Working For Jobs

by Tom Philpott.

I
spend my days teasing out the trouble that lurks behind the towering
bounty of our food system. How is that Americans can get a McDonald’s “McDouble” (a double
cheeseburger) for a dollar? In the time it takes you to eat it, I can give you a bite or two of the social and
ecological ruin that accompanies that burger. Or you can just scroll
through my archive.

While
writing about food politics on my monstrous Dell “Latitude” laptop, I
often daydream about a sleek new Mac Air or MacBook. And as someone who reads a lot of online news for my job, I kind of want an iPad. I also wouldn’t mind
trading in my perfectly serviceable 3G iPhone for the new-and-improved 4G. (That flash would really improve my Tom’s Kitchen photos, wouldn’t it?) Honestly, it’s mainly lack of funds that holds me back from
these purchases.

In
other words, like a lot of folks, I think hard about where my food
comes from, but spare very few thoughts about where my gadgets come
from. Still, every once in a while, I came across an item like this post by Elizabeth Grossman, on the excellent public-health blog The Pump Handle, that really makes me pause.

No gadget is an island

Grossman
filed a report from the Indonesian island of Batam, which lies just
across the strait from Singapore, a major manufacturing center of
electronic gadgets and components. If U.S. high-tech companies have
outsourced manufacturing to countries like Singapore, then places like
Batam are where Singapore-based companies send their labor-intensive,
highly toxic work. Writes Grossman:

Thanks
to much of the island’s designation as a special economic zone
beginning in 1989, Batam has been experiencing explosive growth. In the
1970s, the island’s population was under 10,000. Today it has soared to
about 900,000 and continues to grow. The industry here is primarily
electronics—shipbuilding and general manufacturing are also major
industries—with Batam’s workers providing inexpensive labor for
assembly line production for Singapore-based operations of international
companies. Panasonic, Epson, Sanyo, Siemens, Flextronics, Infineon,
Teac, Schneider, Unisem, and Philips are some of the names we see on
factory buildings in the Batamindo Industrial Park, one of the island’s
largest industrial parks. The website for its Singapore-based developer notes that more than 60,000 people work for the companies located here.

The
food and consumer-tech industries have similar challenges: keeping the
end product reasonably cheap while maintaining brisk profitability. That
means holding down worker wages.

“[U]nions are the exception throughout
the electronics industry worldwide,” reports Grassman, “a legacy of the historical anti-union bias of the microchip industry.” Remarkably, the workers at Batamindo Industrial Park are unionized, but all is not well. Grossman met with union workers and heard their stories. Here’s a sampling:

One
union member describes his hearing loss after working at the same
factory for ten years. He’s had to go to Jakarta (about 540 miles away)
for treatment, he says, showing us copies of his audiometry tests.
Another, who’s worked for Varta for 15 years making nickel metal hydride
batteries, tells us of colleagues suffering from cancer. Yet another
union member tells us about co-workers who’ve been diagnosed with lung
disease[; the] official diagnosis is TB—“from printed circuit board cutting
dust.”

Several
people mention women’s reproductive health concerns, among them
menstrual problems, miscarriages, birth defects, and quadruplets. One
man puts his hand on his wife’s shoulder and tells us of her breast
cancer. She’s spent 15 years working in a plant assembling lithium
batteries. No one knows if there’s a connection, but when pressed, the
company management paid for her treatment.

If
all of this sounds vague and anecdotal, it has mainly to do with lack
of resources for research, not the lack of basis for concern. What government or
corporation has the incentive to study the health effects of working in
Indonesia’s technology manufacturing sector? The governments of the United
States, Singapore, and Indonesia all benefit from strong electronics
sales—think tax revenues and GDP growth—as do the companies that manufacture and market gadgets. A
country with a robust public health care system might have an incentive
to crack down on industries that routinely sicken workers; but
Indonesia has no such thing. So to figure out how the workers who make our gadgets are faring, we have to rely on anecdotes. And those anecdotes are dismal.

Sour grapes—and iPads

Grossman’s
report got me thinking about those quickly forgotten stories last
spring about a spate of suicides in China’s electronics sweatshops.
After re-reading this May 2010 Der Spiegel piece on the topic, I feel like Aesop’s fox regarding the grapes he could not reach: even if I could afford an iPad or the latest iPhone, I don’t think I want one anymore.

The
article focuses on a vast factory in Shenzhen, China, where 300,000
workers crank out products for Foxconn, a Taiwan-based company that
assembles gadgets for Apple, Nintendo, and Dell.

Get this:

Ma
Xiangqian, 18, was part of this peculiar Foxconn [manufacturer of the
iPad] world, where everything is numbered: buildings, machines,
component parts, finished products and, of course, people. For wages of
up to 1,940 yuan per month (€230, or $285), the young man from Henan
province spent his 12-hour shifts shoving plastic pieces into a machine
that formed casings for Apple computers. Then he went home to sleep with
nine colleagues in a room of one of the many dormitory blocks on the
factory complex.

To
earn these pathetic wages of little more than a dollar a day, the workers—most of whom come from
hundreds of miles away in inland China—eat and sleep under highly
regimented conditions on the factory premises, which the company
cheekily insists on calling a “campus.” So as not to impede the endless
flow of goods leaving the premises and inputs coming in, workers are
“allowed to walk alongside each other only in pairs,” Der Spiegel reports. “If there are three of them, they must form a line.” On the
factory floor, prevailing conditions would make Orwell (or Chaplin)
flinch:

The
men and women in white uniform coats and bonnets are forbidden from
holding personal conversations. This rule is printed on the flip side of
their corporate IDs. The only sound is a whistle and hiss from the
machines where they push green circuit-boards for laptops or credit-card
readers. On eight different conveyor belts, they finish work on eight
different products for several different world markets.

By
the end of May, Der Spiegel reported, no fewer than 10 workers had
committed suicide; three more had attempted it unsuccessfully. In
response to global outrage over the conditions, Foxconn has bumped up wages and announced plans to build plants in inland China, nearer to workers’ homes. But the UK trade journal TechEye points to a report suggesting that the “promised pay rise to … has failed to
materialise – indeed, most workers haven’t even been told about it.”

TechEye quotes a European fair-labor activist on the situation, who comments in
terms that will be familiar to close watchers of the meat industry:

A
brand like Apple has a very high profit margin on hardware: more than
40 percent. But it asks suppliers, which have a much lower profit margin
of about 4 percent, to lower production costs. As a result, labour
costs are squeezed and workers never get living wages.

Figuring
out what to do about our destructive consumer-electronics system is
even more vexing than figuring out how to reform our foodways. In food,
we can build out alternative production/consumption networks like
farmers markets and CSA (community-supported agriculture) programs. By
contrast, community-supported, artisanal smart-phone factories are
inconceivable. Gadget-making, it turns out, is even more
capital-intensive than food production—and then there’s the problem that you can’t just compost your electornic waste. Nor can we, in a digital information age, merely opt out of the system on which I write these words and you read them.

But
we can dedicate ourselves to knowing, and not ignoring, the fact that
our gadgets, like our food, have a story. And we can reject the planned
obsolescence—the lust for the newest and flashiest at the expense of
the perfectly useful—that underpins the consumer-tech industry.

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