What–you thought rosaries and crucifixes were magically exempt from Chinese slave labor?
A labor rights group alleged Tuesday that crucifixes sold in religious gift shops in the U.S. are produced under “horrific” conditions in a Chinese factory with more than 15-hour workdays and inadequate food.
“It’s a throwback to the worst of the garment sweatshops 10, 20 years ago,” said Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee.
Kernaghan held a news conference in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to call attention to conditions at a factory in Dongguan, a southern Chinese city near Hong Kong, where he said crosses sold at the historic church and elsewhere are made.
Spokespeople for St. Patrick’s and another New York landmark, the Episcopal Trinity Church at Wall Street, said the churches had removed dozens of crucifixes from their shops while they investigate the claims.
“I don’t think they have a clue where these crucifixes were made — in horrific work conditions,” Kernaghan said.
Kernaghan said the factory’s mostly young, female employees work from 8 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. seven days a week and are paid 26 cents an hour with no sick days or vacation. Workers live in filthy dormitories and are fed a watery “slop,” he said.
As I recall, it was the moneychangers in the Temple that most famously got under Jesus’s skin.
He wasn’t any too keen on slavery, either.
What he was keen on, was redistribution of wealth, so that situations exactly like this–slavery in officially atheist, “socialist” China–don’t happen.
Oh, I love it when I see Ron Paul try to convince everyone that the minimum wage hurts workers. It couldn’t have hurt these workers much more, now could it? If this is the kind of “liberty” Ron Paul wants to give the U.S., then Ron Paul doesn’t know the meaning of liberty. He would probably tell you these workers deserve this treatment because that is what the economy in China can bare. And of course, since U.S. workers have to compete with these very workers, we should get paid the same. See for yourself: http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=878
Ron Paul will make Bush’s record on the economy look good. Libertarians should all get a Darwin Award as soon as they declare themselves. There is nothing like supporting putting you and others into slavery.
Yeah, it’s crazy. No one ever got ahead by working for minimum wage, no matter how “generous” someone else thought it was. Hell, if I thought I’d be well off on it, I’d be working as a salesclerk at the local Mall-Wart.
Flibbertigibbertarians, of course, think poverty is the result of laziness on the part of the poor, and that being rich is a reward for being clever, ambitious, hard-working, etc. Reality shows just the opposite–the working poor are the hardest-working of all, and yet they have the least to show for their efforts. And who works harder than a slave who is worked to death? Just ask the Nazis how profitable they were…right before they had to be gassed and incinerated as “useless eaters”.
Meanwhile, those richest sure don’t look like they’re working very hard; they often have a paunch, and I’m guessing that the most exercise they get on the job comes from lifting that h-e-a-v-y telephone receiver, and hollering at their stockbroker to sell, sell, sell.
And whenever they do that, someone hard-working somewhere loses a job and feels like shit because s/he wasn’t “working hard enough” to keep their job from migrating to a prison camp in China.
Maybe these gibbertarians should stop smearing liberty by conflating their wackonomics with it, and simply call themselves the Slavery-Nazi Party. If they did, it would be truth in labelling (which, if I’m not mistaken, is required by law for cans of soup, so why not parties?). There is precious little real liberty in their platform. And what there is, goes to exactly the wrong people.