There should be more push back against goods made in non-democratic countries like Vietnam, and not just against Made-in-China.
My previous phone was a Samsung Galaxy S5 and I was surprised to find out that it was made in Korea. Manufacturing in Korea certainly didn't seem to harm Samsung's financial prospects back then, and the phone wasn't any more expensive than its Made-in-China competitors. I have zero reservations about South Korea's workers' rights protections, workplace health and safety, and environmental regulations.
Too often the discussion becomes:
1. We shouldn't manufacture in China
2. We can't afford to manufacture in US/EU
3. Let's just manufacture in Vietnam/Cambodia/Myanmar instead
When it should be:
a. We shouldn't manufacture in non-democratic countries
b. Let's manufacture in democratic countries instead
>I have zero reservations about South Korea's workers' rights protections, workplace health and safety, and environmental regulations.
Well, Samsung only just apologised last year to workers for some unusually high rates of cancer among workers at its (local) semiconductor and display factories[1]. It took ten years or more to go through the Korean courts. In general, Korea's industrial death/injury rates are very high compared to Western countries.[2] Workplace health for workers in Korea's electronics industry in general does not appear great, to say the least.[3] Finally, Samsung's treatment of workers in its Vietnam factories is, by most accounts, subpar at best.[4]
I live in Korea and I've been here for about four years. (Note that if we were to cover something outside tech/electronics, like construction, the workplace health and safety situation in Korea would appear even more dismal). I think I've dumped enough links already, but without adding more I will agree that legal protections for workers are quite strong in Korea at the base level, but they are often blatantly disregarded or skirted around by employers.
Interesting! It sounds like South Korean worker rights are a little below US/EU ones, but still far superior to the completely lacking ones in China/Vietnam/Cambodia/Myanmar? Or is that wrong?
Sounds about right, but I can't properly speak to US/EU ones, and definitely can't speak properly about worker rights in those other Asian/SE Asian countries. I think we'd probably all agree that EU ones are some of the best. I would guess that generally Korean worker rights are better than the ones in those Asian countries. (The growing foreign labour force in Korea, mostly for manual labour and factories, and mostly from SE Asia and China, might disagree, as they often fall into the same migrant labour trap that exists in other developed countries.)
Some things that I think are good about Korean labour law/rights:
-No at-will employment: employers must have a solid reason for firing somebody (misconduct, financial loss, crippling lack of company funds). In practice, this is often skirted through social pressure, i.e. employees encouraged openly to quit, or having their working lives turned into quiet hells until they quit to get away. If a person is fired they must be given either 30 days' notice or 30 days' salary.
-"Pension"/severance pay: all full-time workers accumulate a month's salary for each year worked at a company. Legally this must be paid out within 14 days after leaving a position. My own (Western) country has nothing like this, and I think it's especially good for the Korean context where a person might work for LG, Samsung, or Hyundai for twenty years, then be eased out right when their kids are starting university. Often, they can't find other whitecollar jobs. Every second or third cabbie I talk to in Seoul used to work for one of the big Korean firms. So the severance gives people a bit of a buffer if they randomly get fired or have to quit.
-Strong state-funded healthcare and social safety net.
Two less-good things:
-Koreans famously work some of the longest hours in the OECD, and it's usually overtime that people find it impossible, culturally, to say no to. The government legislated against it this year (all work beyond 8 hours per day and 40 hours per week to be defined as overtime, with time and a half paid for overtime and a maximum of 12 extra hours per week allowed) so hopefully things are going to slowly change there. In practice, people still seem to be working tons of overtime (for which they should be paid extra) without reporting it, but the law is still new.
-Minimum number of leave days per year is around 11-12 for the first year of employment and could be higher. In practice, corporate culture often limits peoples' freedoms around when they can take leave. Lack of separate sick days is common: people have to either use a leave day, or work sick.
If it helps, most large brands do take efforts to ensure that their factories and manufacturing partners adopt safety and worker rights measures. Ikea, for instance, forced one of its Indian manufacturing partners to start an on-premise school for its workers' children. It also delayed production by a nearly year to ensure that the supplier could meet all its safety regulations.
I've seen this first hand in Ludhiana, India. I know the narrative from the Nike sweat shop days still holds, but large brands are very aware of the backlash they could face and make efforts to improve working conditions wherever they can. If you're a worker in say, India, you're better off working at a factory affiliated with Ikea than one selling to local brands.
We really need to get rid of the concept of optimal human capital in globalism; focusing the world's battery production in a country with a ton of lithium or whatever is fine, but playing the musical chairs of shit labor & environmental laws so companies can gain more money they aren't going to spend in your country anyway is not
In my mind this thinking is no better than isolationist thinking of those countries. Bringing business to those countries is the best way to improve living conditions of the workers and expose them to the better world.
China is particularly problematic because they are huge and powerful. I agree it would be better to use democratic countries instead, but since that's not gonna happen, I'm glad companies are at least moving to smaller countries.
My previous phone was a Samsung Galaxy S5 and I was surprised to find out that it was made in Korea. Manufacturing in Korea certainly didn't seem to harm Samsung's financial prospects back then, and the phone wasn't any more expensive than its Made-in-China competitors. I have zero reservations about South Korea's workers' rights protections, workplace health and safety, and environmental regulations.
Too often the discussion becomes:
1. We shouldn't manufacture in China
2. We can't afford to manufacture in US/EU
3. Let's just manufacture in Vietnam/Cambodia/Myanmar instead
When it should be:
a. We shouldn't manufacture in non-democratic countries
b. Let's manufacture in democratic countries instead