"China Blue" Film Screening & Discussion

"China Blue" is San Francisco-based director Micha Peled’s cinéma-vérité exposition of the slave-like conditions of China ’s “floating population” of over a hundred million peasants driven to cities to look for work. It follows two teenage girls who sew blue jeans for foreign retailers like Wal-Mart. Their lives are typical of today’s hyper-exploited Chinese working class: 18-hour days, 7-day workweeks, and wages of 6 to 12¢ an hour, and fines of several days' pay for leaving the company dormitory and going to town. Human rights groups have said this is among the better factories in China! The film even captures the conditions getting so desperate that the workers threaten the boss with a strike (illegal in China), in the midst of a round-the-clock rush order for Wal-Mart, after going months without pay.

Afterwards we’ll discuss how the film makes the case for internationalism and working class solidarity along the entire Wal-Martized just-in-time supply chain, from the exploitative production on the shopfloors of China to the alienated consumption -- and benefit-less low-wage labor -- in the shopping malls of the U.S.

Sunday October 14, 10:00 a.m. to noon

The Institute for the Critical Study of Society
6501 Telegraph Avenue
Oakland

Wheelchair accessible