Yesterday the New York Sunday Times ran a fascinating piece on the manufacturing of iPhones. The making of 200 million phones is taking place in the far east, mostly in China. When President Obama asked Steve Jobs “why can’t that work come home?” Jobs replied: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.” The article, written by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, describes the reasons why this work will never come back home (and why we wouldn’t want them anyway).
In the months prior to the release of the iPhone, Steve Jobs carried a prototype in his pocket. He discovered that the plastic screen was easily scratched by the keys and loose change that people often have in their pockets. He informed his engineers that this was not acceptable and insisted – at the last minute – that they redesign the phone with a scratch- and break-resistant glass. Corning Glass was able to do this.
Corning (made in America!) shipped the new parts to China, where they arrived around midnight. Supervisors at the assembly plant woke up some 8,000 workers sleeping in company dorms, gave them tea and a biscuit and set them to work in 12 hour shifts installing the glass into bevelled frames. The plant churned out 10,000 phones per day.
It is impossible to envision an American workforce positioned to perform this kind of work under these conditions. We do not house our workers in dorms (except migrant farm workers). We do not suddenly change work schedules to begin at midnight. Even in the Republican dream of a post-union workforce, it is inconceivable that American workers would accept this kind of pressure – and be paid $17 per day or less.
iPhones and Pyramids
Nearly seven years ago we blogged the emerging issue of worker rights in China. While there is a bare-bones structure of rights, these are arbitrarily enforced and easily avoided. China is a single party state, run with ruthless efficiency by the Communist Party. Opposition is not tolerated; dissent is brutally suppressed; and workers are at the mercy of their employers. To enforce rights, you need a constitution and an infrastructure of laws and regulations. And you need lawyers to argue on behalf of workers. China has none of these crucial elements and, truth be told, no real interest in developing them. And that is why everything is made in China: quality is high, working conditions are whatever management wants them to be, and labor costs are low.
While technically not slaves, production workers in China labor under appalling conditions that do not and cannot exist in most western cultures. They may be paid better than the slaves who built the pyramids, but they are paid less – while working harder – than any comparable workforce in developed countries.
So the late Steve Jobs was correct: the jobs involved in assembling essential electronic devices will remain off shore. These jobs are never coming home, unless, of course, the economy collapses totally and our workers are reduced to accepting virtually any working conditions. Which leads to questions beyond the scope of a workers comp blog: what manufacturing jobs will remain domestic? What will happen to the millions of production workers in America who no longer have jobs? As the American middle class declines, how will the economy function? Who will buy the goods that drive the engine of capitalism?
Epilogue
I drove my American assembled Japanese car to the Verizon store yesterday and picked up my black 16 gig iPhone, designed by indisputable geniuses in America and assembled by an underclass in China. It’s awesome. I can’t imagine life without it.
Posts Tagged ‘offshore jobs’
Building Pyramids, Building iPhones
Monday, January 23rd, 2012Another sad chapter in the “no exit” chronicles
Monday, December 20th, 2010We’re just a few short months away from the 100-year anniversary of one of the most horrific industrial tragedies in our nation, one that catapulted the issue of worker safety to the forefront and helped to usher in a new era reform, including the protection afforded by workers compensation programs. On March 21, 1911, The Triangle Factory Fire killed 146 women and girls, most of whom were trapped on an upper floor of the factory. They were unable to get out because the doors had been locked to prevent theft. You can read many first-person accounts of the tragedy at the link above. My colleague wrote about it in his post The Original “No Exit” : The Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Fire.
In the wake of this tragedy, many safety laws were enacted and many lessons were learned.
Or were they? Last week, the tragedy was mirrored in a Bangladesh garment shop fire that killed 29 women workers and injured another 100. It’s feared that more bodies will turn up. Reports say that to prevent theft, emergency exits were locked.
Now some might think that, however tragic, a fire in Bangladesh doesn’t have much to do with us here in the U.S. Except that in our global economy, it does. Many of the most successful U.S. retailers and clothing manufactures have outsourced former domestic garment jobs to some 4,000 Bangladesh factories. In an article Workers Burned Alive Making Clothes for the GAP, human rights and labor groups make the link. The article paints a grim picture of serial fatalities in Dickensian-era sweat shops where workers are paid less than a dollar a day. In response to publicized abuses, some US companies have established “Codes of Vendor Conduct,” but with a continuing stream of fatalities and worker abuses, labor groups question the effectiveness of these codes and demand a higher level of scrutiny. “How many times in one year do workers have to die before GAP Inc determines that the Hameem group “lacks the intent or ability” to make improvements? This is an American company accountable to American consumers.”
It’s not just The Gap. Other companies that are supplied by Bangladesh garment factories include Wal-Mart, Tesco, H&M, Zara, Carrefour, Gap, Metro, JCPenney, Marks & Spencer, Kohl’s, Levi Strauss and Tommy Hilfiger. Surely, American companies could join forces in leveraging their buying power to demand that safety and basic human rights are enforced.
Unfortunately, here in the U.S., we aren’t immune to such abuses, either. In 1991, 25 poultry workers were killed in a Hamlet chicken processing plant in North Carolina, another instance of workers being locked in. An investigation resulted in the owners receiving a 20-year prison sentence and the company was fined the highest penalty in the history of North Carolina. One would think that U.S. employers would have learned from the Triangle and the hamlet fires, but one would be wrong. In 2004, The new York Times reported that Walmart was locking night shift employees in. Later in the same year, OSHA cited a Winn Dixie supermarket in Mobile, Alabama for similar practices.
The road to good safety practices here in the US was paved with the blood of workers. It took incidents like the Triangle fire and large scale mining disasters before the US public clamored for reform. It remains to be seen whether the same types of offshore tragedies will galvanize consumer opinion enough to call for better worker protections.
