Tonight Nightline will broadcast a segment on Foxconn's massive factories in Shenzhen, which has a population of workers greater than NYC. That they toil for low pay in exploitative conditions to make our shiny Apple products is an open secret the mainstream media is finally covering. But monologuist Mike Daisey shining on a spotlight on Foxconn factories for years, particularly with his electrifying play The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Having read a transcript of the Nightline segment, Daisey says it "does a lot for actually helping to give a human face to people who have been ignored forever." However, "context is everything." On his blog, he writes:
So when Nightline says: "But while we looked hard for the kind of underage and maimed workers we've read so much about, but we mostly found people who face their days through soul-crushing boredom and deep fatigue." You have to take it with a grain of salt, in the context of what they were doing. The whole reason I talked about the underage workers I met in the monologue was because of how they said the monitoring was completely ineffective. Even Apple's own audits have discovered child labor in their supply lines—but you need real labor investigators, with independence, to root things out.
And maimed workers? Why on earth would maimed workers still be on the production lines? I talk about how they get thrown away when they don't perform—why would they be waiting in the dormitories to give interviews? News organizations like Nightline are fantastic at catching executives saying the wrong thing—which is often when they say exactly what they mean...
But the best part is when this former Apple executive, who has moved over to Foxconn in their very cozy relationship, says: "Of course you can argue that we should have opened up five years ago. Well five years ago, we are under the radar screen, nobody really knows us, we are doing well. Why should I open it up?" This is the real voice of both Apple and Foxconn. They knew what the labor situation was years ago—they knew their workers were being driven into the ground, they knew exactly what they were doing as they squeezed margins and ran their workers harder... and their only real regret is that the world started paying attention.
Nightline reporter Bill Weir says there "were always five to six people with us as we toured the factories and dorms." Considering the presence of the minders, it's impressive that he found workers brave enough to say anything negative, but Weir says the most common complaint was about low pay. He also showed an iPad to a worker who had never seen one before. She said people should be careful with it, "because they work so hard to make them."
The segment airs tonight at 11:30. And Mike Daisey's show has returned to the Public Theater, back by popular demand through March 18th. We highly recommend it, and you can also download the transcript of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs on Daisey's website. He said he released the transcript this morning "under an open license so that anyone can perform it, anywhere, totally free."
