Thirty-one men rescued who were held as slaves in Chinese factory

From the BBC:

The picture with the article breaks my heart. I wish the factory owners a lifetime of dragging hot bricks twenty hours a day, on only water and bread, and be killed with a hammer when they are too old. And I want to find some relief bankaccount where I can donate some money for these poor men. There’s no limit to how cruel people can be. Thank God these men at least have been rescued.

I cannot think of a punishment evil enough for the people who put these men through that…but I hope the Chinese authorities can think of something - perhaps a torture involving water?

On the one hand, I commend the Chinese for discovering this horrible situation and freeing the men. On the other hand, I wonder if there are a lot more places like this that might continue to operate, given the correct bribes to the correct authorities.

Then again - you read about this stuff happening all over the world - in the USA or Africa and Europe…sadly, human cruelty and slave labor is without borders.

The poor blighters. :frowning: Hope they chuck the book at that guy who owned the place.

That’s indescribably fucked up- I’m glad the men have been freed and will get their back wages, though.

On another note, did anyone else see the article linked from the one in the OP?

Wish I had my own Cargo Cult, mutter mutter…

I am annoyed at my own annoyance, but Martini, why the lightheartedness only three posts in this thread?

It may be a cultural thing, but I feel that what has been done to these men is just as awful as it would have been if children had been kidnapped and tortured and exploited for a year. Just because these men were adults doesn’t make their suffering any less awful; if anything it makes it worse. These men are fully aware of their suffering, while kids can make up a fantasy; they were just as helpless as kids are; and they also had families worried sick about them.

Link doesn’t work for me, but if it makes anyone feel better, someone responsible will probably get a bullet in the back of the head. The local party secretary gets held responsible more often than one would normally expect and may in this case.

There are plenty of human rights abuses in China, but egrarious behavior such as this usually ends up with pretty swift justice when someone high enough the justice chain finds out about it.

The juxtaposition between this horrible outrage and the BBC linking at the end of the article to a report on Prince Philip having his own Cargo Cult is (to me, at least) incredibly amusing, especially if you know anything about Prince Philip and his somewhat colourful turns of phrase.

I guess I’m just an absurdist like that.

None of this should detract from the ghastliness of what those men have suffered, however.

Hmmm…from Proletarian Revolution 24/7 to Corporate Slave Labor, in 15 years.

Then again, China has been/was one big slave labor camp for a long time.

That is really horrifying. It’s scary to think about how much brutality still occurs around the world in this day and age.

Well, if nothing else, it’d be worthwhile to look into donating to a human rights organization in their honor, at least in the hope that someone else can be spared from enduring this sort of treatment.

Sometimes people really suck donkey balls :frowning:

Very terrible, but at least these men were saved and hopefully the guilty parties will get whats coming to them.

Excuse me, wages? What about overtime, pain and suffering, compensation for what may be extensive physical and mental ailments?

Sorry, but a correct paycheck is the LEAST of what these poor guys should get.

Well, it’s certainly a decent start. Hopefully there’s help for them and their nasty, nasty trauma.

I don’t speak Chinese, but in Spain when someone says “las pagas debidas” (which would be translated into English as “wages owed”) that would mean including overtime, seniority, vacation comp et al. Could be the same with Chinese, that the concept is just not identical to your “wages”.

Way nasty. How bad off do you have to be to remember only your name?

I dunno, I am not suprised some people react to horrible news with humor. It’s not that we don’t feel the pain, it’s just that sometimes if you don’t laugh, you cry. For some of us, it’s a defence mechanism.

It makes a part of me weep inside to see another human treated so cruelly.
A bullet to the back of the perps who did this is far to kind, yet to treat them as they treated their own kind is inhumane.

I think the only course for justice is whomever is responsible should lose all their assets ( going to these men) and, in turn, become homeless themselves.

Then, maybe, they will learn compassion and humanity.

I’m trying to find an email for the writer of the article, Michael Bristow BBC Beijing News. Maybe he could do a follow up with some kind of info on donations to a humanintarian outfit that may be assisting them. So far, no luck.

I’m just always amazed at how anyone can be a slave in the 21st Century. I mean, you’d think that it just wouldn’t work, either from the slaves not being “willing” to go along with being slaves, or from people having gotten to the point of realizing how immoral such an action is, and thus not doing it to begin with. Obviously, that’s not the case.

Still, I gotta admit, if I could have a slave to empty the cats’ litter boxes, I’d probably have one. Don’t hit me.

More arrests made.

This is and has been front page news in China。 this will be made into a BIG example, and yes, I fully expect to see quite a few cases of capital punishment。

Just to explain a little bit, the victims are all probably from the impoverished countryside, didn‘t have cell phones and uneducated。 I’m guessing it started out with very long hours and bad conditions, and finally when even these poor ignorant peasants had enough then it turned real nasty。

These people maybe have one phone or mobile phone servicing their entire village。 They go to find work, their families don’t know their location as they move around, and probably didn‘t have the opportunity to get word back home when they got sucked into the trap。

Which, if they execute the ones directly responsible for this, will be a fitting punishment, IMHO.