This is an old post that I originally had at another site, but while catching up on some reading, I was reminded by the power of the interviews we did last summer, the stories we began to tell, and the sense of respect I have for China's migrant workers

Earlier in the year while a few of my interns were inbetween assignments, I tasked them to get out of the office and do some street interviews. Now, executing street interviews was nothing new for them, but instead of taking out a video camera and asking questions to our typical targets, I wanted to push them outside their boundaries and speak to people whom they were more likely to walk right past on their way to work.

Migrants. Cooks. Sidewalk Seamstresses. DVD vendors. Pot Sticker vendors. Fruit vendors. Crane Operators. Bus Drivers.

It was a project I named Shanghai's 100 hardest jobs, which was (for the sake of full disclosure) inspired by the Discovery Channel program Dirty Jobs.

Initially, my interns were a bit skeptical, and were giving me the face of "he has gone crazy... again", but over the course of the next few weeks the first team completed about 30 interviews (2 more teams have since completed nearly 100 interviews), and were looking for more. In short, they were not only hooked, they were seeing a side of Shanghai that they never new existed.

... and they were Shanghaiese.

Reading through the interviews (we use the same questions for each), one is given a really humbling glimpse into the lives of these people and how hard they have it. People who are busting their humps day in and day out, and eating bitterness, for a common cause.

Hope and opportunity.

Cigarette Vendor - female from Henan

Q: Would you want your children to have this job?

A; No. My husband and I have this job/career because we lack of qualified education background. Letting them step on our old roads is the last thing I want to do. To my 14-year-old girl, I don’t have so many strings attached and just want her to live a happy life; as to my boy, I hope he can be a government official someday, a big name who has power (laugh).

Watermelon Vendor

Q: What do you want most right now?

A: We hope our boys can go to school in Shanghai. The education conditions are much better than we have in Linyi and we can take care of them while making a living here.

Hat Vendor

Q: If there was one thing you could change about your job, what would it be?

A: Change? It is such a luxury to me. How can I dream about changing my current status? I want to do my own business, like opening my own restaurant, but who will give me the money? I want to recruit and train my employees, but who will teach me how to manage or run my place? I dare not think of change. I guess my only hope is my son. He is the one can bring real changes.

Everything comes down to hope and opportunity

For the next generation.

One of the issues that brands entering China are coming to more fully apprecaite is the fact that as they transition from a export led model to one meant to capture the local Chinese market, the costs and risks of their supply chain are going to increase.  That unlike before, where a firm could compartmentalize and seperate the secrets of their supply chain, skeletons are being exposed at a far higher rate, and the costs of exposure are far higher.

It is the core message of my recent article for Supply Chain Asia, and I encourage you to download the full 5 page article when you have the time.

When the news of another mining incedent occuring last week in China, it would come as no surprise to anyone the bakground of the mine, or the fact that mine managers had ignored clear signs of danger.  It was an event that sadly happens with enough frequency in China that there would be little question that news of corruption, greed, and failure to head safety guidelines would be at the top of the list.  That, in their greed, another illegal mine had once again put the profits of the mine before the miners themselves, and it cost lives. 

But when a nearly identical incident occured in West Virginia that very same week, it became clear that the problems China faces in cleaning up industry are not problems they face alone. Especially as news that the mine had been cited for hundreds of violations, and told to shut down on numerous occasions.

Yet it didn't

That in their short term interests to keep a mine open, and pay the relevant parties their relevant fines, the greater picture of the environmental and social costs were neither fully respected, nor planned for. Another sign to me of not only how difficult to enforce regulations and fines are, but how difficult it is to create systmes that cannot be exploited.

Working with the issues of CSR and sustainability, this is perhaps the goal that we should be achieving.  That, regardless of whether we would wish it to be true, the only way we are going to be able to solve problem is to focus not on how to convince human nature to be just, but to create systems that are able to remove the flexibility of human nature to exploit systems for greed.

That, knowing full well that mine owners are operating as a result of an economic system that we have created, that it is also dependent on the very economic of that system in order to survive. 

It is simply a matter of leadership.