In the wake of Apple’s record-setting quarter, a lot of pundits—well, a lot of people—have criticized the computer giant for manufacturing its products in China. The American company should be creating American jobs, the refrain goes. Many, if not all the people crying foul are liberal and well-educated, i.e. the sorts of people who have never and would never work in on an assembly line, not if you bribed them with a new iPhone 5 and 6. People like Salon’s Andrew Leonard. So here’s my question: If working long hours on an Apple assembly line, undertaking the Sisyphusian task of trying to satiate the global demand for a smart phone, sounds like a circle of hell, why do you at the same time believe that an Apple manufacturing job could solve anyone’s problems?
Nearly any Chinese laborer employed by Apple will claim to be grateful for the job. On the other hand, nearly any North Korean will claim to be grateful for Kim Jong Un’s dynamic leadership. Hyperbolic? Sure. But when we speak of progress and welfare, do we really mean a society where maybe half the population has their noses to the grind?
Or maybe it’s fear that drives the sentiment that America needs to rebuild its manufacturing sector. We occupy this crumbling, quasi-imperial position which allows many of us to work 9-5 at quasi-useful sinecures. It’s plain to see that times are changing, that we may soon be enslaved by a race of giant ants if we’re not careful. The only problem is that by preemptively digging trenches, we have to dig and live in trenches, which is not in the end so different from giant ant enslavement.
Way back in high school, I learned that during the Great Depression farmers were ordered to destroy stores of food to bolster crop prices, even as Americans were homeless and starving. We have a long history of confusing economic welfare and human welfare. Part of this has to do with a Hobbsian bent that dictates we let people starve rather than provide handouts, because humans are innately evil and lazy and if you give them free food they will become full-time bums. I don’t know how much food America produces on a daily basis these days, though I do know we have a lot of vacant homes lying around, and an excess of stuff in general. But even though people are suffering it wouldn’t do to give these things away, no, we require that more roundabout distribution vehicle called labor, which is why it’s so important we win back those manufacturing jobs from China, at any cost, even if it means slashing wages and slackening environmental regulations.
That people must work for a living has lead to some irrational decisions, to say the least. As unemployment numbers rise, not once has anyone considered that with rapidly improving automation technology (see Redbox video rental machines, automated car factories, the ATM), fewer and fewer humans are needed to perform frankly mundane jobs. This should be a good thing—something sci-fi fans have been dreaming about for the past century—but, because of our values, this lack of chores is actually causing a worldwide crisis. One logical solution to our labor shortage would be to slash hours where possible and better distribute what job hours do exist and are useful. Note I say useful, because people are frequently put to useless tasks in the name of livelihood. We have trouble transitioning away from not only useless but harmful industries because shuttering factories costs jobs and we lack the infrastructure (physical and moral) to provide for people out of work.
But people do want (need?) iPhones and many humans are still required to produce them, or at least I suspect that’s the case. You never know with Apple. Is it really fair, though, that people are made to work ungodly hours performing repetitive, machine-like tasks to make your phone? Does it make you feel good about your purchase? I’m racked with guilt about it, honestly. I likely made as much as ten of these workers combined at my last job and I would have gladly given most of it away to not work in an Apple factory, or any other factory for that matter. I view these laborers the same way I view front-line Marines. If people really are needed to produce iPhones, I’d feel much better about the whole business if we all took turns working, say, twenty hour weekly shifts. Oh, I know many of those factory jobs are highly skilled and we lack the know-how stateside, but we could learn. We could learn to farm, too, to plumb, to suture wounds. To raise children. Divide and conquer. At least a little, to take the edge off.
My point with all this is that all these talks of job creation are a sham. They distract from our very human desire to not become automatons, and the very real inequality that forces some people to either languish in unemployment or work day and night at soul-crushing jobs, which sounds a lot like being stuck between a rock and a hard place. How liberal intellectuals can wish assembly-line jobs, at least as they exist today, on others, is beyond me.
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Joan Walsh
Kerry Lauerman
Salon.com
Comments
http://open.salon.com/blog/f_arouete/2012/02/23/does_the_american_apple_rot_at_its_capitalist_core
To quote John Perkins in his jaw-dropping book Confessions of and Economic Hit Man
"Today, men and women are going into Thailand, the Philippines, Botswana, Bolivia and every other country where they hope to find people desperate for work. They go to these places with the express purpose of exploiting wretched people - people whose children are severely malnourished, even starving, people who live in shantytowns and have lost all hope of a better life, people who have ceased to even dream of another day. These men and women leave their plush offices in Manhattan or San Francisco or Chicago, streak across continents and oceans in luxurious jetliners, check into first-class hotels, and dine at the finest restaurants the country has to offer. Then they go searching for desperate people.
Today, we still have slave traders. They no longer find it necessary to march into the forests of Africa looking for prime specimens who will bring top dollar on the auction blocks in Charleston, Cartagena and Havana. They simply recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell in the markets of their choosing, Or they may elect not even to own the factory themselves; instead, they hire a local businessman to do all their dirty work for them.
These men and women think of themselves as upright. They return to their homes with photographs of quaint sites and ancient ruins, to show to their children. They attend seminars where they apt each other on the back and exchange tidbits of advice about dealing with the eccentricities of customs in far-off lands. Their bosses hire lawyers who assure them that what they are doing is perfectly legal. They have a cadre of psychotherapists and other human resource experts at their disposal to convince them that they are helping those desperate people.
The old-fashioned slave trader told himself that he was dealing with a species that was not entirely human, and that he was offering them the opportunity to become Christianized. He also understood that slaves were fundamental to the survival of his own society, that they were the foundation of his economy. The modern slave trader assured herself (or himself) that the desperate pople are better off earning one dollar a day than no dollars at all, and that they are receiving the opportunity to become integrated into the larger world community. She also understands that these desperate people are fundamental to the survival of her company, that they are the foundation for her own lifestyle. She never stops to think about the larger implications of what she, her lifestyle, and the economic system behind them are doing to the world - or of how they may ultimately impact her children's future."