Workplace: The World trade as woven in Guangzhou : printer friendly version The Workplace: World trade as woven in Guangzhou By Thomas Fuller International Herald Tribune Wednesday, March 23, 2005 GUANGZHOU, China Workers in a warehouse here move their arms so quickly they blur like helicopter blades. They twist and weave dried willow branches and clip the loose ends, creating sturdy baskets. The boss pays them the equivalent of 23 cents for each one, a small fraction of what the final products sell for in the United States but a decent wage that can amount to about $100 a month for a skilled basket weaver. With Easter Sunday just a few days away, thousands of similar baskets are being sold around the world this week, and many of them are made in China by companies like the one tucked away on a small dead-end street here. "Made in China" became a ubiquitous phrase years ago, but in a world where global trade is so efficiently impersonal most of us would still be stumped by the question "made by whom?" So here in a very abbreviated way is a little slice of globalization, the story of a small basket-weaving company in China whose wares are ultimately sold in places as far apart as shopping malls in the United States and department stores in South Korea. The employees here work to the frenetic rhythms of southeast China, where container trucks clog the highways and clothing is stitched in the most improbable nooks. Yang Da Yuan, a wiry and taciturn middle-aged son of farmers, founded Anhui Funan Mei Yan Willow Arts & Crafts about 15 years ago. His business is different from the huge, foreign-owned factory complexes that line the main roads around Guangzhou. Most of those factories have dormitories for the hundreds of thousands of young migrant workers who travel from the Chinese interior. Yang outsources most of his production: The baskets are made in Anhui Province, west of Shanghai, by farmers who weave in their spare time and in their own homes. He treats the farmers like freelancers, the ultimate flexible labor force. They are paid by the piece, and during the Christmas rush, which takes place in October because of the time it takes to ship products to the West, Yang asks his network of hundred several farmers to step up production. As long as it is not planting season or the harvest, they are usually available, he said. The company also has about a dozen basket weavers here in Guangzhou,
northwest of Hong Kong. The workers sit on stools or wooden chairs in a dimly lit area of the pitched-roof warehouse, the concrete floor strewn with willow branches. They silently manipulate the willow, stack the finished products behind them and only casually look up when the boss walks by. Most of the baskets they make are samples for clients.
Yang shows me a dusty fax machine in the office near the busy basket weavers. This is the font of prosperity for the company, where orders arrive directly from foreign retail chains. To avoid confusion over language - no one at the company speaks English - each order has a picture of the type of basket next to the quantity and price. It is too late for the batches made this week to be sold as Easter baskets, so they will be displayed as food baskets or filled with other products and marketed with gift sets. Yang is originally from Anhui, so Guangzhou is a foreign city to him. He navigates the streets of this sprawling, polluted metropolis with the wide eyes of a first-time visitor. Yet on one topic - price - he has a more cosmopolitan vision. "We are much cheaper than Indonesia...