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If the poor are truly blessed, then God must be
smiling on those Chinese workers forced to make crucifixes and other
religious articles while toiling in deplorable sweatshop conditions. A highly respected workers’-rights group, the
National Labor Committee, has documented the brutal sweatshop conditions at
the Junxingye factory in southern China. Here, young women workers —
many only teenagers — work from 8 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., seven days a
week, making Christian artifacts. They’re paid 26 cents an hour — less than
half of China’s miserly minimum wage. Out of this meager pay, workers
are docked for bad food and bunks in cramped, filthy dorms. This lowers
their pay to nine cents an hour — less than $10 a week. They get no
sick days, holidays, or maternity leave — and, ironically, they have
no religious rights. The National Labor Committee found crucifixes from
this factory being sold at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral
— for $29.95 apiece! The cathedral has now pulled these products from
its gift shops, which is an essential ethical step but barely a start. The
church must use its full moral authority and enormous purchasing power to
clean up China’s sweatshop factories engaged in religious commerce.
Far worse than any one gift shop is the Association
for Christian Retail — a consortium of some 2,000 religious stores
that do nearly $5 billion a year in sales of Christian products. Like
Wal-Mart, this profitable economic entity has shifted its manufacturing en
masse to China, yet it has not revealed the addresses of its factories,
much less the labor conditions in them. This is one association that should ask itself: What
would Jesus do? For information, call the National Labor Committee at
212-242-3002.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist, and author.
This article appears in Dec 27, 2007 – Jan 2, 2008.
