Here’s the cover of the March 2011 edition of Wired magazine, which just showed up in the mail:
1 million workers
90 million iPhones
17 suicides
This is where your gadgets come from. Should you care?
Yes, you should care. We do. Kudos to Wired for shining a much-needed spotlight on this important issue.
The main point of performer Mike Daisey’s powerful one-man show about Apple and its Chinese factories is that in China, it’s cheaper to have people make products rather than have machines make those products. As a result, people are treated like machines. They perform the same tasks, day in, day out. They work excessively long hours and if they break down, they are discarded. Most tellingly, if they try to commit suicide, the factory puts up big nets around its buildings to catch them. Nothing about the work or the workplace is changed.
It’s these nets that Apple touts in its just-published Supplier Responsibility report, which details the progress it has made during 2011 in imposing standards on its overseas contractors. The report discusses child labor, factory poisonings and conflict materials. A whole section is devoted to the suicides in 2010 at Foxconn, its largest overseas supplier.
I think performer/journalist Mike Daisey has very important things to things to say about Apple, the electronics industry, and modern industrial production.
Go see his hilarious but upsetting one-man show at Berkeley Rep, or watch this great TechCrunch interview:
It may be the New Year, but sadly, it appears that the mere turning-over of the calendar isn’t enough to put a stop to the slate of Foxconn suicides: last Friday, a female engineer leaped from her brother’s 10th floor flat to her death after being insulted by a superior, ordered to quit, then sent to a psychiatric hospital on Foxconn’s orders.
The suicide is the fifteenth so far, although the first Foxconn suicide in 2011.
