The One Device

by Brian Merchant

  A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

  “The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

  The follow-up question here might be: Why is it so imperative that our phones be assembled with “breathtaking” speed?

  There are all sorts of MBA answers to that question—certainly, it gives Apple an operational advantage to be able to summon so many souls at the drop of a hat to mass-manufacture a new device or part. The rapidity of the process tightens shipments and allows Apple to be more nimble with matching production to demand—or effectively manipulating scarcity, even—and keeping extra inventory from piling up. It’s cheap, efficient, and fast. It also aligns with Apple’s instincts for secrecy: the less time a device spends in production, the fewer leaks there will be.

  The dollar value of these advantages is considerable, but at the end of the day, the net difference between this massive, flexible operation and a more conventional assembly line that could be run in the U.S. amounts to a new phone getting into your hands a bit sooner and a bit more cheaply. The cost is tens of thousands of lives being made miserable by those last-minute orders, militaristic work environments, and relentless stretches of overtime. This is not necessarily Apple’s fault, but it is certainly a by-product of a globalized workforce. Apple was actually one of the last major tech companies to move its manufacturing overseas; it had spent decades touting its Made in America bona fides.

  And Tim Cook, who rose through the ranks at Apple on the strength of his supply-chain wizardry, is himself a key driver in that push toward breakneck production. One of his initiatives has been an attempt to eliminate inventory—today, Apple turns over its entire inventory every five days, meaning each iPhone goes from the factory line in China to a cargo jet to a consumer’s hands in a single workweek.

  Since the explosion in the iPhone’s popularity—and the rise of the iPad and competitor smartphones and tablets—Foxconn has branched out and set up a number of factories across China. Longhua is likely still the biggest single factory operation, though today, a newer operation in Zhengzhou, a poorer, more rural region in mainland China, is the largest iPhone maker. According to a 2016 New York Times investigation, the Zhengzhou plant, now called “iPhone City” by locals, can churn out half a million handsets a day. Meanwhile, Foxconn is in talks with the Indian government to move some iPhone manufacturing to the second-most-populous nation; it already has factories running in farther-flung locations like the Czech Republic and Brazil, and it’s considering more. It is reportedly building a fleet of so-called Foxbots, iPhone-building robots that might eventually replace human laborers altogether.

  All of this serves to keep its employees’ wages—which are higher than other factory workers’, it must be noted—low. It’s a pretty astonishing sign of how far the assembly line has evolved. Henry Ford famously began paying his workers five dollars a day in 1914, a high wage for the era, saying he thought they ought to be able to afford the Model Ts they were making. (That wasn’t the whole story, of course—before he increased wages, he had a major attrition problem. The annual turnover rate was 370 percent because people hated the boring, repetitive work.)

  That’s not true of employees who make iPhones—despite the fact that it’s only a handheld device, not a car. If an iPhone factory worker wants to buy the product he spends most of his waking life piecing together, he’d have to work several months straight—or find one on the black market.

  Take the curious bazaar outside the Shanghai iPhone factory, marked by a banner reading PEGATRON MARKET. Yes, you can buy iPhones there. But they probably won’t come from the megafactory next door. Most of them will come from around the world. One shop owner told us that he has an associate buy iPhones from the United States, where they can be purchased without an import tax, so he can sell them at lower prices.

  Let that sink in for a minute. After all the myriad parts and materials flow to China from around the world—glass from Kentucky, sensors from Italy, chips from around China—after they are finally gathered together in one place, then pieced together bit by bit into the one device—here, in the Pegatron megafactory—the iPhones are sealed up and loaded onto a cargo plane bound for the United States. There, they are loaded onto the shelf of an Apple Store, where an enterprising Chinese associate buys them for U.S. prices and hauls them all the way back to Shanghai, literally a stone’s throw from where they were manufactured. And that’s the cheapest way to get a new iPhone for the workers who actually assemble them. I ask the seller what he thinks about the fact that the iPhone is made a couple hundred feet away, yet he has to buy them from America.

  “I have no choice!” he says. “That’s what I need for my business.” And, indeed, his prices are nearly a hundred dollars cheaper than they are at a seller a few stalls down, who said he went through official channels to buy the iPhones from Apple.

  This isn’t a rare occurrence in Shanghai. We visited an ultramodern downtown mall, one that sold luxury goods, brand-name clothes, and upscale toys, where a number of stalls were advertising themselves as Apple Stores; they even had the white logo and the minimalist, light-wood table design. But a couple of the salesmen there openly admitted to us that they didn’t get the phones from Apple, nor were they official Apple resellers. They too told us that they imported most of their iPhones from the U.S.—one said he had a network of college students living abroad who brought phones back to China for him—or turned to other means. One man told us that he had a contact inside Foxconn’s Apple operation who supplied him with phones that “fell off” the trucks. This was just how things worked, they said—they clearly made little effort to hide their operations, based as they were inside a glamorous mall just a block or two from one of Shanghai’s biggest metro stations. They even admitted that their shirts, which had AUTHORIZED APPLE RESELLER printed across them, were just for show.

  “Everyone wants Apple, that’s why we do it. I don’t even like the iPhone,” Xuao, who runs one such Apple Store, told us. He said he’s not at all worried about Apple finding out. “For the Chinese, they tax the iPhones twice,” he said. “First in Shenzhen when they make them, then at the border when they sell them. It makes no sense.” A new 16 GB iPhone 6s can cost six thousand renminbi in China—about a thousand dollars. Without operations like these, refurbished phones, or black-market phones, few in China’s working class would be able to afford one.

  “Everyone wants one,” the assembly-line worker Jian tells me, “but there’s no internal price for employees, so no one can afford one.” Almost everyone we spoke with really liked the iPhone. They just couldn’t afford it. In fact, whenever we asked if a worker had one, he or she would usually respond with a laugh and “Of course not.”

  Unlike in Ford’s factories, Chinese assembly workers making ten to twenty dollars a day (in 2010s dollars) would have to pay the equivalent of three months’ wages for the cheapest new iPhone. In reality, they’d have to scrimp and save for a year—remember, many workers barely make enough to live on unless they’re pulling overtime—to be able to buy one. So none of them did. We didn’t meet a single iPhone assembler who actually owned the product he or she made hundreds of each day.

  There it is: G2. It’s identical to the factory blocks that cluster around it and that threaten to fade into the background of the smoggy static sky. The crowds have been thinning out the farther away from the center we get; we’ve passed the entry point we tried to get through earlier, the road with the recruitment center on the other side of the factory walls. At this point, I’ve loosened up; we cruise past security guards, most of whom don’t bother to look us in the eye. I worry about getting too cavalier and remind mys
elf not to push it; we’ve been inside Foxconn for almost an hour now.

  G2 looks deserted, though. A row of impossibly rusted lockers runs outside the building. No one’s around. The door is open, so we go in. To the left, there’s an entry to a massive, darkened space; we’re heading for that when someone calls out. A floor manager has just come down the stairs, and he asks us what we’re doing. My translator stammers something about meeting with Zhao, and the man looks confused—then he shows us the computer-monitoring system he uses to oversee production on the floor. There’s no shift right now, he says, but this is how they watch. It looks a little old-fashioned; analog dials and even what looks like cathode-ray screen. It’s hard to say; it’s dark, not to mention damp in there, and my heart’s racing again.

  No sign of iPhones, though. We keep walking. Outside of G3, teetering stacks of black gadgets wrapped in plastic sit in front of what looks like another loading zone. A couple of workers on smartphones drift by us. We get close enough to see the gadgets through the plastic, and, nope, not iPhones either. They look like Apple TVs, minus the company logo. I should know—just the week before I left for China, I bought one. There are probably thousands stacked here, awaiting the next step in assembly line or waiting to be touched up and shipped out. We try the door, but this one’s locked. We try a couple more—most end up being locked. Some are so rusted over, it’s hard to imagine they can function as doors at all. Previous reports had stressed that workers, especially on Apple product lines, had to badge in before entering their factory floor; I wouldn’t expect to be able to waltz in. Then again, we hadn’t expected to stumble onto the grounds either.

  But here we are, passing the hull of another building housing another operation piecing together another gadget. It’s just so big. This isn’t all Apple, of course; Foxconn helps manufacture Samsung phones, Sony PlayStations, and devices and computers of every type.

  The infrastructure appears strained again, and while there’s no construction or outdoor manual labor going on over here, the environs are definitely looking the worse for wear. If this is indeed where iPhones and Apple TVs are made, it’s a fairly aggressively shitty place to spend long days unless you have a penchant for damp concrete and rust. The blocks keep coming, so we keep walking. Longhua starts to feel like the dull middle of a dystopian novel, where the dread sustains but the plot doesn’t, or the later levels of a mediocre video game, where the shapes and structure start to feel uglily familiar, where you could nod off into a numb drift.

  Soon, the buildings we reach begin to look downright abandoned. More lockers, cracked and rusted. Some teenagers wander past, clearly seeking out this periphery; they resemble the troop of kids in Stand by Me. We ask them where we are, and they shrug like teenagers.

  “Here? They call this the docks,” a girl says, and her group shuffles on.

  They didn’t necessarily look underage—an issue that Foxconn has grappled with in the past. In 2012, Foxconn admitted that up to 15 percent of its labor force during summer months were unpaid “interns”—180,000 people, some as young as fourteen years old. While Foxconn insists that the work was purely voluntary and that students were free to leave, multiple independent reports revealed that vocational schools from around the region were forcing their students to man the assembly lines or drop out of school. Why the mandatory work assignment? To plug a labor shortage created by rising demand for the iPhone 5. After the reports surfaced, Foxconn vowed to reform its internship program, and, to be honest, I didn’t see anyone that struck me as younger than sixteen.

  We could keep going, but to our left, we see what looks like large housing complexes, probably the dormitories—complete with cagelike fences built out over the roof and the windows—and so we head in that direction. The closer we get to the dorms, the thicker the crowds get, and the more lanyards and black glasses and faded jeans and sneakers we see. College-age kids are gathered, smoking cigarettes, crowded around picnic tables, sitting on curbs. It’s still quiet and subdued, like everyone’s underwater. Hundreds of thousands of people and it never gets louder than the decibel of polite conversation.

  And, yes, the body-catching nets are still there. Limp and sagging, they give the impression of tarps that have half blown off the things they’re supposed to cover. I think of Xu, who said, “The nets are pointless. If somebody wants to commit suicide, they will do it.”

  We are drawing stares again—away from the factories and shops, maybe folks have more time and reason to indulge their curiosity. In any case, we’ve been inside Foxconn for an hour. I have no idea if the guard put out an alert when we didn’t come back from the bathroom or if anyone’s looking for us or what. The sense that it’s probably best not to push it prevails, even though we haven’t made it onto a working assembly line. Probably also for the best.

  We head back the way we came. Before long, we find an exit. It’s pushing evening as we join a river of thousands and, heads down, shuffle through the security checkpoint. Nobody says a word.

  Getting out of the haunting megafactory is a relief, but the mood sticks. No, there were no child laborers with bleeding hands pleading at the windows. There were a number of things that would surely violate U.S. OSHA code—unprotected construction workers, open chemical spillage, decaying, rusted structures, and so on—but there are probably a lot of things at U.S. factories that would violate OSHA code too. Apple may well be right when it argues that these facilities are nicer than others out there. Foxconn was not our stereotypical conception of a sweatshop. But there was a different kind of ugliness. For whatever reason—the rules imposing silence on the factory floors, its pervasive reputation for tragedy, or the general feeling of unpleasantness the environment itself imparts—Longhua felt heavy, even oppressively subdued. Besides the restaurants and the cybercafés—both, notably, places where workers have to pay to hang out—there was no place designed in the interests of public well-being, or even designed to be an actual public space.

  What was remarkable about Foxconn City was that the whole of its considerable expanse was unrepentantly dedicated to productivity and commerce. You were either working, paying, or shuffling grayly in between. Consumerism condensed into a potent microcosm. Eating, sleeping, working, passing time, all in Henry Ford’s food court. In hindsight, it almost felt like those kids wandering out past the docks were staging a tiny resistance.

  When I look back at the photos I snapped, I can’t find one that has someone smiling in it. It does not seem like a surprise that people subjected to long hours, repetitive work, and harsh management might develop psychological issues. That unease is palpable; it’s worked into the environment itself. As Xu said, “It’s not a good place for human beings.”

  Since the suicide epidemic began, Apple has made some public efforts to hold its suppliers more accountable for workplace conditions. It began conducting supply-chain audits, releasing compliance reports, and instituting some worker-friendly policies to address more egregious violations. In 2012, Apple’s audits uncovered 106 child laborers working in Chinese factories; Apple terminated contracts with one supplier, a circuit-board-component maker that employed seventy-four children under the age of sixteen, and forced the company to pay the costs of sending the children home. Apple became the first tech company to join the Fair Labor Association, a network of businesses that seek to promote worldwide labor laws in order to ensure better workplace conditions. Suicides have slowed, but not stopped. Workers are still logging too much overtime, but child labor has decreased. Wages seem to have stagnated, and turnover is still high.

  China Labor Watch remains deeply unsatisfied and claims Apple’s gestures have largely been made in the interest of public relations. “Apple joined the Fair Labor Association, which helped Apple a lot,” Li Qiang says. “It reduced the Foxconn pressure. The Fair Labor Association made a lot of promises to us and to the public, but as far as we can tell they are all lies. They did not achieve any of their promises.”

  There are no vacations
in Longhua or Pegatron, that’s for certain. But bright spots are emerging for China’s workforce. Laborers are slowly becoming better organized, and wildcat strikes are becoming more common. A generation of poorly treated workers is apt to transfer its knowledge to the next, and as with protests against pollution, the predilection for popular resistance is growing. There are still few meaningful worker protections—so-called labor unions have long existed, but their leadership is appointed by the state, and their power is nil—but many workers have seen the power of collective action. Advocacy groups like CLM, SACOM, and the China Labor Bulletin have succeeded in pushing the issue of workers’ rights into the public consciousness. Meanwhile, the bulging middle class is becoming less tolerant of poor conditions and labor abuses. Li says one improvement is that workers are now regularly getting their final paychecks when they leave the factories, whereas previously they often did not. But the quality of life for the workers—the ferocious pace, the semi-mandatory long hours—has remained the same for years.

  “Nothing has changed,” Li says. These precedents are doubly important because Apple and iPhone manufacturing contracts have such a massive influence on the industry—and on working conditions at large. “I had a meeting with Samsung executives and they said they would just follow Apple,” Li says. “That’s what they told us—they would do whatever Apple did.”

  In Shanghai, I met a charming Taiwanese couple who, after hearing I would be heading to Shenzhen, implored me to visit their company’s factory, which manufactures iPhone accessories in the city’s heart. They thought I would like to see their new technology, called Ash Cloud.

  They were right. It was something.