Mexico and China engage in sweatshop-worker exchange program
By ONANTZIN News
2015-12-14
Mexico City, Mexico -- In an effort to infuse the local sweatshop workforce with a jolt of creativity from foreign workers, Mexico and China have announced a deal that will enable them to swap sweatshop workers across a number of industries, including those in apparel, toys, and packaging.
The deal was finalized last weekend and will see the Chinese and the Mexicans exchange sweatshop workers on a one-for-one basis, with the exception of 10-12 year-old Mexican boys, who will be swapped for adult Chinese males, given both country's understanding that Mexico's proximity to the United States may encourage adult Chinese males to make a run for it across the border.
The move comes after years of stagnant production rates from sweatshops across China and Mexico, which have been losing business to sweatshops in Bangladesh, resulting in concerns among corporations that China and Mexico are no longer committed to bringing the best ounce of effort out of every employee.
Under normal circumstances, these concerns would have been handled by increasing the work day by a few hours and cutting lunch and bathroom breaks, but work-related accidents, fatal and non-fatal, are at an all-time high for both countries. In China, workdays are already 16 hours and lunch breaks have been reduced to 1 minute and 17 seconds (the time it takes to wolf down a burrito, if you really commit to it), which has caused employee confidence to sink from dismal to "just kill me please".
By adding diversity to their sweatshops, employers are hoping that the local workers will benefit from the expertise of the foreign workers. For example, Chinese employers are hoping that the incoming Mexican sweatshop workers can teach the Chinese how to put in a full day's work and then drown their sorrows with music and liquor, which would keep them in a perpetual state of poverty and make them more dependent on the sweatshop, thus raising productivity for fear of losing their jobs -- so the thinking goes.
On the other hand, Mexican corporations are looking for the Chinese to teach Mexicans how to interact better with their fellow workers and see each other as a tight-knit community so that they can ease up on the playful, yet personal and hurtful, insults between each other that result in demoralized workers, fights, and heavy, heavy drinking that renders the workers useless.
Transportation from country to country will be done with freight containers, those akin to the ones used to transport Southeast Asian immigrants; the logic being that there is no point in introducing them to a more comfortable setting, since doing so could significantly affect their state of mind, leading to depression after having experienced something positive.
If the gamble goes as planned, the benefits could be huge, but there are plenty of risks. The last time this was attempted between Mexico and El Salvador, the initiative proved disastrous as the Salvadorian sweatshop workers rioted and killed several Mexicans who kept pestering them and wouldn't shut up about El Salvador's soccer team being inferior to Mexico's.