By Kevin Foley
I haven't read the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson nor do I personally own any Apple products, nor have I ever owned an Apple product. But I understand the late Apple founder was a driven man. Isaacson says Jobs' laser beam focus during his 56 years was to create the perfect electronic gadget.
I'll take his word for it. I'm sure whatever Apple sells in its sleek stores is state-of-the-art and highly useful.
But there is another, much uglier narrative evolving that promises a tsunami of bad public relations for Apple. It's one in which exploited workers, some as young as 12, toil long hours in Chinese factories to produce iPads and iPhones for very little money.
Mike Daisey, a monologist and self proclaimed “worshiper in the cult of Mac," got to wondering who actually built the Apple products he admired. He traveled to China in 2010 to find out and what he discovered led to his one-man show called “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs."
In it, Daisey tells of his journey to the Foxconn campus in Shenzhen, where Apple products are assembled. He was denied access to the factory so he interviewed workers at the plant's front gate as they came and went, uncovering the harrowing truth behind iWhatevers.
“As recently as 10 years ago Apple's computers were assembled in the United States," Daisey wrote in a New York Times op-ed last October, shortly after Jobs died, “but today they are built in southern China under appalling labor conditions. Apple… skirts labor laws by subcontracting all its manufacturing to companies like Foxconn, a firm made infamous for suicides at its plants, a worker dying after a 34-hour shift, widespread beatings, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to meet high quotas set by tech companies like Apple."
Daisey's observations are confirmed by a Hong Kong based watch dog group called Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour or SACOM.
Foxconn has some 1M workers at plants throughout China producing products for nearly half the electronic industry, reports SACOM. While Foxconn maintains it complies with local labor laws, its workers make wages that are slightly above the minimum wage and “far below" a living wage.
For a company like Apple, with its carefully honed image as the coolest of corporate icons, hip, cutting edge, above the fray, ahead of the curve, it has to be very disturbing for users to learn Apple's lauded gizmos are made in Chinese sweatshops.
Stung by the allegations, Apple's CEO Tim Cook, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference this week, said, “We think the use of underage labor is abhorrent. It is extremely rare in our supply chain, but we have worked to eliminate it entirely. Hiring underage labor is a firing offense. No one in our industry is doing more to improve working conditions than Apple."
As a step in that direction, Apple recently announced that a group called Fair Labor Association (FLA) will begin independent inspections of Foxconn plants in China. But critics predict a whitewash since FLA is an industry-funded organization.
"The reason why Apple is having this FLA inspection is not because they want to solve the problems … it's because Apple wants to get publicity and rebuild its positive image," said Li Qiang, executive director of China Labor Watch.
It may be too late for Apple. The controversy has begun to metastasize. More than 250,000 Apple users signed a petition calling for the company to seek worker abuse protections then showed up at Apple stores across the U.S. last week to deliver their demands. Business and industry trade publications, web sites and bloggers are all over the story and certainly Daisey's “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" has brought the issue to the forefront.
“Anyone who sees Mr. Daisey's show — and anyone with a cellphone and a moral center should — will find it hard to forget the repercussions that our casual purchases can have in the lives of men and women (and children) half a world away," Charles Isherwood wrote in his review of the show for the New York Times.
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Kevin
Foley is president of KEF
Media Associates, an Atlanta-based producer and distributor
of sponsored news content to television and radio media. |