What I find most interesting, is that it's US corporations that support the
system in China. China has a state planned Capitalist economy. The US attacks
China as a Communist country with a terrible human rights record, but the US
doesn't like the fact that China's Capitalism is more efficient than ours and
is competitive. And yet, the US is using China and contributing toward what it
does.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, June 2, 2021 9:13 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: 'DYING FOR AN IPHONE'
China's factories give new meaning to "Land of the Living Dead".
Carl Jarvis
On 6/2/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
‘DYING FOR AN IPHONE’
By Chris Hedges, ScheerPost.
June 1, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Above Photo: “Resist.” Illustration by Mr. Fish.
The Suffering Of The Working Class, Within And Outside The United
States, Is Ignored By Our Corporatized Media.
And yet, it is one of the most important human rights issues of our era.
Global capitalists have turned back the clock to the early days of the
Industrial Revolution. The working class is increasingly bereft of
rights, blocked from forming unions, paid starvation wages, subject to
wage theft, under constant surveillance, fired for minor infractions,
exposed to dangerous carcinogens, forced to work overtime, given
punishing quotas and abandoned when they are sick and old. Workers
have become, here and abroad, disposable cogs to corporate oligarchs,
who wallow in obscene personal wealth that dwarfs the worst excesses of the
Robber Barons.
In fashionable liberal circles there are, as Noam Chomsky notes,
worthy and unworthy victims. Nancy Pelosi has called on global leaders
not to attend the Winter Olympics, scheduled to be held in Beijing in
February, because of what she called a “genocide” being carried out by
the Chinese government against the Uyghur minority. New York Times
columnist Nick Kristof in a column rattled off a list of human rights
violations overseen by China’s leader Xi Jinping, writing “[Xi]
eviscerates Hong Kong freedoms, jails lawyers and journalists, seizes
Canadian hostages, threatens Taiwan and, most horrifying, presides
over crimes against humanity in the far western region of Xinjiang
that is home to several Muslim minorities.”
Not a word about the millions of workers in China who are treated
little better than serfs. They live separated from their families,
including their children, and housed in overcrowded company
dormitories, which sees rent deducted from their paychecks, next to
factories that have round-the-clock production, often making products
for U.S. corporations. Workers are abused, underpaid and sickened from
exposure to chemicals and toxins such as aluminum dust.
The suffering of the working class, within and outside the United
States, is as ignored by our corporatized media as the suffering of
the Palestinians.
And yet, I would argue, it is one of the most important human rights
issues of our era, since once workers are empowered, they can fend off
other human rights violations. Unless workers can organize, here and
in countries such as China, and achieve basic rights and living wages,
it will cement into place a global serfdom that will leave workers
trapped in the appalling conditions described by Friedrich Engels in
his 1845 book “The Conditions of the Working Class in England” or
Émile Zola‘s 1885 masterpiece “Germinal.”
As long as China can pay slave wages it will be impossible to raise
wages anywhere else. Any trade agreement has to include the right of
workers to organize, otherwise all the promises by Joe Biden to
rebuild the American middle class is a lie. Between 2001-2011, 2.7
million jobs were lost to China with 2.1 million in manufacturing.
None are coming back if workers in China and other countries that
allow corporations to exploit labor and skirt basic environmental and
labor regulations are locked in corporate servitude.
And while we can chastise China for its labor policies, the United
States has crushed its own union movement, allowed its corporations to
move manufacturing overseas to profit from the Chinese manufacturing
models, suppressed wages, passed anti-labor right-to-work laws, and
demolished regulations that once protected workers. The war on
workers is not a Chinese phenomenon. It is a global one. And U.S.
corporations are complicit.
Apple has 46 percent of its suppliers in China. Walmart has 80 percent
of its suppliers in China. Amazon has 63 percent of its suppliers in China.
The largest U.S. corporations are full partners in the exploitation of
Chinese labor, and the abandonment and impoverishment of the American
working class. U.S. corporations and Chinese manufacturers kept
millions of Chinese workers crammed into factories at the height of a global
pandemic.
Their health was of no concern. Apple’s profits more than doubled to
$23.6 billion in the most recent quarter. Its revenues rose by 54
percent to
$89.6
billion, which meant Apple sold more than $1 billion on average each day.
Until these corporations are held accountable, which the Biden
administration will not do, nothing will change for workers here or in
China. Economic justice is global or it does not exist.
Workers in Chinese industrial centers—self-contained company cities
with up to a half million people—drive the huge profits of two of the
world’s most powerful companies, Foxconn, ****the world’s largest
provider of electronics manufacturing services, and Apple, with $ 2
trillion dollars in market value. Foxconn’s largest customer is
Apple, but it also produces products for Alphabet (formerly Google),
Amazon, which owns more than 400 private-label brands, BlackBerry,
Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, GE, HP, IBM, Intel, LG, Microsoft, Nintendo,
Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba, as well as leading
Chinese firms including Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE, and Xiaomi.
Foxconn assembles iPhones, iPads, iPods, Macs, TVs, Xboxes,
PlayStations, Wii U’s, Kindles, printers, as well as numerous digital devices.
Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, and Pun Ngai spent a decade conducting
undercover research at Foxconn’s major manufacturing sites in the
Chinese cities of Shenzhen, Shanghai, Kunshan, Hangzhou, Nanjing,
Tianjin, Langfang, Taiyuan, and Wuhan for their book “Dying for an
iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and The Lives of China’s Workers”. What they
describe is an Orwellian dystopia, one where global corporations have
perfected the techniques for a disempowered work force. These vast
worker cities are little more than labor penal colonies.
Yes, it is possible to leave, but to incur the ire of the bosses,
especially by speaking out or attempting to organize, is to be
blacklisted for life throughout China’s archipelago of industrial
centers and cast to the margins of society or often prison.
Workers live under constant surveillance. They are policed by company
security units. They sleep in segregated male and female dormitories
with eight or more people to a room. The multi-story dormitories have
bars on the windows and nets below, put up to halt the spate of worker
suicides that afflicted these factory cities a few years ago.
“The workplace and living space are compressed to facilitate
high-speed, round-the-clock production,” the authors write. “The
dormitory warehouses a massive migrant labor force without the care
and love of family. Whether single or married, the worker is assigned
a bunk space for one person. The ‘private space’ consists simply of
one’s own bed behind a self-made curtain with little common living space.”
Workers, who earn about $2 an hour and an average of $390 a month, are
paid in wage debit cards, an updated version of company scrip. The
bank card allows a worker to deposit, withdraw, and transfer money
from 24-hour ATM machines that are accessible at Foxconn facilities.
Managers, foremen, and line leaders prohibit conversation on the
assembly floor that operates on a 24-hour cycle of 10- or 12-hour
shifts. Workers are reprimanded if they work “too slowly” on the line.
They are punished for turning out defective products. Workers are
often forced to remain behind after a shift if a worker committed an
infraction. The worker who violated the rules is required to stand
before his or her co-workers and read a statement of self-criticism.
Any worker issued a “D” grade in their review for “unsatisfactory
performance” is fired. The workers receive one day off every second
week, or two rest days a month. They can be summarily shifted between
the night and day shifts.
The authors describe the daily routine of a worker entering a Foxconn
factory at 7 a.m. with hundreds of thousands of other Foxconn employees.
Each person, prohibited from entering the factory complex with
electronic devices, is checked by facial recognition systems to
confirm his or her identity.
The human flow continues for more than an hour. Night-shift workers
cross the footbridge and pour into the shopping malls and street
markets that have sprung up around the factory. Day-shift workers
cross the same footbridge, in the opposite direction, heading to work.
From the moment they enter the factory gate, workers are monitored by
a security system more intrusive than any that we found in the
neighboring smaller electronics-processing factories. “Foxconn has its
own security force, just as a country has an army,” a stern faced,
broad-shouldered security officer stated as a matter of fact. Workers
pass through successive electronic gates and Special Security Zones
before arriving at their workshops to start work.
Once inside, the authors write, workers endure a familiar ritual:
As workers prepare to begin a shift, managers call out: “How are you?”
Workers must respond by shouting in unison, “Good! Very good! Very,
very good!” This drill is said to foster disciplined workers. A
laser-soldering worker reported, “Before shift-time, a whistle sounds
three times. At the first whistle we must rise and put our stools in
order. At the second whistle we prepare to work and put on special
gloves or equipment. At the third whistle we sit and work. “No
talking, no laughing, no eating, no sleeping” during work hours is the
number one factory rule. Any behavior that violates discipline is
penalized. “Going to the toilet for more than ten minutes incurs an
oral warning, and chatting during work time incurs a written warning,” a line
leader explained.
The work is exhausting, stressful and repetitive. An iPhone has more
than one hundred parts. “Every worker,” the authors write,
“specializes in one task and performs repetitive motions at high
speed, hourly, daily, ten hours or more on many working days, for
months on end.”
A woman interviewed in the book described her life on the assembly line:
I am a cog in the visual inspection workstation, which is part of the
static electricity assembly line. As the adjacent soldering oven
delivers smartphone motherboards, both my hands extend to take the
motherboard, then my head starts shifting from left to right, my eyes
move from the left side of the motherboard to the right side, then
stare from the top to the bottom, without interruption, and when
something is off, I call out, and another human part similar to myself
will run over, ask about the cause of the error, and fix it. I repeat
the same task thousands of times a day. My brain rusts.
The work can also be hazardous. The polishing machine emits aluminum
dust as it grinds the casings. This dust gets into the eyes and causes
irritation and tiny tears. Workers suffer from respiratory problems,
sore throats and chronic coughs. “Microscopic aluminum dust coats
workers’ faces and clothes,” the authors write. “A worker described
the situation this way:
‘I’m breathing aluminum dust at Foxconn like a vacuum cleaner. With
the workshop windows tightly shut, workers felt that they were suffocating.’”
The aluminum dust can also cause fires, such as one on May 20, 2011
when an accumulation of aluminum dust in the air duct on the third
floor at Foxconn Chengdu Building A5 was ignited by a spark from an
electric switch. Four workers died. Dozens were injured. It was not
the only explosion, which Foxconn managed to largely hide by imposing a near
total media blackout.
“Seven months after the Foxconn tragedy, on December 17, 2011,
combustible aluminum dust fueled another blast, this time at iPhone
maker Pegatron in Shanghai, injuring sixty-one workers. In the blast,
young men and women suffered severe burns and shattered bones, leaving
many permanently disabled,” the authors write.
Workers are required to clean one thousand iPhone touchscreens per shift.
They were cleaned for years with the chemical n-hexane, which
evaporates faster than industrial alcohol. Prolonged exposure to
n-hexane damages peripheral nerves, leading to painful muscle cramps,
headaches, uncontrollable shaking, blurred vision and difficulties
walking. It should only be applied in well ventilated areas by workers
wearing respirators.
Thousands of Foxconn workers applied n-hexane in sealed rooms without
ventilators and were sickened, finally leading to its ban.
These vast industrial complexes also discharge huge amounts of heavy
metals and wastewater into the rivers and ground water. Rivers near
plants run black with sewage and are filled with plastic waste.
Workers complain that the drinking water is discolored and smells.
The United States cast its workers aside in the 1990s with
de-industrialization. China did the same by dismantling socialism in
favor of state-controlled capitalism. State and collective sector
jobs in China fell from 76 percent in 1995 to 27 percent in 2005.
Tens of millions of laid off workers were left to compete for jobs run
by corporations such as Foxconn. But even these jobs are now under
threat, partly from automation, with workers on assembly lines
replaced by robotic automatons that can spray, weld, press, polish, do
quality testing and assemble printed circuit boards. Foxconn has
installed over 40,000 industrial robots in its factories, along with hundreds
of thousands of other automated machines.
But over the past decade, the authors note, “the major changes inside
Foxconn were not the replacement of workers with robots but the
replacement of full-time employees with growing numbers of student
interns and contingent subcontracted laborers.”
These workers, part of the gig economy familiar in the United States,
have even less job stability and security than full time employees. As
many as
150,000 high-school age vocational students are employed in Foxconn plants.
They are paid the minimum wage, but are not entitled to the
400-yuan-per-month skills subsidy, even if they pass the probationary
period. Foxconn is also not required to enroll them in social security.
Those who lead these corporate behemoths often replicate the behavior
of despots, not only exerting total control over every aspect of their
workers lives but dispensing folksy wisdom to the masses. They are
often treated by a fawning media as gurus, asked to opine–as Bill
Gates, Warren Buffet, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos do–on a range of
social, economic, political and cultural issues. Their immense
fortunes confer to them in our Mammon-worshipping society a sage-like status.
Terry Gou, the founder and CEO of Foxconn, has published a list of
slogans and aphorisms that adorn the walls of his factories, along
with his portraits. Workers are required to write out passages from
“Gou’s Quotations.” While Mao Zedong called for class struggle and
rebellion, Gou calls for conformity and blind obedience. “Growth thy name is
suffering,”
reads one of his quotes. The Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Dean,
in a
2007 interview with Gou, characterized Gao as a “warlord,” and noted
that “he wears a beaded bracelet he got from a temple dedicated to
Genghis Khan, the thirteenth-century Mongolian conqueror whom he calls a
personal hero.”
“A harsh environment is a good thing,” one of Gou’s quotes reads.
“Achieve goals or the sun will no longer rise. Value efficiency every
minute, every second. Execution is the integration of speed, accuracy, and
precision.”
His more than one million employees, as is true at Amazon and other
large corporations, are subjected to mandatory company meetings where
they are taught to obey company rules, pay fealty to the interests of
the corporation and, as the authors note, strive for “the
individualistic model of success.”
Those who heed the rules, workers are told, are rewarded. Those who
do not, are punished or banished.
Workers in these global sweatshops are organizing underground and
protesting. There were 8,700 incidents of labor unrest in China in
1993, the first year for which official data is available, to 32,000
in 1999, the authors write. “The number ‘continued to increase at more
than 20 percent a year’ between 2000 and 2003. In 2005, the official
record noted 87,000 cases, rising to 127,000 in 2008 during the world
recession–the last time the Chinese Ministry of Public Security
released figures.”
In Hubei’s East Lake High-Tech Development Zone, the authors note,
known as Optics Valley, on January 3, 2012, 150 Foxconn workers
threatened to jump from the roof of the factory and commit mass
suicide if the managers refused to address their demands, which
included protests over forced transfers to other factories’ cities and
a wage dispute.
Strikes, protests and work stoppages that take place now are state
secrets, but the past statistics seem to indicate that they are
growing. Strikes are usually swiftly and brutally broken by company
security and police, with strike leaders being fired and often imprisoned.
We will not save ourselves through the perverted individualism, sold
to us by our corporate masters and a compliant mass media, which
encourages our advancement at the expense of others. We will save
ourselves by working in solidarity with workers inside and outside the
United States. This collective power is our only hope. Amazon workers
from the Hulu Garment factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Global
Garments factory in Chittagong, Bangladesh, recently led a global day
of action to make Amazon pay all its workers, no matter where they live, fair
wages. This has to be our model.
Otherwise, workers in one country will be pitted against workers in
another country. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels got it right. Workers
of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.