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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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.

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The United States must learn more about China instead of criticizing the country for its exchange rate and trade policies if it wants to increase exports to the world’s largest market, US economists have said.

The comments followed a new bout of China-bashing launched by US legislators at a US House of Representatives hearing on Wednesday.
US congressmen and industrial associations criticized China for its foreign exchange regime and trade-related policies, including indigenous innovation, government procurement, intellectual property rights (IPR), market access and the investment environment. They claimed that these disadvantaged US industries and caused job losses.

The hearing comes at a time when US unemployment rates remain high despite initial signs of economic recovery.

“The problem is, we are not good at exports and we don’t pay enough attention,” said Barry P. Bosworth, senior fellow of the economic studies program with the Brookings Institution.

“I don’t think they understand that American workers lose jobs because of this.”

The US itself, especially its industrial unions, should be blamed, Bosworth said.

The unions should have joined trade associations on pushing the government to develop strategies for expanding exports to China instead of complaining, he said.

“But they don’t do anything … they are not international.”

The United Steelworkers, the largest industrial union in North America, has initiated a large number of trade remedy cases against imports from China since the global financial crisis, including the top two cases involving tire special guarantees and oil steel pipes.

The United Steelworkers provided a list of issues including currency policy, IPR and protectionism at the hearing. The union alleged that these will wreak havoc on American workers and urged the government to intervene.

The US should not point fingers but learn more from German firms, which have established a good reputation in China and exported a “huge” amount of products, Bosworth said.

“They were not multinational, but that is not true now,” he said.

Domenico Lombardi, president of Oxford University’s institute for economic policy, agreed.

Read more here.

South Korea has found that pulling off an effective global action against North Korea in response to the maritime disaster that killed 46 sailors is a tough job indeed.

To make North Korea suffer the consequences of its provocative act, the South is taking a closer look at the North’s illicit activities abroad through which it generates cash to sponsor its nuclear program.

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Yu Myung-hwan confessed in an interview earlier this week that the nature of the Cheonan incident made it difficult for Seoul to request joint international action against the North.

“Countries like China consider the maritime disaster a domestic issue that needs to be resolved by the two Koreas,” he said.

“The reaction is distinctively different from that in response to the North’s missile and nuclear programs because they know that the weapons of mass destruction programs posed a grave threat to global security.”

Given that the North’s armed attack claimed 46 sailors and that survivors also suffer from post traumatic depression disorder, it is apparent that doing nothing is not an option.

In an effort to send a clear message that North Korea will have to suffer because of its provocation, South Korea plans to work closely with its allies to cut the cash flow into the North by strengthening policy coordination.

South Korea is also looking into the North’s illicit activities such as drug trafficking, exporting weapons and trafficking counterfeit U.S. currency.

Read more here.

President Hu Jintao has decided to cut short his planned tour of key South American nations and head home early after the BRIC summit in Brazil, in order to help better direct disaster relief after a 7.1-magnitude quake struck Qinghai early Wednesday.

Hu will postpone his scheduled visit to Venezuela and Chile, which was slated for Saturday and Monday, says China Daily.

The delegation arrived in Brazil on Tuesday. Hu is scheduled to meet Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday, and attend the BRIC summit the next day, before leaving to Beijing.

Hu phoned Chilean President Sebastian Pinera and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to explain his change in schedule.

“At this difficult time, I need to return to China as soon as possible and join the people in disaster relief,” Hu told the two leaders.

Pinera expressed his full understanding and support for Hu’s decision. He also expressed deep condolence for quake victims in Qinghai.

Chavez also said he fully understand Hu’s decision, and expressed his deepest condolence. Chavez said Venezuela wishes to offer all necessary support for China’s post-quake disaster relief.

Premier Wen Jiabao has also decided to postpone his visit to Brunei, Indonesia, and Myanmar, scheduled for April 22-5.

The death toll from the quake in northwest China’s Qinghai Province has risen to 617, rescuers said Thursday.

The latest statistics show that 313 people were missing and 9,110 injured, 970 severely, said a spokesman with the rescue headquarters in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Yushu in southern Qinghai.

Rescuers have taken out 115 miners alive from the flooded Wangjialing Coal Mine in north China’s Shanxi Province by Monday afternoon, nine days after the accident occurred, the rescue headquarters said.

“Rescuers are continuing the search for 38 trapped miners. The rescue work is still challenging,” said Liu Dezheng, spokesman of the headquarters.

“It is a miracle in China’s mining rescue history,” said Luo Lin, head of the State Administration of Work Safety, who is waiting at the pit entrance.

“Scientific methods and technology used in the rescue have ensured the miners rescued alive after being trapped underground for a week,” said Shanxi Party chief Zhang Baoshun.

He said most of the survivors were brought out from a working platform, where rescuers had drilled a vertical hole last week. The hole has ensured oxygen in the flooded pit. Rescuers later sent down glucose to the trapped ones.

He said he has been informed that most of the survivors were in a stable condition, and could talk soberly.

Chen Yongsheng, a captain of the rescue team, said rescuers haven’t reached two working platforms under the pit, where the remaining trapped workers may stay.

“The room under the flooded mining lane is small. The water surface was less than one meter below the top of the lane, where the survivors were found Monday morning,” he said.

He said rescuers had used five-seat kayaks to bring out the trapped miners.

The rescue headquarters said they were continuing to pump the water out of the mine pit to reduce the water level.

“It is miracle. It is all worth of our efforts without sleep for several days,” said Wei Fusheng, a white-hair rescuer, bursting into tears.

A team of medical experts organized by the Ministry of Health have arrived in Shanxi to aid the rescue work.

“I have two daughters and a son. I have to do mining work to earn money for them,” said a 45-year-old survivor taken by the Shanxi Aluminium Plant Hospital, which has admitted 35 survivors from the mine on Monday.

The hospital is among five local hospitals taking survivors from the mine.

“How fantastic to be up on ground again,” said a 27-year-old survivor.

He said he heard applause when he was lifted out by rescuers.

He shook hands with some survivors brought out by rescuers.

Rescuers entered the flooded Wangjialing coal mine Sunday evening to search for about 153 workers who had been trapped for a week, after the water level dropped.

Read more here.

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Amid US-led efforts for fresh sanctions against Tehran, China said Thursday that it would continue to work towards a “peaceful resolution” of the Iranian nuclear case.

“On the Iranian nuclear issue, China will continue to endeavor toward a peaceful resolution,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters.

“We have always and will continue to push for a peaceful settlement of this issue,” Qin said, adding that the standoff should be resolved by “diplomatic means”.

Qin’s remarks come as US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said Wednesday that “China has agreed to sit down and begin serious negotiations” over imposing fresh sanctions against Iran.

The US, which accuses Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, has been lobbying for more UN Security Council (UNSC) sanctions against Tehran.

US-led calls have, however, received a chilly reception mainly from China, one of the five veto-wielding members of the UNSC, which insists that diplomacy can still work to solve the Iranian nuclear issue.

Iran says any punitive measures against the country are legally baseless as Tehran’s peaceful nuclear energy program is being fully monitored by UN nuclear watchdog, IAEA.

Read more here.

Zhang Ziyi has vehemently denied accusations that she committed fraud in the name of charity, but admitted to inexperience when organizing a donation drive for the relief of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake victims.

In an exclusive interview with China Daily, the internationally-celebrated Chinese actress – for the first time – answered some 100 questions, most of which involve details about the money she gave to charity or collected for her own foundation.

Ever since an advertisement featuring her was defaced with paint in December, Zhang has been embroiled in a series of allegations.

The most serious of the accusations – mostly from netizens – are about discrepancies in the sums that surfaced in various reports. Shortly after the earthquake struck Sichuan on May 12, 2008, killing some 80,000 and dislocating millions, she decided to donate 1 million yuan ($147,000) to the China Red Cross.

As she was in the United States at the time, she asked her representative in China to transfer the money. But due to what she claimed to be a “communication glitch”, only 840,000 yuan was sent. She said she took “primary responsibility” for it and had already made up for the shortfall.

The other contentious figure was $1 million, which she said she had “hoped” to raise, but had never claimed to have “already” raised. The actual amount pledged for the Zhang Ziyi Foundation is slightly less than $500,000, most of which has not been paid.

The event in the eye of the storm was a fund-raising drive on May 21, 2008, at the Cannes Film Festival. During the one-hour “hastily arranged” initiative, only $1,392 in cash was collected, far less than the previously reported $50,000. The rest were informal pledges.

The total adds up to about $500,000, which is the amount she said she had always referred to when answering the media.

Since then, she said she had been making efforts to pressure the donors to honor their pledges, but her efforts have not been very successful. So far, only $15,050 has been collected.

Zhang said she would personally make up for the shortfall but would not reveal the people’s names against their will.

Burglary, murder and other crimes have increased in North Korea in the wake of the failed currency revaluation last November, an online news outlet run by North Korean refugees told The Korea Times on Wednesday.

The report came out after Won Sei-hun, director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), said last week that despite the internal trouble following the currency reform, the Communist country is still under control. He ruled out the possibility of a coup in the North.

The North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity (NKIS) reported that a North Korean was shot dead in a fight after he, along with several other hungry residents, attempted to loot food items by jumping on a train in North Hamgyeong Province.

The train shipping imported foods from China was passing through the region. The province shares a border with the northeastern part of China.

“A man, who was identified only as Jung, died during a physical fight with security forces,” the report said.

The NKIS Web site provides stories about what’s happening in the isolated state based on reports from secret stringers living in large North Korean cities.

The North Korean freelance reporters send their stories to the organization’s staff based in Seoul by cell phone on a regular basis, an activist of the organization told The Korea Times, asking not to be named.

She declined to give details on the secret reporters, such as the number of stringers and what cities they are based in.

The NKIS said residents in North Hamgyeong Province have been living in horror as several burglary and murder cases have been reported since last month.

Crime has risen in the North after the failed currency reform led ordinary people to face an even worsened economic reality. After the revaluation, prices soared, and it was harder for people to make ends meet.

Evgeni Plushenko, one of Russia's underperforming athletes, took silver in men's figure skating.

Perhaps it’s surprising that Russia managed to walk away with even three gold medals after giving its worst-ever performance at a Winter Olympics, writes The Moscow Times.

Its luge team, for one, has to build its own sleds for lack of money and only got a track to practice on at home in 2008 — and even then it doesn’t freeze properly.

“We make the equipment ourselves and almost from scratch,” Valery Silakov, president of the Russian luge federation, told The Moscow Times.

Silakov explained that it is hard to find people to produce luges within the country and even the Khrunichev space center cannot guarantee that its luges, which cost more than $100,000 each, will reach the needed speeds of about 130 kilometers per hour.

The Russian luge team left the Vancouver Games medal-less after veteran Albert Demchenko, 38, placed fourth. 
 
Demchenko complained in Vancouver about the lack of financing for his sport, saying he has to repair his luge out of his own pocket.

He and his fellow athletes only got a chance to train in Russia when a luge and bobsleigh stadium opened in Paramonovo, outside Moscow, in March 2008. The stadium, however, routinely faces problems with its freezing equipment, Silakov said. The stadium originally built for Soviet athletes is located in now-independent Latvia.

Despite the difficulties, Demchenk said he would like to try his luck at the Sochi Games in 2014, when he will be 42.

Russia might need him. With many athletes deserting during the turbulent 1990s, the younger generation who has replaced them remains amateurish. “Many of them entered sports schools after the [training] system had already been destroyed,” Silakov said.

With only two events left Sunday, Russia looked set to place a dismal 11th in the gold medals table, well behind leader Canada (13) and even countries like South Korea (6) and China (5). Russia also won five silvers and seven bronzes for a total of 15 medals.

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