Joyce Hackel

Joyce Hackel

Joyce Hackel is a producer at The World.

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Why Chinese Factory Workers Don’t Covet Your iPad

March 27, 2012 ⋅ Post a comment
Leslie T. Chang's Factory Girls examines the lives behind our high-tech gadgets.

Leslie T. Chang's Factory Girls examines the lives behind our high-tech gadgets.

Theater performer Mike Daisey apologized on his blog this weekend for losing “his grounding” and fabricating details of his stage monologue.

Daisey’s solo show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” deals with the conditions for factory workers who make Apple products.

The public-radio program “This American Life” retracted one of its most popular stories featuring excerpts from Daisey’s show.

We retracted the piece we aired by Bruce Wallace about Mike Daisey’s one-man show.

Daisey made up details about the lives of factory workers, and he didn’t spend much time with them.

Leslie Chang did invest time getting to know Chinese factory workers.

She’s is a long time China correspondent, and a contributor to the New Yorker.

She spent two years getting to know assembly-line workers in south China for her book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China .

“They are not victims. The workers choose to leave the countryside to go to the city. They choose to work in a certain factory,” Chang tells host Marco Werman. “It’s true they can’t organize a union. They can’t sue their boss. Certainly the system is stacked against them. But their choice is to leave to a better factory. And over time the really bad factories don’t have workers and they have to improve conditions or they go out of business.”

Chang says it’s all part of a massive transformation sweeping China.

“Hundreds of millions of people are leaving the countryside for the city. This is larger than the number of people who came from Europe to America over a century,” Chang says. “The changes that they’re going through are immense and personal and let’s just give them their due that they’re choosing to go through these lives and not just think it’s about us and our IPADs.”

Discussion

3 comments for “Why Chinese Factory Workers Don’t Covet Your iPad”

  • http://twitter.com/pjdubs Patrick Wood

    This is a really great story I heard it on VPR this evening.  I respect Leslie’s efforts to tell this story in a way that is centered on the people we are supposedly concerned about, and not on ourselves.  She makes a great point that respect should be given to people’s efforts to improve and transform their lives and actualize their dreams.  To some degree what more can anyone hope for… but from my white “liberal” US, sustainability centered perspective, it seems that there is something wrong with our global economic system when people are struggling so hard to achieve minimal gains that result in entrapment in a urban factory rat-race inching barely out of poverty.  I gather that their lived experience tells them that this is better than what they had, and certainly any step out of poverty is better than none.  But I wonder what they are going to find in it’s place.  Many people have struggled in similar ways only to find themselves entrapped, depressed and demoralized by urban life.  I wonder if their nutrition is better.  I wonder if their communities are stronger.  I wonder if their health, and vitality, and longevity, and those of their former communities and peers will be improved and resilient 10, 20, 50, 100 years from now.  When those factories die as a result of global financial or energy crises, or a combination of the two, what will the fall out look like for these individuals and their communities.  I hope they will still believe in their choices.  I fear we may all find themselves in a wasteland.

  • dmarti1949

    Leslie Chang COMPLETELY missed the point of Mike Daisey’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”.  It wasn’t about why Americans should feel bad about the current working conditions of Chinese employees; it was about why Americans should feel bad about helping to diminish the future working conditions of ALL employees.  After all, China’s current working conditions are the fault of the Chinese people and their failure to control their birth rate.  In business, the labor of workers is like any other commodity and the greater the number of workers, the lower the value of their labor.

    By purchasing goods that are manufactured in what we used to refer to as “sweatshops”, Americans have unwittingly helped a global business/finance oligarchy to effectively use Eastern workers as a tool to redefine the working conditions of Western workers.  Overwhelmed by the huge numbers of Eastern workers who are willing to tolerate any abuse, future Western workers will ultimately have no choice but to accept these same working conditions or face the widespread unemployment.  

    Charles Duhigg of The New York Times got it right when he said, “Let me pose the argument that people have posed to me about why you should feel bad, and you can make of it what you will.  And that argument is — there were times in this nation when we had harsh working conditions as part of our economic development.  We decided as a nation that that was unacceptable.  We passed laws in order to prevent those harsh working conditions from ever being inflicted on American workers again.  And what has happened today is that, rather than exporting that standard of life, which is within our capacity to do, we have exported harsh working conditions to another nation.”  Soon, those harsh conditions will be exported back to us, as we strive to compete with the East.  Welcome to Globalization!

  • Martlark Martlark

    These Chinese people have made the judgement about their working conditions.  Working in a factory for much less than Western wages is far preferable to the ‘natural’ slavery of peasant labour.