Happy 2011 to all. New Year's resolutions? Definitely more blog postings, certainly more shooting, obviously less impractical thinking. Anyways, it is a great start to the year, with quality writing on labour and employement around the world, in the January issue of the online magazine Words without Borders. I have enjoyed most of both the non-fiction and fiction narrative featured, and especially that of Andrés Felipe Solano's Six Months on Minimum Wage, where he goes undercover in a textile factory in Medellín, Colombia:

"My work day begins at 6:45 a.m. (...) At the entrance I look for a yellow card with my name on it and I slide it into the slot of a metal clock that looks a lot like a small safe. I hate that sound in the morning, the heavy clack, like a shackle; but I love the music it makes at 5:00 p.m., when I check out, like the snap of fingers returning me to the world. Each time you stamp your timecard in a factory, it’s like putting a price on your day. Mine is worth 14,500 pesos ($7.67).

He bears witness to the precarious working conditions in which his coworkers are employed and learns why they need to put up with them. But, just as importantly, Solano offers a meaningful insight into the socio-political fabric in which the factory is inserted:

"Twelve thousand employees in the industry have lost their jobs in the first half of 2007 and some employees have already departed, rather than wait for their pink slip. One of my coworkers told me in the hallway that he was moving to a town in the middle of the rainforests of Chocó to run a hardware store. (...) Something smells bad in this city. Thousands of country folk made their way through the rainforest to found Medellín, the great city of industry. And now their descendants are returning to the humidity of the jungle."

He is later employed as an assistant in a lorry collecting the finished clothing from workshop to workshop, most set up in the living rooms of houses in neighbouring urban districts:

"Our second errand that afternoon is in a slum built on top of an old dump. We’re there to collect a dozen sacks of clothing. In Moravia. Or what was left of it. The night before I arrived in Medellín a fire burned down two hundred houses in this barrio. My travels with Isaza were becoming a sort of verification of the city’s tragedies."

In the last paragraphs the writer considers his own experience from a strictly personal standpoint and struggles to come to terms with the intensity of it all.

"I close my eyes and see the cutters on the fifth floor, the embroiderers and the printers on the fourth, the fifty sewing machines on the third, sounds that are by now as familiar to me as tapping on a keyboard. (...) Every time I write something in this little black book it seems like the answer is ever more remote, like a cargo ship headed for the Orient."

Writings by Najem Wali or Quim Monzó in this current issue, or browsing through that of November 2008, The Enigma of Arrival, are in any case a reality check after the Christmas celebrations and a much needed source of insight.