Food for thought

The Toronto Star is examining clothing manufacturing and the retail sector in Canada. Retail is "a job where workers face low wages and part-time hours; it is the largest employment sector in the country; a business where many employers compete by cutting labour costs (only here, I ask); a growing part of the country's economic future." Capitalist apologists keep telling us that growing poverty of the working class was a mistake by Marx. As wealth to the capitalist class continues to soar, it seems Marx's analysis is getting harder to disprove.
The same series reported on Cambodia, a growing player in the garment--making world. Cambodia was touted as a model for fair labour practices. Right now that means starting work at 7am and sewing T-shirt sleeves until eight or nine at night, six days a week with one hour for lunch and sewing 950 shirts per day, with 25 cents extra for every one hundred shirts above that quota. With all that work, a young woman can expect to receive $130 per month. Now that's fair, by nineteenth century standards that capital hastens to reproduce wherever it can get away with it. John Ayers