The price of an iPad

I’m writing this on my iPad today, and I have to pause once in a while to admire the beauty of its polished LCD screen. The black reflective surface is remarkably resistant to scratches, its viewing surface almost as attractive as staring into a black mirror, or a high-tech abyss.

The iPad screen, though, is a black pearl of great price; it takes hundreds of grueling hours for employees — most of them encamped in large “city” factories in provincial China — to polish these babies up so that they’re the sleekest thing since Kubrick’s monolith. Yes, there’s a price to pay for our insatiable demand for beautiful gadgets, though we hardly ever see it. Workers are said to stand 12–15 hours a day in Chinese factories, until their legs wobble. Some use dangerous chemicals to buff up the screens — stuff toxic enough to result in hospitalization or death. Stories about 13-year-old girls sweating away in such factories are now common.

All so we can play Angry Birds while waiting in line at a bank.

The demand is the problem: Apple is so incredibly successful at making and marketing these sleek, tactile gadgets that world demand is completely insane. It means that Apple — by its own admission — must outsource the bulk of its iPad, iPhone and other manufacturing to overseas factories, which have an endless (and cheap) labor supply to fill orders.

These are not your typical factories. Foxconn, which houses and employs up to 240,000 workers in some of its facilities in China, even had Steve Jobs (when he was alive) marveling at the availability of movie houses, shopping malls, barbers and bowling alleys inside these mammoth workhouses.

Jobs is no longer around to say much about the employee suicides that have taken place in recent years, or a number of lethal fires caused by aluminum dust buildup in the closed, airless factories. Here’s what a reporter for New York Times found at Foxconn:

“The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws… Two people were killed immediately, and more than a dozen were hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.” (Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, NYT, Jan. 27, 2012)

I know it’s a bummer to contemplate what actually transpires to allow you — or me — to tap away on a lovely black screen, but it’s not a pretty picture. Workers in factories such as Foxconn routinely work 75 hours per week to keep up with global demand for iPads and iPhones.

And it’s not just Apple. Other makers — Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, I.B.M., Toshiba — outsource manufacturing to Chinese factories that work round the clock, because demand is so high for high-tech gadgets. There’s nothing wrong with a free market. But it’s a lopsided market that allows businesses to find the cheapest, fastest way to pump out product while keeping its distance from how the work actually gets done.

Foxconn, to take the most visible example, faced a rash of suicides and suicide attempts among employees two years back. From reports I read then, many of the attempted suicides were hoping to cash in on the company insurance benefits, which would have at least provided around $2,000 to their families if they had died. From what I read, this led the company to change its insurance policy to remove suicide from its payouts. Recently, an ABC reporter who was allowed to tour the Apple facilities at Foxconn couldn’t help noticing the safety nets set up below employee living quarters, presumably to stop people from jumping to their deaths.

This is the ugly underbelly of our luxury items. It’s akin, maybe, to the human cost involved in hand-picking cottonseeds out of raw cotton back when Southern slaves supplied what was a new, highly-valued product. Or the blood and toil involved in African diamond mines, just so ladies of leisure can sport carats at luncheons.

Apple is now having its “Nike moment,” the critics say. Meaning they are facing a lot of public scrutiny over how their overseas factories operate, just as Nike faced charges of making sneakers in Asian “sweatshops” in the ‘90s. The light is focused on Apple because they are simply the largest, most profitable high-tech company right now. How they deal with this unwanted attention could determine how other gadget makers do business in China and other emerging manufacturing hubs.

In response, Apple recently opened its overseas operations to an independent US monitoring team, though critics say Fair Labor Association is not all that independent of corporate influence. This is big, though. Apple is famously private about its corporate culture and manufacturing secrets. So they can only be doing this because the public relations fallout otherwise is equally huge.

Lo and behold, a few days after that announcement, Foxconn announced it would raise its worker salaries by 25 percent and limit its work shifts to a more humane number of hours. Will such practices have a domino effect on other foreign businesses manufacturing in China? Time will tell. One former Apple executive who advises Foxconn told ABC reporter Bill Weir: “Of course you can argue that we should have opened up (to outside monitoring) five years ago. Well, five years ago, we are under the radar screen, nobody really knows us, we are doing well… Because we’ve been so successful, successful in the sense that it seems everybody’s happy. Right?”

Right. It’s much easier to ignore a problem when things are going smoothly, as smooth as those AMOLED touchscreens. But not so easy anymore.

In the meantime though, expect no slowdown in the assembly lines. After all, when you’re selling 60 million iPads and iPhones a year, somebody is going to have to make them shine.