Factory Trip

Last Saturday the UC students and a few Hanu UCHANU students took a surprise day-long trip to two different factories. The first factory that we went to was a garment factory called Hanosimex. The second was a Yamaha motorbike production plant. Naturally, we weren’t going to be shown factories that “beat their workers”, as Gerard put it. These factories had made sweatshop labor extraction easier on our tender First Worlder eyes.

The Hanosimex factory tour began with a talk around a large executive table about the achievements of the corporation. Ho Chi Minh’s bust cast its gaze downwards on us as we were told about the profits gained by this factory’s exploitative practices. If he could see what had become of his country, I’m sure his disgust and scorn would be as great as mine every time I think about it. The situation was so ironic that I couldn’t take the spokeswoman seriously. I kept imagining if Bac Ho’s bust came to life and started attacking the bourgeois factory owners and their lackeys. After that we went to the massive production line that took pure cotton and polyester and, through a long and capital-intensive process, spun the cotton into spools of thread. This part was interesting because there were only a few workers in the entire complex. Rather than workers laboring, we only heard the mind-numbingly-loud hum of the machines at work. We saw looms that apparently turned the threat into fabric, but we were unable to see that or the color dying part of the process. Next we went to the labor-intensive part of the process, the sewing room. I was blank-faced the entire time as nothing came as surprise to me. I also didn’t feel any worse than I normally do for these people. The fact that the vulgar Liberal hedonist First Worlder shop-a-holics felt “bad” for the workers angered me. Their lifestyle and existence is only made possible by this process. I’m just disappointed that the workers were friendly to us and waved and smiled, rather than trying to kill us as a slave kills his master.

Later in the day we went to a Yamaha production plant. It was interesting to see the assembly line in person, but again I didn’t learn much. It was interesting, however, to see the difference between a Japanese factory and a domestic factory. Everything was highly modernized and the production line was streamlined and efficient. They claimed that the entire process is synchronized so that the precise amount of needed parts for each bike is made simultaneously.

One of the most distasteful parts of the experience was having to hear the thoughts of the First Worlders that were with me. All of them without a doubt go through each day not even considering the fact that their environmentally-unsustainable standard of living exists, not because of their labor, but because of the stolen labor of Third Worlders. They rarely, if ever, think about how 25,000 children die a day from starvation and preventable diseases and that this situation was caused by the same system that affords them their decadent lifestyle. For them, the trip was like visiting a zoo or a museum- it is detached from their everyday lives. They refuse to see the connection between their parasitic existences as First Worlders and the exploitation and oppression of the majority of humanity in the Third World. As beneficiaries of the capitalist-imperialist system, it is not in their material interest to oppose the system as a whole, even if they outwardly express “sympathy” for the victims of ruthless exploitation. It makes more sense that First Worlders would support the system, regardless of how distasteful it seems at times to them. After all, where would they be without their consumer goods, vulgar media, crude worldviews, and Liberal hedonism? They’ll find out when the JDPEN disburses them throughout the Third World, puts them to work, and watches them very closely.