Child Labor, Soccer Balls, and Pakistan

The German magazine Der Spiegel has an interesting story on the effects of banning of child labor in the city of Sialkot, Pakistan--where many of the world's soccer balls are stitched together by hand. This passage highlights the complexities of the globalization of labor:

Parents now send their children to the brickworks and into metalworking companies where no one is worried about corporate image. The families need the money to survive. The local sports companies are aware of what's happened but they want to fulfil the wishes of their Western customers. After all, the people who spend a lot of money on footballs want to do so with a clear conscience. The customer in a sports retail outlet doesn't realize that young girls are now hauling bricks right next door to Danayal, the stitching factory.
"Ten or 12-year-olds were well off here," says one manager who asked not to be named. "They learned a trade here that secured them an income for life. Now we're having trouble finding new stitchers."

So banning child labor from the soccer ball trade gives us a clean conscience but fails to eliminate the problem? Do we give up trying to change things? Is there no alternative? These are the sorts of questions that a story like this raises. My argument (in chapter 5 of the book) is that the problems go even deeper -- to the idea that we divide work up globally and split up labor into pieces -- and that the solutions must be more than the simple idea of banning products produced under harsh conditions.

Why Rankings Only Tell You So Much

Well, it turns out that those of us living in Canton, Ohio are living in the 9th most miserable city in the U.S., according to Forbes magazine. While there is no denying that we are far from being an urban paradise, it's sad that such rankings might turn people away from a community that has actually been on the upswing. For example, we've had a revival of interest in new downtown restaurants and art galleries here. The Joseph Saxton Gallery has a world-class collection of prints from world-famous photographers, right here in Canton.

Their methodology

takes into account unemployment, taxes (both sales and income), commute times, violent crime and how its pro sports teams have fared over the past two years. We also factored in two indexes put together by Portland, Ore., researcher Bert Sperling that gauge weather and Superfund pollution sites. Lastly we considered corruption based on convictions of public officials in each area as tracked by the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice (Forbes.com).

Which means that the list is dominated by cities in the upper Midwest and Northeast regions, i.e., the Rust Belt, since we all have cold weather and high unemployment, due to manufacturing jobs leaving our areas. Northeast Ohio is further harmed by corruption and poor sports teams. At least Canton has low crime and short commuting times. New York and Chicago are also on the list, but they are considered highly desirable places to live.

In the end, we love living in Canton, and are growing more attached to the place every day.

Another Student Goes Global

I just heard from Matt Massie, a December graduate of Malone, who is spending a good chunk of this spring semester Amman, Jordan. You can follow him on his blog Living in Love in Jordan.

He's trying to practice a healthy form of globalization--the kind that many Christians have been practicing for over 2,000 years and that I highlight in chapter 10 of my book--in which both the global stranger and the local native benefit from mutual exchange. In his case, that means teaching English as a second language to Jordanians. He's curious to learn more about the Middle East and to share what he knows, and the students (one hopes) are curious to pick up some valuable English skills. This kind of exchange is how the Church has gone global since the Day of Pentecost.

I'm proud of Matt, just as I'm proud of many other students who go out to serve the church, their communities, and the world. Best wishes to Matt on his new journey!

A Review for Amazon?

So far I've talked to one person who's actually managed to finish the book. Would anybody who's read it care to post a review on the Amazon website?  I'll be happy to offer some kind of recognition here on this blog, or somewhere else. (Maybe a free gift copy?)

Thanks in advance!

Information Technology Speeding Donations to Haiti

This is a followup to my last post (touching on chapter 3 of the book), on the potentially positive sides of speeding up money flows. This applies to the Haiti situation in particular. The Red Cross is making it very easy to make donations (hopefully for the relief effort in Haiti and not for administrative costs). According to an email I just received from one of the listservs I'm on:

To help, text "HAITI" to "90999" and $10 will be sent to the Red Cross, charged to your cell phone bill. Please visit the U.S. Department of State's website to read up-to-date information and to learn about more ways to offer assistance at state.gov. Please share this message as widely as possible.

That's pretty slick and fast, so there's no surprise that people had donated millions of dollars to the Red Cross already (according to NPR this morning). The only problem is that relief supplies are facing bottlenecks. The airport is not only tiny (with one runway) but it also has structural damage. The main port facility at Port au-Prince has also been destroyed, so cargo ships can't dock there, and there's only one other port facility available, and it's small. One NPR reporter tried to get in with relief experts, but their flight was deleted to the Turks and Caicos Islands.

So all the money in the world won't help if they can't figure out a way to supplies in quickly. The whole situation is deeply disturbing. The infrastructure of an entire country has crumbled. It's a total collapse of everything: both physical and social institutions. Pray for Haiti.

Information Technology as Blessing?

In chapter 3 of the book, I attack the rise of information technology in financial matters. It's a bit strong to say that I argue that it is a curse, although I do think that ATMs, websites, online banking, and pay-at-the-pump credit card scanners contribute to serious problems in our lives. In general these technologies of finance speed up the world. More specifically, they contribute to three problems: depersonalization, arrogance, and abstraction:

• De-personalization or disconnection: our human relationships suffer the more we use money. In fact, we begin to use monetary values to measure the value of those relationships. We need to build communities and attach faces to what our money is doing.
• Arrogance: we begin to think that we're in control, and we can move our money around at will. We need to practice humility with our money.
• Abstraction: we forget what money really is and what it really is for. Electronic technologies contribute to a loss of tangibility about money, which is already an abstract thing to begin with. When all we see are numbers flitting in and out of electronic accounts, we get detached from the concrete realities in which those numbers are rooted. We need to practice concreteness with our money.

But I had a new thought today, as I went online to process gifts our kids chose to give to our denominational relief relief agency. Here I was, using slick web technology to make donations to specific causes with faces attached. The technology made it extremely easy to give money away--the same technology that erodes the virtues in us. It was slick, but for a good cause.

So if I could add a footnote to chapter 3, it would say something about how the church can also tap these technologies to begin moving its members toward a healthier way of living with money. I hesitate to say that such a faster, flatter world is a blessing, but I wouldn't hesitate to say that we can carefully and prudently use these technologies toward worthy ends from time to time. 

We're not subverting the system from within, but we are witnessing to a different way of handling money, a hopeful way, a loving way. 

Nation Team Soccer Players Go Missing: Migration in the News

One of the aspects of globalization that I talk about briefly in the book (in chapter 9) is the fact that so many people are moving out of their countries of origin, whether as economic migrants seeking a better life or as political refugees fleeing from oppression.

A 2005 UN study estimated that approximately 191 million people were living outside or the country in which they were born. If all those people were herded together into one country, they would make up the sixth largest country in the world by population, behind Brazil and ahead of Pakistan.

The small state of Eritrea illustrates the problems when people want to leave their country. Recently 12 members of their national soccer team disappeared after playing a match in Kenya and losing 4-0. (If they had won, would they have felt better about staying?)

Migration is a serious and often overlooked aspect of globalization, which is the process of increasing interconnection between peoples. People are moving around all over the world, for all kinds of reasons. Let's hope these guys from Eritrea can be united with their families some day (if they ever turn up).