The corporation-controlled media would like people to believe that the Cold War era was a period of tension and hostilities between the good and the evil, good being the free market block led by the United States and evil being communism represented by the USSR and its satellites. What a lot of people fail to realize, however, is that the very existence of the Eastern Block was the underlying reason for all the welfare programs that were put into place to benefit the poor and to afford them a minimal standard of living so that any fermentation of uprising in the face of dire living circumstances could be prevented. It is not coincidental that immediately after the demise of the USSR and the Eastern Block, a lot of the welfare programs in this country were either completely stopped or substantially cut down. There was no longer a model to look up to; the inspiration had been removed; the evil empire, which could instigate the workers in the so-called free nations to raise their voices in demand for a fairer share of the outcome of their labor, had been obliterated. Although the Republicans started the downsizing of welfare programs, Democrats were also quick to follow through realizing that they no longer needed to bribe the poor into remaining calm.
Interestingly the call for democracy also started with the collapse of the evil empire of communism. During the Cold War, all over the world, the United States found dictators very efficient in curbing and containing movements of the working people who, every now and then, rose in pursuit of fairer wages and better working conditions. It was immediately after the fall of communism that the call for US-style democracy was placed at the top of the US foreign policy agenda.
It is no coincidence that both Reebok and Nike went into South Korea during the death throes of communism, when dictators were still very congenial with the US, and Human Rights were a commodity that the free market economy was not very interested in.
Reebok and Nike, correctly assessing the situation in host countries such as South Korea, China, Indonesia, Taiwan, or Thailand, refused to capitalize on building factories in these countries, but instead just subcontracted local entrepreneurs to take over the manufacturing aspect of their enterprise. “Let them be responsible for workers’ health and safety. Let them negotiate with newly emergent unions. Nike [Reebok, and others] would retain control over those parts of sneaker production that gave its officials the greatest professional satisfaction and the ultimate word on the product: design and marketing.”
Interestingly, American men running companies such as Reebok and Nike, whose business practices align them with the structural-functional frame of reference, and as such should support an expressive role for women and should, in principle, be against the participation of women in the paid labor force, have no qualms when the women in question are from some developing or underdeveloped country. Do these corporate men think of South Asian or South American women as something less than human beings? Isn’t this the new type of slavery?
The outsourcing of footwear production started in South Korea and Taiwan, but as women in South Korea organized against the injustice of their wages and working conditions despite the fact that “at the first signs of trouble, factory managers called in government riot police to break up employees’ meetings,” US-based companies decided to move the factories to totalitarian countries where labor unions were against the law and labor strikes could be punished severely. The exodus out of South Korea left quite a number of women unemployed. These women who had initially moved to cities to work in sneakers factories were now absorbed in the “entertainment industry, the kinds of bars and massage parlors offering sexual services that had mushroomed around US military bases during the Cold War.”
In a competition to bring foreign investment into their countries, South Asian countries made all sorts of concessions to foreign capitalists. These concessions included low wages, long working hours, no health benefits, few regulations, and a tacit pledge of suppression of any labor strikes or attempts to form unions. With governments propagating that women who worked in these factories were in effect carrying out their patriotic duty towards their country, any attempt by women to organize for better wages and working conditions could be punished as treason. Thus the race to the bottom assumed unprecedented proportions.
As accounts of inhumanities and unfair working conditions were reflected in reports that appeared in Western media, US-based footwear-producing companies refused to acknowledge any responsibility by rationalizing that these factories did not belong to them and they were run according to the laws and labor regulations of the host countries. Reebok presented human rights awards to Chinese dissidents while hypocritically turning a blind eye on the atrocities that were perpetrated in factories that in had subcontracted to foreign investors.
Despite all the ongoing injustice, there is hope. Women in all the host countries are gradually becoming aware of their plight. Feminist activist groups are helping to organize them and raising their consciousness.
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