I was listening to the TED radio hour today and they were talking about common perceptions about things that we actually have all wrong. One of the segments was about capitalism and factory workers in China. The general view in the West is that factory workers in China are terribly abused to feed the frenzy of Western consumerism and that if the workers could escape, they would. However, according to the woman giving the TED talk, who has spent a lot of time in China talking to thousands of factory workers over many years, the workers do not see their situation as abusive. Many of them moved out of villages in China where they lived in dormitories and faced conditions much worse than those they face in the factories. Factory work often involves working in cramped spaces with several other people and up to fifty people sharing one bathroom. According to the workers, life in the villages is noticeably worse.

The researcher talked about how a Marxist approach in this case is incorrect. Marx believed that factory workers were dehumanized and identified themselves as whatever they were making, not as people. Conversations with the factory workers in China, however, reveal that the workers view their job as exactly that, a job. They do not see themselves as what they make or identify themselves with what they produce. They separate themselves from the product and see it as a way to make money so they can go to school, get married, etc. It gives them the opportunity to have a life that they could never have in the villages.

The researcher also talked about a certain level of assumed Western guilt over the treatment of factory workers who create the things we consume at such a great rate. However, she argued that the guilt is not a result of anger on the part of factory workers at their mistreatment to feed capitalism and consumerism, but is instead self-imposed by Western consumers.

Do you agree with her? If so, why? If not, why not?

My personal thought is that people in the western world identify themselves by what they do. I'm a chef, I'm a carpenter, I'm a lawyer, I'm a teacher, etc. This can be seen quite clearly in the development of last names in the west; names such as Baker, Smith (blacksmith), Carpenter, Mason (stonemason), etc. As a result, people in the west see a harsh work environment as an assault on their very identity and therefore assume that all workers around the world feel the same. Based solely on what the factory work researcher learned, it seems that the Chinese factory workers do not see their work conditions in the same way because they do not define themselves by their jobs to anywhere near the same degree.

What are your thoughts on this?