Dying for an iPhone Epilogue

 "Dying for an iPhone takes readers deep inside the dark Satanic mills of Foxconn's industrial empire. Drawing on the words of the workers themselves, the book offers an invaluable portrait of the Chinese working class as it pumps blood (sometimes literally) into the productive heart of world capitalism."

—Ben Tarnoff, cofounder of Logic Magazine

"A deep dive into exploitation and labor struggle in the world of high-tech electronics manufacturing in China during the past decade. Dying for an iPhone is an exposé of the human suffering behind the brands. Everyone should read this."

—Hsiao-Hung Pai, Taiwanese journalist

"Dying for an iPhone is an absolutely necessary read for anyone seeking to understand the realities of modern-day capitalism. Contrary to the mythology of Silicon Valley, this carefully researched book explains why companies like Apple owe their success more to exploitation than to innovation."

—Wendy Liu, author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism

"A sobering investigation into the human, social, and environmental costs of producing the devices we have come to rely on, a process in which both corporations and we, the consumers, are complicit." —Nick Holdstock, author of Chasing the Chinese Dream

"When reading chapters describing the assembly line experience Of workers, and the scientific management system, I could only compare it to the chapter in Marx's Capital, when we are taken into the hidden abode of production. Dying for an iPhone is truly a great achievement to present such incisive description and analysis in a highly readable and accessible form."

—Jeffery Hermanson, International Union Educational League

Dying for an iPhone

APPLE, FOXCONN, AND THE LIVES OF CHINA'S WORKERS

Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, and Pun Ngai

Published in 2020

Preface

I A Suicide Survivor

2 Foxconn: The World's Largest Electronics Manufacturer

3 Apple Meets Foxconn

4         Managing Foxconn

5 Voices of Student Interns

6 Fire and Brimstone

7 Wandering the City

8     Chasing Dreams

9 Confronting Environmental Crisis

10     Dead Man Walking

II     Strikes and Protests

12     Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China's Workers 

Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

APPENDIX I: OUR BOOK WEBSITE

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Epilogue

There's a right way to make products.

It starts with the rights of the people who make them.

—Apple Supplier Responsibility (2016)'

In 2016 Apple released its tenth Supplier Responsibility Progress Report. "There's a right way to make products," the company proclaimed. "It starts with the rights of the people who make them." That's supposed to be the Apple way to make products. Through interviews, poems, songs, letters, blogs, photos, and videos, Chinese workers revealed a different world: we learned that our beloved high-tech gadgets are not produced in a Silicon Valley paradise. Indeed, while designed in Silicon Valley, they are not produced there at all.

While Foxconn should seriously examine the link between suicide and employment conditions, and develop effective policies not only to prevent employee suicides but to guarantee the welfare of its nearly one million employees, we have shown that the lives of Foxconn workers are not only constrained by management policies but in the first instance are shaped by the brand whose products are being produced. That is, above all, Apple, but also Samsung, Microsoft, Amazon, and other leading global buyers of electronics products.

Can Apple Serve Humanity?

Transnational corporations have benefited tremendously from the speed, flexibility, and efficiency of China's supply chain and its

workers. In return, Apple proclaims its dedication to "educating and empowering supplier employees," stating that "every workday should include opportunity and enrichment."' At the 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference, CEO Tim Cook prioritized the use of new technology to advance social good and closed his presentation with this message: "At Apple, we believe that technology should lift humanity and should enrich people's lives in all the ways that they want to experience it.113 On June 9, 2017, Cook delivered MIT's commencement address, proclaiming once more the Apple mission: "To serve humanity. It was just that simple. Serve humanity."4 In 2019, he opened the Apple Supplier Responsibility Progress Report with the following: "We believe that business, at its best, serves the public good, empowers people around the world, and binds us together as never before."' Presumably, Cook was referring not only to the consumers of Apple products but the workers who produce them, the vast majority of them working at Foxconn. Can we say that Foxconn workers' lives have been changing for the better? Are the workers and student interns who produce Apple's products part of that humanity?

Apple has engaged with business leaders, technology experts, and social scientists to address critical concerns. "The same leverage [of large firms] that can be used to demand lower prices and better quality from suppliers," pinpointed by Frederick Mayer and Gary Gereffi, "can also be used to press for better labor practices."6 The key is closer collaboration between buyers and suppliers to advance mutual benefits by overcoming labor governance problems, that is, placing the welfare of workers to the fore. In 2013, in the wake of the tragedies of suicides, explosions, and poisonings in large supplier factories in China (notably, Foxconn, Pegatron, and Wintek), Apple established an academic advisory board for its Supplier Responsibility program. 

The eight advisors initially appointed were global supply chain, labor, and China specialists from leading US universities: Richard Locke (Brown University), Mary Gallagher (University of Michigan), Mark Cullen (Stanford University),

Margaret Levi (Stanford University and University of Washington), Dara O'Rourke (University of California, Berkeley), AnnaLee Sax-enian (University of California, Berkeley), Charles Sabel (Columbia University), and Eli Friedman (Cornell University).' With access to "Apple's audit data, program results, and supply chain information," the advisory board was offered the opportunity to develop projects that could be incorporated into Apple's Supplier Responsibility program.8

Locke, an authority on international labor rights and corporate responsibility, served as chair (2013-2016) of the Apple Academic Advisory Board and has been provost of Brown University since July 2015. 

He expressed hope that the advisory board will "shape the practices of Apple and its suppliers so that all employees involved in Apple's supply chain ... are paid living wages, work within the legal work hour regimes, work in environments that are safe and where they can express their rights as citizens." Under his coordination, the academic advisors planned to first, "study and make recommendations to Apple about current policies and practices"; second, "conduct or commission new research on labor standards within Apple's supply chain"; and third and finally, "share existing research which may help improve those policies and practices."

Writing for the May 2013 Boston Review special issue; Locke commended not only Apple but also Nike and HP for their commitment to voluntary regulation of their labor policies: "These businesses have committed to using private, voluntary regulation to address labor issues traditionally regulated by government or unions. And for the most part, the companies have acted on these commitments.'" At the same time, Locke acknowledged that what he described as the huge efforts of companies to improve workers' well-being had produced only limited results on the ground. His collaborative research on global supply chain governance led him to conclude that the effectiveness of corporate attempts to regulate labor practices may depend less on the programs implemented and more on the national political economy context.1'

Market reforms, conducted under the auspices of the Chinese state, have indeed reclassified the rights, status, and benefits of different segments of workers. The older generation of state sector workers have lost their job security in successive waves of enterprise restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and privatization since the late 1990s. At the same time, younger cohorts, the great majority being rural migrants, at best receive inferior health insurance, pensions, maternity packages, and other benefits, and are paid less than local workers. With business reorganization and massive layoffs, urban state sector and collective enterprise workers find it necessary to compete for jobs with rural migrants. The divisive hiring system, which includes both direct and indirect labor, gives rise to new forms of social conflict and inequality as workers doing identical tasks working side by side may have different conditions, including wages and security. This both keeps labor cost down for the company and increases its flexibility to hire and fire workers.

But it is important to reiterate that Apple and other international companies are responsible for rights violations at Foxconn and other supplier factories. Leading American and European firms, having actively shed domestic employment through outsourcing and other forms of subcontracting, have failed to honor labor rights in the companies that now produce and assemble their products, whatever their company codes state. Fundamentally, the buyer-driven business model functions to assure "a rise in profitability for [companies that] operate at the top of industries and increasingly precarious working conditions for workers at lower levels."" This situation has driven workers and their supporters to join hands to launch anti-sweatshop campaigns to forge solidarity with workers in China and worldwide.

Global Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns

Foxconn's expansion from Taiwan to coastal China was a springboard for operations that eventually spread throughout China, and then Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The company's international links and its global exports are the heart of its economic prowess, but they also render it vulnerable to a transnational movement that seeks to secure labor and environmental justice.

In the wake of the plague of suicides at Foxconn, across the straits beginning in June 2010, Taiwanese scholars Lin Thung-hong and Yang You-ren issued an open statement with more than three hundred signatories and held a press conference in Taipei to condemn Foxconn management for its brutal treatment of mainland workers. They confronted Terry Gou, the head of the Foxconn Group, as he promised to increase wages. Noting that "recent pay raises" at Fox-conn did not address the deep-seated problems confronting workers, they concluded, "We believe that the Foxconn suicide cluster is a bitter accusation made with 11 young lives against the inhumane, exploitative labor regime.""

Thousands of miles away in Mexico, workers at Foxconn Guadalajara launched solidarity actions to protest labor oppression in China. Their support included creating a makeshift cemetery to allow the workers to rest in peace and draw media attention to their plight worldwide." They also read out a press statement in Spanish calling on not only Foxconn but also Apple, Dell, HP, Sony, Nokia, and other global brands to take responsibility for the unfolding labor crisis in China.

In the US, university students and faculty members, union organizers, and labor rights groups protested outside Apple's flagship New York store to demand justice for Foxconn workers. They decorated the surrounding sidewalk with photos of the young Foxconn victims and a funeral bouquet.'5 On the West Coast, San Francisco's Chinese Progressive Association held a candlelight vigil for the Foxconn victims and their families. The memorial featured solemn teenagers holding signs with the names of Foxconn workers who had taken their own lives.16

Thirteen young activists picketed an Apple store in San Francisco on June 17, 2010. They carried placards showing the names and ages of twelve of the thirteen Foxconn suicide victims whose names are known, and an unnamed placard for the thirteenth. They had a moment of silence for each of them. The iPad placard "DEATH PAD" reads, "Gongren yao zhengyi" (Workers Want Justice).

On June 14, 2010, United Students Against Sweatshops, working with a nationwide network of over 250 American college and high school chapters, sent an open letter urging Apple CEO Steve Jobs to "address the problems in Shenzhen by ensuring payment of living wages, legal working hours, and democratic union elections in Fox-conn supplier factories." The letter was copied to our campaign allies, including Hong Kong—based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), San Francisco Chinese Progressive Alliance, and Washington, DC—based Worker Rights Consortium (an independent labor rights monitoring organization that investigates working conditions in factories around the globe)." They received no response from Apple. Clearly, it is necessary for the campaign to continue to expand and deepen, reaching out to corporate management and concerned citizens through coordinated actions.

"iSlave" at Ten: 2017—The Campaign Continues The year 2017 saw the launch of the campaign "#iSlaveatl0—No More iSlave." Ten years earlier, Apple had entered the mobile phone market with the launch of the iPhone. As time passed, consumer awareness of the links between electronics manufacturing and the-plight of workers grew, and as Apple became a global behemoth, more consumers demanded that the company act responsibly and transparently. 18

On November 3, 2017, Apple released iPhone X, priced at US$999. SACOM (Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior) held a banner "iSlave at X" to protest the company's labor policies at the Apple store in Festival Walk, Hong Kong.

In the wake of consumer movements focused on Nike, Adidas, and other makers of sneakers, has Apple become more sensitive to the ability of school- and university-based consumer actions to stage boycotts? A substantial part of Apple's market is education generated, and its claims to ethical practices directly impinge on students and faculty, among other consumers. This could open the way for strong pressure on the company in the many countries that constitute its global market.

Besides updating its smartphone with the launch of iPhone 11 in September 2019, Apple has been promoting its app development curriculum for high school and community college students at home and abroad. "The app economy and software development are among the fastest-growing job sectors in America and we're thrilled to be providing educators and students with the tools to learn coding," enthused CEO Tim Cook.19 The company proposes that every child be taught how to code at school and notes that Swift, Apple's primary programming language, is an ideal vehicle for learning. In a seamless digitized ecosystem, Apple's apps are linked with virtual classrooms such as iTunes U by utilizing iPhones, iPads, Macs, TVs, Watches, and other Apple products.

"Education is at the core of Apple's DNA and iTunes U is an incredibly valuable resource for teachers and students," trumpeted an Apple company statement.2° What goes unmentioned is an open secret: the exploited student interns in Foxconn's factories are excluded from Apple's worldwide educational initiatives. Working day and night to make the iPhones and iPads, they have no time to rest properly, let alone to study coding.

In shining a bright light on Apple, anti-sweatshop activists simultaneously seek to stimulate further inquiry into the labor conditions of Samsung and of the entire electronics industry, thereby hoping to promote an industry-wide solution to the chronic problems in China and other countrjes.2'

Is Foxconn a Global Predator?

No one is free when others are oppressed. This book, sparked by the rash of suicides and grounded in research on Foxconn, Apple, and the Chinese state, has attempted to inform and heighten social consciousness concerning labor issues to inspire transnational activism in opposition to the oppression of labor wherever it is found. A collectivity between workers and environmentalists has been emerging. Despite pressures from both the Chinese authoritarian state and global corporations, labor organizing for sustainable change continues. Given the economic prowess of Foxconn and its durable relationship with major clients, including notably Apple, our engagement

with Foxconn workers is strategically important to leverage for longterm change in an entire industry that has global ramifications. In 2011 Foxconn proposed major investments at six facilities in Brazil (in the states of São Paulo, Amazonas, and Minas Gerais). The plan called for a US$10 billion investment that would create 100,000 jobs in what was projected to be the largest iPhone production site outside of China.24 By 2017, however, Foxconn employed just 2,800 workers and most of the proposed sites were abandoned. The company discovered that in Brazil, as elsewhere, it could not duplicate the synergies of East Asia centered on China, nor reap the advantages of Chinese state support and control of the labor force for jobs averaging US$2.50 per hour in plants in Eastern Europe or Latin America. In any event, the Brazilian government that had cut the deal with Foxconn was soon immersed in corruption charges and the Dilma Rousseff administration was impeached, ending, at least for the time being, Foxconn's plans for the construction of plants in Brazil.25

Foxconn has striven to move up the value chain by striking sweetheart deals with governments all over the world, as revealed by international studies and mainstream media reports. The Taiwanese multinational has frequently captured new markets by circumventing labor, social, and environmental regulatory controls and taking advantage of China's massive global investment under the Belt and Road Initiative. Even when Foxconn's attempts to replicate its early successes in China through large-scale investments globally have encountered challenges and resistance from workers, residents, environmentalists, progressive politicians, and concerned citizens, its expansion has continued. In March 2017, Foxconn entered into partnership with Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi to make smartphones at Sri City in Andhra Pradesh, India .2' Local authorities granted duty exemptions and tax concessions to big investors that are said to be even more favorable than those offered in China. Foxconn has negotiated with officials in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, and Telan-gana to expand its manufacturing capacity.27 However, while continuing to hold out the prospect of creating fifty thousand jobs in Maharashtra, as of 2019, plans remained at the level of talk.28

While China remains the heart of the Foxconn empire, the company operates six factories in Eastern Europe, including two Czech, one Slovak, one Hungarian, and one Russian (in St. Petersburg). It also has a complex in Turkey (100 kilometers west of Istanbul in a European Free Trade Zone). These Foxconn manufacturing complexes, all of them small compared with the company's China plants, serve fast-growing European, Middle Eastern,, and African markets.22' Foxconn relies heavily on agencies to recruit temporary workers for its two Czech factories, thereby increasing organizational flexibility and lowering operating costs in response to rapidly changing production needs. Foxconn had similarly announced plans to establish a smart-phone assembly plant in the university town of Yogyakarta in Java, Indonesia. As early as 2014, the company claimed that it would invest US$1 billion within three to five years, turning Indonesia into the "most important growth area aside from Taiwan and China." Foxconn boasted that it is "not just building a factory" but bringing in "a whole high-tech supply chain," including machinery development, optics, and semiconductor businesses. 29 However, after one year, plans to build the Indonesian factory were canceled. In 2017, with news of Apple's investment in a research and development center in Tangerang of Banten, west of Jakarta, there was

Foxconn has five manufacturing sites in Mexico—a series of maquilas—in Ciudad Juárez (the largest city of Chihuahua), San Jeronimo (a port of entry in Chihuahua), Reynosa (a border city in northern Tamaulipas), Tijuana (the largest city of Baja California), and Guadalajara (the capital of Jalisco). The Mexican sites allow Fox-conn, Apple, Sony, Amazon, and other brands to enjoy zero tariffs on goods imported to the US. As of 2015, Foxconn had twenty-two thousand employees in Ciudad Juarez, making it one of the largest foreign investors in Mexico.23

again talk of Foxconn ramping up production of smartphones in Indonesia.30

Perhaps the most powerful incentive for diversifying Foxconn's production portfolio is the attack on Chinese imports that has emerged as a centerpiece of the Trump administration's "America First" drive, resulting in the imposition of crippling tariffs on Chinese products and continued threats to raise those tariffs yet further. In the US, Foxconn quickly joined the parade of companies responding to President Trump's attacks on China's and others' "unfair trade practices" with its own initiatives designed to protect its access to the US market. Other corporate giants followed suit, including the Chinese internet giant Alibaba, whose chairman Jack Ma told Trump that he would create one million jobs in the US, and Japan's Softbank founder Masayoshi Son, who dangled a US$50 billion investment in the US before the president.

With high-profile support from then Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, President Trump and the media were quick to hail Foxconn's Mount Pleasant project in Wisconsin. As early as 2017, Foxconn announced plans to manufacture large displays for TVs, with a prospective budget of "more than US$10 billion."" In return, Mount Pleasant's Village Board of Trustees secured 2,800 acres of farmland, roughly four square miles, to build the Foxconn manufacturing hub.32 In 2018, Foxconn began to build a manufacturing campus at a site dubbed "Wisconn Valley" in Wisconsin, attempting to smooth the waters at the time of an emerging US-China clash over trade imbalances."

From land acquisition to road improvements to support services, Wisconsin committed more than US$4.5 billion in subsidies to close the Foxconn deal. It was the largest public subsidy package for a foreign corporation in American history. One estimate suggests that the Foxconn incentives are "more than 10 times greater than typical government aid packages of its stripe.1134 The plant would impose other costs on the state. It is estimated that the Fox-conn LCD screen factory "would require an average-day demand of 5.8 million gallons [of water) per day" and another 1.2 million gallons would be needed "for adjacent operations related to the factory."35

Boosters envisioned Wisconsin's transformation into a mid-western high-tech hub. By December 2018, however, Foxconn had hired a grand total of 178 full-time employees in Wisconsin, along with 854 employees involved in the construction, falling far short of the hiring target for the year .3' The original production plans were significantly reduced, even as Foxconn held job fairs in Mount Pleasant, Racine, Green Bay, Eau Claire, Milwaukee, and elsewhere. In light of angry popular denunciations of Wisconsin's lavish subsidies, Foxconn's promise of creating thirteen thousand jobs in Wisconsin seems dead in the water, if indeed the plant is ever completed. Critics also note that the projected composition of the Foxconn Wisconsin workforce has shifted from blue-collar workers to, knowledge workers such as engineers and R&D scientists, thus undermining President Trump's goal of reinvigorating the American industrial labor force. As of February 2019, Foxconn had taken steps to build a Generation 6 facility, rather than a more advanced Generation 10.5 plant that would be capable of producing large screens. And in October, the plan for a Generation 6 facility was also scrapped in favor of a smaller factory under its Foxconn Industrial Internet (FIT) subsidiary to make small LCD screens as well as automotive controls, servers, and various other devices.1137 In short, the original grandiose plans for the Wisconsin high-tech hub have been scaled back to what will be at best a modest facility.

In summary, Foxconn's worldwide expansion extends its impact on labor and the environment but on a scale that is a small fraction of both its Chinese operations and its much-touted global plans. When workers, with support at home and abroad, unite to reclaim their dignity and right to fair labor, the case of Foxconn—both its present international profile of plants in twenty-nine countries and territories, and its proposed extensions to the US, Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world—could inspire a new round of global labor struggles.