After “This American Life” retracted its exposé of Apple’s Chinese suppliers, some commentators have suggested that the focus on labor abuses in Foxconn and elsewhere lacks perspective. After all, if those Apple jobs are so horrible, why are Chinese workers lining up to get them?
James Fallows has a more nuanced take on this whole affair. Yes, he notes, Apple’s suppliers aren’t the only source of worker abuse in China, or even the worst offenders. “Internationally owned factories,” he notes, “are at the better end of the Chinese spectrum in wages, working conditions, safety, and (usually) environmental policies.” That doesn’t excuse the fact that workers at Apple’s suppliers are often, as the New York Times put it,forced to “stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk.” But Apple gets far more scrutiny than, say, the 6,027 Chinese coal minerswho died on the workplace in 2004.
Still, Fallows writes, that doesn’t mean the undue Western focus on Apple is misguided. “International firms like Apple can and should become a force for workplace and environmental improvement in China — showing the way, as Wal-Mart is, for domestic Chinese firms. Of course, it’s not just ‘firms like Apple’ that should do this. Especially Apple should, given its prestige and iconography.”
One new headache, though, is that Mike Daisey’s lies could make reforms in China even more difficult. Even though many of the things that Daisey claimed to see — like workers poisoned by n-hexane — did, in fact, happen elsewhere, he lied about having witnessed them. “Worse,” Fallows adds, “[Daisey’s fabrication] gives ammo to those inside China who want to pooh-pooh complaints about safety, pollution, working conditions, and so on. Daisey is everything they warned against, come to life.”
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