It's playing right now at The Public Theater in New York City. I'm hoping it eventually makes its way to the D-FW Metroplex. In the meantime, we have Doc Severinsen next month and Carol Burnett in April. Great entertainers both, but neither challenging our sensibilities.
We need our sensibilities challenged . . . our sense of right and wrong . . . our sense of ethics . . . our sense of those who provide our comfort through their own discomfort.
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is a one-man show, a monologue written and performed by Mike Daisey. I listened to an excerpt, lasting about 40 minutes, on a podcast from the This American Life show on Public Radio International. You can listen to this at http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/454.mp3.
In it, he tells that almost all of the electronics to which we in America have become addicted are manufactured - by hand - in Foxconn Corporation's factory in Shenzhen, China. By some estimates, the factory houses as many as 430,000 workers. Foxconn makes, Daisey says, "electronics for Apple, Dell, Nokia, Panasonic, HP, Samsung, Sony, a third of the electronics products you use every day."
Daisey tells of his trip to the main gate of the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, where he planned to stand and talk "to anyone who will talk to me." He says that guards at the gate carry guns, and "along the edges of each enormous building are the nets, because - right at the time that I am making this visit - there has been an epidemic of suicides at the Foxconn plant. Week after week, worker after worker has been climbing all the way up to the tops of these enormous buildings and then throwing themselves off, killing themselves in a brutal and public manner. . . . Foxconn's response . . . is to put up these nets."
Daisey goes on to tell of talking to the workers, through an interpreter he brought with him, as they come through the gate at shift change.
"Everyone wants to talk. . . . We can't keep up with them." In his first 2 hours, he says, "I know I met workers who were 14 years old, 13 years old, 12. . . . Do you really think it's credible that Apple doesn't know, or are they just doing what we're all doing? Do they just see what they want to see?"
Their hours, he says, are 60-minute hours, meaning that they don't get to take a minute here and there to go to the restroom or chat at the water cooler or go outside to smoke. They stand in an assembly line that shows no mercy. Everything is manufactured by hand, "and the lines only move as slow as its slowest members, and each person learns how to move perfectly as quickly as possible. If they can't do it, there are people behind them, watching them, and there are cameras watching both sets of people, and people watching the cameras."
"The official workday in China is 8 hours long," Daisey says, "and that's a joke. I never met anyone who had even heard of an 8-hour shift. Everyone I talked to worked 12-hour shifts, standard, and often much longer than that. . . . Sometimes, when there's a hot new gadget coming out, . . . it just pegs at 16 hours a day, and it just sits there for weeks and months at a time. . . . While I'm in the country, a worker at Foxconn dies after working a 34-hour shift. I wish I could say that's exceptional, but it's happened before."
There's more to Daisey's report . . . his monologue . . . his show. But that's enough.
I'm concerned about the treatment of these people by their employer and a Chinese government that looks the other way, possibly even encourages it. I'm also concerned about the culpability of corporations from America and elsewhere in this exploitation and abuse of human beings, children and otherwise. But what disturbs me even more is that they have pulled the rest of us - we American consumers - into this. We're responsible, too, because they're giving us what we demand at a price that's halfway acceptable to us . . . by exploiting God's children - of whatever age - on the other side of the world.
And Cain's question comes to me: "Am I my brother's keeper?" (Genesis 4:9b, NIV)
And Jesus' question: "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" And, after receiving the answer, "The one who had mercy on him," the challenge posed by Jesus: "Go and do likewise." (Luke 10: 36-37, NIV)
And Jesus' indictment of us all: "Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." (Matthew 25:45, NIV)
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