globalization

“We have to work too hard and I am always tired. It’s like being in the army. They make us stand still for hours. If we move, we are punished by being made to stand still for longer … We have to work overtime if we are told to and can only go back to the dormitories when our boss gives us permission … If they ask for overtime we must do it. After working 15 hours until 11:30 p.m., we feel so tired.”

Those are the worlds of a female employee at factory in China that manufactuers the iPod Nano. It’s from a investigative report published in the British paper The Mail on Sunday. (The Mail’s report isn’t available online but excerpts can be found at Salon, Macworld, and Ars Technica.)

Since I’ve devoted quite a bit of blog space this past week to the overall economic benefits of sweatshops, I thought it time for some balance.

It also comes at a particularly opportune time, since I’d been not-so-subtly hinting to David about wanting one for my birthday later this month.

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New York Times‘ columnist Nicholas Kristof also writes a blog, On the Ground, where he often responds to reader feedback and posts additional material that doesn’t make it into print. I often learn more from these items than the published essays.

Like Saturday’s note on this column about misguided efforts to close down sweatshops in Africa. (Since a subscription is now required to read it, I’ll post the gist of it here:)

Well-meaning American university students regularly campaign against sweatshops. But instead, anyone who cares about fighting poverty should campaign in favor of sweatshops, demanding that companies set up factories in Africa. If Africa could establish a clothing export industry, that would fight poverty far more effectively than any foreign aid program.

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We in the West mostly despise sweatshops as exploiters of the poor, while the poor themselves tend to see sweatshops as opportunities.

On a street here in the capital of Namibia, in the southwestern corner of Africa, I spoke to a group of young men who were trying to get hired as day laborers on construction sites.

“I come here every day,” said Naftal Shaanika, a 20-year-old. “I actually find work only about once a week.”

Mr. Shaanika and the other young men noted that the construction jobs were dangerous and arduous, and that they would vastly prefer steady jobs in, yes, sweatshops. Sure, sweatshop work is tedious, grueling and sometimes dangerous. But over all, sewing clothes is considerably less dangerous or arduous — or sweaty — than most alternatives in poor countries.

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There aren’t many things that would make me wish I were still in college, but this is one of them.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is offering to take a university student with him on a reporting trip to Africa.

We’ll visit schools, clinics and villages, perhaps chatting with presidents in their villas and Pygmies in the rain forest. The winner will write a Weblog for nytimes.com and prepare a video blog that will be shown on mtvU.

He’s doing this to make the point that students in the United States need a more international education. We grow up so ignorant about the world outside our borders. In an increasingly globalized economy, workers of the future need information about the customs, culture and attitudes of societies other than our own.

In many other countries, students take a “gap year” after graduating from high school to get this kind of unofficial education. It’s a year, I wish I’d taken when I had the time.

Traditionally, many young Britons, Irish, Australians and New Zealanders take a year to travel around the world on a shoestring, getting menial jobs when they run out of money. We should try to inculcate the custom of such a “gap year” in this country by offering university credit for such experiences. So here’s my proposal. Universities should grant a semester’s credit to any incoming freshman who has taken a gap year to travel around the world. In the longer term, universities should move to a three-year academic program, and require all students to live abroad for a fourth year. In that year, each student would ideally live for three months in each of four continents: Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe. A student might, for example, start off teaching English and studying Latin American history in Ecuador, then learn Chinese intensively in Chengdu, then work at an AIDS clinic in Botswana while reading African literature on the side, and finish up by studying Islamic history in Istanbul. In each place, the students would live with local families.

Since I was a teenager I have wanted to live abroad — to experience a culture and life radically different than the one I was familiar with. In college, I considered studying in Spain, but different circumstances intervened and I never took the opportunity. I also toyed with joining the Peace Corps, but compelled by the need to earn a living, different choices seemed to make more sense, to be “safer.”

As a fledgling reporter, I remember interviewing a university professor who regaled me with tales of bargaining with rug merchants in Ankara and buying beautiful saris in India. I remember thinking wistfully that I’d never have the opportunity to drink tea in Thailand, the way that she had.

As time went on, I consoled myself with the idea that one day, maybe after I retired, I could join the Peace Corps or take an extended trip to live abroad. I’m really grateful that fate has intervened and pulled me out of the path I thought I was on, sending me packing to Asia while I am young enough to appreciate it.

It’s not that I think there’s so much wrong with my own culture that I have to get away from it. I just think that you learn more about your own history and beliefs when you can look at them from the outside. I also expect to learn more about the world and about people, than what I can experience from my own small part of it.

Recently, Jodi over at The Asia Pages has written about her experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Krygyzstan and how it opened her eyes to how narrowly people view cultures other than their own.

Sometimes I’d find myself shocked at what the Kyrgyz didn’t know about the United States and the life I lived there.

What? You know who Mike Tyson is but not Michael Jordan? You’ve never heard of nachos, tacos or enchiladas? You’ve never seen an escalator before? You’ve never been in an airplane?

Eventually I learned. The world may seem to revolve around the United States yet at the same time, it does not. And things that were obvious to me were completely foreign and abstract to some. It came as a shock at first but over time, I got the message: There is a world beyond the US of A.

It’s a lesson that I think too few people ever learn.

*Title of the famous book by Maya Angelou.