StickWithANose

One of the tragedies of this most current era of globalization is the degree to which exploitation remains hidden from those who benefit from it. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploited workers often lived in close proximity to the middle and upper classes who accumulated wealth from their labor. The exploitation of industrial workers was visible to those who lived in urban centers, and the labor unrest that arose from exploitation had an immediate impact on the society as a whole. However, in the early 21st century, the exploited often live thousands of mile away, and their suffering is easily obscured by the slick packaging of the culture industry and the gadgets we fetishize. Over the past few days, we in the West have been given little glimpses into the darker side of globalization, such as the rash of suicides at a Chinese plant that manufactures iphones and Motorola gadgets and the sparks of labor organizing at a Honda manufacturing facility in China, but the sad truth is that these glimpses disappear beneath the veil of consumerism and consumption… the veil of gadgetry and technology… the veil of ideology.

The critical issue for a left politics in the early 21st century is how do you make the real costs of an iphone visible?

The suicides at the vast Foxconn plant in Shenzhen ought to shake outsiders. They ought to make them wonder about the human cost to the 420,000 workers who make those nifty iPhones and iPads which so delight savvy westerners. Workers sleep in corporate dormitories, where an ever-shifting population of migrants makes it hard to form friendships, let alone relationships. The basic pay is $130 a month and overtime is essential. Most work 12 hours a day under the eyes of a fanatical management. One man killed himself after supervisors allegedly tore into him for losing a prototype iPhone.

Liu Zhiyi, who went into the plant undercover for a Chinese newspaper, said the lives of workers were mind-numbingly tedious. “As they make the world’s finest gadgets,” he said, “it seems that while they are controlling the machines, the machines also dominating them; the parts gradually come together as they move up the assembly line; at the same time, the workers’ pure and only youth also disappears.” [...]

The employers who feature in the pages of the China Labour Bulletin do a little bit more than turn their workers into assembly line automatons. They set thugs on independent union reps. Since the start of the global recession, there have been ever more cases of employers, including “respected” European companies, cutting rates or just closing factories and running off without paying back wages.

Here we have the workshop of the world, which is also the sweatshop of the world, where even the practices of “good” employers would be unacceptable in the west. And yet the citizens of the world, particularly Europeans, do not care about the use of the one-party state to deliver a rigged market economy in which there is freedom for the rich and authoritarianism for the poor…

For all that, I cannot imagine Stephen Fry stopping his drooling over the iPad – “Just to see this is fantastic!” he burbled as crowds gathered for its launch at the Apple headquarters in London – and showing some common decency by expressing a little concern for Apple’s workers. More to the point, I am not sure that anyone would listen to him if he did. China is too big, too powerful, too impervious to criticism for Europeans to think about. The scale of the Shenzhen plant is beyond our imagination. A boycott of Foxconn’s products would not just mean boycotting Apple, but Nintendo, Nokia, Sony, HP and Dell too. Boycott China and you boycott the computer age, which, despite the crash, effectively means boycotting the 21st century, as we so far understand it…

It would be heartening if people could shake themselves and say that the iPad is just another computer, which we do not need and will not buy unless Apple persuades its suppliers to improve workers’ conditions. Until we do, the hypocrisy of the Chinese communists is our hypocrisy as well.