How Apple Could Respect Dignity of Chinese Workers

by Paul Garver

Steve Jobs can be pretty clueless. He described the Foxconn factory complex in Shenzhen where thirteen young workers had leapt from the windows of high-rise dormitories as a “pretty nice place” for a factory, with restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools. He failed to note that at the world’s biggest supplier of iPhones, iPads and iPods 450,000 workers had to work such long overtime hours to supplement their meager base pay that they had little time left but to eat and sleep. They were not permitted to talk to the co-workers on the job, and had no union to represent their interests.

As part of its campaign to improve conditions at Foxconn and in remembrance of those who died, the Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) released an open letter to Steve Jobs on June 8, a day Apple launched its new iPad. Since Foxconn has belatedly raised basic wages and promised more in the future, SACOM’s letter stressed Apple’s responsibility for encouraging fundamental reforms:

We call on Apple CEO Steve Jobs, head of one of the world’s most successful technology businesses and a big buyer of Foxconn products, to swiftly reform Apple’s purchasing practices to support the enforcement of workers’ rights. We propose that this reform should rest on the building block of workers’ involvement in decisions that concern them. Workers’ participation will build the community resources to reduce suicides. And strengthening the participation of workers in enterprise management will help monitor and improve working conditions more widely.

Key to improving worker participation, the letter argues, is the formation of genuinely representative trade unions at Foxconn in place of the currently management-controlled and wholly ineffectual union:

We call on Apple and other brands to support genuine reform of Foxconn’s unions. Brands and suppliers should commit resources to facilitate union campaigns and elections at the shopfloor level. Independent non-governmental organizations and reputable labor scholars are ready to assist Chinese unions and management to provide participatory training to all workers at Foxconn.

Writing in the June 10 China Daily (a semi-official English language publication in Mainland China), Liu Shinan asked why the Chinese trade unions had been inactive at Foxconn before the wave of suicides. He noted that 1200 trade union officials from the Shenzhen Trade Union were now running around interviewing workers and organizing recreational activities for them, but were nowhere to be seen beforehand. No union had taken concerted action to ascertain the cause of the suicides or to improve wages or woking conditions. He concluded that the role for a trade union is to protect the legitimate rights and interests of employees, especially during conflicts with company managements, and that since most trade union officlas were also members of the Communist Party, they must never forget that they, first and foremost, must represent workers’ interests.

The proper role of Apple and other global electronics companies for which Foxconn supplies products is to actually put into practice their stated respect for workers’ rights, and to pay Foxconn a high enough price that it can provide decent wages and conditions. It is our role as consumers to insist that we will not buy products drenched in the blood of workers.