Real Shame
posted by bitchphd
Okay, this shit is genuinely shameful, and I am genuinely ashamed of it.
Oh, it's not selling unsafe toys to American kids that's so shameful. What's fucking shameful is that we--and I include myself--only give a shit about the American kids whose rooms are stuffed to the gills with cheap-ass toys made in sweatshops in China, whose workers are often not much older than children and who not only handle the lead paint or other toxins that we don't want our kids to have even minimal contact with, but do so for 12 hours or more a day, for a few cents per week, while living in cities where the air is polluted by the same industrial toxins that we're suddenly so concerned about.
And yes: we've all known about this for a long, long time. But we haven't collectively cared much. And now our concern is going to mean more pressure on Chinese workers, and Chinese management, to somehow make things that are safer on the consumer end without costing us more money. Which can only mean driving wages down and hours up to make up for increased costs in raw materials.
It's fucking shameful that we're willing to exploit and poison Chinese kids so that our own kids can have Ikea bins filled with plastic doodads and hundreds of felt tip markers and multiple sets of educational magnetic toys. And it's shameful that this is the kind of thing I don't want to talk to Pseudonymous Kid about, because I don't want him to feel guilty about his room full of toys made by slaves.
“I, like you, care deeply about the safety of children,” said [Mattel's] executive, Robert A. Eckert, in testimony before a Senate subcommittee. “I can’t change the past, but I can change how we do things.”
But the toy-testing campaigns promised by the industry are not at all sufficient, members of the Senate panel said, proposing a long list of their own legislative changes that go far beyond what the industry had offered.
The initiatives include an increase in fines for selling dangerous consumer goods and a prohibition _ — backed up by the power to file criminal charges — against retailers’ selling any product that has been recalled.
“This has got to stop,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota. “It is time for us to take action.”
Oh, it's not selling unsafe toys to American kids that's so shameful. What's fucking shameful is that we--and I include myself--only give a shit about the American kids whose rooms are stuffed to the gills with cheap-ass toys made in sweatshops in China, whose workers are often not much older than children and who not only handle the lead paint or other toxins that we don't want our kids to have even minimal contact with, but do so for 12 hours or more a day, for a few cents per week, while living in cities where the air is polluted by the same industrial toxins that we're suddenly so concerned about.
And yes: we've all known about this for a long, long time. But we haven't collectively cared much. And now our concern is going to mean more pressure on Chinese workers, and Chinese management, to somehow make things that are safer on the consumer end without costing us more money. Which can only mean driving wages down and hours up to make up for increased costs in raw materials.
It's fucking shameful that we're willing to exploit and poison Chinese kids so that our own kids can have Ikea bins filled with plastic doodads and hundreds of felt tip markers and multiple sets of educational magnetic toys. And it's shameful that this is the kind of thing I don't want to talk to Pseudonymous Kid about, because I don't want him to feel guilty about his room full of toys made by slaves.
Labels: China, family values, human rights, Pseudonymous Kid, racism
Posted at 1:53 PM
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