Could Western corporations do without sweatshop production? Although British workers also suffered from sweatshops in the past, a mixture of increased unionisation, philanthropy and labour laws helped to improve conditions for the working class. The workers are very much subjugated and repressed in these Third World assembly plants. It is difficult to see where they could help themselves, anyone found trying to start an independent union is quickly out of a job.
When a multinational places an order at the behest of a buyer the workers are set quotas to meet the order. Professor Doug Miller, an expert on the garment supply chain and workers' rights, has identified a discrepancy between the estimated and real time taken for a garment worker to complete an order. So the multinational buyer's calculations are based on standard minute values (SMVs) – virtual minutes based on a factory that operates at near 100% efficiency. However, in countries such as Cambodia, the efficiency of factories rarely rises above 30%. Garment workers can therefore work flat out without any hope of meeting their targets within their paid working hours. At this point, they are forced to work overtime and sometimes gates may be shut or locked (including the fire escapes).
We are beginning to hear of intense worker despondency and depression. These stories blunt the usual retorts of: "It gives them jobs" or: "They are just having their industrial revolution now." Time after time, the capitalists try to placate with their soothing words: "We're working on these challenges", "We've been let down badly by a supplier", "These are not our values" etc and placated by their corporate social responsibility reports. Robert Reich warns in his recent book, Supercapitalism, corporate social responsibility is "as meaningful as cotton candy". Legally binding ‘corporate social responsibility’ that would restrict a company’s ‘flexibility’ will not be allowed to happen because this would effect capital accumulation.
In a statement, Apple said: "Apple is committed to ensuring the highest standards of social responsibility". Yet an investigation into the conditions of Chinese workers has revealed the shocking human cost of producing Apple iPhones and iPads. The investigation gives a detailed picture of life for the 500,000 workers at the Shenzhen and Chengdu factories owned by Foxconn, which produces millions of Apple products each year, accuses Foxconn of treating workers "inhumanely, like machines".
■ Excessive overtime is routine, despite a legal limit of 36 hours a month. One payslip, seen by the Observer, indicated that the worker had performed 98 hours of overtime in a month.
■ Workers attempting to meet the huge demand for the first iPad were sometimes pressured to take only one day off in 13.
■ In some factories badly performing workers are required to be publicly humiliated in front of colleagues.
■ Crowded workers' dormitories can sleep up to 24 and are subject to strict rules.
■ In the wake of a spate of suicides at Foxconn factories last summer, workers were asked to sign a statement promising not to kill themselves
Workers claim that, if they turn down excessive demands for overtime, they will be forced to rely on their basic wage: workers in Chengdu are paid only 1,350 yuan (£125) a month for a basic 48-hour week, equivalent to about 65p an hour.
Last May, seven young Chinese workers producing Apple iPads for consumers across the globe took their own lives, prompting an investigation into working conditions at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, southern China. Nine Chinese sociologists wrote an open letter to the media calling for an end to regimented and restrictive work practices which they condemned as "a model where fundamental human dignity is sacrificed for development". But a year on and interviews with mainly migrant employees and managers have laid bare the dark side of Apple Inc's net £3.6bn profits: a Dickensian world of work. NGO investigator Leontien Aarnoudse explained although Apple and Foxconn make enormous profits employees "work excessive overtime for a salary they can hardly live on while they are inhumanely treated by the management. Many workers interviewed claimed that they were regularly required to work far in excess of the 36 hours of overtime per month that Chinese law – and therefore international labour law – permits. At Chengdu it was claimed that anything between 60 and 80 hours of overtime a month was normal. The rule that employees should have one day off in seven is often flouted. Others said that if they missed targets, they had to work through their lunch breaks to make up for it. During work, some employees claimed they were forbidden to speak to each other and some were forced to stand for hours without a break. Workers who step out of line can be publicly humiliated.
Nor is Apple unique. Last year the Daily Mail wrote " "The image Microsoft doesn't want you to see: Too tired to stay awake, the Chinese workers earning just 34p an hour. Showing Chinese sweatshop workers slumped over their desks with exhaustion, it is an image that Microsoft won't want the world to see. Employed for gruelling 15-hour shifts, in appalling conditions and 86F heat, many fall asleep on their stations during their meagre ten-minute breaks. For as little as 34p an hour, the men and women work six or seven days a week, making computer mice and web cams for the American multinational computer company" (Daily Mail, 18 April)
US writer Wendell Berry says: "The global economy institutionalises a global ignorance, in which producers and consumers cannot know or care about one another, and in which the histories of all products will be lost. In such a circumstance, the degradation of products and places, producers and consumers is inevitable." According to philosopher Iris Marion Young, we cannot blame consumers directly for the misfortune of the sweatshop workers, but we can accept political responsibility and change the process. She said that, although many individuals are involved, from the manufacturers to the consumers, they should all play their part in improving the lot of the ‘Third World’ workers. This is unrealistic in a capitalist world. There will always be someone who wants to make even more profit, by forcing poor conditions on the workers, or moving the factory elsewhere to where the labour laws are laxer. The Western corporations are just trying to do what they have to do in capitalism: make the biggest profit they can. If they don’t their rivals will undercut them and they will eventually go out of business or be taken over. It is a dog-eat-dog world.
The experiences of the Foxconn workers in China have happened time and again in the past and will be repeated time and again in the future, for as long as the working class believes that there is no alternative to the capitalist economic system. Working people everywhere would do well to reflect on the fact that capitalism cannot operate in any other way and is incapable of being reformed to do so.
ADAPTED FROM HERE;-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/30/apple-chinese-workers-treated-inhumanely
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/30/apple-chinese-factory-workers-suicides-humiliation
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/01/lucy-siegle-human-cost-consumerism
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