A job to die for

How we all love those cool modern gadgets with the half-eaten apple pictured on the back. Apple appliances have become a type of identification mark that certifies our belonging to a trendier and more techno world. It should not be forgotten, however, that the other side of the shiny coin of success that has turned Apple into the world’s largest stock-listed company hides a darker story: the factories of semi-enlsaved workers of the Foxconn company in China. The firm’s main client is Apple, but Foxconn also works for Microsoft, HP and Sony, among others.
Foxconn employs around a million people, in a working environment that bears little resemblance to Silicon Valley. Foxconn’s employees, mostly adolescents, live stacked on top of one another in dormitories of 100 beds, and their typical day can easily be summed up as follows: they get up, they eat a bowl of noodles with rice, they work for 15 hours straight, they return to their dormitories, they do carry out their ablutions and wash their clothes and then go to bed, only for the whole thing to start again the next day at 7am. For this they earn around 30 euros a month.
At the same time, Foxconn is an impregnable fortress, and the workers’ mobiles and cameras are confiscated when they first enter the factory. The featured photograph was taken with permission of the company, which does not make it difficult to imagine that the scene portrayed was set up beforehand. However, the serious expressions on the faces of the young people and – above all – the two supervisors walking the aisles, suggest quite a different story about the factory.
Not long ago, more than 150 of the company’s employees climbed up to a rooftop at the Wuhan plant with the intention of throwing themselves off. Individual cases of suicide have happened in their dozens in the past couple of years. Between 50 and 100 years ago, workers were exploited like this here, but it was not a pretty sight. Now we can exploit Chinese workers who, because of their distance from us, need not trouble our consciences.


Published in Catalonia Today magazine, February 2012