Foxconn

Foxconn technology Group is a hardware manufacturing company, with factories primarily in China. Their biggest client is Apple, and these days, that's a very lucrative contract for any manufacturer, especially with Jobs introducing a new hipster must-have product every 2 months. The issue with Foxconn, however, is that they take the phrase "drop dead" very literally; since the announcement of the iPad from Apple, 12 employees at Foxconn factories have died, either by committing suicide, or simply from being overworked. The most notable case is this one, where an employee died after working a 34 hour shift. No, that's not a typo; a person was made to work for more than a day straight, literally until he dropped dead.

http://kotaku.com/5553243/foxconn-employee-dies-after-34+hour-shift

Foxconn's response to these rash of deaths, far from considering not overworking their employees, was to install anti-suicide nets across their buildings, so employees who do decide death is better than working at Foxconn can land in the nets and get back to work.

There are several aspects of this whole case that disturb me, chief among them being the seeming apathy from, well, everyone. Jobs has repeatedly thrown his support behind Foxconn and called the deaths "regrettable" and "troubling". The public seems to shrug off news of every death as "the price for cheap products", which is troubling on so many levels, chief among them being the idea that a human life is an acceptable tradeoff for affordability of a gadget. After all, we're not talking about food here; the foxconn employees don't save 10 lives by sacrificing their own. These people are dying in the creation of iPods and iPhones. Are we really gaining anything as a population by feeding people to the slaughter just so we have something to listen to on a commute? Is the iPhone really that good that it's worth a human life? Why are we as a group at the stage where meaningless technology is worth human lives? We're not talking about making pacemakers and defibrillators here; there is not a single Apple product that can save lives, so why is it acceptable in the slightest that people are dying in the manufacturing process?

Furthermore, the defense of "well, it would be costlier if it was manufactured in North America" is not only irrelevant, but it's bullshit. Did I miss the memo where it was decided that $700 ought to cover the fact that someone died making the product? I have a hard time believing that if even one American or Canadian worker died after working 34 hours that the factory wouldn't be shut down, and the company running the factory wouldn't have their clients terminate contracts for fear of backlash (and hell, maybe I'm wrong, and naive for thinking so, which seems imminently probable). But Jobs does essentially the equivalent of "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie" and nobody bats an eyelash. I just can't wrap my head around the fact that people are dying and killing themselves out of being overworked, and somehow this isn't a point of mass anger. Not only that, but Apple continues to support this kind of behaviour, and consumers continue to support Apple. Is it latent or subconscious racism? Does the distance add a sense of "out of sight, out of mind" to these cases? Or, (and this is what I'm most afraid of), has our consumerism taken over so completely that we now apply a "by any means necessary" belief to even the things we want and don't really need? The only useful Apple product is their laptop; everything else is a luxury item. So why is it acceptable and, in fact, borderline irrelevant that people died in the making of these products? And not just one or two; 12 people to date. With no consequences whatsoever.

I shudder to think of the kind of callousness that makes something like this go unnoticed by the public at large. I really, really hope that I'm wrong, or that this is an anomaly, or maybe even that it simply hasn't reached the tipping point where it enters the public consciousness. If that's not the case, and we truly are at the point where people's death from manufacturing mp3 players and cell phones is greeted with a "meh", then I think we as a species are beginning to lose our fundamental humanity. And if that's true, it can only get worse from here.