This article is an expansion of Jason Perlow’s arguments from our ZDNet Great Debate: Do Happier Chinese Workers Spell The End of Affordable Tech Gadgets?
Sometimes, you have to go into a battle with the full knowledge that you are going to lose.
According to ZDNet Editor-In-Chief Larry Dignan, our Government blogger and my long-time friend David Gewirtz won our face-off in the Great Debate solely on the statistics of pure unflinching numbers. I lost, but I took the moral high ground.
As much as I would like to believe that costs are going to increase due to the possibility of human rights conditions improving in China, the reality is that from a systemic perspective, that nation is such a long way off from improving the lives of its people to the level of a Westernized nation that it will likely take decades before we will ever see an economic impact on the supply chain.
That’s great for companies like Apple, but it sucks for the human beings that feed our thirst for electronic gadgets.
Better work conditions are only part of the variables linked to overall costs of the goods being produced. Wages, benefits and and working hours factor into do factor into the overall picture but these are more than offset by tax advantages and reduced regulatory costs imposed by the Chinese government as well as the price of energy and other raw materials that are needed to produce durable goods in that country.
One only has to look at the overall picture in China to fully understand the magnitude of the human rights problem and why it is unlikely to abate anytime soon.
The vast majority of Chinese — hundreds of millions of them — not only work in conditions that most of us would consider barbaric but their living conditions make many of the people in our own country living in near poverty look like they are living in comparative luxury.
While the big modern cities like Shenzen and Chengdu where Apple’s products are being made are growing and new cities are popping up all the time, there are still many places in China still do not have electricity and clean running water. So everything is relative.
In this debate, even though I knew there was no way I was going to win against Gewirtz’s hard numbers, I thought it was important to take the moral high ground.
Ultimately if you believe that all human beings should have the opportunity to live and eat well, and work under clean and healthy conditions and work reasonable hours, then the first world lens is the only frame of reference you can possibly have.
This is the standard that you set, and you keep that standard in mind, but you also don’t assume you can change things overnight.
The ripple effect of increased prosperity positively affects the entire community. The rising tide lifts all boats, so to speak.
So how do you improve the situation? It would require a fundamental shift in the way products are manufactured. At the end of the day, as CBS News demonstrated in its investigative report “The Dark Side of Shiny Apple Products” these consumer electronics products are being manufactured by hand using human beings.
Could you mechanize and introduce more automated manufacturing methods instead of using what basically amounts to slave labor or indentured servitude? It requires motivation.
In Japan, the country has experimented heavily with robotic assembly lines in the last 30 years (particularly in their automotive industry) because they wanted to find their way out of an energy crisis that began in the 1970s, in addition to eliminating monotonous jobs that nobody wanted to perform and improving overall output efficiency.
But Japan’s and China’s culture and socioeconomics are very different. It’s actually cheaper for final assembly in China to be done by human beings instead of robots because have such a huge supply of labor that is willing to work under such harsh conditions and for such low pay.
Regardless of working conditions, working in electronics manufacturing is so much better than doing hard manual labor in China’s infrastructure improvement projects or agricultural work, especially for the uneducated.
And as good as today’s industrial robots are, they still can’t do the type of precision manufacturing work required to do final assembly for something like an iPhone or an iPad. Even in Japan or in Korea, which are far more modernized than China in their manufacturing practices, human beings still do some of the finer work.
But even if robots are capable of doing all of the work, China’s vast and cheap labor pool isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, so there’s little incentive to replace human beings with robots. Not unless the manufacturers themselves had compelling reasons to do it, which they don’t.
So if you can’t replace human beings, what about inspections, like the type that Apple is now proposing to be done by 3rd-parties?
It’s certainly a good start but it only matters if Apple is vigilant with continuous follow-ups by the third-party auditors, and if there are actual negative consequences for the non-compliant manufacturing subcontractors.
But it remains to be seen if other major consumer electronics manufacturers who do business in China are going to be vigilant about auditing their subcontractors as well, now that the human element of Apple’s manufacturing has been placed under the microscope.
And as well-intentioned Apple may be with allowing 3rd-parties to examine their assembly lines at their subcontractors, we all know that any pre-arranged inspections are going to give Foxconn and other companies doing outsourced work considerable notice in order for the third party inspectors to see what they want to see, with no violations.
There has to be unfettered access to the facilities for repeat inspections, without any notice in order for this process to be effective at all.
Apple’s decision to allow 3rd-party inspections of its production lines in China was primarily a public relations move although it is clear, at least from internal communications that have been since made public, that executive management was incensed that the company could be perceived as uncaring.
However it remains to be seen if Apple is more concerned about the perception itself or if it wants to demonstrate legitimate compassion for the people who manufacture its wares.
There may be an interesting twist. ZDNet’s own Tom Foremski noted this week that Apple cultivating a “Think Fair” image may also be good for business and give them a competitive advantage, given the fact that their streamlined supply chain and significantly higher margins may give them some leeway for creating Fair Trade electronics whereas their competitors may face significant challenges in doing the same.
So what can be done to affect change against a seemingly unsurmountable systemic human rights problem in China?
[Next: Affecting substantive human rights changes in China]»
