by Mickey Huff
10. William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004).
11. Ibid., 155–156.
12. David Rothkopf, SuperClass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008).
13. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010). See also Censored story #22, “Wachovia Bank Laundered Money for Latin American Drug Cartels,” Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution, Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 66–68.
14. David Rothkopf, Superclass, Public Address: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 9, 2008.
15. “Defense Against Terrorism Programme of Work (DATPOW),” North Atlantic Treaty Organization, September 24, 2012, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/SID-EBFFE857-66071109D/natilive/topics_50313.htm?selectedLocale-en.
16. Nazemroaya, Mahdi Darius, The Globalization of NATO (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2012).
17. William K. Carroll, The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st Century (London and New York: Zed Books, 2010).
18. Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, “The Network of Global Corporate Control,” PLoS ONE, October 26, 2011, http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.113711%2Fjournal.phone.0025995. See also Censored story #6, “Small Network of Corporations Run the Global Economy,” Censored 2012, 69–70.
19. More details on this University of Zurich study, and the list of the top twenty-five of the 147 super-connected companies, is printed in full in Mickey Huff and Andy Roth with Project Censored, Censored 2013, 247–248.
20. Vitali, et al., “Network of Global Corporate Control.”
21. “The Top Asset Management Firms 2012, Banks around the World,” June 30, 2012, http://www.relbanks.com/rankings/largest-asset-managers.
22. “Barclays Total Assets: 2.426T for Dec. 31, 2012,” http://ycharts.com/companies/BCS/assets.
23. See the Censored News Cluster, “Iceland, the Power of Peaceful Revolution, and the Commons,” in this volume, for coverage of Iceland as a notable exception to the international trend of banks not being held accountable for systemic misconduct.
24. Dylan Murphy, “Money Laundering and The Drug Trade: The Role of the Banks,” Global Research, May 7, 2013, http://www.globalresearch.ca/money-laundering-and-the-drug-trade-the-role-of-the-banks/5334205. See also Scott, American War Machine.
25. Ibid.
26. Kylie MacLellan and Matthew Tostevin, “Factbox: Banks drawn into Libor rate-fixing scandal,” Reuters, July 11, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/111/us-banking-libor-panel-idUSBRE86A0P020120711.
27. “Barclays Fined for Attempts to Manipulate Libor Rates,” BBC News, June 27, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/buisness-18612779.
28. Matthew Leising, Lindsay Fortado and Jim Brunsden, “Meet ISDAfix, the Libor Scandal’s Sequel,” April 18, 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek, http://businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-118/meet-isdafix-the-libor-scandes-sequel.
29. Dan Margolies and Ross Kerber, “Vanguard Sued again for ‘Illegal Gambling’ Investments,” Reuters, April 8, 2010, http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/04/08/vanguard-lawsuit-idUSN0818833420100048.
30. Matt Taibbi, “Everything is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever,” Rolling Stone, April 25, 2013, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425.
31. John Rudolf and Chris Kirkham, “Gunmaker Investments Under Review By California Teachers’ Fund After Newton Massacre,” Huffington Post Business, December 18, 2012, http://huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/118/gunmaker-investments-newton_n_2325323.html.
32. Yasha Levine, “Exposed: The Billionaire-Backed Group Strong-Arming Parents into Destroying Their Kids’ Public Schools,” AlterNet, April 26, 2013, http://www.alternet.org/education/exposed-billionare-backed-group-strong-arming-parents-destorying-their-kids-public. On efforts to privative public education, see also, Adam Bessie, “GERM Warfare: How to Reclaim the Education Debate from Corporate Occupation,” Censored 2013, 271–296.
33. Tyler Durgen, “A Detailed Look at Global Wealth Distribution,” Zero Hedge, October 11, 2010, http://www.zerohedge.com/article/detailed-look-global-wealth-distribution.
34. “World Bank Sees Progress Against Extreme Poverty, but Flags Vulnerabilities,” The World Bank, February 29, 2012, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2012/02/29/world-bank-sees-progress-against-extreme-poverty-but-flags-vulnerabilities.
35. Mark Ellis, “The Three Top Sins of the Universe,” http://www.starvation.net.
36. Please see http://projectcensored.org/financial-core-of-the-transnational-corporate-class/for a searchable chart of the members of the superclass.
37. On the heritage of the commons, see http://www.fairsharecommonheritage.org.
CHAPTER 10
Apple Exposed
The Untold Story of Globalization
Nicki Lisa Cole and Tara Krishna
Critical readers might have the impression that they are fully informed about labor and environmental abuses within Apple’s supply chain in China. In fact, the New York Times would have us believe that Apple has made significant progress in addressing issues that have been brought to light over the last year and a half.1 However, based on a comparative analysis of news coverage in the United States and China, we find that US reporting has been clouded by a Western lens, and that it has over-whelmingly ignored the voices of workers themselves: rural Chinese citizens affected by environmental pollution, and those displaced by ongoing construction of new factories. US coverage has focused nearly entirely on just one supplier, Foxconn, without specifying which factory location, and has disproportionately focused on the brand image of Apple. Our comparison to Chinese coverage of these issues reveals the US coverage to be unbalanced and narrow in focus, and thus it has missed the bigger picture of the systemic and extensive labor and envi-ronmental abuses coursing throughout Apple’s Chinese supply chain.
Drawing on Chinese news media reports, a series of reports on Apple and its suppliers from a coalition of Chinese nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and scholarly research from Chinese sociologists who study labor conditions and resistance, including numerous accounts of Chinese citizens, we offer a more robust and chilling account of the untold story of globalization in China. In this essay, we present worker perspectives on the rash of suicides at Foxconn factories, to counter the corporate media account of Chinese workers as grateful and passive, and to reposition them as people who regularly resist, protest, and fight tirelessly for their rights. We highlight Chinese and English language news stories on the coerced enslavement of college students as “interns” at Foxconn factories, the forced relocation and reconfiguration of rural Chinese communities, and the destruction of agriculture as land is razed for ongoing factory construction. And we reveal that most Chinese factory workers are young migrants from rural peasant communities who face long-term and psychologically damaging isolation from their families and friends when they enter factory jobs. This trend not only affects the workers themselves, but also has negative consequences for Chinese elders who are left without a younger generation to assist in their care, and for “left-behind children” who grow up in rural communities without their parents. The combined pull of young adults into urban factories and the displacement of rural communities is resulting in a major geo-spatial and social reorganization of Chinese society, the implications of which have not been addressed at all in US news coverage.
And, while some recent coverage, including that by Project Censored authors, has pointed to the environmental problems that stem from technological production in China,2 we draw on a series of Chinese NGO reports to reveal the long-term, systemic nature of this problem, and identify Apple as the
most offensive and least-responsive tech contractor operating in the region. We illuminate the vast and intensely dangerous problem of air, water, and soil pollution that has ravaged mainland China and the health of its residents over the last decade. While the New York Times offered praise for minor changes in labor policy at one Foxconn factory, and while Chinese NGOs report that Apple has overseen some targeted and limited—though successful—environmental corrections at a couple of suppliers, we hesitate to applaud these moves because of the vast and mostly unaddressed scope of the implications of China’s role as the world’s factory.
MIKE DAISEY: THE SPARK THAT IGNITED A
FIRESTORM OF COVERAGE
As readers of last year’s Censored 2013 are aware, on January 6, 2012, the popular public radio program This American Life aired an adapted version of performer Mike Daisey’s monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.3 In the radio episode, Daisey explained that he became curious about the manufacturing process behind Apple products after an iPhone customer found photos of Chinese workers on his device. The customer shared these photos with the Cult of Mac website frequented by Apple devotees, which is how Daisey came upon them.
Inspired by these photos, Daisey took a trip to Shenzhen, China, to visit one of several Foxconn factories in the region where Apple’s mobile devices—iPods, iPhones, and iPads—are assembled. After meeting with workers and visiting their dormitories, he was saddened to learn of the dangerous, sickening, and oppressive work conditions that young Chinese laborers endure in the factories. Consumer outcry and criticism of Apple followed these revelations.4
On March 16, 2012, This American Life host Ira Glass retracted the story and characterized Daisey’s claims as lies.5 While many were dismayed that Daisey had not witnessed firsthand all that he described in his monologue, he nonetheless deserved credit for sparking interest in Apple’s highly secretive supply chain.
Since January 2012, corporate media have paid significant attention to Apple and to Foxconn, the Taiwanese company incorporated as Hon Hai that holds contracts for assembly of Apple products.6 Building on Daisey’s monologue, Western media outlets relayed reports of suicides at Foxconn factories, provided details about the health risks that assembly workers face because of long, break-free hours and chemical exposure, and described the crowded dorm rooms where workers live.7 News sources, most notably the New York Times in its “iEconomy” series, prominently feature testimonies from Apple executives who explain the slow management of these problems by citing complex corporate procedures, and insist that Apple is doing its best to address the plight of workers. The series in the Times has been widely read, and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for “Explanatory Reporting” on April 15, 2013.
THE US MEDIA INVESTIGATES FOXCONN: UNDERLINES
APPLE, ECLIPSES WORKERS
After reviewing print media coverage of labor issues in Apple’s supply chain, from sources including the New York Times, the Atlantic, PC Mag, the San Francisco Chronicle, Mashable.com, International Business Times, the Los Angeles Times, Yahoo!, and the Cult of Mac, among others, we find significant disparity in Chinese versus US coverage. US corporate media coverage has been overly focused on one of many suppliers, Foxconn, and on the brand image of Apple, while Chinese coverage includes the voices of workers and speaks to issues throughout the entire Chinese supplier base. This narrow focus of corporate media coverage in the US does a disservice to Chinese workers and citizens, as it suggests that Apple’s image is more important than their suffering. We recognize that significant decreases in funding for investigative reporting, even among major print news outlets like the New York Times, contributes to this problem, and that journalists themselves are not to blame.8 Nonetheless, it is important that we recognize the full scope of the problem, and come to understand what has limited our ability to see the full scope.
Troublingly, US coverage of locations of labor abuses is uniformly vague. Although Foxconn, a Taiwanese-owned company that contracts production and assembly for Apple, has been the focus of reports on labor abuses, specific factory sites go unmentioned. This gives us pause, as we have found that Foxconn has over twenty different production facilities throughout China, and five alone in Shenzhen.9 We also note that this focus is curious, as there are dozens of other suppliers operating on Apple’s behalf in China, and of those, only Wintek, where the workers have been subject to poisoning with n-hexane gas, has been included in US coverage.10
We are more disturbed by the finding that across the coverage, with the exception of a couple of articles from the New York Times’ “iEcon-omy” series, writers consistently contribute to the dehumanization of Foxconn’s already-exploited factory workers by not including firsthand accounts of the conditions from workers themselves, and typically, do not even name those whose workplace suicides are reported. Instead, coverage of labor abuses tends to focus on the brand and reputation of Apple, Inc., and on the Western activist group SumOfUs.
To this end, coverage of the SumOfUs “Ethical iPhone” campaign eclipses all the efforts that workers themselves have expended to fight for their rights, which we will elaborate later. Workers have been fighting labor battles at Apple suppliers in China for years, but it was only when SumOfUs refocused attention on consumer rights that corporate media picked up the story.11 While it is the workers’ voices that should matter most here, theirs are missing from US corporate media coverage.
Finally, the New York Times seems to have closed the door on conversation about these issues with its final installment in the iEcon-omy series published on December 26, 2012. Reporters Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher reviewed some changes at one Foxconn location in Shenzhen, which have happened since scrutiny has focused on the supplier. The piece champions Apple for joining the Fair Labor Association, and lauds minor changes to workplace safety and comfort made at Foxconn under the leadership of embarrassed founder and CEO Terry Gou.12 The article seems to suggest that the media attention has done its job, yet Apple, Foxconn, and many other Apple suppliers have affected the lives of workers in more intimate and extensive ways than audits can uncover, in addition to wreaking environmental devastation and health and safety issues throughout Chinese communities on a mass scale.
WORKERS TELL A DIFFERENT STORY
Factory workers’ accounts complicate the reports provided by Western media sources. Research completed by Hong Kong Polytechnic University Associate Professor of Applied Social Sciences Pun Ngai and her colleagues at production sites throughout China reveals that workers experience many more problems than US corporate media accounts suggest.13 Foxconn’s leaders and factory supervisors demand that the workers execute their tasks efficiently and mechanistically, and workers recognize the company’s “human subordination,” putting into more serious terms the problems glossed over by US corporate media sources. In Pun’s report, one male worker offered an explanation for the widespread suicides by attributing worker deaths to the fear caused by assembly line superiors and the immense amount of scrutiny faced by any frontline worker who has made a mistake—a perspective lacking, for example, in the Los Angeles Times coverage from June 2012.14 Another worker, Tian Yu, survived her jump from the fourth floor of the Shenzhen Longhua dormitory but continued to feel the exhaustion of long work hours and the loneliness that had prompted her suicide attempt. Numerous reports, spanning several years’ time, from Fiona Tam, reporter for the South China Morning Post, offer additional evidence of the poor working conditions and psychological distress that factory workers suffer.15 Contributing to the oppression and stress of workers is that most are not given legally required employment contracts, and consequently lack job stability, rights, and resources.16
A January 2011 report from a group of Chinese NGOs including Friends of Nature, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, and Green Beagle, titled The Other Side of Apple—which has been referenced in previous Project Censored coverage—offered further documentation of this problem.17 The report stated that an examinatio
n by Xinhua News Agency of a worker paycheck found that 60 percent of the workers’ monthly income was based on overtime.18 One worker logged over 136 hours of overtime—100 hours more than what is legal in China. The report further stated that a random check by the Shenzhen Human Resources and Social Security Bureau found that nearly three-quarters of all workers had significantly exceeded the overtime limit.
Workers do, nevertheless, find ways to mitigate these stressors and put pressure on managers, factory owners, and the Chinese government to obey labor laws and improve working conditions. Pun and her research team found that some combat feelings of powerlessness by “[making] fun of their line leaders in their daily life.”19 Others participate in more revolutionary behavior. Fieldwork completed from 2003 to 2007 at a Taiwanese-owned factory in Shenzhen details the worker networks created in their dormitories. The small amount of space available to workers in these dormitories facilitates kinship and encourages collective action.
Pun’s report explained that workers organized a strike in 2004 without much help from trade unions or labor organizations.20 The 2011 NGO report also documented an April 2009 strike of 7,000 workers at Dongguan Wanshida in protest over high-volume production demands and thirteen-hour workdays. Interviews with and studies focused on the factory workers thus elucidate their frustration and strategic rebellion, whereas in US corporate media accounts, workers are portrayed either as victims or happy to have a job, if they are touched upon at all. Further, the absence of coverage of the work of Chinese labor groups, unions, and NGOs, in addition to the workers themselves, contributes to the erroneous Western perspective that China is a lawless land of capitalism run amok.
US corporate media coverage also suggests that the Chinese themselves are to blame for the labor and environmental abuses, rather than the American corporations, like Apple, that create these conditions by allotting suppliers the slimmest possible profit margin, which encourages suppliers to sidestep regulations and labor laws in the economic interest of their companies.21