The Human Cost of Apple’s Success
It’s all Apple all the time these days: “astounding” earnings reports in the news on Jan. 25, lingering shots of Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene sitting near Michelle Obama at the State of the Union address the day before and, of course, ever since his death in October, near ubiquitous references to Jobs himself in pretty much any conversation or piece of writing or speech aimed at promoting creativity or ingenuity or an all-American, against-all-odds model of success.
And yet, a series of New York Times articles this week spoke of a darker reality behind the glowing Apple story: the “millions of human cogs,” as the Times’ Charles Duhigg and David Barboza put it, in China who are now laboring 12 hours a day, six days a week in order to maintain the company’s — and their country’s — amazing rate of growth.
These are workers who live in dormitories where they can be called to their jobs on a moment’s notice and who often work double shifts in highly unsafe conditions. They’re workers who have their jobs because, unlike their American counterparts, they’re willing to do all it takes. “It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad,” Duhigg and reporter Keith Bradsher wrote in an earlier story. “Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.”
(MORE: Should Americans Care About Apple’s iPhone Factory Conditions?)
Duhigg and Bradsher’s story contrasted the work ethic of the (employed) Chinese with quotes from Eric Saragoza, a 48-year-old unemployed American engineer and father of five. Saragoza spoke of his desire to spend weekends at his children’s soccer games and deplored the appetite in Silicon Valley for workers who are willing and able to sacrifice having a home life to give their all to the demands of their jobs. “What they really want are 30-year-olds without children,” he complained.
The Times stories, operatic in scope, raised very serious questions not just about Apple or the many other companies that similarly rely on overseas labor to support their growth and flood the world with cheap products and services; the articles also threw into stark relief the human cost of the growth model itself that has allowed Apple and China to thrive in the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression. It’s a model of growth, all too unquestioned in the U.S., that demands endless quality-of-life sacrifices in the service of productivity and profit.