You Know Corporate America Is Really Bad When...

You know corporate America is really bad when they lobby one of the most repressive and brutal governments on the planets to treat their workers with even less humanity. The Chinese government seems to be realizing something that our own government still has not: that an ever rising divide between the haves and the have nots dooms society to eventual failure. Having abandoned traditional communism decades ago, the Chinese Central Committee is now echoing the sentiments of the New Left Chinese intellectuals that worker rights and ecologically sustainable development are crucial to the longstanding health of a modern society.

Sounds like common sense, like good-old-fashioned enlightened self-interest to me, but to Wal-Mart and all the rest of the American and International investors who have profited so hugely on Chinese semi-forced labor alarm bells are ringing. Though Wal-Mart is fiercely anti-union in the U.S. and treats its American (and illegal Mexican) workers miserably, even they know they couldn't get away with treating them half as badly as workers are treated in China.

Every time I buy a pair of cargo pants from the Gap I expect to pull out a little slip of paper. Instead of it saying, "Inspected by ILGWU #406," it will read, "Hello, My name is Xua Ping and I was a physics professor at #1 Beijing University. I once posted a political cartoon on the internet. Now I am clamping snaps onto low-rise khakis fourteen hours a day."