Will America finally grant its workers First Amendment rights?

The Constitution guarantees “freedom of speech,” the right to “peaceably assemble,” and the right to petition for “a redress of grievances.” Yet these civil rights are commonly denied to workers.

Sure, we can say what we want, but we pay a high price to speak — often losing our jobs, health care, and benefits for our families. But we pay an even higher price for not speaking.

In 2016, Kyaw Kyaw, 50, died on the job at Nishikawa Cooper, a manufacturer of auto parts in Fort Wayne, Indiana, leaving a grieving wife and family.

More than 100 of his coworkers — refugees and freedom fighters who fled Myanmar’s oppression — subsequently petitioned corporate headquarters over issues of discrimination, health, and safety.

Saw Eh Dah circulated the petition — and was then fired.

In 2018, Shacarra Hogue, a 23 year-old college student, was gruesomely crushed to death in a massive press on her fourth day on the job at Fort Wayne Plastics. Equipment manufacture safety restraints had been purposely removed.

Shacarra’s co-workers knew the job was dangerous but felt coerced to say nothing for fear of losing their jobs. Now many of her traumatized former coworkers commonly think, “If only I had said something.”

Deaths like these often go ignored unless family members and fellow workers fight back. Still, the best they often receive is a modest legal settlement — and a demand to sign a non-disclosure agreement to silence them.

This leaves other workers — and all of us — vulnerable.

Boeing workers in Renton, Washington were silenced when they tried to sound the alarm about the 737Max’s deadly safety problems. It took two crashes and 346 deaths before government and the media took an interest in the complaints of muzzled workers.

It’s been a big year in U.S.-China relations, and the conclusion of 2019 may or may not see the end of a trade war between the nations. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, charged with monitoring and investigating the national security implications of this bilateral economic relationship, has had plenty to keep an eye on.

Among a number of recommendations for congressional action in the Commission’s just-released annual report, several stand out in particular.

The Commission calls for Congress to address U.S. dependence on Chinese pharmaceuticals – an issue to which we’ve been paying close attention to for some time. Just this past month, Michael Wessel, who sits on the U.S.-China Commission, laid out in testimony before a House committee China’s plans to dominate America’s drug supply as a means of securing economic supremacy but also to potentially “weaponize its supply chain should it so choose.”   

The Commission’s 2019 report recommends that Congress continue to hold hearings exploring U.S. dependence on China’s pharmaceuticals. However, the commission is clear on the goal of these hearings: Legislation that requires the Food and Drug Administration to identify pharmaceuticals that are manufactured exclusively in China or formulated with the active pharmaceutical ingredients made in China, as well as an investigation to determine whether those drugs are manufactured with as much regulation as pharmaceuticals produced in America.

The Wall Street Journal has published a lengthy look at Amazon’s years-long effort to bring products directly from Chinese factories to me and you, the American consumer. How has this effort turned out?

Well, the title of the article is “Amazon’s Heavy Recruitment of Chinese Sellers Puts Consumers at Risk.” So … maybe good for The House That Jeff Built, but kinda bad for consumers!

This is another example of the Journal giving Amazon the business recently. Only a few weeks ago it reported that the company stubbornly lists for sale lots of clothing produced in Bangladeshi factories that even competitors like Walmart shun because of chronic violations of basic safety standards. And in August, the Journal detailed how little oversight the company has over the products sold on its platform, which results in “thousands of banned, unsafe or mislabeled products” floating around on there. The paper itself found more than 10,000 such items on the site between June and August.

And now comes today’s story. The paper reports that out of nearly 2,000 sellers of problematic items (whose addresses could be determined), more than half were based in China.

That’s the result of Amazon’s effort to “cut out the middleman” between Chinese manufacturers and America’s online shoppers.

That was the sales pitch an Amazon representative made this year at a trade event in Hong Kong … but it’s not an accurate description of what the company has been selling to the Chinese manufacturers it’s recruiting. The Journal cites another Amazonian who was much more on the nose in 2017 when she told a conference audience of Chinese business people: “We help factories directly open accounts on Amazon and sell to U.S. consumers directly. This is our value.”

These pitches appear to have been effective. Amazon doesn’t require its sellers to list where they’re located (or share that information), but the Journal cites an outside analysis of the 10,000 most-reviewed Amazon sellers that found approximately 38% of them are now located in China … a percentage that has increased steadily since Amazon began recruiting Chinese sellers in 2013.