NEW YORK CITY — Stephanie Wilson was reaching for a receipt inside a paper shopping bag from Saks Fifth Avenue when she found a letter pleading, “HELP HELP HELP.”
The note, which Wilson found after buying a pair of Hunter rain boots at Saks in September 2012, was signed Tohnain Emmanuel Njong and was accompanied by a small passport-photo sized color picture of a man in an orange jacket, she said.
The letter, which also included a Yahoo email address on the back, triggered a hunt for the whereabouts of the mystery man.
Wilson showed the missive to the Laogai Research Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group founded to fight human rights abuses in Chinese prisons. The nonprofit foundation began investigating using its contacts on the ground as well as online, a representative confirmed to DNAinfo New York.
But when Njong’s Yahoo email address bounced back, the nonprofit was unable to locate him.
Harry Wu, the founder of Laogai Research Foundation, spent 19 years in a Chinese prison factory, known as laogai. He said he took steps to verify the letter and believes that Njong took a huge risk in writing and sending it.
“There would be solitary confinement until you confess and maybe later they increase your sentence — or even death,” Wu said.
His organization referred the letter to the Department of Homeland Security, which investigates allegations of American companies using forced labor to make their products.
Homeland Security officials confirmed to DNAinfo that they were made aware of the letter, but could not say if they investigated it or are currently looking at Saks in connection to it. They also could not discuss Wilson’s claim that DHS agents interviewed her in June 2013.
But a DHS official said it’s not the first report of a cry for help letter from China ending up on American shores.
According to DHS senior policy adviser Kenneth Kennedy, the department was made aware of a woman in Oregon who made international news in 2012 when she discovered a similar letter detailing abuse and grueling labor in a Chinese prison when it fell from a Halloween decoration she’d bought at Kmart.
The Oregon letter was anonymous, though The New York Times later tracked down the man who said he wrote it.
A representative for Saks Fifth Avenue confirmed that the store was notified of the letter by the Laogai Research Foundation in December 2013 and said the company took the allegation seriously and launched an investigation, according to Tiffany Bourre, spokeswoman for Hudson’s Bay Company, which took a controlling stake in the famous department store last December.
Bourre said Saks does have its paper shopping bags made in China, but the company was unable to determine the specific origin of the bag that contained Njong’s letter and photo.
Hudson’s Bay Company is currently in the process of ensuring all vendors meet the new company’s standards on workers’ rights, Bourre added.
“HBC has a rigorous social compliance program that outlines our zero tolerance policy, which includes forced labor,” she said.
Two U.S. laws make it illegal for products made using slave, convict or indentured labor to be imported into the United States, according to Kennedy. However investigations are difficult with DHS required to prove how much a company knew about its own supply chain.
“Was there actual knowledge [of slave, convict or indentured labor?] Or was there knowledge that they avoided knowing or seeing?” Kennedy said. “All that plays into the investigation.”
A legal clause known as the consumptive demand exemption, which Kennedy referred to as “the Achilles heel of these laws,” can also greenlight imports regardless of the type of labor used if domestic consumption cannot be met otherwise.
In recent weeks, using the now-inactive email address and social media accounts, DNAinfo located a man who said he wrote the letter that Wilson found.
In a two-hour phone interview, a man who identified himself as Njong said he wrote the letter during his three-year prison sentence in the eastern city of Qingdao, Shandong Province.
Unprompted, Njong described obscure details in the letter, like its mention of Samuel Eto’o, a professional soccer player on English premiere league team Chelsea, who like Njong is from Cameroon in West Africa.
He added that he wrote a total of five letters while he was behind bars — some in French that he hid in bags labeled with French words, and others in English, he said.
Njong, who is now 34, said he had been teaching English in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen when he was arrested in May 2011 and charged with fraud, a crime he said he never committed.
He said he was held in a detention center for 10 months while awaiting a government-sponsored lawyer, who represented him at his court trial and sentencing. He said he was barred from contact with the outside community.
Njong’s arrest and imprisonment were confirmed by his legal aid lawyer in China, whose name DNAinfo is withholding for the lawyer’s protection.
Embassies for Cameroon in Beijing and Washington did not return emails or calls for comment. The Chinese embassy in New York did not respond to requests for comment.
Njong said he was imprisoned in the eastern city of Qingdao, Shandong Province, where he was forced to work long days in a factory, starting at 6 a.m. and continuing as late as 10 p.m. He sometimes made paper shopping bags like the one from Saks, while other times he assembled electronics or sewed garments.
Each prisoner was required to meet a daily production quota, Njong said. He said he and the other convicts were given a pen and paper to record their productivity — and that he used that pen and paper to secretly write his letters.
“We were being monitored all the time,” Njong said. “I got under my bed cover and I wrote it so nobody could see that I was writing anything.”
He said he hoped the letter would help lead someone to him.
“Maybe this bag could go somewhere and they find this letter and they can let my family k
now or anybody [know] that I am in prison,” explained Njong.
Njong said he was discharged from prison in December 2013 — he received a reduced sentence for good behavior — and was put on a plane back to Cameroon, where he reunited with relatives who had no idea what had happened to him and had believed him to be dead, he said.
After struggling to find work in his home country, Njong recently moved to Dubai and secured a job that will allow him to stay there.
He said that though his imprisonment ran its course without intervention, he was happy that his letter made its way into at least one person’s hands.
“It was the biggest surprise of my life,” said Njong. “I am just happy that someone heard my cry.”
Wilson, who has never spoken to Njong, said she thinks about his plea for help all the time. She had always been mindful of the products she purchased and where they were made in a bid to avoid sweatshop labor, but she never thought to worry about generic products like shopping bags.
Wilson has worked for the nonprofit Social Accountability International for the last four years.
“This has been the biggest eye-opener for me,” Wilson said. “I have never once thought about the people making my shopping bag or other consumable products like the packaging of the food I buy, or the pen I write with or the plastic fork I eat my lunch with.”
U.S. Economy Adds 288,000 Jobs in April; Jobless Rate falls to 6.3%
in Economy/by MAM Team“It’s just what the doctor ordered in terms of a further piece of confirmation that the winter was abnormal,” said Eric Lascelles, chief economist at RBC Global Asset Management. “We can just expect further economic normalization.”
Wall Street opened higher on the news, but the major U.S. indexes were mixed at mid-day. The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average inched into the red, while the broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was up slightly. The tech-heavy Nasdaq gained 0.2 percent.
The jobs report contained at least one ominous note. The nation’s workforce shrank by more than 800,000 workers in April, sending the labor force participation rate plummeting 0.4 percentage points to 62.8 percent. The Labor Department said most of that decline was due to fewer people joining the workforce.
“People are not giving up in the labor force,” U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez said in an interview. “That would be a fundamentally different diagnosis of where we are now.”
The number of re-entrants — people looking for a job after being out of the labor market — plunged by 417,000, the largest drop on record. New entrants declined by 126,000. Many high school and college students typically begin entering the job market in April, but the number of people younger than 25 in the workforce fell by 484,000. The participation rate for teens ages 16 to 19 hit the second-lowest level ever.
“I would actually say that this big drop in the unemployment rate is not consistent with a really robust labor market because that labor force participation rate did not rise, and the employment-to-population ratio is shockingly low,” said Tara Sinclair, an economics professor at George Washington University and economist at Indeed.com, one of the nation’s largest sites for job postings.
Another factor driving the smaller workforce could be the expiration of benefits for the long-term unemployed at the end of last year. To qualify for the payments, workers have to show they are looking for jobs. Without the incentive of unemployment benefits, many of them might have ended their search.
The U.S. Senate voted in April to extend unemployment benefits through May for workers who have been out of a job for six months or longer, but the measure faces a rocky road in the House. On Thursday, Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.), the bill’s sponsors, urged the House to move quickly.
“Emergency unemployment insurance is a lifeline for job seekers, and restoring it will strengthen the recovery by bolstering demand at a critical time,” Reed said.
April’s pickup in hiring also helps validate the Federal Reserve’s decision this week to continue scaling back its support for the recovery. The nation’s central bank is reducing its monthly bond purchases by $10 billion to $45 billion — about half the amount it was pumping into the economy every month last year. The Fed has tied its stimulus to the health of the labor market, and Friday’s data clearly show it is improving.
The construction industry provided one of the biggest boosts to job creation last month. The sector added 32,000 jobs, concentrated in heavy and civil engineering and residential building. Over the past year, it has hired 189,000 workers, with the bulk of those gains coming within the last six months.
The main hiring engine was the professional and business services sector, which created 75,000 net jobs. Retailers and bars and restaurants each added more than 30,000 jobs. The health care industry gained 19,000 positions.
China Could Overtake the U.S. as World’s No. 1 Economy This Year
in Economy/by MAM TeamThis day, of course, was always going to arrive. The ascent of China to the world’s No. 1 slot has been inevitable ever since the country embarked on its great quest for wealth in the 1980s. With a population heading toward 1.4 billion, the question has been when, not if, China will topple the U.S. from its lofty perch. Still, we can’t ignore the historic significance of that switch. The U.S. has been the globe’s unrivaled economic powerhouse for more than a century. The fact that China will replace the U.S. at the top is yet another signal of how economic and political clout is rapidly shifting to the East from the West.
That quickly gets everyone’s passions boiling over. To many Chinese, becoming No. 1 is vindication for what they feel has been two centuries of humiliation at the hands of an aggressive West and proof that its authoritarian, state-capitalist economic model is superior to the democratic, free-enterprise systems of the U.S. and Europe. In the U.S., losing the top spot is seen as a symbol of America’s decline on the world stage.
Yet we shouldn’t get ourselves too worked up. These new figures don’t mean as much as many people think. Leaving aside the obvious statistical questions the report raises about the value of GDP figures generally, where the U.S. and China rank misses the more important point: bigger isn’t necessarily better.
On the flip side, if the U.S. slips from its No. 1 position, it doesn’t spell doom. The U.S. still has a substantial lead in innovation, and its dominant position in many industries and sectors is not about to vanish. New York City will remain the world’s premier financial center, and the dollar will reign supreme on the world stage for some time to come. Still, wherever the U.S. ranks, its economy too is badly in need of reform. Better infrastructure, a smarter tax code, an improved education system and more determined efforts to close the income gap would also strengthen the economy’s foundation for growth.
America is Declining at the Same Warp Speed That's Minting Billionaires and Destroying the Middle Class
in Government/by MAM TeamFor the past three decades, the Republican Party has waged a dangerous assault on the very idea of public education. Tax cuts for the rich have been balanced with spending cuts to education. During the New Deal era of the 1940s to 1970s, public schools were the great leveler of America. They were our great achievement. It was universal education for all, but today it’s education for those fortunate enough to be born into wealthy families or live in wealthy school districts. The right’s strategy of defunding public education leaves parents with the option of sending their kids to a for-profit school or a theological school that teaches kids our ancestors kept dinosaurs as pets.
“What kind of future society the defectors from the public school rolls envision I cannot say. However, having spent some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo—a war-torn hellhole with one of those much coveted limited central governments, and, not coincidentally, a country in which fewer than half the school-age population goes to public school—I can say with certainty that I don’t want to live there,” writes Chuck Thompson in Better off Without Em.
Comparisons with the Democratic Republic of Congo are not that far-fetched given the results of a recent report by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which is the first comprehensive survey of the skills adults need to work in today’s world, in literacy, numeracy and technology proficiency. The results are terrifying. According to the report, 36 million American adults have low skills.
It gets worse. In two of the three categories tested, numeracy and technological proficiency, young Americans who are on the cusp of entering the workforce—ages 16 to 24—rank dead last, and is third from the bottom in numeracy for 16- to 65-year-olds.
The United States has a wide gap between its best performers and its worst performers. And it had the widest gap in scores between people with rich, educated parents and poor, undereducated parents, which is exactly what Third World countries look like, i.e. a highly educated super class at the top and a highly undereducated underclass at the bottom, with very little in the middle.
The report shows a relationship between inequalities in skills and inequality in income. “How literacy skills are distributed across a population also has significant implications on how economic and social outcomes are distributed within the society. If large proportions of adults have low reading and numeracy skills, introducing and disseminating productivity-improving technologies and work-organization practices can be hampered; that, in turn, will stall improvements in living standards,” write the authors of the report.
There is a defined correlation between literacy, numeracy and technology skills with jobs, rising wages and productivity, good health, and even civic participation and political engagement. Inequality of skills is closely correlated to inequality of income. In short, our education system is not meeting the demands of the new global environment, and the outlook is grim, given the Right’s solution is to further defund public education while ushering kids into private schools and Christian academies aka “segregation academies.” The Republican-controlled South is where you see the Right’s education strategy in action. “Inspired by home-school superstars such as Creation Museum founder Ken Ham, tens of thousands of other southern families have fled their public-school systems in order to soak their children in the anti-intellectual sitz bath of religious denial.” In other words, we’re dumb and getting dumber.
While charter schools aren’t unique to the South, conservative states tend to respond most enthusiastically to their message, which makes Republican-controlled states ground zero for the further degradation of public education. The U.S. will likely continue to poll like countries like Indonesia and Tanzania, rather than Japan and Sweden when it comes to meeting the demands of a global economy.
Despite their hype and profits, study after study show that kids in charter schools perform no better on achievement tests than kids in public schools. But the correlation between a strong public education system and social mobility is demonstrated clearly in the OECD report. A 2006 report by Michael A. McDaniel of Virginia Commonwealth University showed that states with higher estimated collective IQ have greater gross state product, citizens with better health, more effective state governments, and less violent crime. In other words, were we to invest more in public education, we’d be instantly more intelligent, healthy, safe, and financially sound.
“The principal force for convergence [of wealth] — the diffusion of knowledge — is only partly natural and spontaneous. It also depends in large part on educational policies,” writes Thomas Piketty in his 700-page bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century . In other words, if we really want to reduce inequality, and if we really want to be a global leader in the 21st century, we need to invest more into our education system, which requires the federal government to ensure the rich and the mega-corporations pay their share. But we need to act now.
Polo Ralph Lauren Clothing Line to be Made in Rochester
in American Made, Manufacturing & Sourcing/by MAM TeamUnder the contract with Polo Ralph Lauren, Hickey Freeman will manufacture the company’s “Blue Label” line of tailored suits and sport jackets. The work — which could lead to more Polo contracts for Hickey, Granovsky said — is expected to begin next month.
The deal will increase Hickey’s revenue by at least 10 percent, Schumer said.
Granovsky said the deal was worth about $1 million. He said there will be at least two other such contracts with major clothing labels in the coming weeks.
“There is stability now at Hickey Freeman,” Granovsky said.
Schumer said, “To be able to bring together two dynamic, trailblazing American clothing brands is a huge step forward for Hickey Freeman.”
Officials declined to provide details about the pending contracts, but said the additional work will help Hickey achieve its goal of full factory employment by 2015. The workforce now numbers 415.
Schumer said Hickey’s fortunes improved when Grano bought it in part because Grano also owns the Canadian high-end men’s clothier, Samuelsohn, and understands the importance of quality tailoring over quick returns on investments.
The new deal, and the stability Schumer and Granovsky cited, is in contrast to Hickey’s tumultuous business life over the past several years.
After longtime owner Hartmarx Corp. filed for bankruptcy in 2009, the British private equity firm Emerisque Brands and SKNL, an Indian clothing manufacturer, bought Hartmarx’s assets. Then the holding company they formed, HMX Acquisition Corp., itself filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
Months later, Authentic Brands Group LLC bought Hickey Freeman and turned running Hickey Freeman and sister clothier Hart Schaffner Marx over to W Diamond Group Corp., a private company created by HMX CEO Doug Williams and his wife.
W Diamond Group then sold the Hickey to Grano.
Granovsky said his company is committed to Rochester. “Hickey Freeman isn’t going anywhere,” he said.
The move to Hickey is part of Polo Ralph Lauren’s “Made in America” initiative whereby some of its production will be brought back to the United States, Schumer and Grano company officials said Monday.
The Blue Label brand has been manufactured in Italy. The deal and others to come could boost production and add up to 50 jobs in the next three years.
No one from Ralph Lauren attended Monday’s news conference at the factory on North Clinton Avenue in Rochester.
Granovsky said Lauren is bringing the jobs back from Italy because of the preference American shoppers have shown for products made in this country.
“When Ralph Lauren made the uniforms for the U.S. Olympic team, he became aware of the importance of American-made,” Granovsky said.
Lauren designed and made the uniforms and other clothing for the U.S. Winter Olympics team that competed this year in Sochi, Russia.
Photo Stencil Adds Manufacturing Plant in Golden, Colorado
in Uncategorized/by MAM TeamPhoto Stencil, LLC provides high-performance stencils, squeegee blades, thick film and metal mask screens, and tooling for the surface mount technology (SMT) assembly, solar, and semiconductor industries. Its innovations include the patented AMTX E-FAB® electroformed stencils, high-performance, proprietary NicAlloy™, NicAlloy-XT™, laser-cut, and chemetch stencils, and patented electroformed E-Blade® squeegee blade. Stencil design support and customer-specific design libraries are also provided. Founded in 1979, Photo Stencil is headquartered in Colorado Springs and has a manufacturing facility in Mexico. For more information follow us on www.Linkedin.com/company/Photo-Stencil-llc, visit www.photostencil.com, or email info@photostencil.com.
ContactsPhoto Stencil, LLC
Rachel Miller-Short, +1 719-304-4224
rshort@photostencil.com
Pentagon Sneaker Policy Could Give New Balance a Boost
in Uncategorized/by MAM TeamActing Deputy Secretary of Defense Christine Fox announced Friday that the Department of Defense will provide military recruits with American-made footwear, rather than giving stipends to buy shoes.
U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas, a Lowell Democrat, has estimated that the military had spent about $180 million on cash allowances for recruits to buy sneakers since 2002.
U.S. shoe makers and lawmakers from Maine, Massachusetts and Michigan lobbied for the change to preserve some of the country’s few remaining shoe plants. In 2012, Rep. Mike Michaud of Maine provided a pair of monogrammed New Balance sneakers to the president, urging him to require the Defense Department to follow a law requiring military personnel to wear U.S.-made clothing from head to toe.
Save Our Steel Jobs! #SOSJobs
in Uncategorized/by MAM TeamBut unless our government fully enforces the on-the-books rules, these companies might get away with their bad behavior – and that puts American jobs directly at risk.
So we’re going to do something about it!! Today, the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) is rallying with workers in Lorain, and we need you to stand with us … in person and online.Here are five steps you can take to help build a healthier manufacturing economy.
It’s going to take all of us, pulling together, to make sure these American workers have a fair shake in the global marketplace. But with your help, we can get this done. So take the five steps! Join us in Ohio via our livestream today! And we’ll keep it made in America.
Chicago-Area Manufacturing Grows at Fastest Pace Since October
in Uncategorized/by MAM TeamRising demand for durable goods such as automobiles and business equipment is driving gains in manufacturing, which makes up about 12 percent of the economy. Faster job creation would generate wage growth, accelerating the pace of consumer purchases and resulting in more orders for factories.
The median forecast of 49 economists surveyed by Bloomberg was 57. Estimates ranged from 54 to 60.5.
The national factory index, produced by Tempe, Arizona-based Institute for Supply Management, probably advanced to 54.2 this month from 53.7 in March, according to the Bloomberg survey median ahead of the May 1 release.
The report showed orders, production and employment all jumped this month compared with March.
To contact the reporter on this story: Shobhana Chandra in Washington at schandra1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Carlos Torres at ctorres2@bloomberg.net
Shopper Finds Prison Laborer's Cry For 'HELP' Inside Shopping Bag
in Uncategorized/by MAM Team“We are ill-treated and work like slaves for 13 hours every day producing these bags in bulk in the prison factory,” continued the letter, which was tucked into the bottom of the bag. It ended, “Thanks and sorry to bother you.”
“I read the letter and I just shook,” said Wilson, 28, an Australian who lives in West Harlem. “I could not believe what I was reading.”
The letter, which also included a Yahoo email address on the back, triggered a hunt for the whereabouts of the mystery man.
Wilson showed the missive to the Laogai Research Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group founded to fight human rights abuses in Chinese prisons. The nonprofit foundation began investigating using its contacts on the ground as well as online, a representative confirmed to DNAinfo New York.
But when Njong’s Yahoo email address bounced back, the nonprofit was unable to locate him.
Harry Wu, the founder of Laogai Research Foundation, spent 19 years in a Chinese prison factory, known as laogai. He said he took steps to verify the letter and believes that Njong took a huge risk in writing and sending it.
“There would be solitary confinement until you confess and maybe later they increase your sentence — or even death,” Wu said.
His organization referred the letter to the Department of Homeland Security, which investigates allegations of American companies using forced labor to make their products.
But a DHS official said it’s not the first report of a cry for help letter from China ending up on American shores.
According to DHS senior policy adviser Kenneth Kennedy, the department was made aware of a woman in Oregon who made international news in 2012 when she discovered a similar letter detailing abuse and grueling labor in a Chinese prison when it fell from a Halloween decoration she’d bought at Kmart.
The Oregon letter was anonymous, though The New York Times later tracked down the man who said he wrote it.
A representative for Saks Fifth Avenue confirmed that the store was notified of the letter by the Laogai Research Foundation in December 2013 and said the company took the allegation seriously and launched an investigation, according to Tiffany Bourre, spokeswoman for Hudson’s Bay Company, which took a controlling stake in the famous department store last December.
Bourre said Saks does have its paper shopping bags made in China, but the company was unable to determine the specific origin of the bag that contained Njong’s letter and photo.
Hudson’s Bay Company is currently in the process of ensuring all vendors meet the new company’s standards on workers’ rights, Bourre added.
“HBC has a rigorous social compliance program that outlines our zero tolerance policy, which includes forced labor,” she said.
Two U.S. laws make it illegal for products made using slave, convict or indentured labor to be imported into the United States, according to Kennedy. However investigations are difficult with DHS required to prove how much a company knew about its own supply chain.
“Was there actual knowledge [of slave, convict or indentured labor?] Or was there knowledge that they avoided knowing or seeing?” Kennedy said. “All that plays into the investigation.”
A legal clause known as the consumptive demand exemption, which Kennedy referred to as “the Achilles heel of these laws,” can also greenlight imports regardless of the type of labor used if domestic consumption cannot be met otherwise.
In recent weeks, using the now-inactive email address and social media accounts, DNAinfo located a man who said he wrote the letter that Wilson found.
In a two-hour phone interview, a man who identified himself as Njong said he wrote the letter during his three-year prison sentence in the eastern city of Qingdao, Shandong Province.
Unprompted, Njong described obscure details in the letter, like its mention of Samuel Eto’o, a professional soccer player on English premiere league team Chelsea, who like Njong is from Cameroon in West Africa.
He added that he wrote a total of five letters while he was behind bars — some in French that he hid in bags labeled with French words, and others in English, he said.
Njong, who is now 34, said he had been teaching English in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen when he was arrested in May 2011 and charged with fraud, a crime he said he never committed.
He said he was held in a detention center for 10 months while awaiting a government-sponsored lawyer, who represented him at his court trial and sentencing. He said he was barred from contact with the outside community.
Njong’s arrest and imprisonment were confirmed by his legal aid lawyer in China, whose name DNAinfo is withholding for the lawyer’s protection.
Embassies for Cameroon in Beijing and Washington did not return emails or calls for comment. The Chinese embassy in New York did not respond to requests for comment.
Njong said he was imprisoned in the eastern city of Qingdao, Shandong Province, where he was forced to work long days in a factory, starting at 6 a.m. and continuing as late as 10 p.m. He sometimes made paper shopping bags like the one from Saks, while other times he assembled electronics or sewed garments.
Each prisoner was required to meet a daily production quota, Njong said. He said he and the other convicts were given a pen and paper to record their productivity — and that he used that pen and paper to secretly write his letters.
“We were being monitored all the time,” Njong said. “I got under my bed cover and I wrote it so nobody could see that I was writing anything.”
He said he hoped the letter would help lead someone to him.
“Maybe this bag could go somewhere and they find this letter and they can let my family k
now or anybody [know] that I am in prison,” explained Njong.
Njong said he was discharged from prison in December 2013 — he received a reduced sentence for good behavior — and was put on a plane back to Cameroon, where he reunited with relatives who had no idea what had happened to him and had believed him to be dead, he said.
After struggling to find work in his home country, Njong recently moved to Dubai and secured a job that will allow him to stay there.
He said that though his imprisonment ran its course without intervention, he was happy that his letter made its way into at least one person’s hands.
“It was the biggest surprise of my life,” said Njong. “I am just happy that someone heard my cry.”
Wilson, who has never spoken to Njong, said she thinks about his plea for help all the time. She had always been mindful of the products she purchased and where they were made in a bid to avoid sweatshop labor, but she never thought to worry about generic products like shopping bags.
Wilson has worked for the nonprofit Social Accountability International for the last four years.
“This has been the biggest eye-opener for me,” Wilson said. “I have never once thought about the people making my shopping bag or other consumable products like the packaging of the food I buy, or the pen I write with or the plastic fork I eat my lunch with.”
U.S Manufacturing: U.S. Production Costs Catching Up With China
in News/by MAM TeamU.S. factories can make goods at the same cost or even cheaper than those made in Eastern Europe, according to a Boston Consulting Group report on Friday. And it is now less than 5% cheaper to make goods in China compared with the U.S.
Global shifts in manufacturing costs can be seen beyond America’s borders, the report said. Manufacturing in Mexico is more cost effective than in China, for example, while Brazil has become one of the most expensive manufacturing centers in the world.
These kinds of changes have prompted American businesses to rethink their supply chains in the aftermath of the global recession. Faced with rising wages in China and high oil prices, many are reconsidering the appeal of manufacturing close to home.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Apple Inc. are just some of the companies that have committed to manufacturing some of their products in the U.S.
But Hal Sirkin, a coauthor of the BCG report, said many firms are still making production decisions “on the basis of a decades-old worldview that is sorely out of date.”
“They still see North America and western Europe as high cost and Latin America, Eastern Europe and most of Asia — especially China, as low cost,” he said in a Friday statement. “In reality, there are now high- and low-cost countries in nearly every region of the world.”