Hellbox. Damage. Smelt. Recast.

I’ve seen a lot of links to Mike Daisy’s appearance on This American Life as of late. I saw his show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” live when he performed at the Seattle Rep. With his words in mind, I read this great article published by the New York Times on Apple and manufacturing overseas: Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class.

Regarding Daisy: I am extremely mixed about many things he says. I don’t disagree, per se, so much as I am slightly allergic to activism and/or evangelism, and I view his show first as a theater entertainment product (he is entertaining, as much as anybody who hopes they might possibly be able to change you by seeing them talk is), and second as activism. But I had a hard time articulating some of the reasons I found his argument thin until I read the NY Times article.

If we discuss overseas labor, especially China, we have two questions to consider: Why aren’t goods manufactured in the United States, and why are we not more aware or more accountable for terrible working conditions overseas?

To the first we start with cheap labor, and any 101 home economist might stop there. But it’s more complicated than the price of production, as this quote makes clear:

Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

If the price of spinning up a factory in nine months were cheaper than doing one in fifteen days it is likely the latter still would have won the contract. That it’s cheaper is a bonus — and mind you, this demand is for industrial engineers, not simple assembly workers, which I think we tend to assume of Chinese workers: that the poor foreigners are uneducated and have no options in their lives, so live under the yoke of western consumer oppression. The truth is many of the people employed in the making of these products are skilled workers with degrees from universities.

And to the second point I also have mixed feelings. I think there are many times when American intervention (either political or social) is a net positive (human trafficking of girls for sex comes to mind as something to be very concerned about and growing evidence points as rampant and largely unchallenged), but as the early twentieth century taught us, workers don’t get rights until they stand up and demand them. They don’t get the opportunity to demand them until they have jobs that are abusing them, which means they must have jobs. In a traditionally agrarian society such as China, this is a new phenomena. We are watching a very modern version of a familiar historical march in China (given immense irony by the red color of the flag being waved there), which is not at all to say that they are either following in our footsteps nor will the outcome be the same as it was for American and Britain when we marched them.

But however you slice it, Chinese workers won’t demand better working conditions because rich Americans feel guilty when they turn on their iPhones. Not even if the rich Americans see, as Daisy says he did, rivers of blood pouring from their Macbook keyboards (wait, there’s some on the following keys in mine: h-y-p-e-r-b-o-l). Daisy suggests that as a point of activism we become more aware of the places our tech is manufactured (check, captain) and then reach out to the heads of the corporations that make them and demand that they change the working conditions overseas. Or, you know, bring them home to America.

That makes sense when (during his lifetime) Steve Jobs was somewhat infamous for answering direct email, but I can’t imagine a thousand emails would carry as much water as when President Obama asked Jobs at a dinner why those jobs can’t come to America, and Jobs told him they never would.

Why? By some estimates, according to the article, a US made phone would only add about $65 to the price of the phone manufacture. An amount that surely could be made up in Apple’s enviable profit margin or mitigated with carrier negotiation.

NY Times:

But such calculations are, in many respects, meaningless because building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies. Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility. Other companies that work with Apple, like Corning, also say they must go abroad.

If you reached out to Tim Cook and raised complaints — and let’s say that all of our your complaints are unimpeachable — about the manufacture in China, I would bet that Tim Cook would suggest that you can either have an iPhone made in China, or not have one at all. It’s not a matter of price and profit, it’s a matter of which work force can actually produce the highest tech items ever made: and that question is best answered with a resounding: “not the US”.

So, protest the inhumanities. I’m not denying or degrading the need to, so much as I’m trying to personally wrestle with the ambiguities and complexities of this issue, and the personal value I feel that items like add tremendous value to my life, and in fact, allow me to do my job.

I’ll end on Dasiy’s strongest point, which I’ll paraphrase: we often think of these things that are made in factories as assembled by machines, but they aren’t. Our iPhone, our computers, our everything with chips — they are made by humans at workbenches. Our beloved products are hand made, and at the very least being aware of those fingerprints is an entry cost to talking about these issues in depth.

One more link to the article: Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com

(aside: I’m a very minor Apple shareholder, but I’d argue these same things if the company was some other. Apple is a good target for these debates because of their popularity, size, and the overall quality of their products.)