York professor Dr. Amin Alhassan explains why tech giants “can get away with murder” in Chinese factories
Hufsa Tahir
Staff writer
@excalweb
Xiaodong Lai paid for your iPad with his life.
Last year, two explosions at iPad factories in China killed four workers and left 77 others paralyzed or injured. Lai was one of the dead. The factories, run by Apple supplier Foxconn Technology, were known to be hazardous.
Lai was a 22-year-old college graduate saving up enough money for an apartment with his girlfriend. They wanted to get married.
When Lai’s family came to visit him in the hospital, his girlfriend says she only recognized him by his legs. The rest of him was charred, his face a melted black mess. He suffered for three days before passing on.
The year before that, 137 workers were injured after being ordered to clean iPad screens with a poisonous chemical.
But thanks to the efficient work of Foxconn, Apple reported $13 billion in profits this quarter, with $46.3 billion in sales. The only thing holding sale numbers back was a lack of product supply.
Apple is not the only corporation taking advantage of cheap labour overseas, but it seems that Apple refuses to reevaluate its suppliers’ treatment of workers. A recent New York Times article by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza exposed the truth about life as an employee for an Apple manufacturer.
At Foxconn, the article revealed, banners on the wall remind workers to “Work hard on the job today, or work hard to find a job tomorrow.” Workers pull excessive overtime shifts, working more than 60 hours a week according to pay stubs, interviews, and third-party surveys. Workplace lighting is kept extremely bright for 24-hour-a-day operation. At Foxconn worker housing, as many as 20 workers are crammed into three-room apartments.
In 2005, under pressure to follow other global corporations, Apple introduced a supplier Code of Conduct to regulate its manufacturers and ensure they met standards for worker safety. This worked far better in theory than in practice.
Mingqi Li, a former manager
at Foxconn, said, “Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost.” Apple executives have been conducting audits to comb out instances
of broken regulations. Among other violations, they found instances of child labour and employee exposure to harmful chemicals.
When asked about these charges, the company replied, “Conditions at Foxconn are anything but harsh.”
Foxconn isn’t solely to blame, because suppliers are only allowed a slim profit margin. The majority of the blame rests with Apple. “The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper,” an Apple supplier executive told The Times. “And then they’ll come back the next year, and force a 10-per-cent price cut.”
These price cuts come directly from money that could be used to improve worker safety. Suppliers are forced cut corners to make a profit.
According to Apple’s code of conduct, when Apple discovers a code violation, the supplier has 90 days to correct it before Apple terminates their contract. So far Foxconn remains protected as Apple’s biggest manufacturer despite repeated mishaps.
It is unclear exactly how serious Apple’s suppler code of conduct is.
Dr. Amin Alhassan, an associate professor of communication studies at York, believes the supplier code of conduct is nothing more than good PR.
“Apple is very aware that the only way to survive [in the competitive IT market] is by outsourcing labour to where it is cheap. It will act in the public interest [by having a supplier code], to keep them happy,” he says.
Consumers, Alhassan argues, don’t know the full picture.
The trick is to go to a country with the weakest labour laws and organizations. “China happens to be one of the cheapest,“ he says. The only way a business can cut down costs is in the labour department.
So why do consumers—often aware of the unethical labour practises of expensive Western goods—not care?
Alhassan blames the “dominant, hegemonic ideology.” Consumers “believe business leaders when they tell [them] something. But it’s not their job to tell us the truth. Their job is to make money.”
Outsourcing to China does not universally help companies keep prices low. “What is cheap about an Apple product?” Alhassan asks, “they’re one of the more expensive brands!”
Prices, he says, are determined by demand and supply, not by production cost.
Apple gets double productivity from exploited Chinese workers. Alhassan says factory owners can ban breaks and force employees to work at a faster pace, much like horses.
“[In] third world countries, institutions that protect labour don’t have elaborate laws like we have here,” Alhassan says. “You can get away with murder when it comes to labour there. You cannot in Canada.”
Capitalism grows at expense of labour, he says, putting it in simple equation terms. “The less you compensate workers, the more they produce.”
It’s a fallacy created by corporations that cost has to be kept down. “It’s not about us,” Alhassan states bluntly.
Corporations can afford to give American and Canadian workers the jobs they outsource and still make profit. But compensating workers like Canada’s labour laws require, he says, reduces Apple’s profit margin. “If they did that, could you imagine Apple making half of its recent profit?” he asks wryly.
An Apple executive summed up the real price of consumer electronics in the West.
“You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards,” he told The Times.
“Customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China.”
Or dead workers like Xiaodong Lai.
With files from “In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad” in The New York Times
