The Brazilian Ministry of Labor and Employment said they rescued more than 160 construction workers who were subjected to slavery.
They searched a total of five worker dormitories, four of which had problems.
The construction site belongs to the domestic car manufacturer BYD, and the construction contractor is Jinjiang Group.
According to photos released by Brazil, the dormitory conditions were poor, with an average of one toilet for every 30 people, and no separation of men and women. They ate and lived in the dormitory, and there was no laundry room.
There wasn’t even a kitchen, and all the food was prepared near the construction site, with a few tables casually set up as dining tables.
But as I see it, isn’t this just a case of wanting to find fault?
These conditions at least meet the average level of dormitory conditions for construction workers in China, who dares to claim it’s better than this?
Can this be called ‘slave labor’?
The statement also released some other evidence:
- Workers’ passports and most of their wages were withheld by the construction company, making it impossible for them to leave.
- Sometimes they needed to work 7 days a week.
- The food eaten the next day was already pre-prepared on the same day, and it wasn’t even refrigerated, but placed on the ground.
- Drinking water was not filtered.
- The factory did not have corresponding medical resources, and many workers could not receive timely treatment when they were sick…
The report said that when the Brazilian labor supervision saw the scene, they couldn’t help but shed tears and angrily denounced, “It’s not even as good as slaves”!
They also ordered the construction company to withdraw from Brazil as soon as possible.
But isn’t late payment of wages and holding passports the norm?
As for the water quality and catering, that’s not even an issue.
Brazilians are also too surprised.
Even construction workers are saying on Douyin that this is a conspiracy by Brazilians to steal their jobs, deliberately picking on them:
How to put it?
It can only be said that the world is not the same in terms of temperature. What seems ordinary to us is considered ‘slavery’ by them!
It can only be said that the life we think is not bad is, in the eyes of others, worse than pigs and dogs.
No wonder CPTPP put a series of accession standards, listing the independence of trade unions as the first item, and good labor life and work rights as hard requirements:
If we follow this Brazilian standard, not many of our domestic enterprises can meet the standards!
And in order to join the alliance, the official said it is conducting in-depth communication and exchanges with various members, actively promoting the joining process. And said that it will, through reform, aim to fully meet the CPTPP rule standards.
How can this be achieved?
On Forbes’ 2023 ‘Global Tax Burden Pain Index Ranking’, China continues to be the country with the heaviest tax burden among Asian economies, ranking third in the world.
And the corresponding welfare level ranks 76th among 149 countries and regions in the world, echoing Teacher Qin Hui’s saying, ‘Freedom decreases while welfare does not necessarily increase, welfare shrinks while freedom does not necessarily progress’.
Also, for employee wages, social security accounts for 40% of the total wages!
With so much taken away by hard taxes and social security, supporting 80 million public officials and hundreds of millions of retired elderly people, if enterprises don’t extend working hours and work themselves to death, where will the profits come from?
In other words, if enterprises all adopt the Western 8-hour work system, hardly any of them can survive!
Either reduce taxes, reduce the government’s share, and give it to the people and enterprises, allowing enterprises to shorten working hours and increase employee wages.
Now many places can’t pay wages, and there have been deaths in distant water fishing He died in ‘distant water fishing’, how can taxes be reduced?
In this case, we may not even meet the threshold of CPTPP, no wonder they refused to discuss it for the fifth time.
But this is not surprising. The 5-day work week, which we thought had been ‘since ancient times’, was also promised when we joined the WTO in 2001. Before that, we worked at least 5 and a half or 6 days a week.
If it weren’t for the constant pressure from foreigners, we might still be self-satisfied in the dream of ‘the Celestial Empire is rich in products and has everything, and does not need to borrow goods from foreign barbarians to trade’.
After a hundred years of slumber, foreigners have gradually awakened. I believe that in the process of joining CPTPP, our country can improve treatment and no longer let foreigners regard our workers as ‘slave labor’!
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