Steve Jobs and the Chinese Wall
The former Apple CEO might have been an innovator, but there’s one thing he didn’t invent: exploiting foreign workers.
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs hit the bookstores on Monday (or, worse, the websites that have replaced bookstores as the place where people go to buy books), and the more piquant details have already started popping up in the press. Among those details—actually, it’s a good deal more than details—is Jobs’s Manichean view of humankind (at least, those elements of humankind with whom he came into contact). As Michael Rosenwald summarizes it in Monday’s Washington Post:
In his personal life, [Jobs] was capable of seeing people in only two ways – as enlightened or as bozos. There was no in-between, and he would ruthlessly cast aside whoever he deemed a bozo…. Those who were deemed enlightened were granted the right to work with Jobs in his binary world where products were either ‘the best’ or ‘totally [expletive],’ Isaacson writes.
Isaacson’s description may make it easier to understand Apple’s production process, in which its products were designed to a fare-thee-well in Apple’s tony Silicon Valley headquarters, but manufactured in China in Foxconn’s compound in Shenzhen, where hundreds of thousands of workers turned out all the iPods, iPads and iPhones that have delighted consumers the world over. We might not know about the Foxconn compound but for the spate of worker suicides there that shook the plant, the province, and China itself last year. When investigators and journalists ventured into the compound, they found a factory complex worthy of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis—300,000 workers, many of them still in their teens, working long hours at piddling wages to turn out the latest in Apple technology, then domiciled together ten in a room…