The Global Sociology Blog

This has already made the rounds:

“Dozens of workers assembling Xbox video game consoles climbed to a factory dormitory roof, and some threatened to jump to their deaths, in a dispute over jobs that was defused but highlights growing labour unrest as China‘s economy slows.

The dispute boiled over last week after contract manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group said it would close the production line for MicrosoftCorp’s Xbox 360 consoles at its plant in the central city of Wuhan and transfer some workers to other jobs, workers and Foxconn said Thursday.

Workers reached by telephone said Foxconn initially offered severance pay for those that wanted to leave rather than be transferred, but then reneged, angering the workers; Foxconn, in a statement, said transfers were offered, not severance, and only to some workers.

The workers climbed to the top of the six-story dormitory on 3 January and threatened to jump before Wuhan city officials persuaded them to desist and return to work, according to the workers and accounts online. The workers gave varying estimates of the numbers involved in the strike, from 80 to 200, and photos posted online showed dozens of people crowding the roof of the boxy concrete building.

“Actually none of them were going to jump. They were there for the compensation. But the government and the company officials were just as afraid, because if even one of them jumped, the consequences would be hard to imagine,” said Wang Jungang, an equipment engineer in the Xbox production line, who left the plant earlier this month.

The fracas is the latest labor trouble to hit Foxconn, a unit of Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co that makes iPads and iPhones for Apple Inc as well as Xboxes and other gadgets, helping consumer electronics brands hold down costs. Its massive China plants are run with military-like discipline, which labour rights activists say contributed to spate of suicides in 2010.”

We tend to conveniently forget (and companies are not eager to remind us, it is actually essential that we not know) that every bit of gadgetry (iPad, tablets, iPhones, etc.) or convenience (express shipping!) is always based on someone else’s exploitation and personal consequences (and let’s not get started on conflict minerals). Every extra we get is subsidized by peripheral workers either halfway around the world or the peripheral population (and precariat) within core societies.

And such subsidies come on the form of horrendous working and living conditions, assaults on one’s dignity, low wages, and generalized hopelessness. Or they are enforced by labor-oppressing governments.

Either way, we, core people, benefit from such subsidies while engaging in quite a bit of fairy take thinking as goodies magically appear on our doorsteps, for our consumption and pleasure all the while believing that we have all this exclusively because of our hard work.