SESSION 27: EXERCISES FOR DISCUSSION AND FINAL TASK
2. EXERCISES FOR DISCUSSION
2.1 DISCUSSION: HERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS AND STATEMENTS WHICH YOU CAN THINK ABOUT AND TRY ASKING YOURSELF BEFORE YOU COME TO OUR DISCUSSION ON WEDNESDAY:
- What do you understand by 'Cheap labour practice'?
- Which part of the world is mostly involved in this type of labour?
- What do you know about the two companies APPLE and NIKE? Do they have a good reputation? Are they considered important companies? Would you associate Cheap Labour practice with these companies? Are they multinational companies? Are these companies American? Do you know where their factories are?
- Had you heard of FOXCONN before reading this text?
- Do you remember anything of what happened to NIKE in the 1990s and what was called 'Nike Moment'?
- Do you agree with Ines Kaempfer of the USA FLA who says that Apple is not necessarilly the worst and that it´s just the publicity that is starting to build up?
- Do you think it´s important that significant companies like Foxconn (Apple) should be intensely scrutinized in terms of workers´ conditions?
- Do you think that 'continuing reports of deaths and distress' are significant enough to state that there is a big problem in relation to the manufacturing of the company?
- What do you consider is 'fair and safe work environment'? Do you think it can be compatible with the type of military discipline existing in Far East companies like Foxconn?
- Working for six or seven days a week and for up to 14 hours a day is a threat to workers?
- Do you think that with the worldwide crisis we are having, our work conditions in Europe and America with get worse in the near future?
- What do you know about 'sweatshop' conditions?
- Why do you think workers in Foxconn factories are unsure the pay rises and overtime limits will cause much real change?
- What working conditions would European or American workers consider completely unacceptable?
PREPARING A DISCUSSION IS FUNDAMENTAL:
THIS MUST BE DONE IN TWO DIRECTIONS:
FIRST, YOU NEED TO LEARN NEW VOCABULARY AND EXPRESSIONS THAT YOU WILL HAVE TO USE FOR THE DISCUSSION.
SECONDLY, YOU HAVE TO PREPARE THE TOPIC BY LOOKING UP INFORMATION IN THE INTERNET, BOOKS, ENCYCLOPAEDIAS.
THIS WAY YOU WILL FEEL MUCH MORE CONFIDENT AND AT THE SAME TIME YOU WILL HAVE MUCH MORE TO TALK ABOUT IN THE ORAL SESSION.
FINAL TASK:
HERE IS ONE FINAL TASK THAT YOU MAY DO IN ORDER TO COVER THE FOUR SKILLS YOU SHOULD FOCUS ON WHEN LEARNING A LANGUAGE: LISTENING, READING, SPEAKING AND WRITING.
Write a composition and leave it in the blog as a comment to Session 27, I will edit it in the blog so that everybody can learn from other people´s opinions. Choose one of these two options:
- 'As Nations develop, wages rise and life theoretically gets better for everyone.' Express your opinion.
- How will the crisis affect our working conditions and labour rights?
Nowadays, we are suffering a deep crisis which is changing lots of rights we had got during the last decades. We have been used to living without economic problems and sometimes we are been living in a perfect imaginary world which has turned round to a strong real world recently. So we can wonder whether the crisis will change our working conditions and labour rights.
ReplyDeleteAs crisis begun in 2008, everybody thought it was going to be a temporal season of which we recover very quickly, so nobody gave importance to what was transformed in one of the most traumatic period of time in our recent history. Firstly, the crisis was suffered by no well prepared workers such as builder assistant and people who had not got a minimal qualification. Secondly, when building businesses stopped their activity, it led to increase a lot of unemployed all over the country. Hence, many of these workers have been without a job during this period of time.
In addition to this situation, the number of unemployed has topped 5.6 million last month. Moreover, a huge percentage of them have been without a job for a long time, so if they get a new job, they will not argue about their working conditions and labour rights. On the contrary, they will only be worried about not losing the job, because employers are ruthless and they only want to recover their last economic situation. On the other hand, not only unemployed are suffering the crisis but employed ones as well, since companies with the excuse of the crisis, have reduced wages, and besides, they do not pay overtime in order to avoid being made redundant the companies’ staff.
To sum up, in my opinion, this period of crisis is being used for many economic powers to establish new rules and new laws to cut down citizens’ rights, not only labour rights but health care, education, means of transport too . So we have to get used to starting from the beginning again.
Miguel Ruano
Once upon a time a scientist working on his lab sitting in front of his microscope studying how a type of bacteria behaved.
ReplyDeleteHe could see millions of those bacteria, always moving, trying to eat, to become more powerful, to reproduce themselves, etc. After many years studying them our scientist has been able to know almost everything of them, but he still has a question without answer, why did they behave in that way? Which was their goal?
Yes, a goal must exist because bacteria are always fighting, their life is a global fight and if one of them surrenders, then it starts to stay stiller and stiller until death, as if it knew that the battle is lost and it wasn’t worth to keep fighting and therefore to live.
Imagine you are part of big company in China working a routine job for fourteen hours a day, six o seven days a week, you are suffering every single minute just because you needs money to survive (to eat, to protect your children, to believe you are going to get a better life in the future) but there is a moment you realize your are not going to achieve any goal and your life will probably be the same o worst until you die, maybe in that moment you prefer to jump from the top of a high building and put an ending to this.