Update on PCC and China
In the last post, I mentioned that the Puget Consumers Co-Op began to boycott Chinese goods in 1996 in protest of conditions in Tibet.
I just went to their website and searched for the words "boycott China." I got the following message:
No matches were found for '(boycott or boycotted or boycotting or boycotter or boycotts) and china'
I did find one mention of Tibet - in an article on the origins of rhubarb.
I did a little more digging, and found out that the boycott of Chinese goods ended in 1999:
Members of Puget Consumers Cooperative have voted 52 percent to 48 percent to reject a boycott of China.
It is the second such vote at PCC, and reverses one taken three years ago. Of the 35,000 active members, about 8.5 percent voted this time, up from about 6 percent in 1996....
A group of members first proposed a China boycott in 1995. PCC's nine-member board of trustees, which is elected by co-op members, rejected the boycott.
The anti-China group took up a petition, which at PCC takes only 1 percent of members, and put the measure on the co-op's ballot. In May 1996, their proposal won a majority of votes. PCC removed Chinese garlic presses, wire whisks, pine nuts, cinnamon, medicinal herbs and other items from its shelves.
Co-op spokeswoman Bridgette Boudreau said members complained about the herbs. "So many of our shoppers count on those products for their health," she said.
Others objected to singling out China. "They were calling us hypocrites because we stopped carrying Chinese cinnamon and brought in Indonesian cinnamon," she said.
PCC's China boycott expired in May 1998. In its place, the co-op sent out questionnaires to 1,000 vendors, asking whether human rights were being observed in the supply chain....
It didn't satisfy the critics. A company boycott is "far more effective," wrote Dr. Heather Woods....Woods said PCC had to take its vendors at their word, and there was no way to verify statements about human rights in China....
The two sides disagreed whether the influence of business was good or bad. "The more money China makes, the worse it gets for human rights there," Woods wrote. Management argued that a boycott would hurt "pro-democracy entrepreneurs who are fueling positive change."
The trustees were officially neutral, but unlike the vote in 1996, management campaigned for a "no." "A boycott pre-empts your right to make informed choices," said management's pamphlet.
Under a boycott, it said, members "will be unable to purchase Chinese herbs important to their health, such as astragalus, dong quai, fo-ti, ginger and Siberian ginseng."
Woods argued that Chinese herbs were available from Taiwan and other sources, including the United States....
Buying stuff from Taiwan? Don't tell the International Labor Organization.
Taiwan should not be treated as a country, since its status is that of a province of the People's Republic of China. If in exceptional cases it has to be mentioned in an ILO publication or document it should be referred to as Taiwan, China.
So if you're a labor union member and are asked to boycott China because of its human rights abuses, do you boycott Taiwan too?
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