Labor conditions now resemble those of 1840s Manchester.

Evidence

As the famous Marxian scholar David Harvey points out, an observer flying through time would be unable to see the difference between the working conditions in cotton mills of 1840s Manchester that Marx and Engels reported and in the Rana Plaza textile and apparel factory complex, twenty miles outside Dhaka in Bangladesh, which collapsed in 2013, killing 1,129 workers, mostly women, and wounding many more. Producing textiles and name-brand apparel for Western markets, the factories inside Rana Plaza were under constant pressure to cut costs for the benefit of Western consumers. The same could be said of the Foxconn production complexes in China, which produce most of Apple’s products and employ over seven hundred thousand people. A spate of worker suicides in 2011 at the Shenzhen factory—called “Foxconn City”—compelled Foxconn to install netting on the cramped company-provided living quarters of the migrant workers to capture anyone who jumped. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 131

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Industrial working conditions have not improved since 1840s Manchester — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 131