Frank Pasquale writes on the Balkinization blog, Jan. 20:

Among the billionaires at the vanguard of global capital, Terry Gou of Hon Hai (also known as Foxconn) deserves special recognition for his honesty. "Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache," said the chairman. His company has also begun building "an empire of robots" to replace a whining workforce.

To get a better sense of why the "animals" may be complaining, be sure to listen to Mike Daisey's extraordinary report on his trip to Shenzhen, home of a massive Foxconn factory. Here's one excerpt:

N-hexane is an iPhone screen cleaner. It's great because it evaporates a little bit faster than alcohol does, which means you can run the production line even faster and try to keep up with the quotas. The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin, and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them can't even pick up a glass.

I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It's like carpal tunnel on a scale we can scarcely imagine. And you need to know that this is eminently avoidable. If these people were rotated monthly on their jobs, this would not happen.

But that would require someone to care. That would require someone at Foxconn and the other suppliers to care. That would require someone at Apple and Dell and the other customers to care. Currently no none in the ecosystem cares enough to even enforce that. And so when you start working at 15 or 16, by the time you are 26, 27, your hands are ruined. And when they are truly ruined, once they will not do anything further, you know what we do with a defective part in a machine that makes machine. We throw it away.

When workers are already treated as machines, perhaps their replacement by robots should be a cause for celebration. But the question then becomes: what do the displaced do for a living? Is there an alternative to exploitation?

See our last post on the coming rule of the robots.

We're happy to see this development—a global campaign of coordinated protests against Apple over working conditions in its Chinese plants, held in various cities worldwide on Feb. 9. Writes the Washington Post:

The protesters have collected more than 250,000 signatures from users on sites such as Change.org and Sumofus.org. The petitions will be delivered to the company, while demonstrations will be held in New York, San Francisco, London, Sydney and Bangalore.

But while Forbes informs us (with evident unhappiness) that some are calling for a boycott of Apple, it appears the official organizers of the protests are not among them. CNNMoney tells us their petition is asking for an "Ethical iPhone."

We say that is probably an inherent contradiction in terms—but certainly if the protests are backed up with no teeth...

We have to admit that it irked us to have to favorably cite the annoying This American Life for Mike Daisey's reportage from Apple's China factories. Now we are sadly vindicated in our distaste for this popular public radio program. It seems that Daisey played a little fast and loose with the facts, prompting some unseemly on-air back-peddaling. Here is the basic substance, from a March 23 Guardian piece by Mark Lawson dissecting the ethics of affair:

A theatre monologue called The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, performed at theatres around the US over the past two years by the American performer-lobbyist Mike Daisey, takes the form of a first-person account of a visit to the Foxconn factory in China where iPhones, iPads and other Apple products are made. Daisey reports encounters with 12- and 13-year old workers, and ex-employees who have been seriously injured at the plant. Discipline, he reported in the show, is enforced by armed guards. This appalled reportage made Daisey the go-to guy for anyone seeking to take a bite out of Apple.

However, when a version of the show was broadcast on the US public radio programme This American Life, the China correspondent for another public radio show queried details. In a special edition of This American Life...Daisey admitted that key details (including the underage and wounded workers he met, not to mention the gun-toting security) had been invented – or, at the very least, imported from other journalistic sources. As a result, the Chicago Theatre has cancelled an April date, furious debates have erupted in the US media and theatre world, and both play and performer have become subject to unwelcome scrutiny.

Daisey declined to be interviewed for this article. He has preferred to remain silent since speaking a few days ago, when he argued that he was creating a play rather than a report and that the rules of engagement are different. "The tools of theatre are not the same as the tools of journalism," he said then. "It's not journalism. It's theatre."

Some seem broadly to accept the distinction. New York's Public Theatre, which has hosted the show, said in an online statement: "Mike is an artist, not a journalist." But even they admitted they had problems with the way Daisey had presented his work: "We wish he had been more precise with us and our audiences about what was and wasn't his personal experience in the piece."

This is the problem with shows like This American Life that think it is fashionably ironic and "edgy" to have it both ways—journalism, but not quite journalism. Now defenders of sweatshops and corporate globalization get to gloat, and the progress in consumer consciousness and (perhaps) material conditions for Chinese workers prompted by Daisey's broadcast has been dealt a setback. This blurring of the line between journalism and non-journalism (theater, comic books, you name it) is leading to a dumbing down of our definition of journalism. The decline in standards can also be witnessed in the current hypertrophy of expository writing at the expense of old-fashioned reportage (a phenomenon particularly pronounced in the left media, unfortunately). We don't believe in the myth of "objective journalism" (nothing human beings do is objective, least of all writing), but we do think there are certain standards for distance, accuracy and factual content which are necessary for writing to be journalism at all. By losing sight of this (in fact, embracing open contempt for the concept), Daisey and This American Life weren't doing the Chinese workers any favors.

As sweatshop-boosters like the arrogant jerks at Forbes scramble to downplay or deny the oppression in Apple's China factories, the Fair Labor Association has released a report on Foxconn finding "excessive overtime and problems with overtime compensation; several health and safety risks; and crucial communication gaps that have led to a widespread sense of unsafe working conditions among workers." From FierceMobile IT April 2:

The Fair Labor Association has found that Foxconn workers building products for Apple are working in violation of Chinese labor laws, and has secured a commitment from both companies to revise labor practices. The FLA investigated working conditions at three Foxconn factories at Apple’s request after criticism surfaced charging that Apple was using the equivalent of slave labor to build iPads and iPhones. Foxconn is Apple’s primary contractor for these devices.

Under an agreement brokered by the FLA, Foxconn will cut workers' allowed hours, but will raise their hourly pay so that they don't suffer any loss of income. The FLA found that workers at Foxconn violated the organization's standard of 60 hours per week and the Chinese legal limits of 40 hours per week with no more than 36 hours of overtime per month. The FLA also found that many workers were working 7 days per week without required rest time, and that many weren't paid for unscheduled overtime...

Apple has received significant criticism recently over the labor practices at its suppliers, and as a result the company affiliated with the FLA and published new supplier responsibilities for companies in Apple's supply chain. "If implemented, these commitments will significantly improve the lives of more than 1.2 million Foxconn employees and set a new standard for Chinese factories," said FLA President and CEO Auret van Heerden in a prepared statement.

We are skeptical there will be any significant improvement, short of wildcat strikes hitting the Foxconn plants, or at least the credible threat thereof. Meanwhile... Your iPhone, brought to you by slave labor.