Poverty of Chinese Toy-Making Workers

About 75 percent of the world’s toys come from China where migrant workers are paid averagely 240 dollars per month. Extreme poverty in the rural areas in China make people move to the urban areas in search of such employment. Michael Wolf, a German photographer, documented what he termed as The Real Toy Story which depicts what the life of workers is like as they make the world toys. The photos by Michael Wolf describe China’s grueling toy factories. The photographer visited 5 factories in China that is mainland China. In the factories, the labor is mainly migrant labor. The following research paper critically examines the feedback from the analysis by Michael Wolf in relation to Global Capitalism, Commodity Chains and manufacturing.

The migrant labor came as a result of the issuance of tight controls and regulations by the Chinese government with regards to migration between rural and urban areas. As a result, most people migrated to the cities illegally so as to search for employment. These regulations were associated with the hook system where the government tied welfare entitlements such as education, housing and health to one’s place of birth. However as the country’s economy transformed to a market economy, cheap rural; labor became very vital and integral in order to realize economic growth. As much as the Chinese government promised equal rights to all, most of the migrant workers have continued to work under very poor working conditions such as forced overtime, needless to note that they do not even have employment contracts or social security benefits. (Carter, 2007)

In the work places, the living and working conditions are extremely poor. There are up to 6

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people sharing very small and cramped dorms and...

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...perior introduction to the nature of the world’s labor laws, industrial relations system, and trade union structure. Given the atrociousness of the problems facing industrial relations system, and trade union structure, workers themselves are usually involved in the making of their own fate .Solidarity, some people might not be completely convinced that even the Wolf’s optimism is warranted. The building of a stronger labor movement nevertheless begins with an extremely accurate and concise understanding of conditions as they are presently, and with a vision of what exactly we would want them to be. Consequently, in both respects, the analyses succeeds as well as the present condition of the thousands and millions of workers all over the world who have greatly contributed

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to the tripling of the world’s labor force in the past decades and centuries.