Sticking to the Union
Well, at least one country passed a law to protect migrant labor:
The Chinese legislature passed a law Friday to provide more protection to the millions of farm youths who leave home and become cheap labor in the factories and construction sites that have mushroomed in China’s booming economy.
The Standing Committee of the China People’s Congress, in approving the law, presented it as a bulwark against widespread abuses of the often-uneducated migrant workers, such as forced labor, withholding of pay and unwarranted dismissal. The country was alarmed two weeks ago, for example, by the discovery that hundreds of Chinese were forced to work in conditions resembling slavery at dozens of brick kilns in Shanxi province while local Communist Party officials did nothing to stop it.
China abandoned communism long ago—but the party apparatus has remained useful:
Laws and regulations have long been in place to protect workers. But as is frequently the case in China, the enforcement of the rules has often been frustrated by collusion between local entrepreneurs and party officials eager to promote economic development and supplement their own bank accounts.
China forbids independent labor unions. The official All China Federation of Trade Unions, tied to the same party bureaucrats, functions as an arm of the government — and thus of economic development — more than as a watchdog for workers.
Slave labor, one-party rule, no independent unions—not to mention creeping militarism and rampant counterfeiting—how is the government of China not one giant Tong running the whole country?