generally bad policies.
We need to stop seeing trade regulation as a bad thing, and seeing human rights and labor vioaltions as an externality to trade policy. There is no reason why our country should not set standards for trade and put a moratorium on trade with countries that violate those standards--yet GATT and the WTO prevent us from doing so. So much for "free" trade.
You ask how does it help these workers to modify our trade policies? I believe that the United States standing up to labor abuses will certainly help such workers more than our quiet acquiescence in these atrocities. We may not come up with perfect policy, but we could at least try to improve.
Posted by: I and I | December 4, 2007 5:34 PM
The last thing a lot of big corporations want is truly free and fair trade. They like the law-deck stacked in their favor, thank you very much.
And is it really better for a young woman to work at a mindless, sunless, nature-less job 16+ hours per day for a pittance, probably suffering tendonitis or carpal-tunnel syndrome in the process? Would we want our daughters to work in such conditions? It might be the best thing for them if the sweatshops were to close.
I am also for free trade--if it is really free and fair. And I try to put my money where my mouth is. I have no car; I buy only fair-trade organic coffee; I live simply, so others may simply live. I, too, find it the height of global irony that the crosses many Christians carry were made in Chinese sweatshops. Let's call them to account!
Posted by: John Rasmussen | December 10, 2007 3:57 PM
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