Striking the Bargain: U.S. Production in China
‘Made in China’. How many times have you picked up a product, looked at the label, and found those three words? Lately, America has been driving itself into debt and monetary problems. The war in Iraq is causing troubles financially, and the big companies getting bail-out money, that they then use for useless things like private jets and huge raises for the employees that are on the top of the heap and then coming back and asking for more money is just parasitic. Some of those monetary problems are caused by over usage of production in China. But if enough people write into our government to voice their opinion, we might end that.
In this economy, our country is paying too much to have China, whom we have had problems with before, to produce more than 50% of our so-called ‘American-made’ products. I am against continuation of U.S. goods made in China because we have too many financial problems anyway, so we don’t need to pay another country 2.2 trillion dollars to make many of our goods that come into our house. There has been lead poisoning and disease from children’s toys, and pet food containing deadly melamine, shipped from China to the U.S., so I ask: is it really worth it? The New York Times issued a story in 2007 revealing toxic toothpaste that could cause internal damage in children and people with kidney or liver disease. And it isn’t just the United States that was affected. The U.S. was the 7thcountry to find toxic contamination in the toothpaste. The poison, diethylene glycol, was sweet and syrupy, and was found in ten different brands of Chinese toothpaste. The poison wasn’t even listed on the label of the oral hygiene product. Federal health official called the poisonous toothpaste “an important public safety issue”. The contaminated toothpaste was found in stores in Miami, Los Angeles, and parts of Puerto Rico. Toothpaste from China makes for 3.3 million dollars in the 2 billion dollar American market. “The scope of this is fairly small when you look at all the toothpaste that is consumed in the U.S.” said Doug Arbesfeld, an agency spokesman when he was interviewed by the New York Times. This problem alone should show how dangerous it is to import Chinese products. Many sicknesses were reported from people using the recalled toothpaste, but no deaths were reported.
Some of the pros of ceasing to depend on China for mass production are that we will become more dependant on ourselves, it will open up more job opportunities, it will stop our paying over 2 trillion dollars to a foreign country, and it will make it easier to check the quality of our products. I mean, you can’t just check a Chinese shipment, deny it, and paint on it ‘Return to Sender’. It will still cost money to refuel the ship for the trip back. Some of the cons, though, I admit, will be to construct on more land, costing money, take jobs away from China, who has 2.1 billion people living there, and it will lessen the communication and trust between China and the United States. I can see how there would be problems with this. It would decrease the amount of space that we would have for farming and development, and might cause more problems for the environment. We would have to heavily support the country’s national parks like Wrangell-St. Elias and Yellowstone.
But, to the Chinese job loss mentioned earlier, it was found that most of the products made in China to be shipped to big companies like Wal-Mart and K-Mart were made in Chinese sweatshops, which worked their employees, including boys as young as 12, for 100 hours a week, and paying them 26 cents per hour, half the legal minimum pay in China. This means the employees will earn themselves only $26 a week, which is only $1248 a year. I ask you, would you work on a very tedious and demanding task that could cause injury for only $104 a month? So, the company pays employees, let’s say, 8000 employees, 1240 dollars a year, when 30 billion toys were shipped to America last year, netting about 200 billion dollars, minus $9984000 for paying workers, leaving around 191 billion dollars, minus, say, really expensive fuel for the ship holding all those toys, coming up to 10 billion for that year, leaving around $181 billion, minus 500 million for their building, so close to 179 billion dollars. Now, don’t you think that they could give their employees a bit more pay? Even if they only got 100 billion dollars, they’d still have about 79 billion dollars, more than enough.
Now, I acknowledge that production in China leads to more jobs there and more products here, but considering our current state, and the state of companies owning sweatshops in China, it would be a better idea to cut the production of American products that we use in our homes and businesses. Even if China has 3x the production of America, the U.S.A. was founded to stop the oppression of England taxing us for luxuries. How is this any different from that? We could have a San Francisco Cleaning Solution and Ornament Party, but that would pollute the seas. Oh, which is another thing- we are damaging the environment and the seas by getting overseas shipments, all the oil accidentally going into the seas, the smoke going into the skies. This is a situation we have to get out of.
We can be our own country. We don’t need to have such an amount of dependency on other countries to be the country we are now- the Fire of the West. Write into our capital to speak up against this. Think of our country, the environment, and the benefits. We can make a difference in our country, and all it takes is for you to speak up and inspire others. Then we can make a change.
Special thanks to the New York Times for all the information I got from their website.
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