'It's painful to realise that these things you love so much have blood on them.' American performer Mike Daisey – who appears in Cork this week – is taking aim at Apple's factories in China, where 10 employees have taken their own lives recently, writes BELINDA McKEONin New York
THERE WERE few surprises when Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, announced the new iPhone earlier this week in San Francisco – after all, the features of iPhone 4 had been widely known since the leaking of a factory prototype in April. So Jobs did well, whipping up excitement over a device that his audience of technology addicts had, for the most part, already seen.
But right about the time that Jobs was going public – officially public – with his latest creation, the American writer and performer Mike Daisey was attempting to unveil some of the truly unseen features of Apple Inc by gaining access to the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where hundreds of thousands of workers endure severe conditions to manufacture products for that company (and others). Daisey, a monologist in the vein of Spalding Grey, is known for his explosive, involved and darkly comic riffs on the power dynamics at work in modern society; recent pieces, including two he will present at the Cork Midsummer Festival this month, have seen him create stage performances out of subjects including Wal-Mart, the neutron bomb and the international financial crisis. But a long-standing obsession with Apple products has evolved, over the past year, into an idea for a new monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. And when Daisey performed a part of the new piece in front of a small audience in New York less than two months ago, he was foreshadowing the headlines which would, within weeks, bring shame to Apple and unease to its countless fans.
Because, as Daisey points out, the iPhone prototype left on a barstool by an Apple engineer in California was not the first of its kind to accidentally go public. This time last year, newspapers carried brief reports of the suicide of a Foxconn employee who had lost one of the iPhone prototypes he was due to ship to Apple. Sun Danyong, aged 25, had been detained and allegedly beaten by Foxconn security guards, and later jumped to his death from his apartment building. In the last month, Apple has found itself and its its corporate practices under a harsh spotlight, with news surfacing of a rash of worker suicides at the Foxconn plant.
To Daisey, none of this will have come as news – he has for several months been planning his current field trip to China, where he intends to look into working conditions on the Apple line and to gather material for the second thread of his Steve Jobs monologue. But, speaking on the morning after his New York performance of the monologue’s first thread, he feels that the news of even the 2009 worker suicide came as a shock to many in the audience – even though it was an audience largely comprised of technology journalists keen to see what Daisey had to say about Jobs.
“But what was also just news to them is that people have really not thought about that connection, the connection to the workers,” Daisey says. “And especially in technology, because the objects are so beautiful that the last thing people want to think about is the circumstances of their creation. In fact they pride themselves on being so gorgeously constructed – the rivets invisible, every part so perfectly made – that it feels as though they come from the future, or were hatched organically.”
Daisey is an avid reader of technology journalism – and often blogs about technology on his own website – but he argues that tech journalists often write out of a desire to get close to technology, rather than out of a journalistic compulsion to question or investigate.
It’s a criticism which could be levelled at journalists in more than one field, of course, but given the worrying revelations about the Foxconn plant (and he suspects there are many more appalling practices at work there, from child labour to environmental abuses), it’s one which Daisey believes to hold true for those reporters and bloggers who came to his Steve Jobs performance – as well as for those who lined up in front of Jobs himself, earlier this week, to fawn over the new iPhone.
“It’s painful to reckon with where things come from,” Daisey says. “It’s painful to realise that these things you love so much have blood on them.” Daisey is well qualified to make a piece of theatre about the Apple phenomenon – he has been a self-professed early adopter, eager to get his hands on every device the company produces, for longer, even, than he has been making his signature monologues.
So it was inevitable that his obsession with the company – which itself quickly morphed into an obsession with Jobs, whom he describes as “both a visionary and an asshole” – would find its way into the work. The expedition to China, which he is undertaking with his wife and collaborator Jean-Michele Gregory and with a translator, is, he says, an attempt to further his project of “walking through Jobs’s life”.
Not that Jobs himself has been to the factories, he says. “It’s very difficult to imagine a universe where that would happen. Apple itself takes great pains, and so do all the tech companies, to erect a Chinese wall between themselves and the subcontractors.”
Snooping around Shenzhen is possibly not a wise move on Daisey's part – a large man, he's anything but inconspicuous, and just two months ago, a Reutersreporter was attacked and beaten outside a Foxconn factory for taking photographs. But a general rule out of which he creates his stage work, he says, is that of a kind of gonzo journalism, and he'll be holding to that rule in China. "Not thinking too much about what you're doing," he says. "Just going ahead and doing it." Because the Steve Jobs' monologue is still a work-in-progress, Daisey won't be presenting it in Cork, but the two monologues he will stage there also stem from a preoccupation with hierarchies of power and control at play in contemporary society. Daisey developed the first show, The Last Cargo Cult,after a visit to a South Pacific island where the islanders actually worship – through annual ceremonies and rituals – the material goods left behind by American GIs.
THIS NARRATIVE IS woven against a parallel examination of the international financial crisis, which erupted during Daisey's time on the island. The second show, Monopoly!, starts out from the story of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison's war over electricity and expands to take in Microsoft's antitrust lawsuit, the secret history of the board game Monopoly, and the presence of Wal-Mart in Daisey's Maine hometown. Both shows are quintessential Daisey, taking direct aim at the grip of American capitalism and corporate rule.
But a third piece, From Away, which Daisey will develop and stage in collaboration with local people in Cork, promises to be a different beast, exploring questions of what it is for a community to reckon with outsiders – or what it is like to be an outsider within a given community.
The phrase “from away”, as Daisey explains it, is the Maine equivalent of “blow-in”, and it takes several generations to shake off. Daisey will arrive in Cork directly from China, and he will immediately begin engaging in conversation with people “from across social, intellectual, economic and racial lines within Cork and Southern Ireland”, he says, listening to their stories and discovering what those stories might become. Which is something he can’t know yet.
“But if you tell the story fully, in all its complexity and its layers, if you do your job right, and render that complexity, the subject will exceed the box that you thought it was in. And things work better than you think they were going to.”
THE SKINNYkid from Hunan province leaving the dormitory at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen just shrugs, writes CLIFFORD COONANin Shenzhen
“Conditions here at Foxconn are okay. They are no worse than anywhere else,” he says.
Foxconn employs 800,000 people in mainland China, 420,000 of them in Shenzhen and 300,000 of them here at the Longhua plant. But there are growing signs that this is not a happy workforce.
At least 10 workers have died by suicide, five during May, with three more attempts, at this plant, The crisis has caused a major outcry in China and prompted questions about the human cost of cheap production and breakneck economic growth.
At the dormitory building, which adjoins the west gate of the plant, people glance up at walkways and roofs that have been lined with safety nets and barriers to stop people jumping.
It’s sticky hot, and the sky has that polluted, bleached-out look common in Chinese industrial zones.
Even driving around Foxconn’s Longhua plant in Shenzhen takes half an hour, and the streets are crammed with lorries taking in the components to make the iPads and the iPods, the mobile phones and laptops, for Nokia and Dell that are shipped all over the world from here. Some of the lorries are bringing in the thousands of pigs that are slaughtered every day for the canteen to feed the hundreds of thousands who toil on the production lines of the Foxconn plant.
Their working environments are not Dickensian, not dark or dirty, and they have air conditioning and basic comforts. But their work is very hard, and to make enough money they have to do long overtime hours.
A group of startlingly coiffed young men sit in black polo shirts at a hairdressing salon which makes its income from cutting the hair of Foxconn workers. The customers are mostly young, and want to look good. All of the suicides were aged between 18 and 24 years old.
Workers approach cautiously to talk, interested but understandably wary of the police bikes and motorbikes, as well as of the plain-clothes spooks who walk up and down checking out what’s going on.
They tell stories of working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, assembling electronic components. They tell of how they are not allowed to talk during their work, of how they have to stand for hours on end, and of how some will drop a component on the floor so as to be able to take a break while picking it up.
With property prices rising, many of them are now worried that they won’t have enough money to get married, because they need to buy an apartment to get hitched and no one can afford this unless they work even longer hours. It never ends, and the teenagers I spoke to were very tired kids.
Apple chief Steve Jobs and Foxconn head Terry Gou both insist that Foxconn is no sweatshop, and workers tend to agree, or at least had no feeling either way, but their problems go deeper.
The line “no worse than anywhere else” lingers in the memory, a profoundly depressing thought. There are thousands of plants like Foxconn in this part of Shenzhen.
Wages at Foxconn have been doubled in the last few days as part of an attempt to stop the suicide crisis. But whether that can stem a broader sense of hopelessness and powerlessness remains to be seen.
Mike Daisey performs in Cork on June 15th and 22nd-25th. See also corkmidsummer.com
