Throughout 2010, 14 employees of a factory owned by Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturing company, committed suicide. As usual, American media sensationalized the incidents and called for improved treatment of workers. Following investigations by the factory’s customers, including Apple and HP, Foxconn responded to international pressure by significantly raising wages.
Every suicide is a tragedy, but, comparatively speaking, how indicative of bad working conditions is such a string of suicides? In 2010, Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory employed a total of three hundred thousand workers. This is a suicide rate of 4.7 in one hundred thousand. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Chinese national average in 2011 was 22.2 in one hundred thousand — nearly five times higher. Much as it does with the debate on gun control, the American media opted for the more profitable emotion-mongering over the more newsworthy statistical analysis.
In his article “In Praise of Cheap Labor,” economist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman asserts that “bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all.” He notes that cheap labor is the only advantage the developing world has over the incumbency of businesses in the first world, and that the elimination of this edge would lead to economic stagnation and a reversal of industrial growth in regions where it is needed most. Empirically, low-skill labor in the developing world is one of the most effective and sustainable anti-poverty measures, public or private.
Now, sometimes workers are not aware of the health hazards to which they are being exposed, just as there are also documented cases of forced labor. But excluding these rarer cases, many still believe that informed and consensual agreements can constitute immoral action. You’ll often hear the charged allegation of a business “taking advantage” of its workers. Some claim that by putting an offer on the table for someone to take voluntarily can be a violation of their rights. Such a view requires a counterintuitive — and I think implausible — understanding of rights.
If the right being violated is one to a certain standard of living or work, then this right was violated well before the introduction of these international companies. Allowing the continuation of pre-existing hardship in the developing world is not a violation of rights. If that were the case, then we would also necessarily need to think that these businesses were violating the rights of their future employees even before their factories moved overseas. Further, everyone in the international community as a whole — not just these for-profit private enterprises — would be equally responsible for the absence of financial aid.
So why is it then that many feel so attached to a view that entails such unreasonable conclusions? In Krugman’s words, “Unlike the starving subsistence farmer, the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our benefit — and this makes us feel unclean.”
I find it disheartening that, at Brown University in particular, playing the part of the obnoxious activist who racks up social justice points is so fashionable. We don’t need to find a scapegoat for all of human suffering. Sometimes external circumstances predestine adversity. It is a victimless crime to let “heartless businessmen” get rich and for us to buy cheap products while simultaneously combating poverty in the developing world.
While we might reasonably believe it to be morally superior for businesses to provide better wages and working conditions for their workers, the narrative of parasitic businessmen dragging the developing world down is disingenuous. If anything, it’s the workers who need the businesses — quite literally — to survive. Perhaps we feel that they “deserve” better, but that should not stop us from recognizing the substantial benefits their current jobs engender.
Beyond the issue itself, it is informative to examine those individuals who condemn these business practices. The vast majority of those who protest conditions in factories such as those owned by Foxconn enjoy the phones, laptops and other goods produced by such conditions with no more than a passing admonition to maintain an image of social conscientiousness. While hypocrisy is not direct evidence of invalid arguments or false conclusions, it is important to understand that genuine moral outrage is never a matter of convenience.
At Brown, these individuals and their student organizations will often affectedly call for a “critical discussion” on a complex and controversial issue without any sincere intention to consider the opposition view. They reaffirm their beliefs and perpetuate the echo chamber that makes up Brown’s homogeneous political landscape. This process is repeated ad nauseam and the conclusions to which it leads are not grounded in rational thought, but rather are accepted on the basis of the endless parroting of emotional platitudes. And many students don’t even bother with this transparent facade of self-doubt. Those involved in the Ray Kelly protests were openly uninterested in the possibility that their views were fallible.
Jon Stewart said it best: “If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being tested, they’re not values: they’re hobbies.” It is not a virtue to support ‘social justice’ without thinking through the issue. This argument should demonstrate that Brown is teeming with individuals who are more interested in pushing their own rabble-rousing agendas than focusing on the pursuit of truth. This behavior is intellectually stifling and detrimental to the mission of our university.
As a teenager, the mother of Andrew Powers ’15 worked in a Chinese Timex factory to support her family. Andrew can be reached at andrew_powers@brown.edu.
ADVERTISEMENT
