Yesterday you learned about the origins of the minerals that go into many of our devices and you played a game that introduced some of the human rights abuses that take place at each of four stages in an electronic device's life. Today, we'll look at the labor that goes into their manufacturing by considering the story of Mike Daisey.
In 2012, the radio show This American Life aired a piece by Mike Daisey, a monologist who tells a story about a trip he took to China to learn about the working conditions there. As we learned from Phone Story, manufacturers like Foxconn have been criticized for worker abuse, including high profile stories like installing suicide-prevention nets in workers' dormitories.
In the episode, Mike Daisey talks about meeting underage workers and workers who had been injured on the job, among other abuses, so first, read the transcript of that episode and use hypothes.is to note the specific claims Daisey makes about what Chinese companies are doing.
Then, listen to the This American Life episode, "Retraction," in which the host reveals that many of the details in Daisey's story have been exaggerated or falsified. The transcript is available if you want to read, but I strongly recommend listening to the episode. It is remarkably uncomfortable to hear Ira Glass confront Mike Daisey about lying, and that discomfort is part of the effect of this piece. That way in which audio storytelling compels us to feel a certain way through its sounds and silences is the essence of audio as a rhetorical modality.
The takeaway question, and what I want us to discuss in Slack (again, in a dedicated channel for this conversation) is, "Does it matter that Mike Daisey lied?" In his view, the fact that the story is "emotionally true" may be good enough, even though the story is not "true" in the journalistic sense.
After listening to and discussing this piece a bit in Slack, see if you can find a labor transperency report by your smartphone's manufacturer. Many companies do publish this information, in light of growing awareness around this issue, so see what you can find. Read it, and as you do, try and read through the corporatese to get a real sense of how much they really know about their suppliers. If that's hard to do, then consider how self-reporting differs from third-party reporting on the same situation, like this report summarized in the Washington Post.
Also, if you have an Apple phone, you can compare their transparency and progress reports to see if they're really improving or just moving the benchmarks.
Ultimately, my question today is similar to what I asked about mining: does this matter, and if so, what should we do about it? As consumers? As citizens? As compassionate humans? What are our options and how can we leverage those to have the best and most ethical outcome for the world?