"But BusinessWeek's article portrays U.S. employers from a quite different angle; expending millions of dollars in good faith on audits attempting to ensure that workers are treated well, only to be fooled and tricked by the iniquitous Chinese. 'Can corporations successfully impose Western labor standards on a nation that lacks real unions and a meaningful rule of law?' asks BusinessWeek.
Certainly not, if those same companies are threatening to move to Vietnam at the first sign that the Chinese government may actually be attempting to institute meaningful labor standards!
This is not to say that the new labor law is some kind of panacea that will achieve what the audit firms hired by Nike and Wal-Mart cannot. A law is only as good as its enforcement, and Chinese authorities have a long record of being selective about just which regulations they'll chop your head off for disobeying. Nor is it easy to deny BusinessWeek's sobering conclusion, that no matter how hard the audit firms work, 'Ultimately, the economics of global outsourcing may trump any system of oversight that Western companies attempt.'
But BusinessWeek's failure to consider what the Chinese government is attempting to do might be partially explained by its use of the word 'impose' in its question about how 'Western labor standards' are going to be inculcated in China. The choice signifies an incredible lack of sensitivity to how Western demands, for anything, play in China today. Gunboats impose demands. Trading partners, theoretically, negotiate a deal. Anyone who thinks the West is going to impose anything on China at this stage of the game isn't paying attention. "
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