Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:
While China’s labor conditions have remained a mainstay of activist stakeholders’ campaigns and been featured in the international media for years—notably following allegations in 2004-05 about labor practices in manufacturing plants producing products sold in Wal-Mart stores, and reigniting after 10 Foxconn employees committed suicide in May 2010 at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant—some recent stakeholder assessments have found a slow pace of improvement.
Foxconn, one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers, employs nearly one million people throughout China and builds products for corporations like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Motorola, and Dell. Mike Daisey, a monologist who performs an Off Broadway show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in Manhattan’s Public Theater, decided to visit the Foxconn plant recently for a little research to see for himself what the safety and working conditions were, and “what he found surprised him beyond belief.”
“What I was really shocked by was institutionalized dehumanization,” he said. “The systems that are put in place are working and the objective of them working is to work people, basically, to death.”
While most Americans don’t routinely consider the human cost associated with the production of popular consumer electronics products, Daisey firmly believes that Steve Jobs knew of the conditions in which his products were built at Foxconn, as does Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook. “Apple is a company that believes in micromanagement. They pay attention to details,” Daisey said. “There is no question in my mind that they know what conditions are like on the ground.”
For the past two decades, multinational corporations have shipped thousands of jobs to companies like Foxconn in China, taking advantage of cheap labor in developing countries. “Unfortunately in doing so, Corporate America chose to ignore its Western values and high labor standards,” Daisey said. Several of the workers Daisey met had been doing the same tedious job over and over for so long that the “joints in their hands have disintegrated from doing that work…. [Hands] literally swollen, literally deformed [and] permanently warped.”
But the days of the docile worker in China are coming to an end, and the Chinese corporations know it. Workers like Lan Yimin, 22, represent “the new generation of Chinese factory workers,” who are unwilling to settle for low wages and long hours. Lan, who works in a factory in Shajing, China, doesn’t want to “eat bitterness—as the Chinese call it.” With more information at their fingertips, and as China’s economy booms, Lan’s generation knows more about their rights than their parents before them did. “The young generation has a wider social circle; we talk more about factory conditions and we know more about our legal rights,” Lan said.
As Chinese workers fight for higher wages and labor standards by going on strike, the Chinese government isn’t sitting idly by. In recent years China has moved legislatively to mandate better salaries and working conditions “and is now trying to maintain a delicate balance of improving income levels for workers while not scaring away foreign corporations with higher labor costs.”
“If the [Chinese] government does not treat the workers’ struggle for collective bargaining seriously, if it decides to treat these demands as political, then this will turn into a political struggle,” says Han Dongfang, a labor activist who, for his role in the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, was deported to Hong Kong.
Microsoft has also come under scrutiny for China-related labors concerns with conditions at the KYE Systems factory where Microsoft hardware is assembled for export to the United States, Europe and Japan. Labor rights advocates have raised questions over 15-hour work days and 65 cents-per-hour pay rates affecting thousands of teenage and young adult workers. Employees are prohibited from listening to music or talking. One worker told the National Labor Committee, “We are like prisoners. It seems like we live only to work. We do not work to live.” Microsoft accounts for approximately 30 percent of the work performed at the KYE Systems factory. Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Acer, Logitech and Foxconn also outsource their production to KYE Systems.
Workers at both the Foxconn and KYE Systems factories sleep in dormitories, work long hours and do not get bathroom breaks during shifts.
“And in what must be the best of both worlds for U.S. companies like Microsoft, the workers give the U.S. companies a pass,” the NLC’s report states. “The young workers never think or talk about the foreign companies and put all the blame on the factory. No one has told them how wealthy and powerful Microsoft and the other companies really are.
“Since the young Chinese workers would never dream of making demands against Microsoft or the other corporations, this permits the corporations to tout their codes of conduct while knowing full well that they will never be implemented. It’s all just part of the game.”
Microsoft responded to the NLC report’s allegations of its knowledge of workers’ treatment expressing the company’s commitment to fair labors standards. “Microsoft is committed to the fair treatment and safety of workers employed by our vendors. Microsoft has invested heavily in a vendor accountability program and robust independent third-party auditing program to ensure conformance to the Microsoft Vendor Code of Conduct.
“Actions for non-compliance with our requirements may include corrective action plans, remedial training, certification requirements, cessation of further business awards until corrective actions are instituted, and termination of the business relationship. We unequivocally support taking immediate actions to address non compliant activities.”
Foxconn Technology Group has announced plans to replace its human workers with one million robots, a feat that doesn’t sound easy, but it would certainly cut down on worker abuse and remove some concerns about low labor standards. While such a strategy may help get rid of the bad publicity associated with the past two years’ suicides, it doesn’t represent the kind of systemic shift in attitudes on labor conditions and rights that the majority of stakeholders want to see from Chinese companies.
