Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most—that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and menial tasks, have the least. Eugene V. Debs

History repeats itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history.

Clarence Darrow

There is a startlingly similar pattern in the Pullman Strike of 1894 and what is currently spreading throughout China among its young factory workers. But for this editorial I wish to refocus on a single Chinese male, Ma Xiangqian, who at the tender age of  18 was found dead at the base of a Foxconn Technology dorm, an apparent suicide—and his relationship to Foxconn Technology. The similarities between Ma Xiangqian’s life and his relationship to Foxconn Technology and a worker for Pullman and his relationship to the Pullman Co. are revealing, and testify to the inherent evil of corporations, whether they be those of 19^th century America or of 21^st century China.

The Pullman Strike occurred as a consequence of a down-turned economy and the intractable greed and hard-heartedness of George Pullman, the owner of Pullman Palace Car Company, a railroad car manufacturing business. The economic downturn of 1893 caused George Pullman to cut wages. The problem, however, was that workers still had to work the same long 12-hour days and still had to pay the same rents on their company-owned homes in the town of Pullman, which was built and run by the Pullman company. This led to a strike by Pullman Company workers, which careened into an national railway strike, the first industry-wide strike in our nation’s history. During the long strike a few workers (as is often the case) resorted to violence, which only added to the pressure on President Grover Cleveland to quell the strike. Cleveland finally called in 12,000 army troops. In the process of supressing the strike, thirteen workers died and fifty-seven were injured. Property damage (in today’s value) was around 8 million dollars. Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union, was arrested on both civil and criminal charges , and was tried in a spectacular trial featuring (a later famous) Clarence Darrow, a former railroad lawyer himself who “switched sides” in order to represent Debs. Debs was eventually found guilty  of a much lesser charge of violating a court injunction, and spent six months in jail. While in prison he read Karl Marx. Upon his release, he became the leading socialist in America, running for president 5 times, beginning in 1900.  He attracted many ardent followers, including the famous blind and deaf activist Helen Keller.

What is revealing about the Pullman Strike is the corporation’s opinion that the worker is always in the wrong, that the worker possesses no rights, and that the worker can even be jailed (or killed) if he stops work or persuades others to go on strike; and conversely, that the corporation is  always in the right, and can use whatever force is necessary to keep its factories or supply lines open.

As I wrote in my editorial, “Rotten To The Core”, there have been numerous suicides at Foxconn Technology, both male and female, and numerous suicide attempts as well. (Foxconn Technology has contracts with Apple, Dell, H-P, and many other Silicon Valley firms.) Life at Foxconn, however, appears now to be even more sinister than it first seemed. According to an article in Der Spiegel, Ma Xiangqian’s family  believes his death not to be a suicide at all but rather a premeditated murder by Foxconn Technology.

Ma’s sister, Liqun, said that Ma had resigned from Foxconn six days earlier and had appeared “upbeat”. For some time at work previously he had been severely abused by a Foxconn supervisor simply for breaking a drill fixture on the assembly line, and was forced to clean toilets as a consequence. His family does not believe Foxconn’s story that Ma’s death was a suicide. According to Der Spiegel, “His sister Liqun tells (of) wounds she found on ( Ma Xiangqian’s)  head…which looked like they had been made by a drill fixture. She also found strange injuries on his upper body, wounds which would not suggest suicide.  Sections of Foxconn’s surveillance video are (also) missing from around the time of (his) death.” What makes this suspicion of murder even more believable is that there was recently released on the Chinese Internet a video clip allegedly showing Foxconn’s security guards at a Beijing factory “kicking and hitting workers.”

For the sake of getting that last ounce of profit, corporations will do anything—whether now in 2010 or then in 1894; it is, quite simply, the nature of the beast. The corporation is completely amoral; its only concern is for more profit by whatever means possible, fair or foul. And anyone who stands in their way, like Eugene Debs, or Ma Xiangqian, is a marked man.
A national commission, set up to investigate the Pullman Strike, later found Pullman’s “paternalism” to be partly at fault, and Pullman’s town “un-American”; the Illinois Supreme Court later forced Pullman to divest himself of his town, which annexed itself to Chicago.

Owners, now or then, will do anything to ensure more profit, including the building of “company towns”, thereby ensuring totalitarian control over its workers. Today Foxconn has done exactly the same thing that Pullman did, and for the same reasons—only this one has 300,000 workers in one company town.

A typical Foxconn employee works a minimum 12-hour day (usually longer, with mandatory overtime), and their residence is a dormitory in which 10 people are crowded into a single dorm room, with no hot water. Life for them has thus been reduced to repetitive  assembly-line work and sleep, nothing more. To the corporation these workers are not even human beings, merely a means to an end: humans sacrificed to the all-powerful profit-god Moloch.

Why do corporations do this? CEOs believe, quite simply,  that their workers are a company’s own possession, and therefore they can exploit them howsoever they please. For a corporation, the pursuit of profit trumps a worker being a human being, with the right to lead a happy, healthy, and independent life apart from work. Steve Jobs and the other CEOs of Silicon Valley firms which are contracted  with Foxconn (or other equally venal companies around the world) know this,  but choose to “look the other way”, preferring to contemplate their profit margins rather than inquiring into  inhumane working and living conditions they all know exist but which makes their profit margins possible.

After the railroad strike, George Pullman was so hated  for the rest of his life that when he died he had to be buried in the dead of night, in a more secure lead-lined coffin, put into a reinforced steel-and-concrete vault over which was then poured several additional tons of concrete—just to ensure that no angry worker would stealthily exhume and desecrate his body! The Eumenides (the entities the ancient Greeks believed wrecked vengeance on an evil man’s life) pursued Pullman not just to the grave, but into the grave as well!

And so it is. Even if we mortals can not see these divine furies ourselves, nevertheless they are at work wrecking their vengeance on those who defy God’s law to love and care for one another—with no exceptions, and certainly none for the sake of mere profit. While on earth evil does indeed often seem to triumph,  yet we may take a lesson, and a measure of spiritual comfort (or warning!), from the life of George Pullman himself: None but the good find peace.

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