Foxconn "Glad That Mike Daisey's Lies Were Exposed"

theodp writes "Foxconn Technology Group, Apple's largest supplier and the target of allegations of poor work conditions, welcomed a retraction of a This American Life radio program episode it said was based on lies. 'I am happy that the truth prevails, I am glad that Mike Daisey's lies were exposed,' Louis Woo, a spokesman for Taipei-based Foxconn said. 'People will have the impression that Foxconn is a bad company,' Woo added, 'so I hope they will come and find out for themselves'. Foxconn also said that it has 'no plans to take legal action.'"

Comments

I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't the problem here not that what Daisey reported was false, but just that he didn't directly speak to people he claimed to speak with? Of course from a journalistic standpoint that is awful but it is now sweeping these problems under the rug.

Foxconn can now act like there were no problems and ignore them just because the source used was a secondary source reported as a primary source.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[Maury Markowitz]

> but just that he didn't directly speak to people he claimed to speak with

No.

"The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show."

Basically he stated that all of the "bad stories" were simply made up.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[omfgnosis]

The difference it can make and has made is that Apple has consistently responded to pressure to be more open about its labor practices, and they have enough economic weight to throw around to make real (but perhaps not fundamental) change in at least their supply chain—which is substantial on its own—but even probably in the electronics market overall.

Apple doesn't necessarily need to leave Foxconn (or any other supplier) to make them change their labor policies; the pressure of audits with accountability can go a long way, under enough social pressure. And say what you want about Apple's fanatic following, it certainly exists, but it also has a demographic tendency to be more inclined to apply pressure on labor abuse.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[omfgnosis]

The stories, yes. The actual topics, no.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[LDAPMAN]

"creative activist"?? What the hell is a creative activist? Oh, it's someone who lies because the ends justifies the means.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[greyc]

(Note: I am neither of the AC ancestors, but I'm pretty sure I understand their position, so I'll try to explain it regardless)

The critical difference here is that those Chinese workers are /not/ slaves. They are not forced into taking jobs at foxconn; they take these positions voluntarily, just like people in western countries do, because they think it's a favorable trade for them.

Why do they do this? Because as bad as the working conditions and pay at companies like Foxconn are by western standards, they are very competitive compared to the local alternatives. This point is crucial: Foxconn are not exploiting people in the sense that all else being equal, the people who work for them would be better off just not doing so.

You can make an argument that people living in sufficient poverty to make such a deal favorable is a terrible thing, and I'd agree with that. However, destroying Foxconn's business model by preventing them from selling to western countries does nothing directly to fix these people's poverty; in fact it makes it worse, by reducing the pool of jobs available to them (and not just randomly reducing it; you're taking away some of the best jobs in the pool!).

As an analogy, think of how you'd react if people in a hypothetical country that's even more wealthy than your's decided that your working conditions are far too horrible for your pay, and somehow stopped jobs like the one you have right from being offered anymore, resulting in you having to choose a worse job instead. Would that make your life better? Would you be happy about it? It's the same thing here.

The above is how the simple economic argument goes. Real economies and societies are complicated, of course, and there's several vectors by which driving Foxconn out of business oculd potentially improve the situation for common workers in China. But those aren't clear to me (and aren't clear to various other people who've looked at the issue) - the direct, obvious and robust effect is strongly negative. If you're going to argue that there are other effects compensating for it, it would be good to present your reasoning or link to other people arguing for the above reasoning being incorrect.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[Sentrion]

BTW, freeing the slaves was never a bad idea, but many freed slaves suffered horribly after emancipation. Not that their living conditions were that great before hand, but after the Civil War there were many known cases of entire communities of plantation owners who hired freed slaves on the condition that the freed slaves would be paid after the harvest. But after the harvest, instead of paying what they promised, the ex-masters drove the workers off their land by force and it is believed that thousands starved to death during this time.

And in the case of China, if the "free world" were to ban Chinese imports, China would fall into a severe depression. Unemployed workers would be very angry, as would the Chinese government. There's a slim chance this could lead to a general uprising that could lead to democracy, but more likely is that an over populated and well armed China with nothing to lose would absorb the unemployed men of fighting age into their armed forces, direct the anger of their masses toward the West, and obtain by military force what they could not obtain through commerce. Even in full scale war, such as an invasion of Japan and Taiwan, coupled with supporting N. Korea against the South, the US would likely not be the first to strike with nuclear weapons. And with an expanding military that has been growing more technologically adept, China probably would not see any reason to use their own nuclear weapons unless their home territory came under heavy bombing or invasion.

As an anecdote to support my position, during WWII the WMD of the time was poison gas, which both the Allied and Axis powers possessed in significant quantities, yet neither side resorted to using gas in spite of the scale and devastation of the war. So I don't believe that America's nuclear deterrence would be enough to prevent a conventional war with China.

So, the only option left for those of us who care about human rights and the treatment of workers who make the goods we consume, is we need to proactively seek out products that are manufactured and marketed in an ethical manner. Just as "organic" has become trendy to the point that well-to-do consumers will pay three or four times as much money for pesticide free vegetables, we need to make ethical and sustainable business practices just as "trendy". Kind of like the parable of the contest between the wind and the sun to see who could take the jacket off from a pedestrian. The wind blew harder and harder, but could not blow it off, but the sun just stood still and effortlessly warmed the path of the pedestrian until the pedestrian decided to take off his jacket. In time perhaps "ethically and sustainably manufactured in China" will be the new trendy "organic" label that Yuppies will wear with pride.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[Grygus]

This is, of course, nonsense. What is holding the entire process back is greed.

Apple makes large margins on the sales of iProducts. If they were interested, they could pass some, not even a lot, of that back to their suppliers and conditions there would improve. But they do not; they keep those margins, which are as large as they are precisely because they pay their suppliers as little as possible.

These people are in poor working conditions, not because it is inevitable, but because it is cheap.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[gnasher719]

Wasn't the problem here not that what Daisey reported was false, but just that he didn't directly speak to people he claimed to speak with? Of course from a journalistic standpoint that is awful but it is now sweeping these problems under the rug.

No, that was not the problem. As an example, Apple's "Supplier Responsibility" report says that Apple found a few dozen cases in total where people were employed before they were sixteen, but this was because of errors and improper age checking. So if Apple said the truth then it would be very, very unlikely that a journalist at the entrance of a Foxconn factory would spot anyone who is not sixteen yet. It would be impossible to find anyone who is 12, 13, or 14. But that is exactly what he claimed, which would make Apple liars.

Next, some people were injured through chemicals. You would think that if things are done right, workers who get injured go to hospital, get treated until they are fine, and come back fine and go back to work. And that's what Apple's report says. Daisey said he met many workers who were so ill that they couldn't even lift a glass. That is a completely different matter. If workers either didn't get treatment, or are so bad even after treatment, then the situation is hundred times worse than Apple claimed.

So there are two lies already that made Apple and Foxconn look an awful lot worse than they should.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[Bucc5062]

I see...no culpability by a totalitarian government here...

1 - Make life conditions horrible for population
2 - Offer sightly less horrible conditions in factory
3 - ???
4 - Profit, and repeat step 1

I keep seeing this argument pop up, "hey, at least its better then the farm" like it is a good moral position. In this example, China does not seem to interested in improving the lifestyle of their rural population for it would undercut a steady supply of workers in the factory. The human becomes part of the machine and like any part, when it goes bad, just replace for we have a large inventory in stock.

That is how your argument reads under the BS about its better then the alternative. I imagine that the government would not want to consider more humane, western labor laws for two reasons, there would be larges amount of people dropping their agro tools and flocking to cities for work, but higher wages, less work time, safer conditions means that companies have to pay more for labor and thus take off for "greener" pastures in less enlightened countries. Now what do you do will all those people that has hopes for a job.

Foxconn will continue to exist, because we feed the machine by buying stuff made there, and because the government needs Foxconn to help keep the populous if not happy, at least quiescent with the idea of a better life.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[Americano]

And if his "creative" work involves "creating" facts that are reported on national news as facts, that's okay?

And if Fox News decided to start calling Anne Coulter a "creative activist" - I mean, she writes books, that's creative! - you'd be okay with them reporting, "Anne Coulter says President Obama isn't even an American - he was born in Kenya, and he's a Muslim!" After all, she's creative, and an activist... TRUTH doesn't matter in the news, as long as it's for a "creative" cause, right?

I forgot what a lot of pedants you all are.

What you're calling pedantry is really just people calling you out for the ridiculous logical contortions you're twisting yourself into in order to justify Daisey's lies - presented as fact - "because they're activism for a good cause."

They asked him for the contact info for the translator he used so they could corroborate his stories. He refused to provide that info. If you don't want your stories fact-checked, don't present them to the world as fact.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[MightyMartian]

They're doing exactly the same thing that our own ancestors did in the 18th century when the Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear. They went and worked in deplorable conditions (far worse than anything at Foxconn) in the hopes of creating a better life for their children. It took a while, and ultimately governments were forced to get involved and put limits on hours per day, child labor and so forth, but in the end, by the middle of the 19th century you began to see the middle class forming, and it was the middle class that ultimately began imposing its will on the political classes.

I don't think there's a way around this. I don't think there's a way to go from agrarian society straight into industrial society. The Soviets and the Chinese tried it, and by and large it failed (think Great Leap Forward here, probably responsible for more deaths than any other single policy in human history). The way it's happening in China is, to one extent or another, exactly how it happened elsewhere. At some point, doubtless, the scales will tip and the middle class in China will want the political power that is commensurate to their economic power.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[gnasher719]

I think that it would be more accurate to say, that Daisey took bits and pieces of various real stories, all of them reported by actual journalists, put these details in rearranged form into a fictionalized monologue, and that became a TAL segment.

That's not what happened. First, where are the "real stories"? Second, he added in very significant ways. So instead of a few cases where someone was hired who was too young, his story that all you have to do is wait at the entrance of the Foxconn factory and you will see lots and lots of 12, 13 and 14 year old children. And instead of people being poisoned, going to hospital, recovering and going back to work, he changed it to people being poisoned and having their health permanently destroyed to the point where they couldn't even lift up a glass.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[Ihmhi]

The critical difference here is that those Chinese workers are /not/ slaves. They are not forced into taking jobs at foxconn; they take these positions voluntarily, just like people in western countries do, because they think it's a favorable trade for them.

I understand this and the rest of your post, but they are about as close to getting to slaves as they can be. A lot of them are there because they literally have no chance at a better life without having to go through all the insane hours at Foxconn.

Your first sentence alone could be used in a similar way: "the slaves aren't running away from the fields or complaining much lately, so they must really like it here!" No, they're there because they really do not have much of a choice. I mean, they do in a technical sense. I'm sure they could leave and go back to the countryside to live in a hovel with a dirt floor and absolutely 0 contact with the outside world. That's better than nothing, right?

Argh, the logical leaps that some of us make to assuage our guilt about the shit ways people are treated in other countries! The ones who make our shiny gadgets, children's toys, and a vast majority of the stuff we use everyday, no less!

And yes, I am full well aware that I am using something also made somewhere in China or Southeast Asia. If I had a "buy American" option for electronics I'd take it, although right now I'm killing time at a public library so I don't have much in the way of choice on what sort of computer I use.

Right now the only thing I can really reliably and consistantly buy American are cigarettes and socks.

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[toadlife]

To build a ipad in the USA, you will be paying $18-37 an hour. Your factory will be required to meat all OSHA and EPA standards. The manufacture cost of a single iPad will jump to at least $1100.00 add a 40% markup and now you have a 16gig ipad base model selling for $1599.00

Not buying it. AMD makes microprocessors in Germany, a country with as strict or stricter labor laws and regulations, and the result is certainly not chips that cost twice as much.

Or is your argument that Americans are that much less competent at everything compared to other Western nations?

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[Anonymous Coward]

Paying rent to the company and being forced to buy from the company store IS a form of slavery, Sorry you are too uneducated to see that, or you are just plain old evil and think it's a wonderful thing.

I think you're thinking of the appalachian coal mines in the US from the late 1800's to mid 1900's. Those were isolated places. Rural. Nothing close by. But, this is where the largest Foxconn facility is. It's part of this. Population of over 10 million people. Good luck forcing people to buy from the company store in a place like this.

You may lot like the working conditions, and it is true that they're not ideal, but calling it slavery is simply not true. People want to work there, which is pretty much the exact definition of "not slavery".

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[iluvcapra]

At no time in The Jungle does Upton Sinclair write "I, Upton Sinclair, saw..." And while much of the incidentals in The Jungle are based on real things that happened, you'd be in a lot of trouble if you tried to use The Jungle as evidence to indict anybody. Upton Sinclair never accused a living person of a criminal act in The Jungle, but Daisey makes several falsifiable claims alleging real crimes by real people against real victims.
Upton Sinclair also never represented his work as an account of actual people in an actual situation, which Mr. Daisey repeatedly did to the TAL producers.

"Muckraking," such as it is, still requires that real claims come with real evidence. Modern examples like Michael Moore's or Kirby Dick's works are content to jump back and forth between factual claims, innuendos, and moral appeals, but what makes it "muckraking" is that they never affirmatively lie. They might edit out things against their agenda, they might represented a sequence of events in such a way as to maximize emotional response, they may choose their subjects in such a way that slants their presentation of the truth.

But they never tell you the sky is green, because to them such species of claims shouldn't be necessary. When Mike Daisey said the guy with the claw hand was injured making Apple products, he was telling us the sky was green. His stories in the end aren't even about China or technology manufacturing, they're just a narrative about guilt and his emotional response to globalization, and a certain sort of liberal NPR listener, highly susceptible to demonstrations of guilt, is the consumer. That's why he made it a narrative with himself witnessing things, to elicit emotions and empathy.

If he'd said "people were poisoned by hexane, making the gadgets in your pocket," it still would have accomplished muckraking and had the virtue of being true, but instead, he said "I saw a dozen 13 year olds poisoned by hexane at Foxconn making iPhones," not because he saw that, but because doing a one-man show with "Steve Jobs" in the title sells more tickets than a one-man show about Chinese labor abuses as such.

Louis Woo is their spokesman?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that the real story that Mike Daisey didn't uncover is that Foxconn is a Puppeteer front company.

Ratings

[DigiShaman]

This is what happens when someone goes in with a predetermined narrative. News at 11.

Why was his "act" presented as "fact"?

[msobkow]

What I don't understand is why his "act" was presented as "fact" by the Times.

Their excuse is that it was an "op-ed". Opinion pieces are normally clearly identified as such; this piece was not.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are going to assume that all the issues raised were bullshit because of the lies that were told, which means that if there was any truth at all, it's just been conveniently swept under the rug.

Bozo boy has done FAR more harm to the idea of protecting foreign workers than he could ever have imagined through this literal bullshit.

The real tragedy is

[hsmith]

If there are misdeeds occurring at Foxconn, they haven't been exposed. Any potential problems being reported can now be brushed under the carpet of potential "bs" tied to this story.

He did a huge disservice to exposing truth, good or bad, about Foxconn. If Foxconn isn't all that bad to work for, it would have been great to know - if it is a hell hole, it would have been great to know. But, this just clouds the water in getting to the bottom of it.

Shame, because it would be great to have an unbiased report.

Avid TAL Fan Here

[eldavojohn]

Wasn't the problem here not that what Daisey reported was false, but just that he didn't directly speak to people he claimed to speak with? Of course from a journalistic standpoint that is awful but it is now sweeping these problems under the rug.

Foxconn can now act like there were no problems and ignore them just because the source used was a secondary source reported as a primary source.

So, being an avid TAL fan, here are some things I remember from the two episodes that he lied about (remember Cathy Lee was his translator):

• Guards with guns (in fact, Cathy has never seen one)
• Factory workers meeting at Starbucks
• Visited 10 factories (he only visited 3 according to Cathy)
• Meeting N-Hexane victims
• meeting underage workers (he actually guessed a bunch of young looking girls' ages)
• meeting a hundred factory workers (play says 100, Daisey later says 25-30 now cathy says 2 or 3)
• metal press victim who was fired for workin too slowly
• a lot of the emotional interractions with Cathy
• he presented himself as a "writer/actor" to Cathy but influenced our impression of Apple
• didn't go on the exit ramp with Cathy
• did go to dorm rooms for workers but lied about cameras in them
• Cathy claims she never separated with Mike at the factory
• Cathy says he never spoke to workers in English
• he lied about Cathy's availability and phone number to occlude This American Life's factchecking

The things that really worry me are he calls this "unpacking the complexities of how the stories get told" or "untying the story" in the second episode. This guy reminds me of the religious leaders from my youth who will tell you complex lies about their own personal experiences and they justify it by the fact that you are duped into believing past a mark that the evidence justifies. It's gross and disgusting that he washes his hands of it and calls his thing a performance while never straightening out TAL on the specifics.

Like you said, some of the things happened but at what scale? Daisey makes it sound like you could fly there and pick a factory and you'd find it all. Good for TAL for devoting a full hour to what they had misrepresented. I'm still a huge TAL fan.

And every time you think twitter and blogging and Slashdot have replaced modern journalism, behold the above danger.

Re:Avid TAL Fan Here

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

And every time you think twitter and blogging and Slashdot have replaced modern journalism, behold the above danger.

This, a thousand times.

Not just this story but it was thanks to real capital J Journalism that we got the facts behind KONY 2012 and Invisible Children. I think that Charlie Brooker's take on it is particularly great.

Re:Daisey's Response

[nweaver]

Which is an amazingly disingenuous response. Mike Daisy presents his monologues as first hand experiences . That is a flat out lie. Are his other monologues similarly not encumbered by the truth?

And he was told, repeatedly, that This American Life considers actual facts to be important.

And it also matters a lot. IF a random American in a hawaiian shirt would find out all this it would be a much more serious problem than the reality, which is bad but no where near as atrocious as he presents it.

Evil will always win because Good is dumb

[Comboman]

Anti-corporate "journalists" like Daisey and Michael Moore do irreparable damage to the causes they supposedly support by playing loose with the facts. If I were conspiracy minded, I might assume they were working for the very corporations they rail against.

Re:I am so glad Foxconn is so nice

[Oswald McWeany]

Do you have a link to the statistics of suicide rate of employed individuals in China? Same could be said of any country/company- suicide rates tend to be hiring amongst the unemployed and the convicted.

Americans are essentially competing against slaves

[Lorien_the_first_one]

A point that is not often addressed in public discourse is that Americans have been surrendering rights just to keep their jobs in the face of demands by corporate American. Corporate America is using slave labor in China as leverage to demand and acquire concessions from workers and to bust unions here. Once we call it what it is in the mainstream press, we might see greater awareness in the general population.

"Oh, wait. When I buy a phone, be it Android, Apple or *gasp* Microsoft, I'm supporting slavery. That slavery is being used against me."

This has coincidentally been accelerating for the last 30 years. 30 years? Around 30 years ago we saw the start of:

* The rise of intellectual property
* The lowest income tax rates in history
* The acceleration of the outsourcing of labor to China, Vietnam and Thailand.
* The acceleration of the continual decimation of the middle class.

I'm sure there is more, but you get the picture. Slavery is a great way to cause a depression.

Re:Daisey's Response

[nweaver]

In what way is he a proven liar?
It's just as likely that Foxonn / the Chinese government rounded up a few workers, got their stories straight, and then tipped off TAL to Daisey's "lies".
The follow up fact checking could simply have been fed a different story.

Why believe story B over story A? From your perspective, there is exactly as much evidence for one as there is for the other. Bottom line is that unless youw ork on Foxconn you don't know what goes on there. It boggles my mind that so many people are so eager to default to the "Foxconn is okay and better than most." conclusion with 0 evidence, yet they're so quick to skewer a Western company if they don't hand out raises to the unions who encourage workers to sabotage the line so they can work overtime.

Read/listen to the retraction.

Daisy's personal story was incredibly full of holes, and he admitted it on tape. EG, just to start with, the guards at Foxcon don't have guns. An illegal underground union for $20/day workers wouldn't meet at Starbucks. He lied to TAL about his translator. N-Hexane was a problem at other suppliers a thousand miles away, not Foxcon. Basically, Daisy's story was so full of holes once a US reporter, based in China, started looking at things it all fell apart.

The result is basically anything that Daisy said he has personally experienced in a monologue can't be trusted: it may be based on "truthyness", actual events that he heard or read about in a newspaper, but in no way should one believe that they actually happened to him.

Reality check

[danaris]

sustenance living is impossible when a big factory comes to town and shits on your farmland and pollutes your water supply, as is happening all over china. so unregulated industry destroys the way of life for millions of people, and they have no choice but to go work in that factory.

That...actually doesn't happen very much. The factories tend to be concentrated in areas like Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Dongguan. Sure, there were farms in some of these areas years back, but by and large, they've been urban for a while. And there's a lot of China that's still rural, where the factories don't even want to go. There's just no profit in it.

So, yeah, if you happen to be one of the few hundred—or even few thousand—farmers whose land was taken over or polluted by the factories, then that sucks, and I doubt they received much compensation, because, y'know, mostly-totalitarian regime and all that. But don't forget that that's only 0.00001%-0.0001% of the population. It's hardly a careful, concerted effort to drive people away from subsistence agriculture towards factory life.

And you know what? They don't need any such effort, because the Chinese people are flocking to factory life as fast as they can possibly manage. Subsistence agriculture sucks.

Dan Aris