Apple, the most profitable company in
existence and one of the most popular brands ever
created, has gotten used to being the glowing
center of attention. The release of the next
iPhone or the new iPad invariably stirs an orgy of
conspicuous consumption. Recently, however, a
series of exposes have shifted some attention to
the darker side of Apple, shining a light on the
working conditions at the Foxconn factories in
China where its products are made.
Going
up against Apple is no joke. Given the company's
power and reputation, it's not surprising that,
for every small step forward in raising public
consciousness on the issue of Apple's global labor
practices, there have also been disappointments
and setbacks. Nowhere has this been starker than
in the case of Mike Daisey's controversial piece
of political theater, The Agony and Ecstasy of
Steve Jobs.
In a matter of weeks,
Daisey went from being seen as a muckraking
journalist to an untrustworthy liar. The story has
become a fable of
accountability in the age of globalization. A man
who attempts to hold the richest company in the
world accountable for its labor practices is
himself held accountable for the way he went about
it. It's a moral and practical conundrum that
epitomizes the mini-successes and broader
challenges of fostering a sustained campaign of
global labor justice.
The ecstasy of
Mike Daisey The Agony and Ecstasy of
Steve Jobs is a one-act monologue written and
performed by Daisey, a very large man dressed in a
black short-sleeve shirt and pants who sits behind
a table on an otherwise empty stage and spins a
tale from a set of notes. This may sound like a
snoozer, but Daisey's performance is energetic and
at times truly riveting.
The monologue
tells the story of Daisey's intense love affair
with Apple and what happens when he delves into
the conditions of the workers who produce his
beloved iPhone and iPad. Toward the beginning of
the show, Daisey illustrates the depths of his
romance with technology in general and with Apple
in particular, a company that he is proud to say
has shaped his daily rhythms and the very core of
his being:
My only hobby is technology. I love
technology, I love everything about it ... And
of all the kinds of technology I love in the
world, I love the technology that comes from
Apple the most. Because I am an Apple
aficionado, I am an Apple partisan, I am an
Apple fanboy, I am a worshipper of the cult of
Mac. I have been to the House of Jobs, I have
walked through the stations of his cross, I have
knelt before his throne.
As the play
continues, Daisey details his coming of age
alongside the evolution of Apple, in the process
conveying a mini-company history that exposes the
combination of "genius" and "asshole" epitomized
by Steve Jobs. Over the course of this story,
Daisey explains how the increasingly totalitarian
aspects of Apple have gradually eroded consumer
autonomy.
The real drama of the show
begins when Daisey recounts an epiphany he had a
few years ago on discovering some pictures from
the factory in China where Apple's devices are
made. For the first time, he started to think
seriously about the people who made his phone.
Increasingly preoccupied with these
thoughts, Daisey made a trip to China and arranged
to interview workers at the Foxconn factory in the
gigantic manufacturing city of Shenzhen, where
many of Apple's products and a huge percentage of
the world's electronics are made. Foxconn, a
Taiwanese company that also contracts with other
electronic companies, including Microsoft and
Hewlett-Packard, employs 1.2 million workers in
China.
Daisey's inquiry into the lived
experiences of these workers approximates through
theater something like Karl Marx's
de-fetishization of the commodity, bringing to
light the otherwise invisible labor that goes into
the things we buy. The dramatic center of the
monologue is an account of Daisey's encounters
outside the gates at the Foxconn factory in
Shenzhen, southern China. He details conversations
with factory workers who are pushed to the limits
of human toil, reportedly working successive
12-hour shifts and sleeping in overcrowded
dormitories, with as many as 15 bunks to a room.
He recounts a conversation with a
13-year-old worker and another with a man whose
right hand has been mangled by a machine and is
part of an underground union. This story becomes
the basis for a profound shift in Daisey's
relationship with Apple and, ultimately, a plea to
the audience to join Daisey in a concerted
campaign to force Apple to do something about
these deplorable working conditions.
Daisey has been performing The Agony
and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs since 2010. Although
the show received positive reviews, it did not
really take off until after the death of Apple
co-founder, chairman and chief executive Steve
Jobs in October 2011. In response to all the
hagiographic commentaries at that time, serious
criticism of Apple's global labor practices
started to gain more visibility.
Excerpts
from the show were featured in January in the
United States on the National Public Radio program
This American Life, which quickly became
the most downloaded episode in the history of the
program. Subsequently, on January 25, The New York
Times published a multi-page feature story, by
Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, on Apple's
global labor practices and the working conditions
at Foxconn.
The agony of Mike
Daisey And then the controversy unfolded.
On March 16, This American Life publicly
revealed its recent discovery that Daisey had
exaggerated and fabricated many of the details of
his experiences in Shenzhen. When China-based
journalist Rob Schmidt contacted Daisey's
translator in China, he found many discrepancies
between Daisey's account and hers. This
American Life publicly retracted the story and
removed the audio from its website. Daisey was no
longer an admired truth-teller, but instead a
sleazy liar.
The initial reports did not
reveal the full details of what was and wasn't
true in Daisey's story. Subsequently, however,
This American Life host Ira Glass devoted
an entire episode to explaining these details. In
the introduction, Glass explained that everything
Daisey said about Apple and Foxconn is true: "It's
been corroborated by independent investigations by
other journalists, studies by advocacy groups, and
much of it has been corroborated by Apple itself
in its own audit reports."
The lies
involve details about what Daisey said he actually
saw in China. "As far as we can tell, Mike's
monologue is in reality a mix of things that
actually happened when he visited China and things
that he just heard about or researched."
For instance, Daisey claimed to have
witnessed the overcrowded conditions at the
dormitories, but his translator said they never
went to the dormitories. He reported conversations
with 12- and 13-year-old workers, but she said he
only spoke with one girl who claimed to be 13 and
never confirmed the age of her friends. The
underground union members he met did not actually
work for Foxconn, but for another company.
He did meet a man with a garbled arm, but
he fabricated a scene in which Daisey shows the
man his iPhone, and the man looks at the device he
made in awe, never before having held the finished
product in his hand. As Glass put it, Daisy
"pretends that he just stumbled upon an array of
workers who typify all kinds of harsh things
somebody might face in a factory that makes
iPhones and iPads."
Many, including Glass,
have argued that Daisey should have labeled his
show fiction. I would agree, but only on two basic
premises: one, that fiction doesn't mean entirely
made up, and two, that we understand the politics
inherent in the particular kind of fiction Daisey
has created. The great 19th-century novelists like
Balzac, Tolstoy, and even Dickens were critics of
industrial capitalism, but they were also
interested in teasing out the moral complexity of
the system.
Although parts of Daisey's
show attempt to capture such complexities, the
scenes in which he describes his trip to China do
not. These moments belong instead to the tradition
of melodrama and sentimental fiction. Think
Uncle Tom's Cabin or Carmen. Like
the characters in those works, the Chinese workers
Daisey interviews become archetypes. Yes, they
lack the complexity that is inherent in the actual
attitudes of most Chinese factory workers. But
Daisy is not a realist. Rather, he is a
provocateur whose work prompts us to take heed of
our own role in the global labor system.
Journalistic vs corporate
accountability Daisey is nonetheless being
held to account for his lack of journalistic
integrity. By representing himself as a witness,
Daisey's critics argue, he assumed the role of a
journalist but failed to abide by the established
rules of journalism. Furthermore, by lying to
This American Life, he put that show's
reputation in jeopardy.
In the follow-up
show, Glass actually interviewed Daisey, an
exchange that is itself quite dramatic at moments.
After grilling Daisey about why he repeatedly
lied, Glass says, "I have such a weird mix of
feelings about this, because I simultaneously feel
terrible for you, and also, I feel lied to."
Journalistic accountability is indeed
important. However, at a certain point,
scrutinizing Daisey's practice becomes myopic and
even absurd. By all accounts, virtually everything
Daisey said was true insofar as the things he
described do actually occur in factories all over
China. By focusing on narrow rules of journalistic
accountability, this controversy seemed to lose
sight of these larger truths.
Questions
about Daisey's accountability threatened to
displace the larger issues of corporate
accountability, creating a gigantic loophole
through which Apple/Foxconn might easily escape.
Apple's response While critics
were busy parsing Daisey's account, Apple was
taking steps to preempt any further criticism. In
January, it joined the Washington-based Fair Labor
Association (FLA), which it enlisted to conduct an
independent investigation. FLA visited three
Foxconn factories in China where Apple products
are made. Together, these employ 178,000 of the
approximately half a million workers in Apple's
supply chain.
The FLA report, released on
March 29, confirmed much of what Daisey had
described in his play. It found that Foxconn
employees routinely work overtime, exceeding the
49-hour-a-week limit under Chinese law. Although
workers averaged 48 hours a week, some worked
multiple consecutive shifts for several days in a
row.
There were also some important
differences from Daisey's account. The report
noted few safety violations, although the
relatively safe conditions were partly the result
of recent improvements made in the wake of a fatal
accident in the Chengdu facility last year, when
aluminum dust sparked a fire that killed four
workers. The investigators also found no evidence
of child labor.
Foxconn has since
announced a reduction in unpaid overtime and a 25%
increase in hourly wages.
A qualified
success Some commentators have argued that
this development marks a major moment in China's
urban labor dynamic, predicting that wages will go
up in other companies and further contribute to
the end of China as the world's capital of cheap
labor. That's probably an exaggeration. Besides,
wages are only part of the issue.
As
Duhigg and Barboza reported, Apple has built its
entire design and production process around the
flexibility of labor in the Foxconn factories. In
Shenzhen, thousands of workers at different parts
of the supply chain can be called up at any moment
to implement last-minute design changes and work
overtime to meet tight deadlines.
We
should be careful not to underestimate the power
of large corporations like Apple and Foxconn to
preserve the conditions that made it possible for
them to garner such large profits in the first
place.
At the same time, none of these
qualified or provisional gains would have been
possible without the kind of public scrutiny we
have seen in the last few months. The Agony and
The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs deserves credit for
helping to foment these developments. Melodrama
and sentimental fiction cannot alone change the
world, but they have a place in progressive
politics. In an era when hard-nosed journalism is
vulnerable, the hostility of journalists to Daisey
is understandable. Ultimately, however, it
undermines potential alliances and fails to
document the important political role that artists
like Daisey play.
Daisey put it best in
his heated interview with Ira Glass, when he
suddenly found the words to explain the
accomplishment of his show: "I think it made you
care, Ira, and I think it made you want to delve.
And my hope is that it makes - has made - other
people delve."
Foreign Policy In Focus
columnist Hannah Gurman is an assistant
professor at New York University's Gallatin School
of Individualized Study. She writes on the
politics, economics, and culture of US. diplomacy
and military conflict. Her book, The Dissent
Papers, was published by the University of
Columbia Press in 2011.
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