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Most of America probably now knows that Mike Daisey fabricated sections of his popular one-man play about Apple iPads and his This American Life broadcast. But China’s bloody factories are a problem much bigger than Foxconn, Adam Matthews reports:
“Wang took me on a tour that even [Mike] Daisey couldn’t have dreamed up.”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1uwf4pNtd1qdltkno1_500.jpg)
Most of America probably now knows that Mike Daisey fabricated sections of his popular one-man play about Apple iPads and his This American Life broadcast. But China’s bloody factories are a problem much bigger than Foxconn, Adam Matthews reports:
“Wang took me on a tour that even [Mike] Daisey couldn’t have dreamed up.”
Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook was in China this week, visiting an iPhone production plant run by the Foxconn Technology Group. Foxconn has been embroiled in controversy recently for a string of worker suicides.
Leslie Chang, a long time China correspondent and a contributor to the New Yorker, spent two years getting to know assembly-line workers in south China. In her book “Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China,” Chang chronicles the lives of these workers.
“They are not victims,” Chang said in an interview with PRI’s The World. “The workers choose to leave the countryside to go to the city. They choose to work in a certain factory. It’s true they can’t organize a union. They can’t sue their boss. Certainly the system is stacked against them. But their choice is to leave to a better factory. And over time the really bad factories don’t have workers and they have to improve conditions or they go out of business.” More.
(Image: cover of Leslie Chang’s “Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China”)
Unfortunately, the This American Life blog is down due to all the traffic generated by the recent announcement.
We’ve posted the full press release on our website, pri.org.
Ira Glass writes: We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China - which we broadcast in January - contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth, and this weekend’s episode of our show will explain the errors in the story. Details on our blog.
Last week, Apple released for the first time the list of companies that supply components and manufacturing services to the company. It also announced that it would allow the Fair Labor Association to oversee independent audits of assembly plants employed by Apple.
A week before this news, This American Life aired “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” which followed lifelong Apple superfan, Mike Daisey, to an Apple assembly plant in China called Foxconn, where employees recently staged a protest and threatened to commit suicide.
On the show, Daisey reported on the conditions at the plant, and host Ira Glass talked with with Ian Spaulding, founder and managing director of INFACT Global Partners, which goes into Chinese factories and helps them meet social responsibility standards set by Western companies; and with Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times who has reported on Asian factories.
In the podcast and streaming versions of the program Glass also speaks with Debby Chan Sze Wan, a project manager at the advocacy group SACOM, Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, based in Hong Kong. They’ve put out three reports investigating conditions at Foxconn (October 2010, May 2011, Sept 2011). Each report surveyed over 100 Foxconn workers, and they even had a researcher go undercover and take a job at the Shenzhen plant.
This American Life producer Brian Reed wrote this response to Apple’s news.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Bye, Steve! Enjoy your retirement. The money’s no better, but the hours are.
Steven Levy, senior writer at Wired, and Ken Auletta, writer for The New Yorker, reflect on Mr. Jobs’ career. Levy has been there since the beginning and covered the first Macintosh release for Rolling Stone.
