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Beijing Olympics: The Most Dangerous Game |
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I view the Olympics as a sporting event .. there’s a lot of issues that I suspect people are gonna, you know, opine about during the Olympics. I mean, you got the Dalai Lama crowd. You’ve got global warming folks. You’ve got, you know, Darfur and … I am not gonna, you know, go and use the Olympics as an opportunity to express my opinions to the Chinese people in a public way casue I do that all the time with the president.
I could write paragraph upon paragraph attacking that inarticulate display, but I imagine most of the points are obvious to the majority of you, the readers, so I’ll just break off one piece; the Olympics as a sporting event.
As every athelete knows, sport is inherently more. To athletes, sport is work, sport is money. To sportswriters, sport is epic, filled with players, events, victories and defeats of mythological proportion. To the peanut slingers, ticket takers, souvenir vendors, cameramen and production assistants, sport is industry. Though Olympians are often amateurs, the Games are no less guided by interests and events outside the field of play.
How else to explain the enthusiasm with which cities lobby to get the games? Is it because they want to give their residents a chance to watch some good sport? Clearly not. The motives have very little to do with the actual “sporting event.”
If the Olympics are hosted judiciously, they can bring immediate profit. But that’s rarely the driving motive, and few cities have ever accomplished it. More importantly, the games bring prestige, and provide an excuse to build infrastructure that will last well beyond the actual event. The majority of the events George Bush attends, for example, will take place in a stadium or on a field that was built expressly for the Olympics.
In the case of Beijing, the construction of these stadiums adds another group to the list Bush mentioned above; “the labor rights crowd,” or maybe we’d best call them the “human rights folks,” — a recent Human Rights Watch report, One Year of My Blood, details the systematic abuses of migrant workers in Beijing:
Because a majority of migrant construction workers either do not have contracts, sign contracts that do not specify employer obligations or are denied copies of their contracts, migrant construction workers are routinely forced to rely on their employers’ verbal promises regarding wages and wage payment timetables which very often are disregarded later by their employers
Faulty or Non-Existent Labor Contracts:
A migrant construction worker interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that his employer repeatedly and without reason rebuffed his and his coworkers’ efforts to obtain copies of their employment contracts. “Most of us signed contracts with the company, but didn’t get a copy, [our employer] didn’t give us a copy or after we signed [our employer] said that he had to take [the contract] away to be sealed and signed…[but) never gave them to us."
Some companies in order to cut costs, use migrant workers for the bulk of positions where there are toxins or danger without needed safety training, safety procedures or safety equipment…[so] their work-related illness or injury proportions is high [compared to non-migrants.]
Denial of Independent Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining:
[Chinese] workers have the right to join and organize unions, but must be part of the sole nationwide labor union, the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) which must support the Communist Party.
China’s labor laws do not clearly specify that workers have to represent workers in the collective bargaining process, and under China’s constitution workers do not have the legal right to strike
But Bush refuses to acknowledge the simple fact; these games are not only being hosted by a government that continually violates, and facilitates the violation, of human rights, they are built upon the same cavalier attitude towards human life.
The only way we can view the Beijing Olympics as a “sporting event” and nothing more, is if we include the abuse of human rights into our definition of “sport.” Sadly, in light of Bush’s legacy, that’s not too hard to do.
Q: Doesn’t this make you want to drag every last one of the people (are they?) driving around with W ‘04 stickers out of their Ford pick-up trucks and beat them to death with a wooden spoon?
A: Actually, I was thinking about filing a union grievance.
- On a serious note, this guy is our president somehow. Made two terms. Makes you realize how poor our education system really is when we can’t even vote in a guy who has the competency of an out of work golf caddy.
How’s the view up there on your soap box?
For those who are actually interested in solving human rights abuses, you couldn’t be more wrong. That same logic can be applied to any “non-scolding” interaction with China. Whenever someone buys products from China, visits China, collaborates with their universities in research, and so on, then we are supporting China’s economy and/or implicitly accepting their behaviour.
By that argument, the only way to interact with China is to scold them until they behave properly. Anybody who knows anything about international relations, human beings, or even animals for that matter, knows that doesn’t work. Well, if you are in complete control over them and can beat them into submission, it can work. But then they’ll turn on you the first opportunity they think they can.
The real way to address human rights abuses is through friendship. Educate and guide them. Sure, call them on their failures, but as a means for addressing them. Give them contracts, but include requirements for wages and labour contracts, and proof they are living up to it. Lead them to acting properly until it becomes the norm.
That is how address these problems. You don’t do it through scolding and sending them to their room without supper or, heaven forbid, attacking them with weapons.