We've had the fantastical, even fabulous, stories about what goes on inside Foxconn from Mike Daisey. We've had the various complaints about suicide rates, industrial accidents and exploitation of the workforce. We've had people like me trying to point out that this is all nonsense, for conditions inside Foxconn are better than they are in most other areas of China.
And now Rob Schmitz, the Marketplace reporter who did so much to show that Daisey was indeed making stuff up has been able to film inside one of those very Foxconn factories. You can see the video here.
The real point here is that yes, these are working conditions and pay scales that you or I really wouldn't be happy with. For we are lucky people, lucky to be born in rich societies where such conditions and wages are 50 and more years in the past. However, these conditions and pay are better than what is generally on offer in China. And it is that which is the comparison that has to be made: not with ourselves, but with the options available to those who work in those factories.
In essence, that sort of work, indoor work and no heavy lifting, is markedly better than the alternative of spending 12 hours a day staring at the south end of a north moving water buffalo out in the rice paddies. Which is why 250,000 people voluntary move hundreds, even thousands, of miles across China to take these jobs. They actually compete with each other to get these jobs.
And who are we to say that they are wrong to do so?
