Doing it on the cheap

If you've been reading along, you know that the college where I work is undergoing some major renovations. The progress made by the workers is by turns impressive and frightening. Impressive because they labor under really substandard conditions (e.g., they work in flip flops; most labor is done by hand; no protective gear of any sort is used; scaffolding often consists of little more than a rope and a board, a swing, really) and they still manage to build giant buildings. But it's frightening because -- perhaps not surprisingly -- the quality of their work sometimes suffers.

Like this:




This is part of the building that was built a year ago. As you can see from the photo, part of ledge has crumbled away (this is on the 4th floor), and by way of patching it, the workers have jammed some sort of concrete coated paper into the hole.

We are learning very quickly that these kind of dangerous and makeshift working conditions extend to almost every part of life here. For example, D was on campus earlier today and watched a team of worker clean the floor with gasoline [edited] some kind of yellow paste that when rubbed, turned into a liquid and then into a gas. They were on their hands and knees, using rags, with no masks or gloves or anything. He said that the air was so toxic that you could smell it a mile away.

We've also watched people smoking cigarettes while working with propane, oil, and gasoline. And I've ridden on buses that have doors that won't close. I could go on and on. These are just common examples. [Clearly there are unsafe working conditions in the U.S. But they're not as out in the open, not as taken for granted. No one here even notices this stuff. It's just business as usual.]

There's a tension in this country right now -- a tension between fast growth (lots of stuff being built, a new middle class coming into being) and the desire to do things as cheaply as possible. This is, of course, the driving force behind capitalism, and it's being played out to the extreme here. It really makes me willing to pay more -- a lot more -- for quality made goods that are produced by adequately compensated workers.

What's really disheartening is that the U.S. is following in this path, too. It used to be that "made in the U.S.A." meant something good. Now it probably means that the item was made in some sweatshop by 10 year-olds.