Oh yeah,
It is currently fashionable to pick on the Chinese, but slipshod workmanship can be found in any country, not to mention doing the tech writing on the cheap.
Case in point: the
Bhopal tragedy may have been caused in part by the company's failure to publish technical manuals in any language other than English, in a country where that would be a second language
at best for most workers. There were other, absolutely inexcusable failures at work here. Half a million people were exposed, and it has been estimated that one person dies each day as a result of the exposure. If the Bhopal disaster had happened in the US, can anybody doubt the victims would have had their day in court?
I think it is perfectly legitimate to fault the Chinese for making dangerously cheap products, at the expense of the health of their workers. But didn't we do the same before OSHA (pre-1970)? And aren't we still doing it, when we eagerly snap up cheap imports, paid for by the blood of someone we don't know, halfway around the world?
Multinational trade agreements should consider worker safety. Some 20,000 Indians have died as a result of Bhopal, something that happened when I was 16; yet Union Carbide was an
American company!
