The People That Make Our Stuff

There are no yoga breaks at Foxconn

Hey technology lovers, spend 45 minutes and listen to Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory, a story broadcast on This American Life (and if you can’t listen then read the transcript, excerpted below).

I listened to it this morning on the train, and couldn’t stop even after I arrived at my desk.  It has haunted me all day. Part of that haunting is the way the author tells the story.

There’s some things in it that are difficult to listen to; listening as I do with “first world ears.” The working conditions described are not to be wished on anyone, but they’re all part of the process of economic development, as Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof express at the end of the piece. But knowing that what’s described is a necessary part of lifting people and countries out of poverty doesn’t make me feel better about the process and its effect on the workers involved at FoxConn and all the other factories like it.

Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show recently did a feature on FoxConn, too. The Fear Factory segment can be seen here. What Mike Daisey does with his totally absorbing monologue, Stewart and his team carry out with humor.  But don’t laugh so hard that it makes you miss the point and not give you the creeps. The Daily Show can be funny that way.

There are many universities that have become very finicky about where the t-shirts and sweatshirts bearing their logos are made and whether they’re manufactured with prison labor or child labor. Yet some of those same universities somehow have deals with Apple to outfit their students with technology made in those same kinds of places.

We all are turning a selectively blind eye.

I’d like to hope that once you hear this story and think about its meaning, you’ll be a little less cavalier with how you treat your equipment and how you think about them. Someone spent 34 straight hours making that thing that you’re about to leave in a cab or throw on the couch. Treat it with respect not only for the miraculous things it can do, but as a work of art that people literally slaved to place into your hands.

Here are excerpts of Mike Daisey telling his story:

My only hobby is technology. I love technology. I love everything about it. I love looking at technology. I love comparing one piece of technology with another. I love reading rumors about technology that doesn’t exist yet. I love browsing technology. I love buying technology. I love opening technology. Even when it’s in that bubble packaging, I love opening it. I love the smell of a new piece of technology, that sort of burnt PVC smell when you run electricity through it for the first time. I love that.

And of all the kinds of technology that I love in the world, I love the technology that comes from Apple the most, because I am an Apple aficionado. I’m an Apple partisan. I’m an Apple fanboy. I’m a worshiper in the cult of Mac. I have been to the house of Jobs. I have walked the stations of his cross. I have knelt before his throne.

…

Today Shenzhen is a city of 14 million people. It is larger than New York City. Depending on how you count it, it’s the third largest city in all of China. It is the place where almost all of your crap comes from.

And the most amazing thing is, almost no one in America knows its name. Isn’t that remarkable that there’s a city where almost all of our crap comes from, and no one knows its name? I mean, we think we do know where our crap comes from. We’re not ignorant. We think our crap comes from China, right? Kind of a generalized way. China.

But it doesn’t come from China. It comes from Shenzhen. It’s a city. It’s a place.

…

My plan is this. We are in a taxi right now in the factory zone. We are driving on our way to Foxconn. Foxconn, a single company, makes a staggering amount of the electronics you use every day. They make electronics for Apple, Dell, Nokia, Panasonic, HP, Samsung, Sony, Lenovo, a third of all of it. That’s Foxconn. And at this plant they make all kinds of things, including MacBook Pros and iPhones and iPads.

And so my plan is to take this taxi to the main gate, and then I’m going to get out of the taxi with my translator. And then my plan is to stand at the main gate and talk to anybody who wants to talk to me.

…

…the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen is enormous. The Foxconn plant in Shenzhen has 430,000 workers. That can be a difficult number to conceptualize. I find it’s useful to instead think about how there are more than 20 cafeterias at the plant. And then you just have to understand that workers told me that these cafeterias can hold up to 10,000 people. So now you just need to visualize a cafeteria that seats 10,000 people.

…

And I look up past the gates and the guards. I look up at the buildings, these immense buildings. They are so enormous. And along the edges of each enormous building are the nets, because right at the time that I am making this visit, there’s been an epidemic of suicides at the Foxconn plant. Week after week, worker after worker has been climbing all the way up to the tops of these enormous buildings and then throwing themselves off, killing themselves in a brutal and public manner, not thinking very much about just how bad this makes Foxconn look. Foxconn’s response to month after month of suicides has been to put up these nets.

…

Do you really think Apple doesn’t know? In a company obsessed with the details, with the aluminum being milled just so, with the glass being fitted perfectly into the case, do you really think it’s credible that they don’t know? Or are they just doing what we are all doing? Do they just see what they want to see?

…

They work a Chinese hour, and a Chinese hour has 60 Chinese minutes, and a Chinese minute has 60 Chinese seconds. It’s not like our hour. What’s our hour now, 46 minutes? You know, you have a bathroom break, and you have a smoke break. If you don’t smoke, there’s a yoga break. This doesn’t look anything like that. This looks like nothing we’ve seen in a century.

They work on the line, and the lines only move as fast as its slowest member, so each person learns how to move perfectly as quickly as possible. If they can’t do it, there are people behind them watching them. And there are cameras watching both sets of people, and people watching the cameras. They lock it down. They sharpen it to a fine, sharp edge every hour, and those hours are long.

The official work day in China is eight hours long, and that’s a joke. I never met anyone who had even heard of an eight-hour shift. Everyone I talked to worked 12-hour shifts standard, and often much longer than that, 14 hours a day, 15 hours a day. Sometimes when there’s a hot new gadget coming out– you know what the [BLEEP] I’m talking about– sometimes it pegs up to 16 hours a day. And it just sits there for weeks and months at a time, month after month after month, straight 16′s, sometimes longer than that.

While I’m in-country, a worker at Foxconn dies after working a 34-hour shift. I wish I could say that’s exceptional, but it’s happened before. I only mention it because it actually happened while I was there.

…

Then the workers start coming in. They come in in twos and threes and fours. They come in all day. It’s an eight, nine-hour day. I interview all of them. Some of them are in groups.

There’s a group that’s talking about hexane. N-hexane is an iPhone screen cleaner. It’s great because it evaporates a little bit faster than alcohol does, which means you can run the production line even faster and try to keep up with the quotas. The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin, and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them can’t even pick up a glass.

I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It’s like carpal tunnel on a scale we can scarcely imagine. And you need to know that this is eminently avoidable. If these people were rotated monthly on their jobs, this would not happen.

But that would require someone to care. That would require someone at Foxconn and the other suppliers to care. That would require someone at Apple and Dell and the other customers to care. Currently no one in the ecosystem cares enough to even enforce that. And so when you start working at 15 or 16, by the time you are 26, 27, your hands are ruined. And when they are truly ruined, once they will not do anything further, you know what we do with a defective part in a machine that makes machine. We throw it away.

…

[Here's New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul] Krugman. “It is the indirect and unintended results of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs. It is not an edifying spectacle, but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful, but nonetheless significantly better.”

Does Krugman make you feel any better about what you’ve heard or read?  Me neither.

An Unexpected Education

I’m a podcast listener and have been since the technology came into being.  I subscribe to thirteen podcasts (see below) and am listening to something almost every free moment, including when I mow the lawn.  Yes, that means that I wear headphones over top of my ear buds and yes it looks ridiculous.

For a while, I’ve meant to write of my love for American Public Media‘s daily podcast called “The Writer’s Almanac“.  Garrison Keillor spends five minutes talking about some event for that particular day that has a literary linkage.  More on that later.

Earlier today, I was listening to the After Words podcast from C-SPAN.  The podcast consists of a rebroadcast of the television show in which an author of a new work of non-fiction is interviewed by an expert on the book’s topic.  It usually makes for a more interesting interview than if it were conducted by a journalist with no prior knowledge of the topic.

The podcast in question featured Eduardo Porter, speaking on his book, “The Price of Everything–Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do”.  I’ve not read the book but as I understand it, it is in the field of “rational economics” a la “Freakonomics”.  This has been, until today, a topic of mild interest to me.

Mr. Porter begins the show with the following example:

“There’s some great research done by these psychologists at the University of New Mexico, who studied the tips paid to lap dancers.  And they found…that tips given to lap dancers at the peak of their fertility were much much higher…than for lap dancers who were at any other point in the[ir] cycle. And this was going on without anybody noticing. I mean the patrons did not know this, but something was happening to them, either it was a smell or the way the lap dancer moved or something that was leading them to pay more for that lap dancing experience. So clearly this was not some rational decision to pay more for a lap dance.”

I’m sure the next five minutes of what Mr. Porter had to say were interesting, but I can tell you that I didn’t hear it.  I was stuck on the concept that someone thought it would advance their economic research to talk to lap dancers about their menstruation cycles and then correlate it to their tips.  It’s a shame that Mr. Porter didn’t bring a graph with him.  Perhaps there’s one in the book.

It was when I came back out of my “economics of lap dancing tips” fog that I realized that it was time to reassess “rational economics” as a field of study and to be somewhat more selective in my podcast choices.  But I will admit that I did learn something new.  I can’t wait to spring this on someone at a cocktail party.

. . .

My Current Podcast List (in order as they appear in my iTunes):

APM’s The Writer’s Almanac

C-SPAN – After Words

ESPN: PTI

NPR: It’s All Politics (a comedy routine that’s in the guise of a political news show)

NPR: Planet Money

Old Jews Telling Jokes

PBS NewsHour

Slate’s Hang Up and Listen

Slate’s Political Gabfest

This American Life

Vanity Fair’s Writers Reading (authors read a chapter from their own books)

WTF with Marc Maron (a comedian interviews other comedians)

What I read

Probably Enough to Keep Me Busy

My name is Mark and I am an addict.  My drug of choice is information, particularly on current events.

I started really reading in junior high, but it got out of hand in high school.  At first it was two newspapers a day (Chicago Tribune and the Arlington Herald).  Sports first, then the other stuff.  My reading an article about a rape trial got me “the talk” from my dad. I was in Student Congress in high school and there wasn’t a current topic that was off-limits, so preparing meant covering a wide landscape.  The guy behind the periodical desk at the library came to dislike me.  That experience introduced me to the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, as well as a broader range of general and not so general interest magazines.  Foreign Policy, anyone?  It was a gateway drug.

I went into remission in college, then resumed consuming thereafter.  It’s now really out of hand with both internet’s accessibility and my not having a job.  But even when I worked, I still always had about 40 pages of articles I’d reformatted into two-column, 10-point font to carry with me.  Walking to a meeting, waiting for a lunch partner, lunching by myself, on the train, and in other places appropriate or not, my appetite for news could be described as insatiable.  In the last couple years, I’ve fallen in love with podcasting, so now I’ve got news in through my ears and eyes, often at the same time.  If you see me with my headphones, chances are good that I’m tuned into Fresh Air or something similar, rather than Green Day.

I don’t watch much TV; mostly sports and a few entertainment shows (Modern Family tops the list, Wednesdays at 9/8CT).  I only occasionally watch cable news, and that’s only because I like the way certain people write their material, not because it adds much to my knowledge or understanding of a topic.  Cable TV does all of us a disservice by conflating the ideas of “governing” and “politics” and treating both in the same way CNBC treats the stock market or ESPN treats the baseball season.  It’s not a game.  Policy-making, like history, happens over a long arc of time and does not change eight times within 24 hours. I couldn’t help but notice how the so-called conventional wisdom on President Obama turned 180 degrees in the moments following signing the health care bill (and publication of David Frum’s “Waterloo” analysis). One moment, he’s a political blunderer, the next a genius.  It was never either one and there wasn’t a switch magically flipped on Sunday.  While there are addition points made in this this NY Review of Books piece, it encapsulates my feelings on the topic pretty well.

I used to have a business relationship with CNN and conversations with their executives taught me much about how they think and their need to “feed the monster”.  Essentially, their argument was:  We’re on for 24 hours and have to have something to talk about, so we take small things, small differences, highlight them and if we’re lucky, we’ll get a run of a couple days out of a story.  If that happens, it’s that many fewer other little stories that we’ll have to report. It was akin to taking crap and throwing it against the wall to see what would stick, then talking about it until it fell off the wall.  It works great at first (e.g., the first Gulf War), but with the proliferation of channels, the hosts of these shows have to continually come up with unique things to be outraged about, lest they lose their gigs (think Beck and Olbermann; Hannity and Ed).  If there’s nothing to be outraged about, what’s the point of having them on the air?  So outraged they are.  And we lose the concept of rational discourse in the process.

But I digress.

So, I read.  Don’t tell my business colleagues, but reading about business bores me.

I occasionally get asked what I read.  Unlike someone who came to national prominence in the last couple years and was unprepared for that question, I have an answer.  It’s a long one.  I’m exhausted looking at it.  You’ll note that it doesn’t include Time, Newsweek or any of the other “general interest” magazines.  My sense has been that if they’re only going to publish weekly, their analysis had better be excellent because it comes so late; I find their websites generally uninteresting, too (too much celebrity coverage).  The last time I checked, I didn’t think it warranted the effort.

It’s a habit I can’t kick.  I read the occasional book, but while doing that, I’m thinking of the other current things I could be reading about, so it sort of sucks the pleasure out of it.  The only exception is when I get my hands on a good history book, since I can put myself in the historical context and read it as if it was a current event.  It’s more confusing to explain than to do.

So here’s the list.

Physical media:

• New York Times
• New Yorker
• Vanity Fair
• Esquire
• Sports Illustrated
• Golf
• Golf Digest
• Chicago Tribune (although this is more of a joke now than a paper)

Online – consistently (I pay for access to the WSJ.  I would pay for content at other providers, too.  The notion that this stuff all has to be free is flawed as far as I’m concerned):

• Wall St. Journal
• Financial Times
• The Atlantic
• The Economist
• Slate
• Salon
• National Review
• New Republic

Online – occasional

• Chicago Sun Times
• Forbes
• New York Magazine
• Weekly Standard
• Christian Science Monitor
• Huffington Post
• Crain’s Chicago Business
• Arts & Letters Daily
• The Browser
• The Book Forum

Podcasts:

• PTI
• C-SPAN After Words (from Book TV)
• Fresh Air
• NPR’s It’s All Politics
• NPR’s Planet Money
• PBS NewsHour
• Slate’s Culture Gabfest
• Slate’s Hang Up and Listen
• Slate’s Political Gabfest
• Countdown
• This American Life
• On The Media
• Today in the Past

No Politico, Talking Points Memo or Daily Beast.

If I’m missing something, let me know.  There’s always room on the browser and in the stack of papers for another view.