Emperor in bad jeans
A recent article by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher in the New York Times about why iPhones are not manufactured in the United States is getting a lot of buzz lately. It is essential reading in the same way that Kafka is essential reading. It would be hard to find better examples of Orwellian double-speak or the ubiquitous penetration of capitalist ideology in the symbolic order. But I’ll give you some of the best nuggets. President Obama once asked Steve Jobs why iPhone manufacturing jobs couldn’t be brought back the United States. Jobs told the President that wasn’t going to happen. That pretty much sums things up. Now we know who wears the pants in the American oligarchical family. But the articles goes on to tell us why this wasn’t going to happen.
Reason 1: The Chinese workforce is more “flexible.” After Jobs carried around an iPhone prototype in his pocket for a week, he decided it needed a glass screen as not a scratchable plastic one. Factory workers at the Foxconn plant in China were awakened in the middle of the night and ordered to begin making this massive shift in industrial production.
Reason 2: The Chinese workforce is better educated, possessing more than a high school education but less than bachelors degree.
Reason 3: Chinese factories have government support in securing large international contracts. If a factory needs to make a massive change to land a contract, the government will quickly step in the provide the R&D and the capital to make it happen.
Let’s examine each of those with the mildest of critical gazes. Reason 2, possessing more than a high school but less than bachelor describes every industrial worker in the world; every factory worker, every bus driver, and every janitor. Every person has to be trained to use the equipment at the factory. This argument is just a patent falsehood. Arguable too, you don’t have to high school diploma to do these jobs. You just need the technical/vocational training. With a massive boom in public “universities,” community colleges, and for-profit colleges and the government giving low interest loans to anyone to attend them, it is not true we are not educated enough. Even this is over reaching as you can always be trained on the job. If, if, Reason 2 has any truth to it it is because American high school graduates are graduating from such a poor public education system to begin with, often not knowing how to read and definitely not knowing anything about math or science. If this is the case, the argument should be our public education system is poor. It doesn’t produce enough factory workers? That’s what the problem is?
Reason 3 is a bit more tangled. It would appear our government does not support corporate R&D in sectors outside of military interests to the same degree it did in the past. The one party system in China which is universally lampooned in the United States as being immoral and unjust does has its procedural advantages. Partisan bickering often hinders the quick injection of capital funds in the United States. (Not to a mention capitalist jousting as to who actually owns the resultant technology. If the government funds a pharmaceutical companies research, who owns the results?) The Republican governor of Florida recently rejected $2.3 billion in federal funding to build a high speed train on ideological grounds. So much for jobs and so much for infrastructure. Steve Jobs never thought of telling the President, “give me a massive capital injection to make this factory create the glass iPhone screens.” Assuming that such funding could even be released quickly enough within our bitter partisan two party system it really wouldn’t have mattered much because of Reason 1, but I’ll get to that later. The two industries our government is willing to pump massive funds to is military R&D and farm subsidies. Lord knows that corporate farms need subsidies to keep the producing corn at below market cost to make ultra-cheap high fructose corn syrup and give an entire generation Type 2 Diabetes to keep pharmaceutical companies strong. Yeah, that makes sense. What we don’t need is affordable, high speed, public transportation.
Reason 1 is the most sinister. A more flexible workforce is a euphemism for an army of slaves. Working conditions in China do not conform to labor standards in the United States. Labor standards earned with blood, sweat and tears. Labor standards get in the way? Outsource your manufacturing to a country with more lax standards. Foxconn’s official line is that is workers were not awakened in the middle of the night to accommodate Jobs’ order for glass screened iPhones as this would violate the company’s own labor rules. Anonymous sources, fearing for their jobs, contradict this claim. So what exactly are working conditions like at a Foxconn factory and what rights to workers have? Well, the only negotiating tool they seem to have is threatening mass suicide.
Is it so painfully obvious to suggest all workers have rights? There is a reason the anthem of communism is called the Internationale. Communism has been “discredited” in lieu of what? Worker exploitation and income disparity? Capitalism has won the ideological war. Now there are people in the streets, permanently camped out in protest. Congratulations capitalism. In American, we are free to do that. In China, we may be lucky enough to have a job, locked in a corporate dorm, building iPhones on 12 hour shift.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of Duhigg and Bradsher article - even the President of the United States of America does not have wherewithal to tell the emperor he has no clothes.
