Last week, the
New York Times published an article detailing some of the troublesome working conditions in Chinese factories that makes Apple products:
(T)he workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple's products, and the company's suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.
The article ignited a firestorm of controversy. Consider the reaction that the paper published in a follow up entitled
Apple in China: Has iOrwell Arrived?The inscrutable Chinese
What should Apple do? How should the company react? Before jumping to conclusions,
Charles Hugh Smith put the Chinese attitude into context and compared it to the attitudes in an immigrant societies such as America. He writes that in America:
Nobody cares where you're from, or what caste you are, or anything like that. As long as you do your work without being a real pain in the rear-end, are pleasant to your neighbors and workmates, keep your pitbull chained, etc., then you are good to go. Many if not most of the people you interact with also know English as a second language, and since that's burden enough for all of us, we dispense with all the insider stuff. America is on most levels a WYSIWYG culture: what you see is what you get.
Places like China and Japan are on the opposite end of the spectrum: they are not immigrant cultures. Very few nations have a culture that is adapted not to tradition and an opaque mindset but to getting on with immigrants from everywhere. This is one reason people want to come to America; they lose their baggage here and can be themselves, because nobody cares, we're busy with other things, and it doesn't take 15 years to figure out how things actually work here. If it did, the whole thing would grind to a halt and that would be really annoying.
Unspoken attitudes and preferences are far more important in cultures with long established traditions. Smith writes (emphasis added):
(T)here are always two doors in Asia: the front door, carefully arranged to present a face-enhancing image to the outside world, and the back door, where everything important actually takes place.
A typical front door in China is the banquet with the glad-handing mayor.