Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century. John Smith
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by twisting our arms when we come to sell our products to their markets. They have nothing to say against the World Bank, no complaints about Structural Adjustment and no attempt to understand the transnationals and their behaviour … if one is really serious about labor standards and workers’ rights, then one should join hands with the workers of Bangladesh.38
THE iPHONE
In contrast to the humble T-shirt, iPhones and laptops are technologically complex commodities. Their dazzling sophistication and iconic brand status can too easily blind the observer to the exploitative and imperialist character of the social and economic relations they embody. Nevertheless, the same fundamental relationships that can be seen in the simple article of apparel are also visible in the latest high-tech gadgetry. The same question that we have asked of the T-shirt hanging from your shoulders could also be asked of the smartphone in your trouser pocket, or indeed of any other global commodity; that is, any other product of globalized production processes. The question we have asked of the T-shirt can also be asked of the iPhone: what contribution do the 1.23 million workers employed by Foxconn International in Shenzhen, China, who assemble Dell’s laptops and Apple’s iPhones—and the tens of millions of other workers in low-wage countries around the world who produce cheap intermediate inputs and consumer goods for Western markets—make to the profits of Dell, Apple, and other leading Western firms? Or to the income and profits of the service companies that provide their premises, retail their goods, etc.? According to GDP, trade, and financial flow statistics, and to mainstream economic theory, none whatsoever. Apple does not own the Chinese, Malaysian, and other production facilities that manufacture and assemble its products. In contrast to the in-house, foreign direct investment relationship that used to typify transnational corporations, no annual flow of repatriated profits is generated by Apple’s “arm’s length” suppliers. Just as with the T-shirt, the standard interpretation of data on production and trade assumes that the slice of the iPhone’s final selling price captured by each U.S., Chinese, and other national firm is identical to the “value-added” that each contributed. They reveal no sign of any cross-border profit flows or value transfers affecting the distribution of profits to Apple and its various suppliers. The only part of Apple’s profits that appear to originate in China are those resulting from the sale of its products in that country. As in the case of the T-shirt made in Bangladesh, so with the latest electronic gadget: the flow of wealth from Chinese and other low-wage workers sustaining the profits and prosperity of Northern firms and nations is rendered invisible in economic data and in the brains of the economists.
APPLE’S PRODUCTS, AND THOSE OF DELL, Motorola, and other U.S., European, South Korean, and Japanese companies—an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, according to the New York Times—are assembled by FoxConn, the major subsidiary of Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industries.39 Its complex of fourteen factories at Shenzhen in southern China became famous both for its sheer size and for the fourteen suicides among its workers in 2010—and for the management’s ham-fisted attempts to show its concern, by erecting nets to catch workers jumping from dormitory windows. FoxConn’s Shenzhen workforce peaked that year at around 430,000 workers and was then scaled back in favor of plants elsewhere in China. Most of these are young migrant workers whose right to reside in the city is dependent on their employment, who have no access to municipally provided health and education services, and who cannot bring their families to live with them. In 2013, according to Chinese government figures, 260 million workers were officially defined as residents of their rural places of origin, denying them legal rights and access to a wide range of benefits in the cities where they now live and work.40 This is the hukou system, through which the CCP government has sought to control the influx of labor from the countryside and to create a cheap captive labor force for TNCs and their suppliers. Hukou is a source of deep social divisions and tensions, as the regime promises its reform but resists growing demands for its abolition.
Citing a 2012 survey of “ten factories producing Apple products in China, including a Foxconn plant,” Marty Hart-Landsberg reports:
Low wages compel workers to accept long overtime hours. Most of the factories pay a basic salary equal to the minimum wage stipulated by the local law (around $200/month), so low that workers have to work long hours to support themselves…. The average overtime in most of the factories was between 100 and 130 hours per month, and between 150 and 180 hours per month during peak production season, well above China’s legal limits. In most factories, workers generally work 11 hours every day, including weekends and holidays during peak seasons. Normally they can only take a day off every month, or in the peak seasons may go several months without a day off.41
In one of the studies cited by Hart-Lansberg, Pun Ngai and Jenny Chan gathered testimonies from workers at Foxconn’s Shenzhen factories that provide many insights into the brutal labor regime that is part of the hidden price for Apple’s super profits and Western consumers’ access to the latest high-tech gadgets:
No admittance except on business—every Foxconn factory building and dormitory has security checkpoints with guards standing by 24 hours a day. In order to enter the shop floor, workers must pass through layers of electronic gates and inspection systems. Our interviewees repeatedly expressed the feeling that the entry access system made them feel as if working at Foxconn is to totally lose one’s freedom…. While getting ready to start work on the production line, management will ask the workers: “How are you?” Workers must respond by shouting in unison, “Good! Very good! Very, very good!” This militaristic drilling is said to train workers as disciplined laborers…. Workers recalled how they were punished when they talked on the line, failed to keep up with the high speed of work, and made mistakes in work procedures.42
Not only does the length of the workday and the workweek test the limits of human endurance, workers are forced to work with great intensity throughout their long hours:
“We can’t stop work for a minute. We’re even faster than machines.” A young woman worker added, “Wearing gloves would eat into efficiency, we have a huge workload every day and wearing gloves would influence efficiency….” On an assembly line in the Shenzhen Longhua plant, a worker described her work to precise seconds: “I take a motherboard from the line, scan the logo, put it in an antistatic-electricity bag, stick on a label, and place it on the line. Each of these tasks takes two seconds. Every ten seconds I finish five tasks.”
THESE TESTIMONIES REMIND US THAT ultra-low wages are not the only factor attracting profit-hungry Western firms to newly industrializing countries. As in the case of Bangladesh’s garment industry, they are also attracted by the flexibility of the workers, the absence of independent unions, the relative ease with which they can be forced to submit to working days as long as those described by Marx and Engels in mid-nineteenth-century England, and the intensity with which they can work. Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, in a widely quoted New York Times study, provide a vivid illustration of this:
One former executive described how [Apple] relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.43
Terry Gou, chairman of Hon Hai, FoxConn’s parent company, provoked a storm of criticism in January 2012 with his remark, during a visit to Taipei zoo, that “as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache,” following this up with a request to the zookeeper for advice on how best to manage his “animals.” Want China Times commented, “Gou’s words could have been chosen more carefully…. At its huge plants in China … working and living conditions are such that many of its Chinese employees might well agree that they are treated like animals.”44
IT IS WORTH PAUSING AT THIS POINT to see how the ideologues of neoliberalism justify the brutal labor regimes