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What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found

That is why I am upset by many Americans’ thinking. We do not have the same opportunities as the West. Our governmental infrastructure is different. The country is different.

This line of thinking is so depressing. The incremental improvements offered by the mindless Foxconn “company store” model are undeniably better than rural farm labor. No one disputes that.

But Apple’s margins are north of 30% - their products make executives and designers unfathomably rich while workers make $2 a day. Foxconn and Apple’s model is an extraordinarily unfair distribution of the fruits of Apple’s labor; why aren’t rank-and-file factory workers rewarded with a larger share of Apple’s unimaginable wealth?

The answer is that they’re in a poor negotiating position and are repressed from collective bargaining. As a result, management absconds with the lion’s share of the money and the factory workers live like cattle. They get contemptibly referred to as animals by their tyrannical CEO. They are less than human.

(via thecallus-deactivated20130520)

I happened to move to Guangdong province the same summer as Tiananmen Square. My new home was far away from the protests, but shared Beijing’s compulsory poverty.

Mercifully everyone was getting richer, thanks to factories. A Nike factory opened that year, informing what would become an abiding, personal frustration with the anti-“sweatshop” movement. Back then, the movement seemed naively oblivious to the realities of everyday Chinese; today it seems more cruelly oblivious to the realities of everyday Americans. For 20 years now it has consistently cast Chinese laborers as victims, quantifying that victimhood by an arbitrary formula: How many hours of assembly line toil would be required to purchase whatever overpriced good they happened to be assembling?

But Chinese factories aren’t really sweatshops anymore — rather they’re some of the most sophisticated high-tech manufacturing plants in history. This is not because their workers assembled more and better sneakers every year. It is because China’s government, emulating that of Japan and Taiwan and Korea before it, subsidized industries that required rapid, constant change. And by doing that, China created a working class that is no longer so impoverished that it’s also powerless. Economic growth isn’t always pretty, but if you can legitimately make things better than they were for the majority of the population, it’s worth it.

Over two decades the quintessential Chinese factory worker has gone from earning $50 a month assembling $100 sneakers to $300 or so a month, depending on overtime, assembling $300 or so smartphones. If a Foxconn worker — given the other opportunities in life and the current no-cell-phone policy on the factory floor — was going to splurge on a smartphone, the only reason he wouldn’t buy an iPhone is that Apple products are inevitably a ripoff, which is the not-so-dirty secret of 31.5 percent operating margins.

Because when you work in a factory, brands lose a lot of mystique, as Chang demonstrates in Factory Girls when she experiences a mild panic attack after discovering, all at once, that a teenage subject’s beloved collection of Coach and LeSportsac handbags is not fake. The purse factory at which she works is actually a genuine, officially sanctioned Coach factory, and this is no big deal because she is friends with the security guards, who will let you take a bag out of the factory as long as you promise not to sell it to strangers.

Working at Foxconn is nothing like that. Surveillance cameras are ubiquitous; “military” protocols the sneaker factories abolished in the early nineties govern every little process; countless rules seem intended purely to subjugate; and security guards are friends with no one, as Sun Danyong learned when an iPhone prototype in his car went missing in the summer of 2009. Foxconn security searched, interrogated, and tortured Sun in episodes he described bitterly to friends. The more he thought about it, the angrier he became.

So he jumped out of his 12th-story window to protest the perverse pathology that values inanimate objects over the humans that make them. Nowhere in his final text messages or chat transcripts did he mention long hours or low wages. The first news reports focused on Foxconn’s draconian confidentiality and non-compete agreements; in ensuing interviews with the Hong Kong labor rights organization Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), workers focused mostly on military training, standing, and other practices they described as “nonsense.”

But the nonsense works better closer to home. Excerpts of Adam Lashinsky’s new exploration of Apple’s vaunted “culture of collaboration,” Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired–And Secretive–Company Really Works, detail a policy prohibiting employees from talking to one another about any topic about which both parties have not yet been officially “disclosed” — Distortionspeak for “cleared to discuss” — by a higher authority.

To be clear: Enforcing such a policy at a company that prides itself on collaboration is pretty much the textbook definition of “Orwellian.” It is also good for shareholder value and a practice that has stood the test of time: Forbidding workers from talking to one another keeps wages down, especially when senior management has struck deals with its rivals (as Apple allegedly did) agreeing to refrain from poaching one another’s talent.

Amid all the recent talk about the need for U.S. Navy minesweepers in the Persian Gulf in case Iran attempts to close the straight of Hormuz with sea mines, I noticed an interesting fact about China’s minesweeping plans. They involve drones. Not sleek, purpose-built, sea-going drones, but vessels originally designed to carry people that have been quickly converted to be remotely operated from an anti-mining mothership.

So it is not a question of imposing American standards on the Chinese. We have a right to hold the Chinese to their own standard, just as other countries have a right to hold us Americans to the standard of our laws and Constitution.

How could this be done? Congress could enact a law empowering the U.S. Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration to impose penalty tariffs on imports of products made under conditions that violate international labor standards and the domestic laws of the country of origin.

The U.S. government could adopt a policy of only purchasing electronics equipment, especially for the military, with U.S.-made components. This would be wise on national security grounds. If the U.S. has a military confrontation with China, we don’t want the Chinese to be in a position to cut off supplies vital to our military.

Labor and consumer organizations could recognize companies that obey the law and refrain from fraud, and we the people could patronize these companies.

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.

One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilo stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.

When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot. The report of the investigative team sent by the provincial leadership in 1969 to interview survivors of the famine records that the man died of grief three weeks later.

Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party. One inspector in Sichuan wrote that “commune members too sick to work are deprived of food. It hastens their death.”

As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another. Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.

BEIJING — A Chinese court has sentenced a dissident writer to seven years in prison over a poem he wrote urging his countrymen to gather at a public square, a human rights group said Friday.

Rather than investing in state of the art facilities, corporations found that the opening of China offered them something that exceeded the cost performance of the best automation: an infinite supply of human hands available so cheaply that for the first time in a century the price of labor was a negligible fraction of the cost of goods. Why build complex and expensive factories, when you can rent sheds full of people? And hey, you can even get someone else to pay for the shed.

You could—you can—rent people to use without regard for safety laws, pollution laws, health care costs, or any danger of legal recourse. People you can use without concern over discrimination and without compensation for workplace injuries. People who have never heard of a pension. People who will perform the most tedious, repetitious, injurious processes right up until the day they can’t.

In fact, you can rent people wholesale and use them as an excuse against ever paying retail. You can rent disposable, untrained kids, work them to destruction for peanuts, and use their very availability as proof that other workers should be willing to accept the same terms. You know, American workers, the most capable, most productive workers on the planet. The people whose efforts and partnership made the corporations possible. Former workers. You can use desperation as proof that the workers who took the wages you paid them and lived under the agreements you offered, were overpaid bums. It’s a win-win.

It doesn’t stop with the workers. You can produce your goods in a place where environment is not even an afterthought, and justice barely a rumor, then argue the same should be true everywhere. You can drink from the firehouse of statist dictatorship, and use it to declare that the burdens of democracy are too great to be tolerated. You can eat your cake… and a billion other people’s too.

China was the weapon that corporations wielded against not just Japan, but American government and American workers. And why not? The business of corporations is to make money. They are obligated by law to maximize profit for shareholders. They’re not there to help workers. They’re not there to hurt workers. They are agnostic to the concerns of workers. Ditto America. Protecting the nation and workers is the business of government not corporations.

But that can only happen when the government is focused on the welfare of it’s citizens rather than the panacea of being “business friendly.” Under the motto of being business friendly deregulation in the United States accelerated the outsourcing of jobs, driving up income inequality and destroying our manufacturing base in a way that didn’t happen in places that didn’t buy into the farce of corporate rights. Because a business friendly government rather than a worker friendly government is a pointless government, an anti-government, a poor quality cartoon of a government only without the helpful robots and the automatic shaving machine.

This is why China is busy economically colonizing Africa—now home to an estimated one million Chinese workers—and is making fools of us in Afghanistan, where American military power is currently protecting huge Chinese investments in coal, copper, and other resources.

At the time Deng opened China for business, western societies had enjoyed decades of economic growth. Even though there had been periods of recession and surges of inflation, overall economies had expanded rapidly. Incomes at the top had risen, but so had incomes at the middle, and the bottom. The value of items was not completely tied to the value of labor, but the value of labor was still a big enough component in the cost of goods that workers in America and elsewhere could afford to buy the things they made. Labor cost and goods costs were still tightly coupled.

Deng offered corporations a chance to break that connection. By moving the source of production to China, they could sharply reduce the cost of labor. At the time, labor’s value was increased by years of training and skill acquisition and Chinese workers lacked the experience of American workers, but Deng’s assault was well timed. Manufacturing was becoming increasingly automated, and the value of long periods of training diminishing. Besides, the number of available Chinese workers was such that manufacturers could sort and sift to find those who learned fast and were most productive.

Far more than at any point in the past, the cost of goods and the cost of labor was suddenly and irrevocably severed. The goals of manufacturing workers in the US were no longer a concern to employers, because those workers were now ex-employees. Even as prices fell, the reduced cost of labor made it possible for corporations to extract higher profit margins.

By opening China as a manufacturing hub for the west, Deng punched a hole in the tub. He destroyed the value of labor, convinced corporate management that they could separate their customer base from their worker base, and broke the back of western manufacturing. He decoupled labor value from product value and wrecked the system that had made the US and other western nations wealthy. The result was a flood of inexpensive goods flowing in, a flood of money pouring out, enormous disparity in incomes between those who owned the factories and those who used to man them, and a rapidly approaching point where even cheap isn’t cheap enough.

It’s become popular to view American workers in the decades after World War II as “highly paid.” The truth is they were “rightly paid,” with incomes that tracked well against the value of the products they produced. This was only possible because of the tight alignment between workers salaries and the price of goods.

Rather than organize an international revolt of workers, Deng generated a conspiracy of business leaders willing to devalue their work force. He showed CEOs that they could become fabulously wealthy if they only reduced their companies to nothing more than nameplates and outlets – brand names for China Inc. He showed them that they could profit from the destruction of their own system. What we took as economic victory was really an invitation to economic suicide, and corporations lined up to jump.

(via I cite)