China has disadvantaged workforce
Amy Wu's article ("Standing tall", November 29) is a very good example of right-wing ideology posing as simple common sense and, as usual, oversimplifies and airbrushes out inconvenient details.
It is certainly true that in China construction projects can be completed in a time frame that would seem phenomenal in Western Europe or the US. Wu puts this down to "a lack of red tape and a 24-hour work cycle" which is "getting things done". You can certainly get things done quickly when you have a large and economically disadvantaged workforce which is willing (or effectively forced) to compete in a system where there is very little in the way of job security or negotiated pay and conditions.
The regulation of industry and independent unionisation of the workforce which exist in the advanced economies of the West that Wu sees as such drags on productivity exist for a reason; without them there would be highly exploitative working conditions for employees and the sort of graft and corruption which not even the Chinese government denies is endemic in China.
Wu uses the Hoover Dam as an example of the kind of project the US was once capable of but which is, in her view, inconceivable today. She conveniently ignores several facts about the construction of the dam.
First, it took five years to construct and was not consistently a round-the-clock enterprise. Second, the workforce was by no means happy with conditions and there was a series of industrial actions in 1931 culminating in an all-out strike in 1935. Third, among the unionised workers, there was a feeling that the project was worth the effort because it would benefit the larger community, it wasn't just a new building to make someone else money.
Lastly, work on the dam was extremely hazardous, 112 people died. It's hard to imagine the same level of fatalities with modern industrial health and safety regulations, the kind of regulations that Wu holds up as brakes on production. Is it this 1930s version of America that Wu thinks we should return to?
I agree that the unions may have their own agendas and that bureaucracy can hold things up, but we ought to consider very carefully indeed before abandoning the safeguards and guarantees that people fought for over the last 200 years. Wu's position is typical of conservatives, essentially she is saying that workers are lazy and the law gets in the way of progress, that is, the people who aren't actually doing the work making more money for less outlay.
