Image via CrunchBase

June 16th was a great  day for Apple: orders for iPhone 4 topped 600,000, and that figure, according to a NY Times article, excluded orders which, because of a technical glitch, didn’t go through. “The company, “ said the Times, “ apologized to its customers who were frustrated by the computer hiccups…which affected the ordering system…,” and customers were urged to try to order their iPhone again. Apple said that “it was the largest number of preorders” in its history. Everyone seemed pleased (and none more so than Steve Jobs, presumably), including Wall Street, which saw Apple’s shares rise 3% to $267.25. AT&T was also pleased, since now they can extend their client’s new iPhone contracts for another year or more. Total iPhone sales estimates for this quarter have risen  from 8.5  to 9.5 million. Hey, what’s not to like?

On June 6, just a little over a week ago, Ma Xiangqian, a 19 -year -old Chinese male, committed suicide at a manufacturing plant owned by Foxconn Technology, one of whose clients is Apple.  Ma jumped from a high-rise dormitory which houses Foxconn’s  employees: since Ma’s  death, there have been 12 other suicides  or suicide attempts too (8 men and 4 women).  Foxconn Technology, founded by Terry Gou, has four-hundred thousand employees in Shenzhen, the electronics manufacturing center in China and is a $60 billion dollar corporation.

According to the NY Times, Ma Xiangquan had worked 286 hours (including 112 hours of mandatory overtime) during the month before he died. And what great salary, you may well wonder, with all that overtime, did he take home?  With his regular wages plus 70% overtime,  he averaged a mere one dollar an hour.

So, what is life like working at a plant making Apple’s high tech  products? Well, aside from the pathetic pittance of a salary, and grueling mandatory overtime, according to the NY Times, there are “military-style drills,” “verbal abuse  by superiors,” and “self-criticisms” which one must read aloud.

Foxconn workers sleep ten to a room; cold showers are the norm (there’s little hot water); on the assembly line one’s every movement is “mapped” and timed with a stop-watch down to milliseconds. Employees eat in the company cafeteria, sleep in company  dorms, have few or no friends, and are even forbidden to have snacks! As Ma told his sister, at Foxconn you only work and sleep. And if you should object to being so degraded, you might end up like Ma, forced to clean toilets. This is a plant that has contracts with Apple, Dell, and Hewlitt-Packard.

What is singular about all this is not the work regimen:  long ago that received an apt name—“slavery.”  No, what is singular is the blindness caused by a corporation’s insatiable appetite for profit at all costs, including all human costs. Steve Jobs, when told of the suicides at Foxconn, became defensive and said  only,“It isn’t a sweatshop.”

There was no spark of human compassion awakened, nor a determination to root out evil at its core, the rottenness which makes one human being enslave another. Just a lone defensive reply—“It isn’t a sweatshop.”

As long as Apple keeps the orders for iPhone coming; as long as the profits at the bottom-line keep bulging; as long as Apple’s stock price  keeps rising, then Steve Jobs is happy—and frankly, so are we, who buy these high-tech products stained by the tears, sweat, and blood of our fellow human beings—and exalt at the rise in our stock portfolio.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Foxconn Blames Suicides on Personal Problems, Compensation (businessweek.com)
• Foxconn’s 11th: Death by exhaustion (tech.fortune.cnn.com)