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After Bloomberg reported on BYD’s situation in Brazil, public opinion at home and abroad has been in an uproar.

The situation is roughly like this: in Camacari, Bahia, Brazil, the Brazilian labor department found that on the construction site of the BYD factory under construction, more than 160 workers lived in very poor conditions, and their passports and wages were also withheld by the construction company.

The outsourced construction company that built the BYD factory is called ‘Goldman’. The workers live in four facilities. According to the Brazilians, the workers sleep on plank beds without mattresses, there is only one bathroom for 31 people, the working hours are too early, and sometimes they work seven days a week.

The Brazilians said that the workers have been rescued by the local authorities. But this living environment is shocking, precarious, and degrading, comparable to:

Slavery.

Due to the concise text and the particularly immersive pictures, foreign media were in an uproar, and they came out to criticize BYD one after another. Some even came out and said, are you going to compete with Tesla for the top spot like this?

When the news was transmitted back to China, it was already more comprehensive than Bloomberg’s, because Goldman employees showed their work and living environment on their video accounts.

According to this guy’s description, he works 8 hours a day and earns 13,000 yuan a month. They don’t need to be rescued at all. It’s the Brazilians who are playing tricks and want to drive them away and come to work themselves.

He said so, and Daxing has a sense of picture. The construction and building materials industry generally has local snake forces. Friends who have watched ‘The Knockout’ in detail all understand. Brazilians certainly understand too. BYD brought people from China to build factories. What can they say? They can only tell the labor department:

I want to eat fish.

At this point, domestic public opinion is completely divided. One side believes that BYD is losing face abroad. Even if they gave the workers high salaries, they still brought the 996 and ignored the living environment guarantee. As for this guy who came out and said that he was not enslaved, he is:

Unaware of being enslaved.

The other side believes that what’s wrong with this environment? Domestic construction sites are like this, and even some university dormitories are not as good as this, and they earn a lot of money, and the workers haven’t complained, so why are you making a fuss?

After two days of silence, Goldman Brazil branch and BYD’s public relations general manager Li Yunfei came forward. Goldman said that the local labor department’s inspections were frequent, and there were cultural differences involved. They kept asking leading questions, coupled with translation errors, so there was no enslavement and rescue at all, it was all a misunderstanding. If you don’t believe it, look at the videos and fingerprints taken by our employees.

It can be seen that the Brazilian labor department took the employees away from the construction sheds, infringing on their human rights and insulting their dignity. They were very angry, and the fingerprints were pressed so hard that they went through the paper.

Li Yunfei said it more directly. He said, if you want to frame someone, why not find an excuse! In the matter of smearing Chinese brands, smearing China, and attempting to undermine Sino-Brazilian friendship, he saw how relevant forces abroad maliciously associated and deliberately smeared, and how some domestic self-media:

Collaborated internally and externally.

Is it necessary to first stabilize the internal situation before dealing with external threats? Daxing remembers that BYD didn’t say that in Brazil.

In their statement, they said that they had severed cooperation with the relevant institutions and promised to “fully comply with Brazilian law.” They also said that they had conducted a “detailed review” of the working and living conditions of the subcontracted employees and repeatedly asked the construction company to improve.

It seems that they do know that working seven days a week is illegal, and they also know that those construction workers don’t live well, otherwise they wouldn’t have issued such a statement.

Li Yunfei is right about one thing. Bloomberg is always good at smearing, and they don’t even spare their own country’s leading companies.

Daxing remembers that they used a fishing expedition reporting method to expose the illegal activities involved in Apple’s supply chain in Indonesia, which caused frequent local mining accidents and environmental collapse, and finally caused Apple to lose face internationally.

Apple had investigated itself thoroughly at the time, and also completely changed some of the iPhone’s production processes.

Daxing sees that many media have analyzed this incident from why they didn’t use local Brazilian construction companies, how Chinese companies going abroad should learn lessons from it, how BYD solved labor disputes in Vietnam, and how foreign companies treat their employees, so I won’t go into details.

Daxing just wants to say one thing, don’t always think that someone wants to harm you, since you feel that you have no problem, then let everyone discuss it fully, the sky won’t fall.

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