Listening to “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” on NPR’s This American Life left my thoughts in a maelstrom. I was excited because I knew what he was talking about and I agreed. I was flustered because I wanted to say he had no idea what he was talking about and I disagreed. Daisey’s monologue initially inspired me to launch into one of my signature 8A tirades, but then I decided not to. Instead of ranting, which would actually make for a far more concise posting believe it or not, I’ll recount a case study.
While in China for business, I dealt with a fellow I’ll call Bob. Bob is the owner of a large factory in Dongguan. He owns the commercial building, actually an entire campus of buildings, all the machinery inside said buildings, the company, and in a way, you could say he even owns the laborers. They eat and sleep in a dormitory he owns. On their days off, for entertainment, they attend events he sponsors. Bob wears Armani, a 24K gold watch and drives his Porsche through the narrow, winding, otherwise poverty-stricken dark alleyways of Dongguan.
Bob says he is good to the laborers. Bob sincerely believes that he is. In fact, Bob sees himself as a savior. In an honest moment once, he talked about how tough it was to do business in China. Paying off government officials was such a chore, a common occurrence that one simply accounted for it in the books as overhead. There were thugs who tried to come by and shake up the factory owners, playing Robin Hood, so the owners had to hire their own thugs. When I asked him what it was like to do what he does, in his line of business, he volunteered this: Everybody is fake, everybody lies, everybody cheats, and you cannot trust anyone.
I asked him, “So what keeps you going?” I expected his answer to be money or some fluffy euphemism for money. Instead, he said, “I am doing good for my country. I create jobs and many families depend on these jobs I create. I give these migrant villagers a chance for a better life. I train them and give them a new set of skills. I am giving them opportunities. I am saving them from poverty.”
Bob is probably still doing it just for the money, though it was of interest to me that he’d cite that reason of all reasons for what keeps him going.
So what’s it like to be saved from poverty? Like Mike Daisey said, the laborers work long hours, six days a week, are supervised by supervisors who are in turn supervised by more supervisors who are monitored by an intricate network of surveillance cameras, all of which are personally monitored by Bob, the live video feeds splayed on a wall of TV screens in his office. When I was there with several partners, we met at Bob’s office to discuss business. At every down time or lull in the meeting, Bob would float toward that wall of monitors and he’d stand there god-like, and by that I mean he seemed convinced he himself was a god, staring with sharp, alert eyes into the many screens, his hands folded behind his back.
Overtime pay is unheard of. The laborers are not paid hourly. They are paid monthly salaries on the assumption that they work, say, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. And before your first world head explodes over your perception of labor code violations right there, they work even more than that, all of it unpaid. It’s simply expected that you put in the extra time. Now try to show up late because you’re pregnant and have morning sickness (a true story I heard) or take too long a lunch break and suddenly you’ll see the money deducted from your paycheck. They must punch out any time they leave the factory floor, be it for lunch, bathroom breaks, a cigarette break, or morning sickness. They punch in any time they enter the factory floor. Managers will study the punch card records and interrogate anyone who punches in and out a bit too frequently.
Complimentary meals are provided for the laborers. That sounded great to me at first, and I thought I wanted to eat in the cafeteria with them and try out the lunch there. I quickly realized you couldn’t pay me to eat those meals. The parts of rotting vegetables you throw away and the parts of animals you don’t otherwise eat are tossed together, drenched in cheap soy sauce, and walloped over rice. These are the complimentary meals the laborers eat every day of their working lives.
Other than Lunar New Year, there’s basically no time off for these laborers. I asked one woman who worked the factory floor what her idea of a vacation was, what did vacation mean to her? She smiled and said, “Taking a whole day to go into the city with my best friend Ling and watch a movie.” (My idea of a vacation? Two weeks at a resort in Maldives getting pampered in spas.) She and I were around the same age, two similar looking Asian females. While we chatted, we were in disbelief at the other, at just how different two people’s fates could be.
Yet whether the first-world hipster activist is willing to acknowledge it or not, by the standards that Bob is most familiar with, he was right. He was a savior of sorts. The laborers come from the faraway rural villages of China, places with living conditions I cannot even comprehend, places where paved roads, indoor plumbing, electricity, and abundance of food are unheard of. They hail from places where rice is a prized delicacy, a scarcity, served only to honored guests. And here we thought all Chinese people eat rice every day.
Where they come from, few get the chance to attend school past junior high. If you can’t get an education, then the next best thing is to work at a factory and learn some trade skills. That’s why so many of them enter at the age of 15. For them, factory work is basically an equivalent to school.
Factory work is their golden opportunity. Here at this Dongguan factory, there are paved roads to walk on, which do not cause as many blisters as the pebbled dirt country roads did; there are lights that turn on and off with a switch, electric fans when it gets too hot, heaters when it gets too cold; you don’t have to put on a coat and go outside, mosquitoes nipping at you, for a toilet, oh and by the way the toilet flushes so when you do go, you don’t have to smell the stink of other people’s poo; and the food? Vegetables and meat over rice? Every day?! Yes, please!
When Bob was 17 and his parents, younger brothers, and sisters were starving, he made the trek from his village in central China to Dongguan. He started off as a laborer in a factory not unlike the one he owns now. He was a fast learner, did his best to absorb every skill learnable on the factory floor. Then he became a manager. Bob didn’t just work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, oh no, he worked every hour the damn factory was open, 7 days a week. When he hit 30, he had saved up enough to buy a couple of machines and in a rundown apartment, started his own boutique factory with a couple of entrepreneurial buddies. By continuing to work every hour possible, 7 days a week, he grew that home business into the factory I was visiting that day. His mode of transportation went from a bicycle he stole off the streets because he was that desperate to a Porsche.
Bob is by no means a unique case study. There are literally millions of folks just like Bob in China and their ascent to dirty crazy wealth started on the factory floor. It is so common that it’s a cliché, a stereotype of Chinese “new money.”
That is the golden opportunity Bob talks about, what he believes he offers to his factory workers. It is, in fact, the ultimate all-American dream, ironically enough. So Bob can’t help seeing anyone who works less than 12 hours a day, 6 days a week as lazy because in direct comparison to the hours he’s worked his life, it is. Bob isn’t some privileged, sheltered trust fund baby who doesn’t have a clue. He was one of them, a migrant laborer. He doesn’t have a high school education. He got where he is today by working until his fingers were gnarled stiff (he showed me). And (I suspect) a little fakery, lying, cheating, and that’s perhaps why he now doesn’t trust anyone. Point is, had you pitied 17-year-old Bob, he would have spat that pity back in your face. Grown-up Bob would gloat and ask you, “So what kind of car do you drive?” all the while stroking the Porsche crest on his key fob.
That’s the aspect of Daisey’s monologue that made me uncomfortable, not the actual monologue itself but the responses. What we Americans are really feeling is pity. We pity the Chinese factory workers because we look down on their lifestyles because by our assessment, our life is way better. Okay by any assessment our life is way better. But that’s the social food chain. Doesn’t make it right. Just makes it a whole lot tougher to change than the simple little proposition Daisey made. More on that later.
The city girl and translator from Hong Kong that Daisey hired pitied and looked down on the Shenzhen factory workers because her quality of life is better. In turn the average working class American enjoys a better quality of life than that translator and a white collar middle class American enjoys a better quality of life than the working class American and Paris Hilton, well she… she would totally pity and look down on my 99% quality of life. And so while I see Daisey’s perspective, I also see Bob’s: You work long hours on the factory floor and aw, you’re tired? Well tough shit. Guys like Bob were there, they did that too, and now they (while stroking the Porsche crest on their key fobs) drive Porsches.
Back to the solution Daisey proposed: switch out the workers so each one has a shorter shift. Simple and feasible enough. Yet is he so sure that this is a sustainable proposition for the workers? It sounds just peachy until the workers get their drastically reduced paychecks. It’d be like only having part-time jobs available when you and your starving family are desperate to find a full-time paying position. You are plenty happy to put in the time and the labor if it means you can earn enough to help your family get rice on the table. And that is the limitless resource that China has: desperate starving villagers. Even if one wave of workers unanimously strike and demand overtime pay, owners can easily, too easily find another wave of workers somewhere in China to migrate to their factory and do triple that overtime without objection.
True, notwithstanding, labor unions are cropping up (because conditions really are shit even by shit standards), but progress is slow. Recall the bribery/extortion money factory owners pay government officials. One reason the owners agree to pay the money is because the officials in turn agree to do what they can to keep the factories profitable. And that means ignoring the complaints filed by disgruntled laborers. And issuing false certifications so that the factories can convince the rest of the world that they’re legit, humane, eco-friendly, green, sustainable, whatever the first-world trendy demands du jour require. Most first-world corporations who attempt to run due diligence investigations on Chinese factories typically only call for copies of those certifications. Once they see it, they’re happy and give the thumbs up. It’s not really their onus if those certifications are falsified. Right? Right. Thus, even if first-world corporations like Apple succeed at demanding certain labor conditions be met by the Chinese factories they deal with, the factories and the government officials who issue the certifications who are in bed with these factories will just lie. What’s Apple going to do about that? Move manufacturing back to America? Oh, but that would make business operations way too expensive for American corporations. That’s why we should inconsiderately make the demands on the Chinese corporations and dictate to them how they ought to run.
And it’s not like China is the only culprit. Don’t get swept away by the Sinophobic media. South American countries deal with the same issues. Child labor? Plenty of it. When there are no schooling options for the 13-year-olds and their parents need these able-bodied kids to bring home some income, families decide the only fighting chance at survival they have is to send these kids to work. The life and times of a Peruvian sheepherder seem way worse than the Chinese factory worker. And as a woman, I would rather be a Shenzhen factory worker wiping iPhone screens for 15 hours a day than be living in the Congo. Oh but wait the Peruvian sheepherder and women raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo have nothing to do with us (at least not with our beloved iPhones), with corporate America? Oh but it does. Open your eyes to what’s beyond the headlines and inevitably you realize, holy shit, the whole world sucks, not just China. Even China’s neighbor, India, is on board with the child labor factory shenanigans.
All this is horrifying, yes, especially to the privileged, sheltered trust fund baby. Anyone with the power to make change ought to make change, yes, and Daisey’s monologue is important, yes. But before we take arms against China, let’s step back for a moment and reason here. To expect a third world country (or at least a country with people and a subculture still firmly rooted in third world lifestyles) to uphold first world labor and legal standards right now because someone wrote an exposé and we read it and now we’re upset is not just preposterous, it’s fucking stupid.
Plus, and I direct this to you, NPR, since your program is called “This American Life,” why not focus on the sweatshops and scandalous labor conditions that are still pervasive here in the States? Would you believe there are factories on American soil that mirror the conditions in these Chinese factories we’re denouncing? Care just a little more, dig just a little deeper, and you’ll find them. What about the loophole around fair wages that is the migrant workers who stand out in front of Home Depot? All sorts of U.S. companies big and small retain their services and grossly underpay them just to save a buck. Are these U.S. companies big and small somehow less evil than the Chinese factories exploiting their workers? We Americans can hardly get a hold of what’s going on within our own borders that it seems highly inappropriate to be propositioning quick fixes for labor code violations abroad.
Daisey’s monologue? Powerful. Galvanizing. Honest. But naïve.
