First, the adulation: let us praise Steve Jobs. He was, after all, an admirable man. He epitomized the rags to riches story we hold dear in America—plus, most important, he made cool toys. Really cool. He had an eye for sleek, sexy functionality and created intimate eye candy, putting the p in Personal Device. It’s no accident that a quaint ‘i’ became emblematic of his multi-billion dollar business. As one rather sarcastic iPhone App puts it, “you were looking for something that would symbolize your status, your dynamic lifestyle, your unique personality….just like everyone else….” But the unfortunate truth is the iPhone is the product of an army of slaves whose names we do not know, and whose lives we would never want to experience. They work twelve hours a day for thirteen days straight for months on end. They earn as little as 130 dollars a month, or approximately 40 cents an hour. In fact, Foxconn, the Chinese based plant in Shenzen province that assembles the iPhone has draped a series of nets and steel poles jutting out 20 feet above the sidewalk to catch workers attempting to commit suicide. The Foxconn workers kill themselves by jumping from Foxconn windows. Foxconn is the reason most Americans can afford an iPhone, at all. Altogether, the company employs about half a million people. Working conditions are so bad that 17 workers killed themselves within the space of a few months, hence the netting. Steve Jobs knew this too, and tried to do something about it, demanding inspections and guarantees of improved work conditions, but his actions were all reactive. There’s an instructive email exchange which was recorded on the website MacStories from Labourstart.org after the jump:
We’ve been asked by unions and NGOs in Hong Kong and Taiwan to launch a big international campaign to put pressure on the factory owners — and on Apple — to probe why this is happening, and to allow workers there to have real, independent unions that can bargain collectively.
Please take a moment to send off your message now.
And please — spread the word!
Thanks very much.”
MacStories reader Jay Yerex forwarded this notice to Stephen Jobs with an email that read simply:
“Steve
Apple can do better!
Sent from my iPhone”
Steve Jobs replied later, with this message:
“Although every suicide is tragic, Foxconn’s suicide rate is well below the China average. We are all over this.”
Now this is an interesting reply, as Jay Yerex probably wasn’t expecting a response that defensively acquitted Foxconn by way of a average statistic for Chinese suicides …As Yerex noted, “As much as I know that running a huge and successful company like Apple is most of the time about numbers, any death, any loss of life is not acceptable, and shouldn’t be discussed in regards of “average” and “numbers”…”
Besides, there’s something especially graphic and consistent about the method of the suicides.
As Dan Lyons has noted:
“Arguments about national averages are a smokescreen. Sure, people kill themselves all the time. But the Foxconn people all work for the same company, in the same place, and they’re all doing it in the same way, and that way happens to be a gruesome, public way that makes a spectacle of their death. They’re not pill-takers or wrist-slitters or hangers. They’re not Sylvia Plath wannabes, sealing off the kitchen and quietly sticking their head in the oven. They’re jumpers. And jumpers, my friends, are a different breed. Ask any cop or shrink who deals with this stuff. Jumpers want to make a statement. Jumpers are trying to tell you something.
Also, consider this. Walmart has 1.4 million employees in the United States. Can you remember a time when 10 or 15 Walmart workers jumped to their deaths from the roofs of Walmart stores over the course of a few months? Have you ever heard of Walmart asking employees to sign a no-suicide contract, or putting safety nets up on all of its buildings? If this did happen, would you think maybe something is going on at Walmart? Or would you just say, well, 10 or 15 people out of 1.4 million is still waaaay below the national average?”
As it turns out, the reasons for the suicide aren't hard to find. The jobs these workers are asked to do are soul deadening, but they do it since it's less expensive to have armies of human beings doing nothing but plugging cables into boards and screwing boards down to plastic enclosures all day than to have a machine do it. According to Lyons, the employees are put through double- and triple-shifts. They must keep the assembly line moving no matter what pain or other problems they have or they risk "demerits," They live as techno-serfs in company dormitories on the vast Foxconn campus. When they get injured they are shoved out the door with no help. The message is simple: you’re done. So when you want out, there are a few choices. You could opt for the quick dramatic death that let’s people know what’s going on, or the quiet desperation of working until you are worth less than death and kicked out the door, anyhow. Some folks have apparently chosen the former course. It’s the industrial equivalent of Buddhist Monks burning themselves in Vietnam.
Despite pressure from labor groups and NGOs, alike, Jobs failed, ultimately to change those conditions before his death—it’s a failure you’ll hear little or nothing about from the usual suspects, but it goes to the heart of a systemic problem. Steve Jobs –one of the wealthiest men in America at his death -- failed to change labor conditions for his workers because he played by the same neoliberal rules that constrained his competitors from showing true compassion or concern for their workers as well. The same neoliberal system that, for example, demands austerity cuts in a time of recession, and rules out most, if not all labor and environmental concerns when negotiating the minutia of free trade agreements.
These failures don’t get much press, but they should; they are the dominating feature of our world—they constrain paupers and billionaires alike. It’s a system built on the premise of openness and ‘freedom’ but one which is increasingly delivering inhumane working conditions, environmental degradation, broken governments, and corruption. Free trade agreements espoused by both Democrats and Republicans are at the heart of what drives this system. In theory these agreements seek to protect business and ‘growth’ with an underlying assumption that the wealthier a country becomes, the better it is able to protect its people and its environment. But this is the reverse of what happens. Corporations are by far the dominate players in these talks. They have huge influence over strong and weak governments alike and they seek the lowest labor costs and the least restrictive regulatory environment in an effort to produce their goods more cheaply than competitors. Since the lawyers who craft the agreements are often working for the corporations in question, environmental regulations and labor rights are essentially ignored. A race to the bottom ensues for the cheapest labor costs and least restrictive regulatory environment; a race which sees destroyed ecosystems and basic slavery as ‘the winners.’ This has been happening for years, and now we're seeing the results in the evisceration of our middle class: the loss of decent paying jobs, and the loss of a corresponding decent living standard.
*
Over a decade ago, Seattle had what might be called the first ‘Occupy’ event. On November 30, 1999 hundreds of small citizen organizations gathered to decry the undemocratic policies established by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization in their neoliberal drive to privatize the world for the corporate elite. They gathered to fight the orgy of ‘free trade’ agreements that had taken place since the beginning of the 90s. Probably about 60,000 individuals took part in protests against the WTO’s Third Ministerial in Seattle. As Paul Hawkens notes, the demonstrators and activists who took part were not against trade, or globalization, per se, “…but against what it actually entails, which is the corporatization of the commons.”
What does that phrase mean ‘the corporatization of the commons’?
It means that what we had once considered a civic virtue, understanding, embracing and protecting the public good, has become, in the speech of higher finance, an externality; a cost of doing business that is deemed superfluous. Individuals are no longer defined as citizens, but consumers. The purpose of government is merely to assure that smooth and orderly commerce can occur, and occasionally to provide the opening of new markets, by war, if necessary. Terms like ‘the public’, ‘the commons’, ‘citizens’ and ‘civic virtue’ are no longer used, or, if they are used, they appear in scare quotes, atavistic claptrap from another century.
Consider the following items and a sampling of their associated corporate owners, heretofore considered ‘public’. Previously, free agricultural seeds are now corporate owned and sold [Montrose], previously free water is now corporate owned and sold [Bechtel], previously local farms are now corporate owned [Archer Daniel Midlands], previously local airwaves are now corporate owned airwaves [Clear Water], previously local media are now corporate owned media [FOX]. These are just small samples of existing ‘owners’… Take, in another instance, the current legal struggle to copyright the Human Genome (our DNA!) a portion of which Myriad Genetics thinks it ‘owns’ thanks to the U.S. Patent office.
Beyond the specter of profit seeking corporations ‘owning’ the blueprint of human life, there’s the less tangible harm caused to what we had once considered the ‘commons’, those things include our culture, our environment and neighborhood, our ability to self determine, our democracy: in other words, the basis for our civilization. As economists Jeffrey Sachs notes in the first sentence of his new book, The Price of Civilization “At the root of America's economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America's political and economic elite.” Matt Taibbi sounded the equivalent in Rolling Stone, “What makes people furious is that they [the financial and political elite] have stopped being citizens.”
But it’s not just being a ‘citizen.’ Steve Jobs failed because it was more important for his company to make a profit than for his company to act humane. This is coming from one of the more ‘progressive’ corporations on Earth. He failed at making his company (or its subcontractor) good for the humans that worked for it-- the worst kind of failure because it should call into question the legitimacy of the entire enterprise. Since when is the speedy production of a technical toy more important than the life of a human? That’s what is weighed on the scales every day in places like Shenzen; and the human life inevitably weighs much, much less than corporate profit. Keep in mind, other humans are making those calculations, and they are hiding the responsibility for their decision behind the happy face of corporate entities like Apple, the financial double speak and servile rubric of ‘remaining competitive.’ Certainly no one at Apple wanted 17 people to kill themselves because their work conditions were so miserable, but somewhere along the line, it became more important for Jobs and his management team to make that extra million or so, then it did to ensure that their human slaves would be given an extra hour during the day to regain a sense that their life was something more than a dreadful treadmill of work.
It was not always thus. Corporations were not initially profit driven homunculus, aping the rights of humans, while mechanically destroying everything that makes human existence livable. Corporations used to be legal entities created by humans to better the human condition. In fact, when American colonists declared independence from England in 1776, it wasn’t King George they were most concerned about (although he receives a good round of abuse), it was the English corporations that extracted their wealth and dominated trade. After fighting a revolution to end this exploitation, our country's founders remained wary of corporate power to such a degree that corporations were explicitly forbidden from attempting to influence elections or public policy. It’s as though they had a premonition of how bad things could get if corporations were given even the slightest power. The privilege of incorporation itself was granted only selectively to enable activities that benefited the public, such as construction of roads, railroads or canals. Enabling shareholders to profit was seen as a means to that end, not the other way around.
According to ReclaimDemocracy.org, the states also imposed conditions (some of which remain on the books, though unused) like these:
*Corporate charters (licenses to exist) were granted for a limited time and could be revoked promptly for violating laws.
* Corporations could engage only in activities necessary to fulfill their chartered purpose.
* Corporations could not own stock in other corporations nor own any property that was not essential to fulfilling their chartered purpose.
* Corporations were often terminated if they exceeded their authority or caused public harm.
* Owners and managers were responsible for criminal acts committed on the job.
* Corporations could not make any political or charitable contributions nor spend money to influence law-making.
Corporations were understood to be dynamic legal creations, just as capable of causing ruin to a community as helping it, and thus rules and regulations were designed to tightly control corporate behavior. If you were to describe how the founding fathers and subsequent US governments thought of corporations, you might imagine something powerful, yet recognizably dangerous, not so much human as a carefully controlled guard dog. If the dog ever bit anyone, they were quickly put down. We’ve come a long tragic way from that initial view of the corporate entity. Now corporations are demanding the rights of individuals and have more power than most governments. They influence our elections, they pollute our air and poison the water, extract profit to themselves and their shareholders, while demanding to live essentially rent free and responsibility free in the commons. They have become really lousy neighbors and citizens, and they are dangerous bullies to boot.
If corporations are unable or unwilling to serve humanity, as they were designed, there is, of course, a remedy: change the laws.
Revoke their charters, restrict their licenses or nationalize their services until they learn to honor the public and the public commons they were initially designed to serve.