What Now?

This American Life broadcast an episode in January called “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” where a writer, Mike Daisey, spoke about his experience in China at the factories building iPhones and iPads.  A couple weeks ago, This American Life broadcast another episode called “Retraction” where they explained the falsehoods in the January episode.  I listened to both episodes, became a little obsessed with the story (googling it everyday to find the latest development) and below are my thoughts.

Retraction, the 460th episode of “This American Life” is one of the most dramatic radio broadcasts I’ve ever listened to.  Although we are in a post-radio era, podcasts like “Radiolab” and “Wait wait... don’t tell me” are as popular among my friends in our adulthood as LPs of “The Lone Ranger” and “The Shadow” were for my father in his childhood.  And due to the portability of music in the aughts, my friends and I listen to everything all the time everywhere.  So when I say that Retraction is compelling, I’m stacking it against the plethora of radio that I pump into my brain all day.  We’re talking about fifteen-second silences between Mike Daisy and Ira Glass where for a moment, you wonder if your iPod is broken.  Ira questions Mike like a neurosurgeon, delicately shaving layers of a tumor, restrained and eloquent, exposing the reality that Mike Daisy lied.  He lied to fact checkers, he lied to reporters, he lied to the thousands upon thousands of people who listened to his story.

I am not writing this from an angry place.  I am writing because I feel awful for Daisey and (obviously) worse for the factory workers.  His intentions (the altruistic humanist ones as opposed to the successful writer/actor ones) were to light up the reality of where our beautiful, high-functioning gizmos come from not unlike Eric Schlosser or Michael Pollan exposing our food origins in Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  Although he stretched the truth, incorporating kernels of multiple stories into one giant episode, Daisey was trying to address the big picture.  There is child labor, repetitive motion injuries and 16 hour workdays in China.

Should I stop using my iPhone?  How come I never paused to think about what I was buying and why it costs so little compared to what it can do?  Did you know that if you want to buy a pair of pants, pants,  made by union members in America, it costs more than one hundred dollars?  The reason is because in this country, we pay people to work an eight-hour day with benefits and rotating responsibilities.  And the labor cost is only a small part of what raises the price.  The speed and cost at which China can produce one million iPads depends on multiple factories capable of immediate changes using a near-infinite number of overtime workers.

So if it took longer and cost more, would you still buy it?  How much would would you pay for pride let alone a clear conscience?

Like many, Daisy’s bent truth aimed at awareness has numbed me to the very real story.  It sounds awful, then it’s untrue, but the reality is still awful.  My brain can’t handle that back and forth.  There are nets around the walls of the Foxconn factory so that people cannot commit suicide by leaping from the roof.  There are people working by hand, repeating the same movement over and over all day, everyday to build your iPhone.  Their hours are horrible and their pay is a joke and they're working 70 hours a week in these conditions to save and get ahead.

Towards the end of Retraction, Charles Duhigg explains that we’re not only condoning the reality but are, by purchasing and using the product, creating the reality.  Although the facts, the fact-facts as Lewis Black calls them, aren’t as Hollywood-dramatic as Daisey presented, we must look at our consumption and daily routine.  The world is too small, too connected for us to ignore how our actions affect other people.  The question is: what do we do now that we know?

You can find both Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory and Retraction at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives.  I encourage you to listen to the original then listen to the Retraction.  It’s worth two hours of your time, I promise.