I finally have an iPad and I’m just sick about it.
Whose deft hands assembled this? I look at the metal frame, the magical touch-screen, the dots, the filaments thinner than hair, the connectors that make it look like a tidy homemade bomb, the logic board that itself looks like an aerial shot of the massive factory where it was made, with bridges, parking lots, warehouses and silos, a curving gold grounding strip on the left like a highway home. This is a microcosm of industrial hell.
We say we yearn for the handmade? The iPad is as handcrafted as the papier mâché rabbit your child brought home from school. It was assembled by human fingers at astonishing speed in giant sheds containing tens of thousands of workers in Shenzhen, China’s notorious industrial zone. When I visited Shenzhen in the early ’90s it had 1.2 million people, no big deal. It’s at 14 million now.
Foxconn, in Shenzhen, is the company that makes about a third of all the electronics we use daily, whether they’re branded as Apple, Dell, HP or other famous names. If you thought robots worked through endless Chinese nights you were wrong. When human labour is as cheap as it is in China, only human labour will do.
Only this kind of labour could produce electronic gadgets for the price we in the West like to pay. We worship the god of Cheap and Shenzhen’s millions make this possible.
Mike Daisey, who visited the Foxconn factory to create a brilliant monologue called “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” that was adapted for NPR's This American Life, was dazed by the beauty and horror of what he saw. It employs 430,000 people. Its cafeterias accommodate up to 10,000 people at a time. Staff sleep in tiny dormitories for 15 in slotted bunk beds stacked up to the ceiling like coffins for thin people.
Cameras watch the line workers and supervisors throughout non-stop shifts of 12 to 16 hours, he reports. Cameras watch the rooms and hallways. The atmosphere is military and indeed, the workers wear uniforms. They are not allowed to speak to each other at work. After a recent string of suicides, Foxconn installed nets on the upper floors and made workers sign documents promising not to kill themselves.
Terry Gou, the head of Hon Hai (Foxconn) said of his employees last week, “Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide . . . to manage one million animals gives me a headache.” He later apologized and fudged his remarks but the point was made.
The Chinese migration from country to city has been good for industry and for the workers themselves who leave behind drudgery and sometimes borderline starvation in the rice paddies. But it is also a story of industrial hell on a much larger scale than anything the Victorians dreamed up with their dark Satanic mills.
The essayist David Sedaris once worked at an Oregon apple-packing plant, a character-disintegrating experience. The apples “were merciless, pouring down the belt without interruption 24 hours a day. . . . It occurred to me that everything we buy has been poked or packaged by some unfortunate nitwit with a hairnet and a wad of cotton stuffed in his ears. Every barbecue tong, paper hat and store-bought mitten arrives with a history of abject misery.”
At this point, he had been on the job 45 minutes.
When you work as hard as Foxconn employees do for dimes an hour, the joints in your hand disintegrate, Daisey reported. Workers don’t switch from job to job, as Canadian workplace standards would demand. They make the same motion hundreds of thousands of thousands of times until their hands are used up. “When you start working at 15 or 16, by the time you are 26, 27, your hands are ruined.”
We’ve grown accustomed to saying “blood diamonds.” But these are equally “blood gadgets.” The way to stop this is to pay more for them.
And would that be so terrible, to value our purchases more and treasure them longer? LINK
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