Manufacturing jobs received a huge (at
least rhetorical) boost after featuring prominently in President
Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last week. He proposed
offering substantial tax incentives to corporations who are willing
to open factories in the United States and hire American workers. In
addition to these incentives, he has urged state governments to
provide additional funding to community colleges in order to train
Americans to be able to do these jobs.
The problem with Obama’s proposal
though, is that it is predicated upon only half of the complaints
made by American manufacturers. Companies like Apple do business in
places like China not just because they’re trying to avoid the cost
of doing business in America or because of the ubiquity of cheaper
engineers, but because the labor laws there are somewhat less rigid
(which is saying something, given the decline of our own). At the Foxconn plant referred to above (and several others located in China), workers sleep in a dormitory
and are subject to being woken up in the middle of the night with no
explanation because Steve Jobs had a shit fit over the quality of theiPhone’s original screen and demanded an immediate overhaul
of the entire assembly line production. In this case, workers at the
Foxconn plant spent 12 hours on that shift, most likely after having
returned to their dormitories only hours after coming off of a
similarly long shift.
Rather than being framed as a direct
offense against basic human rights, the ability of Foxconn and of
Apple to complete the overhaul within a matter of days is being
hailed as the supreme example of a flexible high tech manufacturing
plant. The conditions by which this flexibility is achieved is
largely ignored, and the suicides which have occurred at Foxconn
plants as a direct result of their labor practices have been trivialized.
The most Americans seem to understand
of this ‘flexibility’ is the product that ends up in their hands.
Were the entire plant powered by something OTHER than humans, perhaps
this would be a marvel of modern manufacturing. But it is not, and it
is wrong to consistently say that Foxconn and similar companies operating around the world have a leg up in manufacturing
because of their flexibility. It is not flexibility—it is abuse. To
achieve ‘flexibility’ on par with Foxconn plants, America would
need to loosen its labor standards, though that certainly does not
seem far off. With the consistent denigration of labor unions, it is
becoming increasingly possible to circumvent basic labor standards,
as was the case with Amazon. It is also worth noting that presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich thinks that American child labor laws are too strict and advocates sending children to work.
Hey, Foxconn employs children and they make the iPhone. If you want those jobs to come to America, you'd better start pulling out all the stops.
What we seem to want to do then, is to
offer companies who abuse workers overseas large sums of money to
come home and do it here. And how long will it take after we have
lauded them as heroes for returning to America before we realize
these giants of industry exist solely by trading in bodies?
Companies like Apple have explicitly
stated that they have no obligation toward America, that it’s the
government’s job to take care of the country from which this
computing giant originated. Meanwhile, Apple has done everything inits power to evade United States labor law and tax codes, all the while complaining loudly about social, legal, and political matters unrelated to itself. Can someone please tell me why we adore these people so much?
