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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2021
VACCINE SKEPTICSU.S. EVANGELICALSOPT OUT OF SHOTSPAGE 5 | WORLD
NISH KUMARFAN OF BBC, EVENAS SHOW ENDSPAGE 13 | CULTURE
PUPPY PARENTING WISDOMTRAINERS AND THEIR TIPSARE IN HIGH DEMANDPAGE 15 | LIVING
companies invite legal enforcementfrom Washington under an Americanban on imports.
Labor activists will charge them withcomplicity in the grotesque repressionof the Uyghurs.
But forsaking Xinjiang cotton entailsits own troubles — the wrath of Chineseconsumers who denounce the attention
Faced with accusations that it was prof-iting from the forced labor of Uyghurpeople in the Chinese territory of Xin-jiang, the H&M Group — the world’s sec-ond-largest clothing retailer — prom-ised last year to stop buying cotton fromthe region.
But last month, H&M confronted anew outcry, this time from Chinese con-sumers who seized on the company’s re-nouncement of the cotton as an attackon China. Social media filled with angrydemands for a boycott, urged on by thegovernment. Global brands like H&Mrisked alienating a country of 1.4 billionpeople.
The furor underscored how interna-tional clothing brands that rely on Chi-nese materials and factories now facethe mother of all conundrums — a con-flict vastly more complex than theirnow-familiar reputational crises overexploitative working conditions in poorcountries.
If they fail to purge Xinjiang cottonfrom their supply chains, the apparel
on the Uyghurs as a Western plot to sab-otage China’s development.
The global brands can protect theirsales in North America and Europe, orpreserve their markets in China. It is in-creasingly difficult to see how they cando both.
“They are being almost at this pointtold, ‘Choose the U.S. as your market, or
choose China as your market,’” saidNicole Bivens Collinson, a lobbyist whorepresents major apparel brands atSandler, Travis & Rosenberg, a law firmin Washington.
In an age of globalization, interna-tional apparel brands have grown ac-customed to criticism that they are prof-iting from oppressed workers in coun-tries like Myanmar and Bangladesh,where low costs of production reflectalarming safety conditions.
The brands have developed a provenplaybook: They announce codes of con-duct for their suppliers and hire auditorsto ensure at least the appearance ofcompliance.
But China presents a gravely elevatedrisk.
Xinjiang is not only the source of 85percent of China’s cotton, it is also syn-onymous with a form of repression thatthe U.S. government has officiallytermed genocide. As many as a millionUyghurs have been herded into deten-tion camps and deployed as forced labor.
The taint of association with Xinjiangis so severe that both the Trump and Bi-den administrations have sought to pre-vent Americans from buying clothingproduced with the region’s cotton.
For the apparel brands, the dilemmais heightened by the Chinese govern-ment’s weaponizing of China’s con-COTTON, PAGE 7
Picking cotton in Xinjiang, a Chinese region where as many as a million Uyghurs have been herded into detention camps and deployed as forced labor.AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
‘Moral test’ for global apparel
An H&M store in Beijing. Chinese consumers have seized on the company’s renouncingof cotton from Xinjiang as an attack on their country.
KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGES
Brands can forsake cottonfrom repressed region, butat cost of Chinese market
BY PETER S. GOODMAN, VIVIAN WANG AND ELIZABETH PATON
C. Tangana, one of Spain’s biggest rapstars, two years ago hit “a little bit of acrisis.”
He was riding a wave of fame, knownfor provocative songs and equally pro-vocative interviews. But he was fast ap-proaching his 30s, he said in a recentZoom interview, and risked becomingone of those “cringe-y, embarrassing”rappers who act a decade younger thanthey are.
So C. Tangana — real name Antón Ál-varez Alfaro — did a U-turn and decidedto try his hand at other styles of musicthat he had loved since childhood, likeflamenco and rumba — even Spanishfolk.
“I was opening a window I’d keptclosed,” he said, adding, “I assumed itwould go wrong.”
Álvarez’s experiment appears to havepaid off. In February, he released “ElMadrileño,” an album that mixes tradi-tional Spanish and Latin Americanstyles, including rock, with electronicsounds and beats more familiar to histrap and reggaeton fans. It’s turned himfrom Spain’s biggest rapper into one ofits biggest pop stars.
One of the album’s early tracks, “TúMe Dejaste De Querer” (“You StoppedLoving Me”), has over 100 million viewson YouTube.
“You can listen to his music anytime,in any shop” Pablo Gil, a music journal-ist at El Mundo, a Spanish daily newspa-per, said in a telephone interview.
Some of the musical styles it featureswere last popular in Spain in the 1970s,when the country was under Franco’sdictatorship, Gil added. Álvarez, he said,was taking old-fashioned sounds, “sub-verting their meaning and making themmodern.”
In a review for the newspaper El País,
the music critic Carlos Marcos wrote, “Itremains to be seen whether this is thebirth of a new Spanish pop, or some-thing that we will forget in a few years.”
“But who cares?” he added. “Let’s en-joy it today, and we’ll see tomorrow.”
On YouTube, C. Tangana’s videos nowattract comments from older music fanswho would presumably never have gonenear his records before. “I thought themusic my son listened to was for land-fill,” wrote Felix Guinnot, who said hewas in his 50s, “but this boy is changingmy musical perception.”
Álvarez’s road to fame has been wind-ing, with multiple changes of name to re-flect new musical personas. Born in Ma-drid, he started rapping in his teens, hesaid, but twice gave up on music en-tirely. When the 2008 global financialcrisis hit Spain particularly hard — itslingering effects are still felt by thecountry’s youth — he stopped rapping towork in a fast-food restaurant. Later, hegot a job in a call center selling cell-phones.
He started rapping again after falling C. TANGANA, PAGE 2
A rapper’s latest gig: Spanish pop starLONDON
His winding path to fameleads to a musical style more rumba than rap
BY ALEX MARSHALL
Antón Álvarez Alfaro, who performs asC. Tangana, shows Spain his folksy side.
JAVIER RUIZ
The New York Times publishes opinionfrom a wide range of perspectives inhopes of promoting constructive debateabout consequential questions.
It has been Day 1 at Amazon ever sincethe company began, more than a quar-ter-century ago. Day 1 is Amazon short-hand for staying hungry, making bolddecisions and never forgetting about thecustomer. This start-up mentality — un-derdogs against the world — has beenextremely good for Amazon’s shoppersand shareholders.
Day 1 holds less appeal for some ofAmazon’s employees, especially thosedoing the physical work in the ware-houses. A growing number feel the com-pany is pushing them past their limitsand risking their health. They would likeAmazon to usher in a more benign Day2.
The clash between the desire for Day 1and Day 2 has been unfolding in Ala-bama, where Amazon warehouse work-ers in the community of Bessemer havevoted on whether to form a union. Gov-ernment labor regulators are gettingready to sort through the votes in theclosely watched election. A result maycome as soon as this week. If the uniongains a foothold, it will be the first in thecompany’s history.
Attention has been focused on Besse-mer, but the struggle between Day 1 andDay 2 is increasingly playing out every-where in Amazon’s world. At its heart,the conflict is about control. To maintainDay 1, the company needs to lower laborcosts and increase productivity, whichrequires measuring and tweaking everymoment of a worker’s existence.
That kind of control is at the heart ofthe Amazon enterprise. The idea of sur-rendering it is the company’s greatesthorror. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder,wrote in his 2016 shareholder letter:“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrele-vance. Followed by excruciating,painful decline. Followed by death. Andthat is why it is always Day 1.”
For many years, Amazon has man-aged to maintain control and keep Day 1going by dazzling with delivery, and ithas counted on the media, regulatorsand politicians to ignore everything un-pleasant. The few stories about workersrarely got traction.
But Amazon is now the second-larg-est private employer in the country.There is widespread pro-worker senti-ment in the United States and a pro-un-ion president. In Bessemer, many of thepro-union workers are Black, whichmakes this a civil rights story as well.
So the costs associated with Day 1 arefinally coming into view. And it is show-ing up not only in Alabama, but in theform of lawsuits, restive workers atother warehouses, congressionaloversight, scrutiny from labor regula-tors and, most noisily, on Twitter.
In recent weeks, a heated discussion AMAZON, PAGE 7
Workers at Amazon grow tired ofstart-up paceWringing out inefficiencieshas meant tight control of employees’ every move
BY DAVID STREITFELD
The most harrowing story I’ve read inThe Times in recent days was MiriamJordan’s account of a car crash lastmonth in Southern California involvinga Ford Expedition that had come fromMexico, straight through a breach inthe border wall. The Ford wascrammed with 25 people when it hit atractor-trailer rig on Route 115, 110miles east of San Diego.
“Few of the survivors have beenable to describe what happened next,”Jordan writes. “The crunch of metaland glass, the bodies flung dozens offeet across the pavement. Twelve
people died on thespot, a 13th at anearby hospital.”
Jordan follows thestories of the victimsand survivors, andthere’s a heartbreak-ing sameness tothem: people whohave been driven by
fear or want from their homes in Mex-ico and Central America, and who arewilling to take grave risks and payexorbitant sums to make it to theUnited States.
These are not terrorists, gang mem-bers, lowlifes, benefit seekers or —except in their willingness to violateU.S. immigration laws — lawbreakers.They are seekers of the Americandream, worthy of our compassion andrespect.
Yet those 13 people — along withothers who have recently lost theirlives in dangerous crossings — mightnot have met their grisly fate if theBiden administration’s concept ofcompassion wasn’t also an inducementto recklessness.
And they would not have been killedif a wall had been standing in theirway.
That’s a conclusion I’ve come toreluctantly, and not because I’ve aban-doned my disgust with Donald Trump.Walls are ugly things: symbols ofdefensive, suspicious, often closed-minded civilizations. Walls are, invari-ably, permeable: Whatever else aborder wall will do, it will not seal offAmerica from unwanted visitors orundocumented workers — roughly halfof whom arrive legally and overstaytheir visas.
Walls also cannot address the rootcause of our immigration crisis, which
Why Bidenmust finishTrump’s wall
OPINION
A physicalbarrier couldactually helpDemocratswin immigra-tion reform.
STEPHENS, PAGE 9
Bret Stephens
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