A Response to Maersk’s January Statement
Maersk’s statement begins by reiterating its supposed “high standards” regarding the working conditions and environment at the Dongguan plant. Unfortunately the opposite is true. In certain sense Dongguan Maersk’s working conditions are worse than others. It has an employee handbook that contains 73 penalty clauses, many of them seriously violating basic human and labour rights as stipulated by both ILO conventions and Chinese laws. Our investigation suggests that CIMC (China International Marine Containers (Group) Co. Ltd) plant in Xinhui (hereafter Xinhui CIMC), which is also container manufacturer and business partner of Dongguan Maersk, has an employee handbook (2006 version) containing only19 penalty clauses and none of them explicitly violate basic human and labour rights. We are not sure if the Xinhui CIMC has any internal and confidential penalty clauses, unknown to us, that are as bad as Dongguan Maersk’s. We welcome any correction here. We are, however, very much sure that in Dongguan Maersk, the barrack like factory regime goes from bad to worse. Just compare the 2006 version of Dongguan Maersk’s employee handbook with the 2008 version. One will immediately find out that whereas the former “only” contains 52 penalty clauses, the management found it necessary, after two strikes which reveal the depth of workers’ discontent, to further increase the number to 73! The parts the new managing director has added include the clause on penalizing workers for not queuing up properly in the canteen or failing to put back used utensils.
Globalization Monitor
2009/03/30