The following are supplemental histories that offer deeper context for some of the narratives included in this book.
FACTORY ACCIDENTS IN BANGLADESH
In April 2013, the collapse of a factory in Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza that had produced clothing for many Western clothing companies made headlines worldwide. Killing more than 1,100 workers, the collapse was the deadliest disaster in the history of the garment industry.
Over the past two decades, multinational companies have broken up the assembly of their goods into many small parts and distributed single, simple tasks to small factories and subfactories across the world, which the multinationals often do not directly own or operate. Rana Plaza sat at one end of one of these long supply chains of global outsourcing and subcontracting. Some factories at Rana Plaza assembled clothes for up to forty larger companies.
The creation of so many middlemen often means that the details of workers’ rights and safety regulations are enforced only to local standards, or not at all—which can be part of what allows a factory to make the cheapest bid for a work contract. A large part of the shock felt in the aftermath of the collapse was due to a new awareness among American and European customers of how their clothes are made, and that there is a direct link between cheap goods at home and worker safety issues abroad.
A post-collapse investigation of Rana Plaza found that the building’s structural faults were well known to authorities, and that the upper four floors had been constructed illegally, without permits. Safety violations like these are unfortunately common in many subcontracted factories, where effort is largely focused on producing the greatest number of goods in the shortest possible time. The Rana Plaza collapse was unique for its magnitude, but fires and other building collapses are not uncommon; a fire that killed 112 workers the previous November also made news across the world.
Bangladesh is the world’s second-leading garment exporter, trailing only China, and has more than five thousand garment factories. Activists and labor-rights organizers had attempted to bring attention to Bangladesh’s working conditions for many years, but the size of the industry and its importance to Bangladesh’s national economy made government leaders reluctant to make changes that could increase costs, and possibly cost them work from foreign brands looking to pay as little as the market would bear. And even after the collapse, most brands have been slow to pressure local governments to implement higher safety standards.
NAFTA AND THE MAQUILAS
The North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA, is an agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico that attempted to remove many of the barriers to trade across North America. In effect since 1994, it set out to create a broad, shared market across the three countries. In theory, each would benefit from increased exports—even though their domestic economies at the time were marked by some very significant differences. Ideally, with the removal or lowering of tariffs on a wide spectrum of consumer goods, manufacturers would be able to ship items across borders more easily, and this would result in lower prices, more jobs in places where they were needed, and a decrease in illegal immigration across North American borders.
As NAFTA took effect, however, it brought many unexpected changes, and the treaty has become not only a source of perennial debate about the implications of free trade but also a symbol of the unavoidable interconnectedness of economics with politics. Trade did increase overall, but not without creating numerous problems. In the United States, factories began to close in parts of the country that had strong histories of labor and environmental protections. Large companies found they could increase their profits by moving many U.S. manufacturing jobs to Mexico and taking advantage of local laws allowing employees to be paid less and receive fewer benefits. With workers competing for increasingly scarce jobs in some of the areas where factories closed, wages decreased. Additionally, the growth of manufacturing jobs in Mexico did not markedly decrease immigration to the United States, and the social costs of a more competitive economy were felt strongly in the two countries. (Canada’s government-provided social services created a relatively resilient safety net there.) In general, NAFTA provided many advantages for multinational businesses, but few for labor. By the end of the decade, with the pull of globalization stronger than ever, many of these types of factories moved out of the NAFTA region altogether, taking the opportunities for work with them.
In Mexico, many of the new jobs were limited to low-skill factory work in maquilas, or Mexican factories that operate in free-trade zones created by Mexico’s government. The concept was originally established in the mid-1960s, but NAFTA incentivized a great expansion of the maquila system, with unavoidable effects on its purpose. Factory towns began to attract workers from Mexico’s faraway rural areas, many of whom left farming because they could not compete with waves of cheaper, imported produce. Additionally, the maquila workforce, which had previously been composed mostly of women, saw a rapid increase of men and children.
Although millions of Mexicans had moved to the border region by the end of NAFTA’s first decade, the factories there often failed to support local growth or generate strong communities nearby. Instead, many of the benefits went to the largest, most efficient companies that could best exploit reduced trade tariffs. Many large companies that could take advantage of economies of scale would purchase raw materials cheaply and then subcontract goods manufacture to small maquilas in Mexico or nearby Latin American countries with even looser regulation of labor and wage standards.
By all measures, the gap between rich and poor in Mexico widened, and some experts began to call the industry in the maquila area “high-productivity poverty”—a new phenomenon in which industrial growth failed to produce a higher standard of living.
AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGY IN INDIA
In the middle of the twentieth century, a skyrocketing population coupled with a series of droughts created widespread hunger and malnutrition in India. The country’s population growth began to outrun the limits of its agriculture. By the mid-1960s, India began to utilize agricultural research and technology first developed in more heavily industrialized countries, especially related to rice, wheat, and cotton. The expanded use of pesticides, fertilizers, and improved irrigation, and of seeds bred especially to create high crop yields and grow year-round, diminished the food problem as well as the percentage of the population living below the poverty line. This period of agricultural growth came to be known as the “Green Revolution.”
Soon after the turn of the century, however, experts began to wonder if the benefits of the Green Revolution had run their course. Some Indian farmers, who now had access to a global marketplace, looked to increase their profits by selling cash crops rather than staples in the local markets. During economic downturns, small-scale farms reliant on cash crop sales would often fall into insurmountable debt. Environmental damage and water shortages due to the agricultural changes began to threaten future crops. Additionally, a dependence on genetically modified seeds, designed and patented by international conglomerates, limits farmers to a small number of suppliers, further constraining their choices regarding seed cost, quality, and availability.
For crops like cotton, Bt seeds, modified to be toxic to some insects, account for 95 percent of all farming in the country. Although corporate representatives and industry groups extol the benefits of GMO crops, small farmers have seen costs rise faster than crop yields. Many have begun to wonder if their overall situation has improved, and suicides of severely indebted farmers regularly make local headlines.
AGRICULTURE AND IMMIGRANT LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES
In the United States, undocumented workers make up a greater proportion of the labor force in agriculture and farming than any other field (with groundskeeping and construction close behind). Exact numbers are difficult to measure, but recent studies estimate that even when temporary workers are excluded, one-quarter to one-half of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented immigrants—though other estimates argue that because numbers like these rely on self-reporting, they are significantly deflated.
Working without legal papers, especially in rural areas, makes undocumented workers vulnerable in ways that citizens and authorized residents are not. The available reporting has found that undocumented farm workers consistently receive lower wages than documented workers performing the same jobs. Additionally, the threat of disclosure to immigration authorities, which can mean deportation and separation from children and families, has been used to prevent workers from reporting violence, sexual assault, and harassment.
The dangers are compounded for children who are undocumented agricultural workers, or who may be documented but working alongside their undocumented parents. The risk of a fatal injury for children employed as farmworkers—both documented and undocumented—is more than four times that faced by other working youth.
Undocumented workers in the U.S. are protected by a number of federal and state labor laws, and have been at the center of a long national debate about immigration reform. In addition to general constitutional protections such as equal protection and due process, undocumented workers have a legal right to minimum wage and other benefits mandated by wage laws, workers’ compensation for on-the-job injuries, child labor laws, a safe workplace, and participation in a union. Workplace discrimination against undocumented workers is also illegal. Additionally, some states, rather than waiting for Congress to finalize immigration reform, have taken steps to expand undocumented workers’ rights locally. In 2013, for example, California approved laws making it more difficult for state law enforcement to detain immigrants, allowing undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses, and allowing undocumented workers to practice law—the latter based on the case of an undocumented immigrant who was brought to the U.S. as a baby, raised there, and graduated from a California law school.
Employer retaliation against workers who attempt to enforce any of these rights is also illegal, but the workers may be forced to disclose their status if an employment claim leads to litigation. Because of the potential consequences of this, many workplace violations remain unreported.
CHINA AND ZAMBIA
Although China has been organizing construction and finance projects in Africa since the 1970s, it has become Africa’s largest trading partner over the last decade, a period when its share of the continent’s exports rose from 1 percent to 15 percent. Today there are approximately five hundred Chinese companies at work in Zambia, bringing a population of one hundred thousand Chinese into the country of only fourteen million—although a language barrier means the two populations live largely separate lives. Zambia has the third-highest level of Chinese foreign investment of all countries worldwide and by 2011 its capital, Lusaka, had become the first African city to provide banking service in Chinese currency.
The current era of foreign business interest in Zambia began in 1997, when, after two decades of falling copper prices, the government began to sell state-owned mines. The next year, a state-owned Chinese enterprise bought the majority interest in the copper mine in Chambishi, updated the mine’s equipment, and, in 2003, reopened it for production.
Underground mining is dangerous work, but the Chinese-run mines took on an unusually bad reputation within Zambia for health and safety. They became a source of complaints about labor abuses, including union busting and pay below the national minimum wage. Dissatisfaction over such conditions led to worker riots and protests that sometimes turned violent. Workers have allegedly been threatened with being fired for reporting dangerous conditions—including acid burns resulting from gloves or boots not replaced often enough—and many accidents go unreported. A 2005 explosion at a Chinese-owned manufacturing plant in Chambishi resulted in forty-six deaths. In 2006, management and private security at a Chinese-owned mining company shot at least six miners during riots over work conditions. Riots and work protests have continued sporadically; in 2010, when several hundred workers protested conditions at Collum Coal Mine, two Chinese managers shot thirteen protesters. Large strikes followed in 2011, and in 2012 rioting workers crushed a Chinese supervisor to death with a mining cart.
In 2007, Zambia became the first African site for one of China’s “special economic zones,” an area where Chinese investors could manufacture and export goods without having to pay taxes to the Zambian government. Zambia–China relations and the pros and cons of Chinese investment—jobs and economic growth on the one hand versus the dangers of pollution and unsafe working conditions on the other—have become a perennial topic in Zambian political debates, and a major campaign issue in presidential elections.
THE BOUGAINVILLE REVOLUTION
Bougainville lies at the north end of the Solomon Islands, just east of Papua New Guinea and six degrees south of the equator. The island is 40 miles across, 121 miles tip to tip. Bougainville has been inhabited for more than twenty thousand years and was settled over the millennia by a number of different migrant populations: by the time French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville landed on the island in 1768, over a dozen distinct languages were in use there, spoken by the island’s few thousand inhabitants.
The Germans took control of Bougainville in 1884, seizing land for huge coconut plantations and drafting Bougainvilleans as laborers. Then, after World War I, Bougainville passed into British and Australian hands. The Japanese invaded Bougainville in 1942, and Allied forces then seized control of the island over a span of two years of intense fighting. Following the war, Australia governed Bougainville as part of a mandate covering Papua New Guinea (PNG).
In 1964, prospectors from Bougainville Copper Ltd. (BCL) began exploratory drilling in the Panguna valley in central Bougainville. BCL was 56 percent owned by ConZinc Rio Tinto Australia, a subsidiary of global mining conglomerate Rio Tinto. Through a land-leasing arrangement, 20 percent of BCL was owned by the PNG government.
Once Rio Tinto learned the extent of the Panguna copper deposit, it began digging the world’s largest open-pit mine. The Panguna mine operations displaced nearby residents, sliced into the mountainside, and washed debris down to the sea. Over the seventeen years of the mine’s operation, from 1972 to 1989, waste from the mines dammed the Jaba and Kawerong Rivers, flooding low-lying farmlands, and tainting the island’s limited fresh water supply.
Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia in 1975, and its share of profit from the mine became its largest source of national income, after Australian aid. To develop infrastructure for Rio Tinto’s operations, the PNG government appropriated thousands of acres from Bougainville landowners.
In November 1988, a small group led by Francis Ona—a landowner and surveyor for the mine, whose objections to the environmental damage caused by the mine went ignored by Rio Tinto and the PNG government—blew up the mine’s electricity pylons with some of Rio Tinto’s own dynamite. Shortly afterward, Ona and his supporters began gathering troops for the Bougainville Revolutionary Army. Rio Tinto shut down the mine in May 1989, but called on PNG to send troops and riot police to reopen the mine; the conflict soon escalated to open war.
In 1990, PNG imposed a total blockade of Bougainville, and an estimated fifteen thousand Bougainvilleans died as a result of the seven-year-long siege that lasted until 1997.
In 1997, PNG decided to bring in mercenaries from the British firm Sandline International. PNG defense force commander Jerry Singirok opposed the move and had the mercenaries arrested as soon as they landed on Bougainville. Singirok was himself arrested by the PNG government, but soldiers in PNG’s central barracks rebelled at the decision. The rebellion, as well as broad public sympathy in both Papua New Guinea and Australia for Bougainvilleans, soon impelled the PNG government to agree to end the blockade and negotiate peace.
The peace process spanned five years and ended in 2001 with a treaty that granted Bougainville a high degree of autonomy and provided for a deferred referendum on full independence and the reopening of the Panguna mine. The date for these referendum votes has been consistently pushed back; the votes are yet to be held as of early 2014.
While the discovery of oil in Nigeria transformed the country over the second half of the twentieth century, its production has, according to Human Rights Watch, “enriched a small minority while the vast majority have become increasingly impoverished,” and created power struggles among the military and government elite. One recent analysis estimated that the wealthiest 1 percent of the Nigerian population collects almost 85 percent of the country’s oil revenues.
Although the Nigerian constitution states that the national government owns all oil discovered in the country, anger at the wealth imbalance has sparked protests from communities that receive little benefit from drilling on their land yet suffer the effects of severe environmental damage. In the 1990s, a protest against the federal government and Shell Oil by tens of thousands of Ogonis, an ethnic group from a major oil-producing region, began to receive international attention. Ogoni leaders founded the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, known as MOSOP, which demanded political and economic autonomy for Ogoniland and accused Shell of genocide. In 1993, MOSOP organized mass protests that caused Shell to end drilling in the oil-rich region, though some of the company’s pipelines that passed through the area were left in place. Security forces organized by the Nigerian government and by Shell soon cracked down on protesters, many of whom were detained, beaten, or executed. Subsequent newspaper investigations discovered that Shell tried to arrange for weapons to be imported into Nigeria.
When WikiLeaks (the international non-profit organization that publishes classified information online) released U.S. embassy communications in 2010, they revealed the relationship between Shell executives and the Nigerian government in greater depth: Shell not only employed its own security force, trained by the Nigerian government, but claimed to have staff in every main government ministry. Executives told diplomats that the company knew “everything that was being done” by officials in those ministries.
In 2011, the United Nations completed a fourteen-month environmental study of over two hundred locations in Ogoniland, concluding that many of the areas Shell had declared clean were still polluted, areas that appeared clean on the surface were severely contaminated underground, and an environmental restoration could take thirty years. In one community, drinking water was contaminated with benzene, a carcinogen, at more than nine hundred times what is generally considered the maximum safe level. Little progress has been made on the cleanup since, and most Nigerian farmers who have attempted to sue Shell in international court had their cases dismissed before a verdict could be reached (see also Alien Tort Statute, page 362).
THE BHOPAL DISASTER AND AFTERMATH
On the morning of December 3, 1984, an explosion at the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, led to a massive leak of toxic gasses and other chemicals into the surrounding community. Between that night and the following few days, as many as four thousand residents of Bhopal died, largely from exposure to methyl isocyanate, a chemical used in pesticides that causes severe nerve and respiratory damage in humans.
Immediately after the leak, the “Bhopal disaster” became one of the most infamous industrial incidents ever, and news of the catastrophe introduced scores of people worldwide to the dangers of industrialization in the developing world, and the ability of foreign investment to influence local regulatory and legal environments.
The leak itself was preceded by significant corporate neglect. By 1984, famine and crop failures decreased the local demand for pesticide in the period preceding the leak, and Union Carbide, the American company that was operating the plant, had made plans to dismantle most of the facility and move production elsewhere. Until this process could be completed, the plant continued to operate below capacity, and with markedly reduced safety procedures and equipment. By the time of the leak in the early morning of December 3, many devices meant to ensure safety had already been disassembled or taken out of operation. Within the first few days, the leak had reached forty tons and killed an estimated four thousand people, blinding and injuring many others. Aside from methyl isocyanate, heavy metals such as arsenic were released into the local groundwater supply, and other toxic chemicals used in pesticide manufacture also contaminated nearby soil and water resevervoirs. Bhopal has experienced an abnormal rate of birth defects and premature deaths in the two decades since.
In the disaster’s aftermath, Union Carbide attempted to avoid all legal responsibility, at first blaming an Indian subsidiary and raising the possibility of sabotage. Eventually, in February 1989, the company settled with the Indian government, agreeing to pay $470 million for victim compensation—a sum so much lower than expected that shares in Union Carbide stock rose 7 percent following the announcement. There were no criminal convictions until 2010, when a New Delhi court convicted eight former executives of Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary of neglect. In the time since the disaster, one of the executives had already died; the others are expected to appeal. At the time of the verdict, the disaster site still contained 425 tons of uncleared hazardous waste.
ALIEN TORT STATUTE
The U.S. Alien Tort Statute is a section of the U.S. Judiciary Act of 1789 that has been used by non-U.S. citizens to bring lawsuits in U.S. courts. The text of the statute reads: “The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”1
The statute was largely unused in courts through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Then, in 1980, two Paraguayan citizens legally residing in the United States sued another Paraguayan citizen, a former police officer in Paraguay’s capital, Asunción, also residing in the United States. The plaintiffs alleged that the former police officer had tortured and murdered their son in Paraguay. In Filártiga v. Peña-Irala, the plaintiffs successfully argued that torture was prohibited under international common law and that U.S. courts had jurisdiction to hear their claim under the Alien Tort Statute. Since the case, dozens of other claimants have used the statute as a basis for successful lawsuits.
Suits have also been brought by U.S. residents against foreign corporations for alleged crimes committed overseas. In 2000, residents of the island of Bougainville near Papua New Guinea brought suit against multinational mining conglomerate Rio Tinto in U.S. court. The suit was led by Alexis Holyweek Sarei, a California resident who had resided in Bougainville for decades, as well as other former citizens of Bougainville. In Sarei v. Rio Tinto PLC, the plaintiffs argued that the company’s copper-mining operations had poisoned the island and made much of it uninhabitable. The Bougainvilleans successfully had their case heard in lower courts before it was taken up by the Supreme Court in 2013.
While Sarei was ongoing, a similar lawsuit was filed by former citizens of Nigeria against Royal Dutch Petroleum in 2002. Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum was brought by refugees who had fled Nigeria to the United States after suffering alleged torture and the extrajudicial killing of family members by the Nigerian government with the alleged cooperation and aid of a subsidiary of Shell Oil.
In April 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum that the U.S. courts had no authority to adjudicate claims against corporations that were based mostly outside of the United States. In light of their ruling, they also dismissed Sarei v. Rio Tinto PLC. Human rights organizations have claimed the Supreme Court’s decision makes it difficult for victims of human rights abuses carried out with the cooperation of multinational corporations to hold those corporations legally responsible.
CHINA AND SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONES
In the late 1970s, China began to open itself to the world market with a series of capitalist-style reforms that included the creation of special economic zones: areas the country designated with tax breaks, investment incentives, and looser regulatory requirements, meant to encourage foreign investment in China. These “reform laboratories” were located outside of China’s most populated areas. Shenzhen, which had been a fishing and farming town on the China–Hong Kong border, was the first special economic zone established at the outset of the new policy.
By 2007, the official population of Shenzhen had increased from thirty thousand to 8.6 million, with possibly another four to six million uncounted, temporary workers. Shenzhen had become an “instant city,” populated largely by young Chinese people who had left their hometowns to work in one of the many factories that had come to the area as China became a manufacturing superpower. Because of the rate of its growth, Shenzhen is not built around a dense city center that expanded over time, but has many dispersed “centers” connected by highway. Today China has more than a dozen special economic zones, and has designated over fifty areas for other types of economic and technological development.
As in other regions across the globe, fast industrial growth in China’s special economic zones came at the cost of environmental damage and poor workplace conditions. Common challenges included twelve-hour shifts of repetitive work with intense production quotas and little room for error, and managers who often shirked rules that allowed employees to rest, socialize, or avoid excessive overtime. Awareness of these conditions began to grow in the Western world, especially around 2010 and 2011, when Foxconn, an electronics company that makes iPhones, Sony PlayStations, and Dell computers in Shenzhen, began ringing its buildings with nets after eleven separate incidents in which workers jumped to their deaths (additional workers had jumped but survived their injuries).
Around the same time, workers began to share stories of their experiences in increasingly public venues. After enduring weeks of bad publicity, companies like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel began to take a more direct role in monitoring the conditions of workers subcontracted to manufacture their products. Many of these companies encouraged reforms such as more vigorous workplace inspections and audits, a stop to illegal overtime and other violations of Chinese law, stronger safety policies, and mental health support.
THE REPUBLIC OF SAMSUNG
Around 2004, some journalists and business commentators began referring to South Korea as the “Republic of Samsung,” noting the oversized influence of the company on its home country. Although known throughout the world mostly for mobile phones, semiconductors, and electronics, Samsung controls more than eighty South Korean companies, in fields as diverse as industrial machinery, home appliances, and insurance. By 2012, Samsung was generating close to 20 percent of the goods and services sold in the entire country, about the same amount as government spending.
This gives the family-run company a significant influence on South Korea’s economy and politics. Despite attempts at preventative regulation, leaders of the company have been convicted of tax evasion and of bribing politicians to secure corporate advantage. Only four months after being convicted of the former, Samsung’s chairman, Lee Kun-hee, received a presidential pardon; the South Korean president said he granted amnesty to benefit “national interests.”
In the past few years, unusually high rates of diseases like leukemia, lymphoma, and brain cancer have begun to appear among young workers in some of Samsung’s manufacturing plants, though details of chemical exposure at the facilities have not been made public. Samsung faced accusations that working conditions were designed primarily to protect sensitive equipment, not workers, from chemical contaminants; many of the Samsung employees who became ill worked at the company’s older facilities.
Beginning in 2007, both Samsung and various labor groups began to release a number of conflicting studies about the dangers of the work environment at the company and in the semiconductor industry more generally, but more recently a definitive cancer link has emerged. In 2012, the Korea Workers’ Compensation and Welfare Service, a government agency, ruled that there was a “considerable causal relationship” between the breast cancer of a woman who died earlier that year and her work at a Samsung plant from 1995 to 2000, and a 2013 ruling by a South Korean court determined that Samsung’s earlier studies examining workplace safety had not examined health hazards sufficiently. These results have encouraged many other Samsung workers, whose cases and appeals are pending.
1 In court systems, a tort is a civil law claim of harm. For more information, see glossary, page 384.