cultofmac.com
Chinese manufacturing behemoth Foxconn Technology announced Sunday that it is raising wages up to 25 percent for its 1.2 million-member workforce. The world’s largest manufacturing company also promised to reduce overtime for workers who are routinely compelled to work 14-hour days seven days a week. Why? The apparent answer is fourfold: workforce suicides followed by unrest at Foxconn, international agitation, a stellar New York Times exposé, and the unstoppable magnification of the web.
Of all those factors, I would rate the unstoppable magnification of the web as the primary factor. The articles in the Times, by David Barboza, Charles Duhigg, and Keith Bradsher, beginning with “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” which appeared on January 21, and followed by “In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad,” which appeared on January 26, sparked massive U.S. scrutiny of the working conditions behind America’s favorite toys. But the traction gained by the repetition of the themes and facts of the articles in every nook and cranny on the wired world so crucial to Apple is what really made the difference.
The Times series should be a contender for a Pulitzer Prize for its impact here and abroad. The coverage it inspired, from pipsqueak bloggers, to the L.A. Times series, and ABC’s Nightline, seems to have done the trick. Apple announced that a nonprofit organization would monitor working conditions at Foxconn. Foxconn announced that wage boosts in the range of 16 to 25 percent would bring worker wages to the $400 a month mark.
Regardless of how this compares to wages in the West it’s a big deal in China. It appears to be enough to spark a paradigm shift at Foxconn. That shift, crazy to say, seems to be a move away from human capital and toward robotics and automation. Yes, eschewing the sweet spot of wage growth and job security enjoyed by American factory workers in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to unions, Foxconn seems poised to go from medieval exploitation directly to worker redundancy. And I suppose this should be a lesson to all that Chinese business has become an ardent student of unreconstructed capitalism and, furthermore, that it can change course in a heartbeat.
According to an article published in the Times on Monday, reported by Barboza from China, entitled, “Pressure, Chinese and Foreign, Drives Changes at Foxconn,” “Foxconn has announced plans to invest in millions of robots and automate aspects of production.”
What effects this initiative will have on the numbers of workers employed at Foxconn plants remains to be seen. But it does portend that a new wave of automation may prevent any appreciable numbers of manufacturing jobs to be repatriated to the U.S. Certainly, some manufacturing technician positions will return, but the idea that large numbers of line workers will ever onshore remains highly unlikely, for this industry at least.
At any rate, kudos to Apple, for undoubtedly putting pressure on Foxconn to clean up its act. Yes, it’s late, and it's too little, but it is change. Apple has far too much to lose if an Arab Spring ever comes to public perceptions of worker exploitation in China. And yes, the events of the last few weeks do represent the first sprigs of a movement that could lead to the perception that Apple’s cash cows are dirty devices.
In a more perfect world, Apple would not be able to outrun a significant wave of rising awareness. But despite Apple’s close controls over its retail brand, the purchasing public cannot resist driving prices to the iBottom using the Amazon button, or whatever mechanism is available to thwart reasonable wage-price relationships in the mean old macro world. It certainly isn’t news that our consumer instincts overwhelm our instincts for job preservation, but that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Nor will the sordid realities of Chinese manufacturing.
However, for a perhaps brief but shining moment, worldwide media pressure has opened a crack in the façade of China, Inc. Even if their workers hold jobs that used to be "ours,” it is a good thing to see workers anywhere make a major stride towards a living wage, and for the economic system that virtually enslaved them to be corrected ever so slightly in a manner that will indirectly benefit workers around the globe, including presumably, here.
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P.S. For a wicked parody submitted by a reader, try this link, from whoacomedy.com.
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If you'll excuse the shameless self-promotion, here's how I put it in my show The Life and Hard Times of the Blues:
"Industrialization came with the promise of a century of peace and prosperity for all. But instead of peace, the Machine Age gave us the horrors of mechanized warfare. Instead of prosperity for all, it gave obscene wealth to a few, whose rank speculation led to the Great Depression. Machines would free men from monotonous, laborious, dangerous work, but at a price. From now on, men would be slaves to machines -- when they weren't actually replaced by machines."
So...when this all dies down - and it will - Apple will go to Vietnam for better pricing. And after Vietnam, they will go to some even crappier economy (Bangladesh?) and have their iPads assembled.
And so on, until every one of the 5 billion workers are busting their chops to just live.
The truth of the matter is that the multinationals have figured out that there's a huge, worldwide, labor *oversupply* and taking down the barriers allows them to take advantage of it.
See, in this country 80 years ago, labor unions solved the problem, (along with FDR) by creating the closed shop.
Well, we all know how that play ended. People who work with their hands are valueless. Whether they're in China or Hanoi or St. Louis.
but i recall reading - many times - that china is one of the most egregious purveyors of web censorship.
actual newspapers like the new york times and wall street journal are running occasional stories of chinese citizens rebelling at government and corporate abuses in china (reality check - virtually every business in china is owned by someone with huge government ties and authority).
although this MIGHT be due to people coming home from an exhausting 14 hour day at the factory to surf the web and get outraged, i suspect its more related to actual people in china talking to each other and saying "we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more"
the factory rebellions are in peasant hands, not being fomented by the intellectuals, as much as our effete western biases would prefer to assume the latter.
In the long run, impoverishing labor will leave too few customers to buy the products. It works the same everywhere as it's working here. Ultimately, it's one global, dysfunctional, stripping of wealth from the many to the few. At that point, the difference between communism and capitalism is the spelling.
My brother introduced me to one of my favorite quotes, tho I know not the source:
"Communism is the exploitation of man by man, while capitalism is the opposite."
"After Foxconn Technology Group announced it was going to close an assembly line for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video games and transfer 600 workers to a new production line, this week about 150 workers climbed to the top of a factory’s six-story dormitory roof—and some threatened to jump. They remained there for two days."
External, worldwide pressure on Foxconn, by contrast, has been accelerated by web-based accounts as well as old-school journalism.
"To quote Bruce Hornsby, "That's just the way it is. Some things will never change." Until they do, that is. What does it take? Something to rip away the complacency, The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, one example. Upton Sinclair, laying waste to the appetite of America with the appalling details of "The Jungle". Steinbeck, turning "Oakies" into humans, Tom Joad into everyman. Prior to that, it's easy to turn a blind eye and worse yet, take easy advantage of corruption, befoulment and injustice."
As you point out, while the workers magnified their internal struggle and leveraged threats of sacrifice, it was through the web, that so many who don't read The Times, watch news documentaries or otherwise are informed, became aware of the issue and the mechanisms of social disapproval began to rattle Apple's bank vault.
It may not matter when only the workers who are considered expendable protest, but when the market begins to be disturbed by such knowledge, the combination will cause change. It wouldn't take too many people deciding to not purchase a product who otherwise would have, to completely obviate all the profits gained by such despicable practices.
R.
Frankly, most consumers care about the slave labor that gives them cheap goods as much as many abolitionists cared about the blood, sweat and tears that were the source of their cotton finery or the tobacco they smoked.
“Kudos to Apple, for undoubtedly putting pressure on Foxconn to clean up its act”? With all due respect, please. Whatever Apple et. al. do is strictly public relations spin. “Think different”? They think the same. Remember Nike? Does anyone really think those working conditions have improved much since we learned that the African-American sports-hero descendants of slaves were exposed as profiting off virtual slave labor? Toss the peasants a bit of chump change, tighten security, plug up the leaks, and when the brouhaha is over it will be nefarious business in secret as usual. The Madison Avenue propagandists move on to stamp-put the next brush fire. All is forgotten - until the next worker manages a public way around the suicide nets.
Come on. This is Kabiki Theater. “Apple announced that a nonprofit organization would monitor working conditions at Foxconn”? So feel good about buying Apple? And no doubt Donald Trump has some under-water ocean-front property in Arizona he’d like to sell us too. The Apple rots from within its core.
How easy it is for Madison Avenue to manufacture consent and nullify the muckrakers at the NYT by issuing Upton Sinclair's infamous ‘Brass Checks.’ For the wizards of Madison Avenue pulling the wool over our eyes is as easy as taking candy from a baby. We can all rest assured there are plenty of sycophant ‘journalists’ one step away from the unemployment lines who are willing to shill for Apple et. al. and Madison Avenue.
Come on. If Apple was serious about workers’ rights this story would never have to be told in the first place. Like Nike they got caught denying what they had a duty to know. “Think different”? No, this corporation thinks the same. If they were really serious
they’d be demanding unfettered, unannounced, random inspections with no notice just the way the INS and OSHA bust American employers. Transparency? This is no search for the truth. Last night’s Nightline travesty (with an admitted conflict-of-interest) was as depressing as hell no matter how well they dared to white-washed it. One can only imagine what the unvarnished truth really is. It was in insult to anyone’s intelligence to even think workers would speak candidly even if they were assured anonymity. Can anyone *actually* believe the workers could trust so-called anonymous input was a real projection? I hope few Americans are that stupid. Packed like sardines into company dorms, minimum 12 hour work days, and further extorted by the company store this is Pullman all over again. “This is how capitalism works.”
I had a very dear friend and former client who was an investment banker selected by Nixon’s State Department be part of the team to travel to China to open it to American manufacturers desperate to escape labor unions and environmental laws and, of course, get tax benefits to boot. The investment bankers were all foaming at the mouth. Imagine it. Talk about “Big Government”! What a perfect solution to pesky labor unions, environmental laws, OSHA, and all those government regulations. What capitalists got and needed was a slave-wage labor force that Big Government could keep under its boot and prevented from organizing. Crush labor, pollute the environment, while keeping political control beyond the reach of the People and, oh yes, keep as much of profits off-shore as they can. I’ll not go on. It was an investment bankers wet dream. Turning a shill’s work back at him “this is the way capitalism [really] works.” Kudos to the NYT but when the shills who call themselves journalists are done it will all blow away.
Wonderful, thanks to taxpayer bail outs GM is back on top. Why? How? The lion’s share of GM profits(assured by taxpayer dollars) were made by selling cars to *Chinese* that were made in China by workers paid slave wages and who have no right to organize. Nice. "This is the way capitalism [really] works."
Suffice to say that Lenin’s proverbial rope by which the capitalists will hang themselves will be infamously stamped “Made in Red China” and, no doubt, sold to Americans on credit extended by Shylock Chin Yang.
I grew up in a timber town in Oregon. While people argued left and right that the death of the timber industry was due to environmental regulations, the inability to cut every last tree, and the spotted owl, the real culprit was automation. A modern sawmill doesn't need 300 or 400 people (or 3,000 or 4,000 people) to run it. The saws are computerized, there are robots, machines, and tools to do what people used to.
So my town shrunk, and has slowly been replaced by tourism. Not anything that anyone can build a life on. Hand-to-mouth restaurant and hotel jobs.
What will we all do to keep from starving? Taking in each other's washing won't get us there.
What, do you think we should all be out in the fields in the fall picking corn by hand, for 18 hours a day, rather than one guy with a huge combine? Automation frees up labor, wealth, capital and resources for other areas that are next in line on the "wish list" of society. Technology replacing human labor is not a bad thing.
As the great economist Murray Rothbard stated:
"Who was displaced by the steam shovel? How many millions of ditch diggers are now out of work because of it? Where are the billions of unemployed that are supposed to have been caused by the replacement of the human pack animal by the wagon and the truck? Where are they, if the doctrine of technological unemployment is correct? Where are the millions of unemployed resulting from the Industrial Revolution—when the truth is the other way around, that thousands of beggars had nothing to do until the Industrial Revolution rescued them!"
It is important to point out that Foxconn manufactures for Amazon, Sony, IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Asus, Samsung, Panasonic, Motorola, Nintendo, Microsoft, Vizio, Nokia and Intel. So where does that leave us? Are we to secede from the Republic of Technology? Most of the crap you buy of whatever description comes from tainted derivation in terms of how workers are treated. I know there is funny business built into the coming oversight at Foxconn. And Apple deserves to be the big target here, by virtue of its size, cachet, market share and hubristic world view. I get it. As to the whitewashing you find in the Nightline version of reality--and I am not arguing with you about that--I just don't weight it as you do, I recommend you check out monologuist Mike Daisey.
From Mashable: "In early January, the radio program This American Life aired an episode titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” The episode took a closer look at the issue, based on an excerpt from Daisey’s one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. In the show, Daisey, a lifelong Apple fan, describes traveling to China to see the conditions of the Foxconn factory for himself."
I should have credited Daisy in my piece, but 700 words is short.
Thanks for reading the piece.
You almost make my point for me for that was addressed in my own longer post on the same subject and from which my comment was taken.
Steve answered you charge as I would. My point is that industrialization created other problems -- dehumanization, dislocation, compartmentalization, etc, etc, etc. Read Robert Bly and plenty of others for details of the human cost of industrialization.
Having done my share of ditch-digging, I'm not fool enough to pine for a return to those "golden days". Unfortunately for all of us, we are too often led by politicians and informed by pundits who do imagine -- or at least claim -- to want to lead us back to some "golden age" that never existed. They espouse nonsense about rugged individualism and competition being the cure for every socioeconomic ill, when history clearly says otherwise.
Men, being a physically inferior species in many ways, has long understood the necessity for cooperation. Latter-day Luddites are in denial about that, and ignorance and greed have rendered them blind to history and reality.
So much for Communism being the Worker's party.
( That's what he gets for becoming a Buddhist. )
"St. Peter don't call me 'cause I can't come
I owe my soul to the company store."
"St. Peter don't call me 'cause I can't GO
I owe my soul to the company sto (re)."
:)