Chapters 20, 21 and TAL

 The chapters of this week brought even more knowledge about globalization. Chapter 20 brings visions about China, and how important It is for the global economy, and especially because of its massive manufacturing centers, that produce tons and diverse goods.  Globalization helped China to increase its economy by allowing them to sell cheap labor, big factories and efficient production. China have a lot of gains with that specially because it’s giving more jobs to their population and allowing them to trade in the international economy. However, in the chapter we see that this situation also has its cons for the population, like exploitation of labor, environmental problems, and global dependence in Chinese production, which can become a problem for countries like US if they don’t want to deal with China anymore. They would be very endangered of losing products that they are in need for, factoring that they are dependent of, and all the things that China made it possible by being "sticky" as well. To end, the chapter shows us a China that is a central country in globalization and that does this thru manufacturing massively.

Chapter 21 talks about not a country but a company, and in this case Nike. To show how Nike and other companies works, the chapter uses the term "commodity chains", which means a network of labor, distribution and producing, to provide a final product to the buyers. The chapters talks about how Nike does not produce their own shoes, but they make their production in factories on countries that they can pay a much lower wage, and by that they can spend their money on design, marketing, and on their brand. The chapter shows us how Nike spends so much in the parts there are important to them, like their global image, but let their workers working in poor working conditions, sometimes not even being able to buy a Nike shoe (even with a month of work). This particular case is about Nike, but it shows how multinationals make profit from this commodity chains, while the countries that provide products have labor risks, and poor environments. We know that globalization can be a good thing, but when companies like Nike uses it only to make profit, ignoring their workers that are making their shoes and products, globalization stops being something good, and became something unequal and socially damaged.

Act2 of the TAL, puts these two chapters in one idea. It tells the history of Cambodia industry of garments, and how they tried to compete with the power of capitalism and had a hard time. In the early 2000s, Cambodia was very dependent of exports and enjoyed the special trade access that US gave them. They also wanted to protect their workers with labor laws like paying overtime, maternity leave... the basic things that make the workers humans. This brought a lot of people that wanted to work and grown the industry. Unfortunately, when this benefits ended, Cambodia could not compete with countries, like China, and it was not exclusively the only country to work with garments, but it was one that wanted to maintain the labor laws. Competing with countries that not necessarily care for their workers gave Cambodia a hard time because they had more costs than others, only by trying to respect rights. The David and Goliath analogy shows Cambodia being the David, having problems to fight the Goliath. Goliath being the global capitalism and these countries you cannot overpower if you want to respect rules and they don't.