Quickly, on Manufacturing in America

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?