Activity

The compliance inspector tries to ensure that the factory is not going to embarrass the brand by ensuring that the factory is sticking to an agreement that would typically cover the length of the working day, the amount of compulsory overtime, wage rates, safety and health requirements, and fire re…

Then in the early 1990s another model train maker called Bachman (originally an American company, now owned in Hong Kong) began to make miniature British locomotives. In the shops, they were priced the same as Hornby’s, though they were made in China. And, as Hornby could not help but notice, the q…

The strikers at the Tianwang textile factory had also expressed their indignation in terms of betrayed idealism as they chanted the slogans of the Revolution and sang ‘The Internationale’. Their solidarity with each other, for as long as they could maintain it, was the last expression of a shared b…

Back on the street, I watched a middle-aged man slowly dip a paintbrush into a pot of vermilion paint and methodically paint a long message of protest on the window of a clothes shop, we demand the minimum, he wrote, in characters so regular that I wondered if, in happier times, he had been the man…

[...] In the old days it was argued that industrial action was a counter-revolutionary act under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Today, the prohibition is the bald expression of a fearful, authoritarian state that dares not allow its aggrieved industrial workers the right to organize. There th…