Apple’s New Iphone Produces a New Economic Authoritarianism

          The historic Christian ambition that people should share the world’s goods as a reflection of the just purposes of God is mocked by the rapid growing global inequality.  Global labor markets exploded in sharp relief this week beginning with a very large scale riot that broke out September 23rd in Taiyuan. It sent forty people to hospitals from a giant factory where parts of Apple’s new iPhone 5 are being assembled.  Only lightly reported by U. S. media, international papers like the Financial Times of London, the Singapore Times, and the Chinese blog, MIC Gadget, reveal a picture of profound upheaval and pathos.

     

           A battle inside a huge Foxconn factory started when floor managers bullied some workers roughly and their regional countrymen responded by overwhelming the managers.  “…One of China’s worst incidents of labour unrest in years” reported the Financial Times this week.

…the plant which employs 80,000 people proved far too big to bring under control….’every inch of ground was covered with people, a black mass of bodies….when the police arrived…they could just stand there and watch.’

You can read about and see photos and video footage of the rioting by going to the blog MIC Gadget at http://micgadget.com/29723/the-undercover-report-on-how-the-new-iphone-5-is-made-inside-foxconn-factory/ 

If you follow the “Commentary” section near the end of the blog you can read Chinese worker’s mixed views of their own ironic and completely authoritarian factory system.

 “…critics, you must consider the fact that "sweatshop" factory wages are enticingly high for a significant population of people in many countries. We are talking: "Mom, I'll work the farm while you wait in line at Foxconn so we don't have to sell daughter #2 for food money." How about we direct our outrage at the global human condition that allows such work conditions to be an improvement?

Growing inequality is implicit in the comparative magnitude of these events and was given further documentation when violent resistance to new austerity measures broke out again this week in Greece and Spain.  

The Taiyuan riot reveals a picture of vivid disproportion. In the Silicon Valley, where Apple and many other computer giants are located, the San Jose Mercury News had celebrated 1,900 new jobs added in August; while in China hundreds of thousands of workers were building the new cell phones invented in Cupertino. In the area around that Apple epicenter unemployment today stands at 77,500. Meanwhile, In Zhengzhou 100,000 new workers were being added to an already existing factory of 150,000 workers—all busy assembling the new Apple phone and products like those coming from Samsung and Verizon.  The starting monthly income at the Taiyuan Foxconn plant assembling Apple products is $283.

This is a theater of the morally absurd.  It is also a drama in which American workers earn less. The diverse publics gobbling up the new iPhone that make Apple richer by the minute seem immune to the implications of this global upheaval revolving around a continued decline in worker economics.   With Apple’s net worth reportedly approaching $1 Trillion, new U. S. Census data just released shows the widening inequality gap in Silicon Valley.  Family median income has fallen 22 percent since 2000 and 3.2 percent in 2011. Home ownership rates are down to 46.7 percent in the richest valley in America.

As authoritative market regimes generated by the likes of Apple lead to rising global inequality, the photos below show a striking resemblance between the conditions of worker’s lives in Taiyuan and the growing prison populations in the United State. As U. S. unemployment becomes permanent for millions of people (compare nearly 2 million unemployed in California with a total of only 12,000 jobs created last month) one can sense that a growing danger: that a global worker underclass will live sometimes in prisons born of their desperation, and sometimes dormitories built in hell.

A Taiyuan Worker' dormitory room 

A U. S. Women's prison cell

Taiyuan Dormitory Window View