Biomass energy plants: see themselves as a cost-effective solution for farmers who need to get rid of dead trees and other woody waste that pose wildfire risks without openly burning them; they also produce energy
Utilities companies: looking for the "least-cost, best-fit" source of energy, don't care where it comes from just that it's reasonably priced
Farmers: need cheap ways to dispose of waste
Technology to dispose of woody waste from almond trees in ways other than open burning or biomass facilities doesn't exist yet, at least at the scale needed for massive almond orchards
Closures of biomass energy plants have forced SJVAPCD to allow more open burning of agricultural waste, which produces particulate matter and contributes to already severe air quality in the Central Valley
Individualizing and psychologizing the suicides, ignoring the publicness of the action and the structural causes, took away from its extreme emotional potency. Although it did spawn a good deal of activism and research, the profit margins of Apple continue to grow and Foxconn’s are shrinking.
Automation is ignored - this topic was raised in the Dialectical Anthropology article that responded to something else that Ngai wrote and cited this piece.
Apple ”released its Supplier Responsibility Progress Report in February 2011 to show the remedial measures taken by Foxconn, its largest supplier, in the aftermath of the suicides. However, none of the ‘remedial measures’ addressed such core issues as speed-up, illegal levels of compulsory overtime work, dangerous conditions in the Foxconn factories, the humiliation of workers, and illegal practices associated with the use of student interns as workers.” -p1263
I think the corporations had extremely little regard for the Chinese factory workers, including the higher-ups at Foxconn and the people of Apple and the other companies that contract their manufacturing with Foxconn. It seemed like pure damage control.
Really just denying responsibility hard: Foxconn’s “public responses to workers’ suicides were uniform: the workers who attempted suicides suffered from individual psychological problems such as depression, distress over heavy debts, or family and other personal problems (Li, 2010). Foxconn hired Western and Chinese psychologists and psychiatrists to defend it in the wake of the plague of worker suicides at the company.” p1260
As more specified in news articles, like Heffernan 2013, Foxconn increased wages but increased the quotas by even more. They started making workers sign anti-suicide pledges that said they wouldn’t blame the company or sue or ask for compensation. They retracted that because of outcry but then just put up nets. “Steve Jobs gamely insisted that the factory, with swimming pools and cinemas, was far better than required. The Foxconn communications director Liu Kun, argued that with more than a million employees in China alone, the rate of "self-killing" wasn't far from China's relatively high average. Everyone pledged to do better and the story went away.”
In this economist article I can’t access, but that is cited in the Wikipedia article on this topic, they also mentioned that Buddhist monks were brought in for prayer sessions.
The activists “condemned the ineffectiveness of the Chinese government and trade unions to enforce labor law and protection of the migrant workers and hence urged Apple and other brands to support genuine reform of Foxconn’s unions.” p1261 - so they are turning to the brands for labor conditions to improve.
Piecemeal approach to self-regulation forecloses more sweeping structural change as well as an actual check on power thru independent control over corporations
No real audit and no punishment for violating something like the UN Global Compact.
Since the CSR initiatives align with some of the infrastructure/development and personal goals of the village elites, it forecloses resistance to the mine and in fact has spawned violent defense of the mine by local people.
Mistrust of the NGOs, who come in and out, and who the corporations have carefully targeted with smear campaigns, forecloses certain kinds of alliances that could have put a check on corporate power, but perhaps not improved the lives of the villagers in the way they wanted.
They see their environmental training as enlightening the backward locals who eat turtle eggs or fish in the reefs - so here they are helping the charismatic environment and helping the unknowing locals to preserve natural beauty. They wanted to provide waste management - they believe it’s helpful to the locals and it also would help with their distaste for trash at the beaches. The other CSR initiatives are portrayed as being forcefully demanded by the village elites and given as concessions to improve security, so the narrative of “help” to the locals is less prominent.