Apple, Foxconn and the news

The story of working conditions at Apple supplier Foxconn - the world's biggest electronic components manufacturer - simply won't go away. January reports in the New York Times have struck a nerve with labor activists, many NGOs and with the news media. But the story remains only half-covered.

On February 20 and 21, ABC television aired two reports on conditions in Foxconn's China plants in Shenzhen and Chengdu, where the abusive conditions had occurred. As ABC said, "For the first time ever, Apple allowed a journalist onto its production line and to witness the labor conditions inside Foxconn, which have sometimes been reported to be unfair and unsafe." That report by Bill Weir was followed by a special edition of Nightline, on which workers were interviewed in depth. 

Although there's no reason to suspect that the reporting is in any way compromised, ABC news is, as critics noted, and the show itself admitted, closely tied through its parent corporation, Disney, to Apple. And two is that with hundreds of thousands of employees, a random set of interviews is statistically unlikely to turn up violations. 

There are far more visually appalling factories than those of Foxconn, which led many viewers and analysts - most of whom never spent one minute working on a factory floor - to rationalize away conditions at the electronics plant. Popular New York Times tech blogger, David Pogue wrote:

"It didn't look like a sweatshop, frankly. The assembly-line work was certainly mind-numbingly repetitive - one woman files the burrs off the iPad's Apple-logo hole 6,000 times a day - but that's the nature of assembly-line work. Meanwhile, this factory was clean and modern.

"More tellingly, the broadcast showed 3,000 young Chinese workers lining up at the gates for Foxconn's Monday morning recruiting session."

Pay at Foxconn is a step up for many Chinese - especially those coming from rural regions - making those jobs sought-after. But neither Pogue nor any of the other mainstream reporters seemed to note that it was the regimentation and utter powerlessness that made the workers' problems so unbearable. As important as the pay and cleanliness of the factory, are the long hours, the on-call employment, the health and safety issues related to those long hours, the cramped company housing - none of which are necessarily evident in a single interview, no matter how probing. These workers are denied any say whatever in their pay or work conditions, and independent worker organizations are suppressed, as Hong Kong-based labor activists have documented time after time.

Only if workers are given a voice in their lives can the wrongs be righted. But that's something that most American reporters have continually overlooked. And that's a shame.

Foxconn, Apple, and the Fair Labor Association (ABC News, Feb. 22, 2012)

A Trip to The iFactory: 'Nightline' Gets an Unprecedented Glimpse Inside Apple's Chinese Core (ABC Nightline, Feb. 23, 2012)

What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found (NY Times, Feb. 23, 2012)

In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad (NY Times, Jan. 25, 2012) 

Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) (website)