Why I Won't Boycott Apple

Some people's opinions about Apple and the recent reports of working conditions in the Chinese factories where iPods, iPads and iPhones are made remind me of that scene in Casablanca where Claude Rains is shocked – SHOCKED – to find there is gambling going on here.

In other words, we're shocked РSHOCKED Рto find working conditions in Chinese factories are low paying, draconian and stultifying, laid bare in a recent New York Times expos̩.

Should we be appalled, assuming we are naively – or pretending – we're just discovering some of these reports? How, exactly, did we imagine these products were being made in China?

But now that the shocking facts have been shoved in our faces, should we, the generation of Vietnam protesters, Freedom Riders and bra burners, organize and boycott Apple?

No.

To me, there are two aspects to consider before deciding Apple is an evil task master exploiting cheap overseas labor thereby necessitating consumer action: culture and those stubborn things called facts.

Different drummers

We have the annoying habit of applying American morality when judging other cultures. Governments and citizens of other countries often find our cultural imperialism anywhere from annoying to meddlesome, degrading, antagonistic, all the way to menacing and even deadly.

Take Asia, for instance.

I've been to nearly a dozen Asian factories for Sony, Samsung, LG, Toshiba, Philips, Sharp and others, factories churning out computer chips, video and audio tape, LCD screens, VCRs, cell phones, computers, TVs, washing machines, air conditioners, refrigerators and microwave ovens.

Workers in most if these factories, like the ones manufacturing Apple products in China for Foxconn, live in dormitories in large factory cities.

The Japanese and South Korean factories I've visited were not sweatshops. They are ordered and clean and meticulous. The primarily young, unmarried workers don't spend their lives in these factories. These are often cherished first jobs for many of the workers, who are able to save enough in three or four years by living in dorms to get married and move on to bigger and better things. Besides, a few years of the drudgery were likely all these workers could take.

I am fascinated by this well-ordered manufacturing process, both from the mechanical as well as from the human point-of-view. Intellectually, I understood the way these factories worked was all perfectly normal to the cultures in which they existed. As a footloose and fancy free freelance American, I always felt vaguely uncomfortable amidst this seemingly neo-fascist factory regimen.

And then I saw the opening games of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Seeing those thousands of drummers all performing in perfect synchronization was scary on one level, but brought the Asian labor culture home to me.

Western individualism has been antithetical in Asia, especially the communist countries. Traditionally, individualism is subsumed by the collective in many Asian countries. Western influence since World War II has worn away some of this cultural collectivism in urban Japan and South Korea, not so much in rural areas and certainly not in Communist China where Western influence is limited.

Our understanding of Foxconn factory working conditions and worker attitudes toward them has to be understood in this distinctly un-American collective cultural context.

It's like a foreign country there

From what I've read, none of what happens in Foxconn's Apple facilities differs from what I've seen in other Asian electronics factories. And Apple is not the only company to use Chinese factories. Nearly all electronics manufacturing is done in Asia, a majority in China, all likely in factories similar in structure and style to the ones I've visited in Japan and South Korea.

And this is nothing new. Large scale electronics manufacturing in the U.S. started moving to Asia decades ago. 

China, of course, is different from Japan and South Korea. Under communist totalitarian rule, China's factories are less open to scrutiny and its operators less sensitive to the human cost. Cynical U.S. companies have and will turn a blind eye toward worker abuses in Chinese factories in the search for profits. Considering America's own checkered labor past, well, again, I'm shocked – SHOCKED…

Perhaps in reaction of reports about abuses, perhaps of its own accord, in the last few years Apple has acted/reacted to make sure the workers who make its products in China are treated with humanity.

Since 2005, Apple has released an annual "Apple Supplier Responsibility" audit. In the introduction of its most recent edition, the report notes:

Apple is committed to driving the highest standards for social responsibility throughout our supply base. We require that our suppliers provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, and use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes wherever Apple products are made.

Our suppliers must live up to Apple's Supplier Code of Conduct as a condition¨ of doing business with us.

This all may sound self-serving, so the question is – who audits the Apple audit?

Auditing Apple

One group is a worker's advocate organization called Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), which disputes the assertions and opinions attributed to it in the Times' piece. Additionally, a BSR representative noted:

My BSR colleagues and I view Apple as a company that is making a highly serious effort to ensure that labor conditions in its supply chain meet the expectations of applicable laws, the company's standards, and the expectations of consumers and other stakeholders.

Then there are the Chinese themselves. Chinese bloggers responding to The Times' piece (responses collected by The Times) have pointed out that it's not Apple's responsibility to monitor factories, but the government's.

Apple's factories employ 700,000 workers. What, exactly, would those 700,000 workers be doing if not working for Apple? One blogger noted:

If people saw what kind of life workers lived before they found a job at Foxconn, they would come to an opposite conclusion of this story: that Apple is such a philanthropist.

Apple knows it's under more scrutiny and knows it has human, corporate and PR responsibilities. Not surprisingly, Apple CEO Tim Cook reacted angrily to the Times' report and sent out an open letter to its U.S. employees explaining the situation and noting it had opened its supply chain "for independent evaluations by the Fair Labor Association."

Apple clearly has the motivation to live up to its lofty intentions.

Labor facts: on the home front

In the meantime, you might have read how Apple blew Wall Street away with its first quarter 2012 results – revenues of $46.33 billion and profits of $13.06 billion, a record for the company and possibly in the history of technology. According to reports, Apple now has more money than Greece and several other countries – profits which, in the minds of some, have transformed Apple from George Baily sticking up for the little folks into a megalomaniacal Mr. Potter.

Commenters on many message boards have angrily asked why Apple isn't using this windfall to bring manufacturing back to America, to share this largesse with our own domestic work force.

This course, of course, is naïve, but not for the reasons you'd think. It's not the higher wages Apple would have to pay that's stopping it from returning manufacturing jobs to the U.S., and it's not even necessarily the number of workers it'd need (although 700,000 workers is a LOT of people).

No, the problem is the dearth of EDUCATED workers the U.S.

Just about a year ago, President Obama met with a group of Silicon Valley bigwigs led by Steve Jobs. At one time, Jobs was proud of how Macs were built in the U.S. But now, Jobs told the president, he couldn't find the 30,000 engineers Apple needed to run the factories because of the U.S.'s immigration policies and our educational system.

President Obama obviously has heard. In his State of the Union address last month, the President repeated his oft-stated desire to somehow keep foreign-born/U.S.-educated workers in the U.S., and to somehow make college easier to afford for Americans. Apple itself is trying to boost our ability to educate ourselves with its new iBooks textbook for iPad effort.

Whether Congress gets off its paralyzed political posterior to make these minimum reforms is another matter. And whether our culture can ever reform itself to make education – especially math and science for engineering – a priority is even a bigger question mark. Whether or not Apple's or any electronics manufacturing jobs on Apple's scale can ever return to the U.S. is doubtful, however, at least in the short term.

In the meantime, I will feel only slight conscience qualms about buying an iPad 3 (hopefully in about a month from now), an iPhone 5 (hopefully this summer) or an Apple HDTV (hopefully sometime in the fall) – the same qualms I feel when I buy anything made in China or India or Indonesia or any Asian or third-world country. But since I'm a pragmatist and I understand how the world works and why, these qualms don't stop me from buying.