The prologue of the epilogue: Violence

You get numb to these things. Humans, like animals, get habituated easily, be it violence or nonsense. Evil-doing is easier to pick up and once you’ve slaughtered a chicken, the next few become easier. It’s difficult for some to lose their conscience, but with some determination and effort, all’s possible. Just do it–such a beautiful slogan with a tick to assure you it’s right.

Tuesday, Jul. 27, 2010 (Aug 9, 2010; Time print)

Just Pay It: Nike Creates Fund for Honduran Workers

By Tim Padgett

It’s no secret that the global economy hasn’t exactly been a boon to the labor movement. But globalization can be cruelest to the Third World employees it was supposed to raise out of poverty. As developing countries compete for investment from large foreign corporations, they all too often push workers’ wages, benefits and rights so low that many of them ought to be called sweatshop nations today instead of banana republics.

Case in point: In January 2009, 1,800 laborers lost their jobs in Honduras when two local factories that made shirts for the U.S. sports-apparel giant Nike suddenly closed their doors and did not pay workers the $2 million in severance and other unemployment aid they were due by law. Following proper public-relations protocol, Nike lamented the situation — while insisting that it wasn’t responsible for the actions of the plants it contracts. Nike did not match its regrets with dollars; the company was, in effect, taking advantage of the cover that the rules of globalization tend to afford so many companies like it today.

This week, however, Nike finally tossed that disingenuous defense like a worn-out pair of Air Jordans. Under pressure from fair-labor groups, the Oregon-based company announced on Monday an agreement with one of Honduras’ largest trade unions to create a $1.54 million “workers relief fund” for the factory employees laid off in 2009. Under the deal, Nike says it will work with its suppliers in Honduras to get still unemployed workers vocational training and hiring priorities as jobs open up. The value of Nike’s total contribution to the Honduran workers will probably be more than $2 million. But what matters more than the money — petty cash compared to Nike’s $19 billion in revenues last year — is the precedent, one that could help make globalization a fairer game. “This is a significant departure from past industry practice,” says Scott Nova, director of the Worker Rights Consortium in Washington, D.C. “It’s a testament to these workers’ courage.”

True, but it was due as much if not more to the business pressure applied on Nike by groups like the Worker Rights Consortium. They convinced scores of U.S. universities whose athletic programs and campus shops buy Nike shoes and clothes — and which effectively make their students walking billboards for the corporation’s products — to threaten cancellation of those lucrative contracts unless it did something to rectify the Honduras mess. Another labor watchdog, United Students Against Sweatshops, staged demonstrations outside Nike shops while chanting “Just Pay It,” a play on Nike’s commercial slogan, “Just Do It.”

While it’s good to see that college campuses haven’t lost their idealism, the Nike agreement is in reality just a first step in addressing a problem that “costs workers around the world hundreds of millions of dollars every year,” says Nova. A big question now, for example, is whether Nike will require that all its subcontracted factories worldwide set aside escrow funds to make sure that severance and unemployment obligations are met. On Tuesday, Nike would only refer to its corporate statement, which said it hoped to “develop long-term, sustainable approaches to providing workers with social protection when facing unemployment.”

Even if Nike was to mandate escrow funding or some similar economic backstop in countries like Honduras, there’s no assurance that other companies would follow its lead. And it’s hard to see Congress passing legislation requiring U.S. corporations to adopt a practice that only benefits foreign workers. But Nova argues that Nike’s move is important as it “will give labor advocates a stronger basis in the future. They can point to this precedent now and say that no less a brand than Nike agreed that companies have an obligation to do more than just cajole these factories.”

Someone also needs to cajole governments like Honduras’ into enforcing their own labor laws. Technically, Honduras, like so many other developing countries, requires companies to provide unemployment aid like severance. But the two Nike contract suppliers in this case, Hugger and Vision Tex, were apparently able to flout that code as easily as a military coup was able to oust then Honduran President Manuel Zelaya last year.

Again, the root of the problem is globalization’s unwritten code: politicians in impoverished countries like Honduras, which has a near 70% poverty rate and whose economy is run by a small clique of wealthy families, get elected by writing strong labor laws, but they’re convinced that they get foreign investment by allowing weak enforcement of those laws. Nike has at least made a strong start in correcting that perverse principle.

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I think when you are a minority by definition, good luck to you. Luck on its own might not be powerful enough, and in the year of the rabbit, there might not be enough rabbits’ feet to go around. Violence is another way to get one’s attention. Maybe Lisa A. Goldstein (a deaf journalist, writing in USA Today on the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act; in Time [print], Aug 9, 2010) ought to consider this, especially when “it’s been 20 years”:

Though the ADA established rights, it has not reduced the need for advocacy. People with disabilities have always had difficulty finding jobs. In fact, there is a 42% employment gap that separates working-age people with and without disabilities … Right now, a real problem is the gap in the ADA regarding the Internet. People with sensory loss are routinely being left out when it comes to online content … It has been 20 years. Why are we still struggling?

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Life is unfair and it’s all about sympathy or action. Real action. “People’s action” gives people the impression that all the people will take action for any problem when in fact those who are not affected by an issue will not take action, or the majority sees no need in taking action to help the minority; given the fact that it is almost never frequently possible to find a cause which 100% of the people believe in, no real action will take place. “People’s action” is then a mirage, an illusion in contemporary times. For the minority then, they can only bank on sympathy. Or violence.

Yet the minority may well be the subject of violence…

Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010 (Aug 9, 2010; Time print)

The Plight of Afghan Women: A Disturbing Picture

By Richard Stengel, Managing Editor

Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years. Her picture is accompanied by a powerful story by our own Aryn Baker on how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban — and how they fear a Taliban revival.

I thought long and hard about whether to put this image on the cover of TIME. First, I wanted to make sure of Aisha’s safety and that she understood what it would mean to be on the cover. She knows that she will become a symbol of the price Afghan women have had to pay for the repressive ideology of the Taliban. We also confirmed that she is in a secret location protected by armed guards and sponsored by the NGO Women for Afghan Women. Aisha will head to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery sponsored by the Grossman Burn Foundation, a humanitarian organization in California. We are supporting that effort.

I’m acutely aware that this image will be seen by children, who will undoubtedly find it distressing. We have consulted with a number of child psychologists about its potential impact. Some think children are so used to seeing violence in the media that the image will have little effect, but others believe that children will find it very scary and distressing — that they will see it, as Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston, said, as “a symbol of bad things that can happen to people.” I showed it to my two young sons, 9 and 12, who both immediately felt sorry for Aisha and asked why anyone would have done such harm to her. I apologize to readers who find the image too strong, and I invite you to comment on the image’s impact.

But bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them. In the end, I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban’s treatment of women than ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan.

The much publicized release of classified documents by WikiLeaks has already ratcheted up the debate about the war. Our story and the haunting cover image by the distinguished South African photographer Jodi Bieber are meant to contribute to that debate. We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground. As lawmakers and citizens begin to sort through the information about the war and make up their minds, our job is to provide context and perspective on one of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our time. What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead.

Time, Aug 9, 2010

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Life is unfair and some crimes committed are beyond redemption, yet life has to move on unless you become the monster yourself:

Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

The Moment

By Christopher Shay

After a decade’s work, a U.N.-Cambodian court has found former Khmer Rouge torture chief Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, guilty of crimes against humanity. From 1975 to 1979, some 1.7 million died as the Khmer Rouge pursued their macabre vision of a collectivist utopia. At Tuol Sleng prison, where more than 14,000 lost their lives, Duch’s guards smashed babies’ heads open and performed “autopsies” on living inmates. His punishment? Thirty-five years, reduced to 19 for time served. Khmer Rouge survivors wept with outrage at the sentence, which could see Duch end his life a free man if he makes it to 86. The four most senior living Khmer Rouge leaders go on trial next, but may not even live to be sentenced given their frailty. Like those who have lived through horrors elsewhere — in Rwanda and Bosnia as much as in Southeast Asia — Cambodians may never be happy with the punishments meted out to the monsters who still haunt their memories. But in their way, surviving and prospering are their own forms of vengeance.

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And so it is, even in the most trustworthy tie-up of jurisdiction for the case, the result is still felt to be inequitable.

I myself have been fighting hard over the last few months (it took them quite a while to read my full-page accusation [apparently] against myself, and an important person later commented that my write-up was too lengthy and no one has the time to read lengthy emails). Now, why would anyone want to accuse himself? To be precise, it wasn’t an accusation against oneself at the outset. It was a report. But I finally realised only a couple of weeks ago that a report of my action in the terms of “Off Peak Car” amounts to an accusation against myself, or an act of surrender. When they say “it’s an offence”, they don’t have to catch you; fine, I agree with that.

But what made this an unjust nonsense is the ‘fact’ that they would never have caught me if I had not reported it. And I have all the evidence on my side. Again, the important person and the Low Tech Authority said this has always been inconsequential (and it’s back to the it’s-an-offence-naturally argument).

I don’t disagree with the fact that they have shown clemency and have taken my honesty into account. It could have been a different charge (of cheating) altogether, but given the 50-50 chance of not getting caught and be punished, it’s worth the try–if you really don’t intend to cheat the system.

Now that I know for sure the Low Tech Authority isn’t that high-tech (I guessed it four years ago, actually), I was reminded of my wondering why the bloody money was wasted on the ex-link system which makes life more painful than inserting a thin magnetic card into the gantry for entry and exit at MRT stations since years ago. I still have to take the card out of my wallet while the gantry flaps still occasionally slam against my crotch. That too isn’t so high-tech. Oh, maybe that gantry system isn’t operated by them–it’s not the ERP gantry.

They claim that they are not the one who sells the OPC-e-‘fix’ and they have five vendors doing that. They don’t own any of the five agencies. And I remember damn well the ‘druglord’ I spoke to on Jan 4 saying the daily system down-time from 12-6am isn’t their fault–it’s the vendors’ problem. Well, all five vendors having the same down-time sounds like a kind of cartel in operation:

I was also told this analogy by the same guy: imagine you walking into a store and taking something off the shelf. You walked out of the store with it, forgetting to pay for it. You only remembered that you had not paid for it two days later, and you went to the police station to report it. The policemen would naturally treat it as an act of surrender.

I was kind of baffled, but the aggression in his speech warned me not to pick out the flaws of that ‘perfect’ analogy or I’d suffer the wrath. Kingpin is somewhere there and I left my superhero costume at home.

Looking at the facts presented, if they don’t own the ‘stores’ which sell the dope for my car, and there is no way I can go back to the ‘stores’ to ‘return’ the ‘stolen goods’, where can I go if I want to remain an honest person in the community? I obviously shouldn’t go to the police station because I did not steal from the ‘police station’–the ‘police station’ was not the one who tasked the ‘stores’ to sell the dope (unless of course it’s back to those good old days when the police are corrupt and linked to the drug cartels in the city). So the analogy certainly didn’t suit the situation and it’s once again crappy analogies from civil servants.

They ought to read more epic novels and classics and refrain from skipping lengthy emails. Literature is a beautiful thing and so is that game called Dante’s Inferno. Honesty doesn’t seem to pay in life, but I probably am not going to Hell.

Or they should just admit there’s something problematic with their system. To be fair, they did indirectly admit it’s not a foolproof system. They should invest in hiring quality thinkers who can tinker it to perfection. But what’s there to be gained to improve something which only affects the minority?

It comes to be concluded that certain policies and initiative are crap and they don’t really work. People are perhaps polite to not tell them the truth. The OPC system which I thought was a marvellous thing is bullshit because (1) as proven by the low take-up rate, smart Singaporeans know best it’s a trick (2) it is not intended to curb pollution problem and all other road congestion problem because it should have been more intelligently tweaked.

I’m going to join the majority pretty soon as soon as I can gather about S$13000. I am planning to do some painting and hopefully it can fetch some money. Haha.

This is the post before the last–it’s difficult to end a beautiful mess of a blog this is. But it is time, I guess. Like what Time’s China Blog said, “Blogs are by their nature ephemeral and this one no less than others. Happily they are also in a sense Buddhist in that they can be reincarnated in different forms.”

It’s just one of those things that fall into desuetude. For what it’s worth, it was worth all the while.

The end is near

The end of this blog is near. There will be one more post coming up soon and as it was with my previous post, it will be a serious and justified rant against the same government agency that has been an irritant. It is the agency that just recently made me understand that, first and foremost, honesty is not a virtue and lies can get you off. So this agency has very much revolutionalised the way I see life in Singapore, although I accept their explanation over my predicament.

Another government agency (which I don’t think I will reveal explicitly) enlightened me on the point that if only more people would read Dante’s Divine Comedy, or any other great literary works, this would have been a better place. But it isn’t. And there’s no point in reading. I have not read too many great literary classics myself.

I think one point about reading is you become a more empathetic person, a more appreciative person. These soft skills are not really required in some parts of the world, though. And I finally would admit that I am too soft to do law even if I had the money to pursue that dream, so I am content with my lot, my position in society.

I will devote more time to finally putting paint on canvas this year and doing a good one. I hope to raise some money LOL but I probably will still find it hard to part with any of my paintings.

Coming up in the last post, a short story. And, finally, the PW tab on this blog will be updated.