Eduardo Galeano - Upside Down - A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

Fear, father of a large family, also begets hatred. In the countries of the North, it tends to cause hatred of foreigners who offer their labor at desperate prices. It’s the invasion of the invaded. They come from lands where conquering colonial troops and punishing military expeditions have disembarked a thousand and one times. Now this voyage in reverse isn’t made by soldiers obliged to kill but by workers obliged to sell themselves in Europe or North America at whatever price they can get. They come from Africa, Asia, and Latin America and, since the burial of bureaucratic power, from Eastern Europe as well.

Statistics

In the British Isles, one out of every four jobs is part-time. And many are so part-time that it’s hard to say why they’re called jobs. To massage the numbers, as the English say, the authorities changed the statistical criteria for unemployment thirty-two times between 1979 and 1997 until they hit on the perfect formula: anyone who worked more than one hour a week was not unemployed. Not to boast, but that’s how we’ve measured unemployment in Uruguay for as long as I can remember.

In the years of the great European and North American economic expansion, growing prosperity required more and more labor, and it didn’t matter that those hands were foreign, as long as they worked hard and charged little. In years of stagnation or weak growth, they become undesirable interlopers: they smell bad, they make a lot of noise, they take away jobs. Scapegoats of unemployment and every other misfortune, they are condemned to live with several swords hanging over their heads: the always imminent threat of deportation back to the grueling life they’ve fled and the always possible explosion of racism with its bloody warnings, its punishments: Turks set on fire, Arabs stabbed, Africans shot, Mexicans beaten. Poor immigrants do the hardest, poorest-paid work in the fields and on the streets. After work comes the danger. No magic ink can make them invisible.

Paradoxically, while workers from the South migrate north, or at least risk the attempt against all odds, many factories from the North migrate south. Money and people pass each other in the night. Money from rich countries travels to poor countries, attracted by dollar-a-day wages and twenty-five-hour days, and workers from poor countries travel, or try to travel, to rich countries, attracted by images of happiness served up by advertising or invented by hope. Wherever money travels, it’s greeted with kisses and flowers and fanfares. Workers, in contrast, set off on an odyssey that sometimes ends in the depths of the Mediterranean or the Caribbean or on the stony shores of the Rio Grande.

In another epoch, when Rome took over the entire Mediterranean and more, its armies returned home dragging caravans filled with enslaved prisoners of war. The hunt for slaves impoverished free workers. The more slaves there were in Rome, the more wages fell and the more difficult it was to find work. Two thousand years later, Argentine businessman Enrique Pescarmona praised globalization: “Asians work twenty hours a day,” he declared, “for eighty dollars a month. If I want to compete, I have to turn to them. It’s a globalized world. The Filipino girls in our offices in Hong Kong are always willing. There are no Saturdays or Sundays. If they have to work several days straight without sleeping, they do it, and they don’t get overtime and don’t ask for a thing.”

A few months before Pescarmona voiced this elegy, a doll factory caught fire in Bangkok. The workers, women who earned less than a dollar a day and ate and slept in the factory, were burned alive. The factory was locked from the outside, like the slave quarters of old.

Many industries emigrate to poor countries in search of cheap labor, and there’s plenty to be had. Governments welcome them as messiahs of progress bringing jobs on a silver tray. But the conditions of the new industrial proletariat bring to mind the word they used for work during the Renaissance, tripalium, which was also an instrument of torture. The price of a Disney T-shirt bearing a picture of Pocahontas is equivalent to a week’s wages for the worker in Haiti who sewed it at a rate of 375 T-shirts an hour. Haiti was the first country in the world to abolish slavery. Two centuries after that feat, which cost many lives, the country suffers wage slavery. McDonald’s gives its young customers toys made in Vietnamese sweatshops by women who earn eighty cents for a ten-hour shift with no breaks. Vietnam defeated a U.S. military invasion. A quarter of a century after that feat, which cost many lives, the country suffers globalized humiliation.

Law and Reality

Gérard Filoche, a Paris labor inspector, proved that a thief who steals a car radio gets a longer sentence than a businessman who causes the death of a worker through an avoidable workplace accident.

Filoche knows from experience that many French companies that evade health and safety regulations also lie about wages, hours, and seniority. “Employees have to keep their mouths shut,” he says, “because they live with the knife of unemployment at their throats.”

For every million violations found by labor inspectors in France, only thirteen thousand end in conviction. In nearly all those cases, the sentence is a tiny fine.

The hunt for cheap labor no longer requires armies as it did during colonial times. That’s all taken care of by the misery that most of the planet suffers. What we have is the end of geography: capital crosses borders at the speed of light thanks to new communication and transportation technologies that make time and distance disappear. And when an economy anywhere on the planet catches a cold, economies around the world sneeze. At the end of 1997, a currency devaluation in Malaysia killed thousands of jobs in the shoe industry in southern Brazil.

Poor countries have put their heart, soul, and sombrero into a global good-behavior contest to see who can offer the barest of bare-bones wages and the most freedom to poison the environment. Countries compete furiously to seduce the big multinational companies. What’s best for companies is what’s worst for wage levels, working conditions, and the well-being of people and of nature. Throughout the world, workers’ rights are in a race to the bottom, while the pool of available labor grows as never before, even in the worst of times.

Globalization has winners and losers, warns a United Nations report. “A rising tide of wealth is supposed to lift all boats, but some are more seaworthy than others. The yachts and ocean liners are rising in response to new opportunities, but many rafts and rowboats are taking on water — and some are sinking.”

Countries tremble at the thought that money will not come or that it will flee. Shipwreck or the threat of it causes widespread panic. If you don’t behave yourselves, say the companies, we’re going to the Philippines or Thailand or Indonesia or China or Mars. To behave badly means to defend nature or whatever’s left of it, to recognize the right to form unions, to demand respect for international norms and local laws, to raise the minimum wage.

In 1995, the Gap sold shirts “made in El Salvador.” For every twenty-dollar shirt the Salvadoran workers got eighteen cents. The workers, most of them women and girls, spent fourteen hours a day breaking their backs in sweatshop hell. They organized a union. The contracting company fired 350 of them; the rest went on strike. There were police beatings, kidnappings, jailings. At the end of that year, the Gap announced that it was moving to Asia.