China Syndrome
By George Monbiot
Source: The Guardian
June 15, 2015
China is the worlds excuse for cruelty and barbarism. If we dont behave atrociously, politicians and columnists assure us, China will, so we had better do it first, before we are outcompeted.
You want holidays, collective bargaining rights and fair conditions in the workplace? Forget it. When Chinese workers have none, such fripperies would hamper British/US/Australian/Canadian industry, making it uncompetitive. Columnists like Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, gleefully regaling us with tales of Chinese workers being
turfed out of their dormitories at midnight, marched to a workstation and obliged to perform a 12-hour shift to meet a last-minute order from Apple, insist that we either compete on these terms or perish. France, he once claimed, is doomed if it seeks to preserve a 35-hour week, while people in Asia
are ready to work a 35-hour day.
In fact French workers
are doing fine: it turns out that European countries with shorter working hours (France, the Netherlands and Denmark for example)
have higher productivity per hour than those whose workers have to spend longer at their desks (such as Germany and Britain). And a country whose people have both decent wages and time to relax can support millions of jobs in leisure and pleasure that dont exist where workers are treated as little more than slaves.
You want your rivers, air and wildlife protected? What planet are you on? China, we are told, doesnt give a damn for such luxuries, with the result that if we dont abandon our own regulations, it will take over the world.
There is no scope for moral superiority in the climate talks, least of all a moral superiority based on unfounded national stereotypes. Collectively, we are wrecking the delicate atmospheric balance that has allowed human civilisation to flourish. Collectively, we have to sort this out. And it will happen only by taking responsibility for our impacts, rather than by blaming other nations for what we dont want to do.
Full article:
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/china-syndrome/