We like shiny. We like new. We like techie. And we like stuff where, heck, we don’t have to fret about too much of the price we pay going into boring things like paying much of anything to the workers who make the shiny, new, techie stuff we crave.
That’s globalization, and that’s a) mostly inexorable, and b) mostly okay. (Although surely we could have been a bit more plan-full as an economy before we so gleefully lobbed so many manufacturing jobs overseas without thinking through some of the implications.)
And it means I can jettison what starts to feel like a sluggish laptop by year two and get something better,cheaper, faster.
Of course, we don’t actually like it when the stuff we crave poisons us – like when the kids got sick from poison-painted toys and trinkets. But, hey, who asked the kids to gum and suck on those toys, anyway?
Okay. So even if they shouldn’t be gumming and sucking on toys, those little darlings are ours.
Unlike the factory workers in China who produce the stuff we crave, who are theirs. If they suffer a few bouts of poisoning… Well, as long as what happens in China, stays in China.
Not that Apple takes this posture.
They’re actually a pretty stand-up outfit, one that tries to enforce health standards in the factories that are part of its supply chain. And they’re not just stand-up; they’re up-front. So we know about the workers who’ve gotten seriously sick at the plant that makes the iPhone screens because it appeared on Apple’s annual report on labor conditions among its suppliers. (Source: NY Times.)
…137 workers at a factory here had been seriously injured by a toxic chemical used in making the signature slick glass screens of the iPhone.
Apple, describing it as a “core violation” of worker safety, said that it had ordered the contractor to stop using the chemical and to improve safety conditions at the plant. Apple also said that it would monitor the medical conditions of those workers.
On further reading, maybe, like most of us, they’re stand-up, up-front wannabes..
…in interviews last weekend, nearly a dozen employees who say they were harmed by the chemical said they had never heard from anyone at Apple.
The workers claim that Wintek, the Apple supplier (which is Taiwanese-owned), has been putting the full court press on the affected employees to accept a cash payout, in exchange for waiving their rights to go back for more in damages.
Wintek, denies that they’re pressuring workers. (Sur-prise!)
“Wintek’s policy of handling this is to put workers’ benefit as the first priority,” [a company spokesman] said.
And who am I to doubt what Wintek’s number one priority is?
Anyway, the chemical that’s sickening so many workers is something called n-hexane. Even the name sounds evil. And evil it is, purportedly causing limb-soreness, extreme weakness, body thermometer malfunction, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, and all the other symptoms we’ve come to associate with chemical poisoning. All suffered in return for a cool $200/month, which includes overtime.
This $200 is, of course, a lot more than the monthly take of your average Chinese peasant living in a rural area whose sole possessions are likely the clothes on his back, a bucket, and a hoe. Which is precisely why so much manufacturing has migrated there. And Chinese factory conditions - Triangle Shirtwaist, anyone? - not to mention environmental depredations, are probably not a whole hell of a lot more miserable than they were in American factories of yore.
But does that have to mean that it’s a stage that every economy has to pass through on their way from sub-subsistence existence in a hovel, to something where there are a few more creature comforts, a few more opportunities for personal enrichment and enjoyment? Couldn’t they jump to reasonably safe, if not still crappily paid? Even if it means we have to pay another $5 for an iPhone, or $20 for a laptop?
Anyway, the good news is that n-hexane is no longer being used at the factory.
Still, it’s one more cautionary tale, one more hint at the trade-offs in our perhaps to zestful and blind-eyed embrace of the glories and wonders of globalization.
But, hey, now that I think of it, we could have factories like this, too. In fact we used to, before all those pesky regulators started nosing around. We can have this again, couldn’t we? What are we waiting for? Let’s go!
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And as for all those baby dolphins dying in the Gulf. Well, survival of the fittest, no?
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