Another day another Yuan

Articles like these sure do make my life complete.

Anti-poverty wristbands produced in sweatshops

FASHIONABLE wristbands worn by pop stars, actors, top athletes and celebrities to publicise the Make Poverty History campaign are produced in appalling "slave labour" conditions, damning evidence has revealed.

Chinese factory workers producing the white rubber bracelets are forced to toil in conditions that violate Chinese law and the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) set up to establish international standards for working conditions.

Trust me, it's nearly impossible to violate Chinese working standards, that place must be a real dump. Perhaps the do-gooders were trying to fight poverty with poverty. What a fantastic slogan "fighting poverty on the backs of the poor".

Another audit at the Fuzhou Xing Chun Trade Company in Fujian province found workers were paid at below the local minimum hourly wage of 2.39 yuan (under 16p) and some as little as 1.39 yuan (9p).

Minumum wage is about .32 cents(Canadian) an hour, and they were paying the slaves about .18 cents an hour. That's pretty freakin' sad. This next sentence has to make you think;

An Oxfam spokeswoman responded that they informed their coalition partners in January, but added: "We could have perhaps put it in writing to make it absolutely clear. We bought an initial 10,000 wrist bands from the Shenzhen company in November. We now see that purchasing this before we saw a full audit was a mistake."

Ya think? Imbecile. You've known about this for 5 months and you did absolutely nothing. You passed the buck, you closed your eyes, shame on you.

Ignorance doesn't make things better. My suggestion is that every leftist in these *charitable* organizations should be made to take a series of sensitivity training courses so this type of thing won't happen again. Perhaps they view Chinese people as less than human.

If you knew that the bracelets were being made in a sweatshop, you should have immediately ceased buying them, but you didn't, you let it go on for months afterwards until you were caught.

As a show of good faith, to show that these folks really care about the poor, they need to give the Chinese workers the money that was stolen and denied to them. Will they do it? Of course not. They'll probably just give them a slave wristband and tell them they really care. Sorry chumps, that doesn't put rice on the table.