[Discuss] foxconn

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

On 11/6/2011 7:47 AM, Stephen Adler wrote:
> I've recently read a news article which talked about Foxconn and their 
> supposed abusive labour practices. Foxconn is the maker of a lot of 
> popular electronics including the iPhone.
>
> This got me thinking, when I go off an buy a motherboard or memory 
> SIMM or whatever, am I buying a product which has been manufactured by 
> laborers who work under conditions I wouldn't allow my own family to 
> work under? Is there any awarness campain or whatever which allows one 
> to buy some electronic component which was manufactured in conditions 
> which meet some kind of labor standards? On my part, I would pay more 
> for my electronic components if I new they were being manufactured 
> using a by someone who's working under good conditions, not sweat shop 
> like conditions. Am I being too paranoid about this in the sense that 
> labor conditions in China are just fine and the workers are well paid 
> and not over worked?

I'm not a Sociologist, but I will caution against making what those in 
that profession call a "Fundamental Attribution Error": the distortion 
that comes from taking an event or a paradigm out of its surrounding 
societal context, and examining it by rules that don't apply in the 
place where it occurs.

Take, for example, the heart-rending pictures of starving children which 
are pushed in our faces on television, along with entreaties to send 
money made by carefully manicured and kindly-looking actors who promise 
to help. The Kleptocrats who rule the lands where those children live 
know that if the children stop starving, that the money will stop 
coming. They like the money just fine, and they know that western 
idealism and (let's be frank) gullibility will assure that a continuous 
river of gold will flow into their Swiss bank accounts so long as they 
assure a continuous river of refugees. To them, the choice is so obvious 
as to be insulting: a few children against the river of gold. By our 
standards, an atrocity; by theirs, common sense.

There is, IMNSHO, no mystery to the success America has enjoyed in the 
past fifty years: our nation had bombed our opponents' factories back to 
the stone age in World War II, and had, in the process, killed millions 
of the men who would have worked in those factories, and most of the men 
who could have led them. The aftermath was a period of peace and 
prosperity that allowed us to lull ourselves into a sense of  (again, 
frankly) moral superiority that compensates for the ghosts of those 
millions, for the terrible and necessary choices and the terrible and 
inevitable consequences our fathers made and suffered. My father was a 
Marine who had been shot on Guadalcanal, and who had what the government 
called a "/Psychosomatic/ /disorder/": what was once known as shell 
shock and is now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He wasn't a nice 
guy to live with: he raised eight kids on a plumbers wages and tried to 
drink away the ghosts of those who had stayed on the canal.

We all live with those ghosts: we all enjoy the gifts their deaths left 
for us. We all, most of the time, have the luxury of judging other 
nations and other people by a code of morality that simply does not 
apply in those places or to those people. What I mean is that we are 
prone to judging others by a set of rules that we can afford and they 
cannot. We are a nation of warriors, and prone to the short-sightedness 
that comes from wars: the winner-take-all economic system, the tolerance 
of diseases which decimate older men but don't affect those of military 
age, the craving for simple answers and direct action,  and, most 
importantly, the willingness to take advantage of other people who don't 
have guns. I was a soldier in Vietnam, and although I did not fall into 
my father's bottle, in a way, I have PTSD: I am always careful not to 
apply American ideas of "right" or "wrong" to places or people who would 
think me a fool for doing so. I cannot escape the knowledge that neither 
enemies nor economics forgive wishful thinking.

I do not contribute to "famine relief" efforts for the starving children 
of Africa, or concern myself with working conditions in the thousands of 
factories around the pacific rim where the natives labor to provide me 
with cheap laptops, fancy "smart" phones, or the integrated circuits 
which dot the landscape of our cars, our computers, our TV's, and our 
moral universe. I made a choice that the best thing I can do to help 
famine victims in Africa is to walk away with clean hands: if Mandela 
proved anything, it is that only Africans can solve the problems of Africa.

If the working conditions around the pacific rim prove anything, it is 
that the leaders of the nations where those conditions prevail are led 
by hard-headed realists who do not choose to pretend that the United 
States' code of morality can or should apply - who see us an an aging 
nation of warriors who will, in due course, give way to more patient and 
more disciplined peoples who beat their spears into the pruning hooks 
they now use to gather the low-hanging fruit of Americans' love affair 
with  electronic toys . They know that things will change in time - 
maybe as little as one hundred years - and they are willing, in fact 
eager, to sacrifice the lives of peasants /now/ in return for the 
continued welfare of their nations /then/.

I prefer to keep my charity and my conscience close, so when Christmas 
comes, I take a Fifty-dollar bill and I give it to the Campesino who 
rides the trash truck in front of my home, and another to the 
Spanish-speaking girl who cleans the tables at my favorite restaurant. 
The cost-of-overhead is zero, the effectiveness immediate, and the money 
is put to use in my local community without delay.

I suggest, with all due respect, that your time and money would be 
better spent solving problems /here/,  in the communities of poorly-paid 
and disadvantaged people /here. /If you need to use a computer keyboard 
made in a foreign nation to affect change at home, please rest assured 
that the leaders of those nations are aware of the risks that your 
keyboard will come back to bite them, and made the trade with a clear 
conscience.

Bill

Copyright (C) 2011 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.

-- 
Bill Horne
339-364-8487