SAN DIEGO—The film "Mardi Gras: Made in China" was shown at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego on Feb, 22.
As a tale of the cost of globalization, the film showed the journey of Mardi Gras beads from start to finish, contrasting people at Carnival on Bourbon street exposing themselves for the necklaces, and the lives of the people in a sweatshop in Fuzhou Province, China which makes the beads.
The director and creator of the film, David Redmon, also attended the event.
The independent film has received many awards, and the attention from many different human rights organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations.
The workers, mostly young girls, are paid by the necklace. With the average wage being around $1.20 a day, many of the workers send the money home so that their siblings can go to school. The factory operates 24/7, with an average work shift of 14-20 hours.
In the film, Dom Carlone, the owner of Accent Annex and Mardi Gras Madness, an importer of the beads says, "It looks like a compound, like a concentration camp. They have barbed wire around and everything else. It's not to keep people from getting out, it's to keep people from getting in. They get paid for what they accomplish, and for every necklace they make, they get so much for that necklace."
In one part of the film, the owner of the factory in China, Roger Wong, says, "If they get paid enough, they're happy right? They don't care who you are, if you are a capitalist or whatever you are - they really don't care. They only care about when you give them the money, when you give them the pay, and how much they get paid. That's important for them."
He continues to say, "If they don't work, or if they make a big mistake on the painting or melting beads, they will get punished. So why should they not pay attention? So they have to pay attention while they work. They should concentrate on their work. If they try to think about something else, they might do something wrong, and I think punishment is really important in the factory."
Workers can be docked a days pay for talking while working, If Male and Female workers are found with each-other, they are also punished. While constantly exposed to styrene, a chemical known to cause cancer, many of the employees who work around it said that when they first started working they would often get dizzy and sometimes faint but they are used to it now.
With burned hands and dyed skin, injuries are also a common occurrence. Roger said that he believes employees will deliberately put their hands in the machines to get time off.
Director Redmon managed to find humor amidst the seriousness of the subject. Part of the film was him following around a woman named Ms. Pearl at Mardi Gras, who loves the celebration. Redmon mentioned that when hurricane Katrina had hit and when Ms. Pearl was forced to evacuate, all she took with her were her costumes and her Mardi Gras beads.
Redmon interviewed many people on Bourbon street, showing how little Americans know of the true cost of their products and sometimes getting reactions such as, "don't know, don't care, beads for boobs man."
Sometimes he also showed people footage of how the beads were made, receiving mixed reactions. He also showed the factory workers pictures of how their beads are used, as they aren't told. They all laughed and giggled as they passed the pictures around, amazed that people actually like the beads which they find rather ugly.
Redmon shared his experiences while making the film. He also shared some of the dangers which he encountered. Once while filming some of the workers on their day off, He was followed by a plain clothes police officer back to the factory. The officer threatened to arrest him and to take his film and equipment taken away since he didn't have a license to practice journalism.
The officer gave him another choice to leave within a couple of hours, so he went to Hong Kong and returned 5 months later to finish the film. At another point, David was filming in Palestine and the West Bank, at the Gaza strip. He had found that somehow there were Mardi Gras beads there. But while trying to figure out how they had gotten there, his film was confiscated.
After the film was shown, a discussion was held. One topic was on the current view of a post-labor movement working environment in China in contrast with the video footage shown.
Professor Susan Bisom, who held the screening of the film said, "The situation is kind of complicated because on the one hand, it's supposed to be a worker's paradise, but on the other, independent labor unions are illegal in China."
"All unions have to be affiliated with the All China Labor Federation - which is an organ of the Communist Party, which is the State. So anyone who wants to organize an independent union is going to run into trouble because they already think they have legitimate unions."
"There's also some cultural confusion about the role that labor representatives are supposed to play in China. They sometimes see themselves as organs of management, so when workers have grievances, they often align themselves with the management perspective rather than the worker's perspective," said Bisom.
Redmon explained some of his plans for a future version of the film. "I really wanted to start the film in Iraq, with Chevron mining the petroleum and the oil, then following that and showing how it's processed into plastic. Then following that and showing everything it takes to get that plastic to that factory, and finally the workers taking it off the 18 wheeler and making it into the beads."
"It takes 18 stages to get a Mardi Gras bead. Then after people throw it in the trash, what I want to show (and I have the footage) is New Orleans residents going through the trash, recycling the beads, going home and washing them. Then sending them off to their relatives or friends in Iraq who are in the war, and then they become a full Mardi Gras bead."
"I also have footage of the soldiers going through the streets and throwing them, saying, 'how much for your women?', 'show me your nose!', then at the end of the day, they crown a man and woman as the queen of Baghdad and the king of Baghdad," said Redmon.