Metal Reviews

Thanks, guys. I have a job lead at University of Connecticut, and I might be writing an intro bio textbook with my dad. (Well, he will be writing it, and I will be forcing his writing to actually be good writing.)

I now officially have a Bachelor's degree.





Weird.

Asshole it hurts.

I managed to slice my lip open the second time I tried to save and it bled for like 3 hours lol

When I was eight, my i saw my five year old sister walk out of the bathroom holding a razer and she was bleeding from all over her mouth and when asked what she was doing she said she was shaveing her mustache. wierdest trip the the ER ever.

Im feeling sore and annoyed that i had to work in the bar at the AKON show.

Isn't that that rapper with the horribly vocoder-ed voice?

I'm sad. I got my hair cut. I miss my long hair

yes, I am now a broken shell of a man

My final exams are on and I'm not entering them. I'm going on holiday. YAAAY!


Hooray for irresponsibility!

I'm getting bored after doing loads of research for my MA dissertation. Academia is cool in a boring kind of way.

Now I'm off to make tea hooray.

I'm mourning my lack of money. Seriously, I'm flat broke. I have nothing.

I need to get a job-- at least over the summer so I won't be bored out of my mind.

yeah jobs or smoking weed are the best way to kill time during the summer

I figure a job would be more productive, y'know, cuz I'd actually be making money. :P



It's understandable. I became a broken shell of a man when I heard that "I Wanna Fuck You" song.

Go Canada Go!

yeah dawg

Whats your dissertation on?

Yeah but money is just a tool of Babylon to control you, man.

It's on industrial relations and organized labour under globalization. Basically I'm going to look at a "top-down" approach to improving working conditions is developing countries (i.e. directives laid down by international institutions like the International Labour Organization). Then I'll compare that to grass-roots trade union activism in developing countries, and try to determine which is a more successful means of improving working conditions, wages, rights etc of workers in those places.

I'm not sure if I'm going to concentrate on specific geographic areas, but good ones seem to be either Central America, or China. China's quite interesting, because the government prohibits any kind of independent trade unions, and you can see big Western companies like Reebok actually bowing to pressure from activist groups, and defying the Chinese authorities by allowing independent unions to work in their factories in secret. It's quite an interesting subject... I think it is at least

Damn Babylonians

Sounds interesting to me as well.
If Reebok is doing this secretly enough to not have the government of china beat down on it, then how do you know about it? Given i don't know much about the Chinnese Gov't but it seems like even a rumor of a company going against a prohibition like that would be enough to get them investigated and broken up.

Haha, I read that at the time and thought it was interesting, and it completely didn't occur to me to ask that question

Anyway, I think that basically the answer is that the Chinese government's commitment to attracting big Western companies into China outweighs their desire to enforce their anti-union legislation. Reebok has (I believe) a universal code of conduct that states that anyone affiliated with it must respect the right of workers to bargain collectively, so had the government investigated them and taken action regarding the ballot it would have effectively barred Reebok and most likely several other big companies (Levi's is another one that has the same rules) from importing from China.

Plus, the factories, whilst producing Reebok goods, were actually owned by investors from Taiwan- and that's another group of people that the Chinese government doesn't want to scare off.

Finally, I think they managed to make the unions independent- in that workers were allowed to elect who would lead them- they allowed the official Chinese trade union confederation (controlled by the govt.) to monitor them, and they then accepted it as an affiliate member once the union had been set up. The book I got this from was written in 2003, and I haven't found information on it anywhere else yet, so at the moment I can't say whether this affiliation with the official union confederation has stopped the Reebok union functioning properly over the last four years, but I guess it's probably quite likely that it has interfered quite a lot.