Guest Comments by Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM)
HONG KONG -- The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) expects 86-million British pounds from the sales of London 2012 merchandise. Most such products involve the official mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville, and the British team mascot, Pride-the-Lion.
In 2008, LOCOG issued sustainable, ethical sourcing codes aiming to ensure that all products associated with it are produced under internationally acceptable social standards. On labor practices, the codes refer to provisions of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) Base Code, which spells out that workers should receive at least the minimum wage as specified in their national legal standards and have a contract defining terms of employment and payment. The ETI Code prohibits punitive fines and excessive working hours.
Regrettably, LOCOG has issued no lists detailing the firms that supply goods to the licensees. There have been no reports on compliance by these suppliers. Consumers remain in the dark about conditions in which the goods are produced.
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Recently, I spent a Sunday reading the famous, amusing book, Dog Gone Cat Case by Jay Scott Kanes. It was amusing for several reasons. I know the tiny location and also the author, who even, under a Lamma Island (Hong Kong) street lamp, signed the book for me. It also was amusing to get a picture of how much people really can love their pets. Probably my biggest objection is that the cats too often think and talk like humans and so don't see the world from cats' perspectives. (Denmark's Hans Christian Andersen is a complete master in seeing the world from any position, be it a one-legged tin-soldier, a fragment of glass or the odd head of a herring in the gutter.) I suggest that having “house cats", like the book's cat-fanciers, Rita and Wayne Tong, tends to be cruelty to animals. It was pleasing that the three youngsters found a way out of the house and that the Tongs never got to know about it. Maybe I've caught a factual mistake: on page 33, Kanes writes that “a toad... hopped extra high". In Denmark, and I believe elsewhere, toads crawl and leave the hopping to frogs. Am I right? As a fan of Charles Darwin, having read several of his books and hundreds of his letters, I'd like to correct Wayne's explanation of “survival of the fittest” on page 68. That expression doesn't always mean “being big and strong". It's about adapting to the environment and can just as well mean “growing” small.
Reader in Denmark
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ESCAPE FROM ASIA IN CRISIS (Part 1)
By Lily Bond
Editor's Note: Born in New Zealand, the author lives and teaches in Thailand. This is part of a work in progress that may become a future book. Although partly fictionalized, the story closely follows real-life experiences of two Asian immigrants.
Preface
By 1979, the New Zealand government and many others recognized a crisis in Asia. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees had languished for years at refugee camps in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. Seeing the need for a repatriation program, the United States, Canada, much of Europe, Australia and New Zealand began to allow groups of refugees to settle within their borders.
To help the Asians assimilate, New Zealand adopted a “pepper-pot policy” that sent families to small towns across the country. While the planners probably meant well, their grasp of Asian culture proved dismal. Imagine a family from a tropical climate and a place brimming with people arriving in a remote town of about 1,000 people nestled in the foothills of southern New Zealand. Within five years, most newcomers had left the outlying areas and migrated to bigger urban centers with better work prospects and where they found compatriots.
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