“They Use Women As Men And Use Men As Animals” In Foxconn’s Apple Factories
You have to live in a bubble (outsourcing your thinking to politicians who tell you how wonderful your life is and how fortunate you are, or consumed with your own narcissistic selfishness) to not question or be concerned over the conditions that people toil under in communist China and other slave labor pools for American corporate capitalism. But, then it’s easy for the self to make everything the responsibility of someone else. The self loves to outsource its responsibilities; part of the self’s endless rationalizations and self-deceit about its very existence. It’s not my problem.
Let’s see. You work in an Foxconn Apple factory. You have to work when they tell you to. Even on a moments notice. You work on average ten hours a day. That includes oftentimes awoken in the middle of the night to head over to the factory for an urgent rush for Steve Jobs. Well, now for Tim Cook. You live in corporate-owned housing. You buy most of your food at the corporate cafeteria. If you say anything to anyone about your working conditions, you are told that you will be criminally-liable. And you make less than $1 an hour that the company takes back through your daily needs of sustenance. Even if you could keep your earnings, it would take you half a year of earnings to buy a mid-priced iPad.
That sounds like the effing bomb! Sign me up to work for the proletariat state and one of its greatest success stories, Apple. What if this was your daughter? Is this the kind of world you want for her?
Some say this isn’t capitalism. Well, is surely isn’t capitalism in the way that most people including myself would like to define it. But, make no mistake, it is capitalism. Throughout capitalism’s history, this has been the rule rather than the exception. Because throughout most of history, democracy and human rights were never to be toiled over or worried about in its construction. Even in the United States. Ahem. Correction. Especially in the United States. Capitalism’s basis premise of concern first for the self is flawed as a democratic economic model. Especially when applied to corporate capitalism. This construct therefore needs to be regulated. There are very easy fixes for this. Painful for the status quo. But very easy. We could take thousands and thousands of pages of red tape out of the regulatory code and replace it with ten lines of code.
Capitalism’s roots and most of its history are, in fact, in slave labor and economic predation. Today, politicians call that a Right to Work state and free trade. Obviously Right to Work and free trade are cleansed political propaganda that goes down much easier than you have no rights at work. Or, even you have no economic rights. Democracy in capitalism? Pshaw!
The world doesn’t need to be this way. And neither does a merit and market-based economy. It’s that way because we allow a very few to define it that way. Oftentimes we fight to defend it to be this way as propaganda encourages us to believe any other way would ruin that cozy little world we exist in.
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