This is a moving portrait of women workers on strike in China at a Japanese owned plant that supplies cell phones for WalMart. The women labor 11 hours a day to earn less than $60 a week and because they are forced to live in government controlled “company” towns they save very little of that money for even poorer relatives back home in China’s rural areas. This story vividly demonstrates what I am calling the “two souls of global capitalism”: a high tech wonder in the advanced countries underpinned by desperate living conditions in the developing world – a picture tragically enhanced by this week’s tsunami disaster in southeast Asia.

In China, yearnings for unions stir