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.
The environmental legacies left behind by industrial production are pervasive in the air, the soil, and the water. This elemental elixer surrounds us.
In the field of STS, it is perhaps obvious to suggest that institutions have cultures, norms, standards, and professional ways of being. Yet, what are we to make of the results of industry telling its own past publically. The corporate origin story could be a footnote in Joseph's Campbells work. The allure of the lone individual working tirelessly until an innovation is produced and the market takes over.
Yet, the Wood River Refinery tells a different story. One about place, about people, about the terrible minutia of life lived within bureaucracy. Yes, the story told is glossy and teleological, but the question emerges. What can be learned about the stories industry tells about itself? What do these artifacts contribute to histories and what weight do we give to these stories within the Anthropocene?
The factory at Wood River is both a place where labor is maximized for profit, but also where worker devote 40 precious hours of their week. Lives persist and even thrive in the factory. Are the stories of these lives at Wood River?
This initiative by the ICC to ground the history of Environmental Justice in Newark, while creating resilience through education and powerful messages.
They wanted to make the waters cleaner and help the enviroment get better.
The source of resilence was local knowledge and community that wanted to see a difference from companies dumping trash in the water.