Worm in the Apple

In an age when financial fraudsters from Wall Street reign supreme, saints from business community are in short supply. The recent death of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Inc, who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 56, gave the much needed boost to the dying art of corporate hagiography. Randian super hero The corporate media went on an overdrive describing Steve Jobs as a visionary, an out of box thinker, a rugged individualist and college dropout who changed the world with apple products. As his biography gushingly tells usAs a boy, Jobs and his father would work on electronics in the family garage. Paul would show his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby which instilled confidence, tenacity, and mechanical prowess in young Jobs. [i] His humble apprentice in the electronics garage, we are told, made him an inspired inventor. In collaboration with Steve Wozniak he founded Apple Computers which flooded geekdom with the iPod, iPhone and the iPad. Its profits surged to US$14 billion last year and it now ranks 35 on the list of the 500 biggest US companies. The corporate pundits cleverly massaged into the obituary of Steve Jobs the dynamism of free market capitalism which throws up Randian super heroes like Jobs in refreshing contrast to the welfare wimps who throttle the economy by collecting food stamps. What the media and corporate spin masters conceal from the public is that the success of Apple Inc is not entirely due to the visionary genius of Steve Jobs but access to cheap Chinese labor which is rarely acknowledged in Apple hagiography. A sweat shop paradise In her classic study of sweat shops No Logo Naomi Klein points out that corporations concentrated more on building brands, that is, on sponsorships, packaging, expansion and advertising than owning manufacturing units. According to this logic, corporations should not expend their finite resources on bricks and mortar like factories which produce things but on brand management. This meant closing the manufacturing/ production facilities in developed economies (high wage areas) and shifting to low wage economies such as China, India, and Bangladesh.[ii] The smart electronic products of Apple are made in China. As Vincent Kolo says, this business empire has been built not just on technological prowess and design skills, but also on ruthless exploitation of cheap and unorganized labor, albeit indirectly through its global system of suppliers.[iii] The huge profits of Apple made from exploitation of Chinese labor could be seen from the high retail price it charges for its products while paying a pittance to the assembly line workers. For instance, each iPhone4 is sold in the US market for US$600 but China based assembly

companies get only US$6.54. The wages which trickle down to Chinese workers are nickel and dimes. No wonder a young Chinese worker wistfully said, Though we produce for iPhone, I havent got a chance to use iPhone. I believe it is fascinating and has lots of function. However, I dont think I can own one by myself. Though the payment of minimum wages is protected in US and in developed economies of Europe, the multi-national corporations circumvent the law by resorting to labour subcontracting in low wage economies. There is furious bid among subcontractors/ manufacturers to drive down the manufacturing costs for the corporations like Apple. Down the food chain are the poor workers who get a pittance in the form of wages. Commenting on the race to the bottom of the wages Naomi Klein says, when the multinationals squeeze the subcontractors, the subcontractors squeeze the workers.[iv] It is not surprising that multinationals regress to 19th century levels of labour exploitation by the subterfuge of subcontracting. Apples main subcontractor is Foxconn in China where the Chinese labour is subject to inhuman working conditions. The iPod nano is made in a grim five storey factory that is guarded by police officers. Here mainly women are employed as they are regarded as pliable and more docile. The workers are kept in dormitories that house 100 workers who live in cramped conditions. In these virtual prisons workers toil for 15 hours a day to make Apple products. Visitors from the outside world are not allowed and an air of secrecy prevails in these facilities.[v] Workers made around $100 per month with half of the salary being deducted towards accommodation and food. In 2009, Foxconn guards were videotaped beating employees. The harsh conditions at work forced workers manufacturing Apple products to commit suicide at the factory located in Shenzhen (China). In 2010 there were 16 incidents of workers attempting suicide.[vi] The rampant abuse of Chinese workers in sweat shops was exposed by labour activists on May 7, 2011.. As reported in the Telegraph, as late as February 2011, child labour has been employed in the manufacture of Apple products. In Hong Kong, there were street demonstrations highlighting the labour abuse by Foxconn the supplier to Apple Inc. The demonstrators waved angry placards with the message Rotten Apple, Bloody Apple and called for the end of labour exploitation. The news of worker suicides coincided with the international launch of iPad raising embarrassing questions about Apples labour policy and the working condition in their manufacturing facilities in China. Apples representatives promised to take remedial measures to improve worker conditions but they remain empty promises. As the report prepared by Chinaworker.info says despairingly, The scandal of Foxconn of Chinas mega-sweatshops and their multinational partners cannot be solved by some tweaking of corporate policies and ethics, but go to the very heart of the nature of capitalism, and its need to continually squeeze more profit out of the working class.[vii] A spurious visionary One is astonished, notes W.E.B.Du Bois with asperity, in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.[viii]

Ignoring the exploitative policies of Apple Inc and its co-founder Steve Jobs, the eulogy of the Great Inventor continues unabated. Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, adds paeans of praise in his obituary on Steve Jobs. In a piece titled Mourning the loss of a visionary leader Friedman exults that there are thousands of US inventors rearing to go is spite of impending recession. Like Steve Jobs they remain rugged individualists optimistic of the future and will tough it out in spite of the Yellow Peril. What the vacuous obituaries on Steve Jobs will not tell you is that the American economy was shafted by corporate greed and by financial conmen from Wall Street. The financial casino economy with mortgage scams, commodity bubbles and ponzi schemes made no real investment in the real economy of inventors and Joe the plumber. The spin masters hoodwinked Joe into believing that he is one clogged toilet away from riches- if only he worked his ass off as Steve did. If there is to be greening of America it does not lie in peddling Ayn Rand myths of super heroes but in blooding truly democratic movements like Occupy Wall Street which targets corporate crimes and fraudulent bailouts. Only then Joe the plumber shall break the shackles of folklore and emerge as a free citizen of his country. C.R.Sridhar

[i] http://www.biography.com/people/steve-jobs-9354805 [ii] No Logo- Naomi Klein- page 196. [iii] http://chinaworker.info/en/content/news/1451/ [iv] No Logo- Naomi Klein- page 212. [v] Inside Apples iPod factories- http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/?newsid=14915 [vi] http://chinaworker.info/en/content/news/1451/ [vii] ibid [viii] Quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me- James W. Loewen- Simon & Schuster- page -18

C R Sridhar