Outsourcing Jobs, by Gary Sernovitz, is long, but worth wading through for a well thought out analysis of the impact of Apple and Steve Jobs. I especially liked these last few paragraphs:
Jobs seems to have attended the Joseph Stalin Charm School: his world was one of clear good and evil; he was a constant liar, in what came to be known among his underlings as his “reality distortion field”; he was “anti-loyal,” abandoning people he was close to; he used silences and unblinking stares to shame people; he held show trials, bringing employees of a failed project into an auditorium, telling them they should hate each other, and firing the leader on the spot. Thus, when I read about Jobs’s praising China to President Obama, I suspected that Jobs liked outsourcing, not just as a profitable business decision but also on a deeper level. Contemporary China has found a way to combine, for outcomes positive and devastating, some of the most abysmal features of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism and 20th century totalitarian dictatorships. This is a combination that would seem to have felt very comfortable for Steve Jobs, as long as he was in charge. Apple has long been infamous for opposing open access and more collaborative computing cultures. Its hardware and software have always been untouchable, unmodifiable, and manufactured for each other alone. Apple tells consumers what they want and what they will get. Its design aesthetic is stark, minimalist, white. Apple’s massive growth in the last eight years to becoming the single most valuable publicly traded company in the world is not entirely explained by the thesis that Apple products are great, or that the company was early to take advantage of wireless broadband, or that Apple’s time had come when we all began to see computers as lifestyle accessories. For every era gets the companies it deserves. A brand of cleanness and simplicity, of chipperly trading control for efficiency, seems particularly well suited for a time when people have lost faith in an incompetent, messy, gridlocked, shallow democracy and in our fragilely recovering economy. Better an iPhone than Il Duce, of course, to make the trains run on time—or at least to tell you how to get to Penn Station—but totalitarian shadows probably should not fall over the products we crave, in how they are made or why we love them. Nor should the manufacture and the appeal of our most desired products reach the same conclusion: that people are much less than our machines.
So what should we do? Mike Daisey’s printed-out suggestions distributed after the show—talk to Apple, be aware, spread the word—conclude with a limp suggestion that is slightly less than storm-the-barricades: upgrade less often. Yet there aren’t a lot of other obvious answers. For there is a paradox of virtue, a cousin to Keynes’s paradox of thrift (where spending less and saving more is individually a good thing but bad for general economic health). Refusing to spend money on any product unless it is ethically manufactured is indisputably right. However, refusing to spend money—or feeling guilty for doing so—traps us both backward and forward. The backward trap comes from wishing that the Foxconn factories did not exist. In 1980, China’s GDP per capita was near the bottom of any country in the world—half the level of Sudan, for instance. By 2010, China’s GDP per capita had increased thirteen times and is now three times higher than Sudan’s. The teenagers coming to Foxconn factories to be dehumanized into machine parts often started their lives in rural villages where life is arguably worse. China’s suicide rate is the highest in the world, 287,000 people each year. But the rate in rural areas is three times higher than in urban ones. However ugly and unforgivable the conditions of factories in China, however frightening and potentially fatal China’s environmental and foreign policies, basic economic development there—and the increased human happiness—is hard to wish away.
The other trap comes when we think about the future. If we stop buying Chinese products unless workers there are immediately treated and paid better, Chinese exports will fall, Chinese people will lose their quality of life gains, and the US government spending (paid for by debt bought by the Chinese) will have to be drastically cut. Is there any way out of the trap of wanting to buy ethically? One solution, at least to the specific issues of the conditions in Chinese factories, will be time. Eventually, the surplus of Chinese workers willing to work under brutal conditions will dry up. Chinese wages will rise, workers will organize, conditions will improve, or the Chinese currency will inflate, and Chinese exports will lose some of their price competitiveness. This is starting to happen now. However, the likely result of is only that outsourced factories will move to other countries and find other workers for whom factory life is better than, well, subsistence rural life. A solution that we can participate in is to be willing to pay more for products that are manufactured or sold ethically. This happens all the time, at farmer’s markets and independent bookstores. But most people don’t have the luxury of paying more for everything.
Certain corporate leaders, who’ve been making 40 percent gross margins, do have that luxury. We are back to Mike Daisey’s fantasy. Had Steve Jobs never lived, there would probably be the same number of workers in Foxconn factories and their treatment would likely have been no better or worse. But Daisey is right that Jobs was in a unique position to make a difference had he decided that it was OK to be slightly less profitable by being significantly more humane. Jobs’s legacy as the lovably jerky Edison of our time ignores that he wanted us to believe that there is an escape from life into cleanly designed and efficient technology, and that only a ruthless dictator could show it to us. It ignores that many of his products were manufactured with child labor in brutally efficient factories. “Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” Kant wrote, “no straight thing was ever made.” Not even an iPad.
