Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” I never quite understood what he meant by that, but I think I’m beginning to. The conditions at the Foxconn factories in China have been written about quite extensively in the New York Times and I think it’s at least worth mentioning for the benefit of those unaware.
The factory produces all types of electronic equipment, including essential circuit boards for Apple, Microsoft, Intel and numerous others. Whats most notable about the company however is not that it produces so much of the electronics we’ve come to depend on or that we import these goods from China, but that it produces these products using the most exhaustive and brutal kind of slave labor.
Many employees live at the plant’s nearby dormitories and regularly work 12 hour days, making up 60 hour weeks. Sometimes employees work more. Their dorms are about the size of a single bedroom in America, each housing about eight people. The plants conditions are unsafe, repetitive and stressful to say the least. Employees are paid about $17 a day. Others with college degrees can aspire to about $22 a day.
Conditions at the plant are so poor that the company installed nets around the building to catch jumpers and offset the number of suicides. Recently, about 150 employees threatened to commit mass suicide unless the plant provide its workers with a raise.
The New York Times quotes a current apple executive who said, “We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers. The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.” That’s an incredible statement since apparently the skills Apple needs to keep their stock price up is slave labor, something the American worker is not yet ready to provide.
This is what happens in an unfettered capitalist system where legal protections and the expectations for a decent life are separated by thousands of miles; eventually everything is commodified including human life and human dignity.
The Times continues, “Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.”
The Times notes one story in which 8,000 employees were awoken in the middle of the night to begin work on a revised model of the iphone. They wrote, “Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.” The plants incredible output capacity can’t be matched except under these conditions. Do we really accept that these can’t be produced here due to a lack of competent workers or is it simply more profitable to enslave hundreds of thousands of people?
Our thirst for these products is insatiable. Already our culpability in the crime is unavoidable. This opinion and your ability to read it are symptoms of that obvious fact. While we can limit our guilt by buying used products or refusing to upgrade to the latest items, workable solutions need to come from our government.
Additional Reading:
Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad – NYT (January 25, 2012)
How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work – NYT (January 21, 2012)
Why Are You Buying Apple (and Other Chinese) Products – Market-Ticker.org
