According to Mike Daisey in his The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, he saw first-hand the appalling conditions in which employees work at Foxconn, Apple’s Chinese manufacturing partner.
Also according to Mike Daisey, making stuff up and presenting it as fact is just fine when you’re presenting a “larger truth.” Or so he said when The American Life, which had broadcast The Agony in the first place on the understanding that it was factually accurate, revealed that, after further investigation, it wasn’t.
I’m not certain of much, but I’m certain of this: If you have to make stuff up to support your “truth,” you’re telling neither the truth nor a truth. Truth be told, none of us has access to the truth. The best any of us can achieve is some confidence that the evidence on which we base our opinions is reliable, the logic we’ve used is sound, and we’re honest in how we explain it.
And so, KJR hereby announces a moratorium on the word “truth” and its derivatives, because whoever lays claim to it is either deceiving themselves or lying to someone else.
Meanwhile, back in not-yet-offshored America, the latest trend in recruiting is requiring job applicants to provide their Facebook password. Or so the story goes.
Unlike Michael Daisey, the AP’s Manuel Valdes and Shannon McFarland reported actual events as they happened — a few factually accurate (or, at least, undisputed) anecdotes. But as someone once said, the plural of anecdote is not data. A few instances is hardly the same thing as a trend.
Which isn’t to say there’s no such trend. It’s to say that we have no more knowledge of whether this is a trend after reading the AP story than we did before reading it, just as was the case with Daisey.
Different reasons, same result.
In the case of Apple and Foxconn, thanks to an investigation by the Fair Labor Association (which despite the name is an industry-funded, not union-funded organization) it appears that Daisey notwithstanding, working conditions at Foxconn, while far from horrific, often violated even China’s lax standards.
Which brings us to a question that’s of personal interest to you.
You don’t have to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation to be responsible for an offshore outsourcing contract. It’s easy to be self-righteous about Apple either (pick one) failing to properly audit its manufacturing partner or knowingly involving itself with a company that treats employees poorly.
It’s a lot harder to avoid being guilty of the exact same thing when the subject is your offshore outsourcer.
There’s a school of thought that says this isn’t your problem anyway. Your job is to contract for the best possible service at the best possible price. The company you’re contracting with is located in another country. It has different laws, different enforcement of the law, a different culture, and different expectations of what a work environment should be.
That makes it all Someone Else’s Problem, doesn’t it?
Legally, it probably does. Ethically? Probably not.
The reductio ad absurdum argument is all you need: Were you to learn that an offshore outsourcer used slaves rather than employees, chaining them to their desks and whipping them if they didn’t write your code while starving them to death because the supply of slave programmers is ample but food is expensive … legally, because that’s how it is in their country … were you to learn this, I sure hope you’d choose a different offshoring partner, even if it cost you more to do so.
If you agree, you agree you have some ethical responsibilities for setting minimum standards for workplace conditions. Now that this is settled, the question that remains is what they should be.
That’s a question that’s easier to ask than to answer. Applying U.S. standards to countries with lower standards of living and different expectations of the workplace truly doesn’t make sense. On the other hand, accepting whatever level of misery is the norm there as your standard is probably the wrong answer, too.
What’s probably the right answer is to spend some time there, talking with the people who do your work, to gain some sense of what they would find comfortable … not luxurious, not barely tolerable, but comfortable. You’re looking for, not physical equivalence to U.S. working conditions, but emotional equivalence.
That’s a complicated proposition. I’d love to offer a simple, clear solution instead, but as usual the world is too complicated for a simple solution to work.
Why is Apple always the one being singled out? What about:
Acer Inc. (Taiwan)
Amazon.com (United States)
Apple Inc. (United States)
Cisco (United States)
Dell (United States)
Hewlett-Packard (United States)
Intel (United States)
Microsoft (United States)
Motorola Mobility (United States)
Nintendo (Japan)
Nokia (Finland)
Samsung Electronics (South Korea)
Sony (Japan)
Toshiba (Japan)
Vizio (United States)
All these companies are major customers of Foxconn? Are they doing anything like Apple to make things better?
Given that this is the most thoughtful article on outsourcing I have seen, what changes would you recommend Tim Cook make in his approach to Foxconn? What would you suggest to CEOs of similar companies that have not had the light glare on them, yet?
With flattery like that, I guess I have to answer, even though I’m pretty sure Tim Cook has little interest in my advice on this or any other subject.
Just my opinion: By engaging the Fair Labor Association, instructing it to conduct a thorough investigation, and further instructing it to conduct periodic reviews, Cook is now handling this as it should be handled.
I also have to be fair in that prior to this, Apple did conduct audits; from what I’ve read Foxconn quite deliberately deceived them. There are limits to what an auditor (as opposed to an investigator) can do, and there comes a point where companies have to decide on the level of trust they place in their suppliers.
Trusting a supplier to not lie to an auditor isn’t entirely unreasonable, at least at first. Where I think Apple went wrong was not pushing harder earlier, when the first credible allegations started to emerge.
What else should CEOs do? The advice I gave at the end stands, coupled with contractual enforcement mechanisms, and the recognition that a better workplace isn’t free … that the negotiated price for services should include a provision for improved working conditions. When possible, splitting business between two suppliers, at least during the early phases of a relationship, probably makes sense as well. At the moment, Apple would have a very difficult time decoupling from Foxconn, which makes any threat of taking its business elsewhere if Foxconn doesn’t fix its problems somewhat empty.
Beyond that, I’m going to disqualify myself. I know enough about the subject to cover some basics. I’m certainly not a specialist in the field, though, and have no illusions that I’ve thought these things through better than those who are.
What is this? Bob talking about ethics?
But, aren’t corporations amoral?
Or is this basically a business decision (ultimately)?
Sorry for the sarcness 🙂
-Rick Mills
Rick … Fair enough. Yes, businesses are amoral, which puts human decision-makers within corporations in a challenging situation from time to time. And no, I’m not in the business of making moral judgments. I don’t know enough about the subject, which is far more complex than most people seem to acknowledge.
As a practical matter, anyone responsible for an outsourcing contract does have to decide what level of involvement they’re going to have with respect to the working conditions provided by the outsourcer. I did my best to provide pragmatic guidance, without straying into ethical territory any more than I had to.
And sarcasm aside, yes, this is a business decision. I just figured the public image dimension of the subject has been dissected to death without any need for me to weigh in on it.
– Bob
Bob, is it true that you wrote this article? Be careful how you answer, because according to the article, if you say “yes” you are either deceiving yourself or lying to someone else. 🙂
While I don’t know if it was your intent, it seems fashionable nowadays to declare truth unknowable, but pretty much impossible for those who declare such to live consistently with their viewpoint—which should make us wonder whether their viewpoint corresponds to reality (i.e. is true).
Clever. To answer your question, to the best of my knowledge and rapidly deteriorating memory, I did write it.
I could even assert that the statement is true. That’s where we all get into trouble: My telling you it’s true doesn’t make it true. The best you have to go on is that I assert it and you trust me for whatever reason. Which means that when you tell someone else I wrote it, you aren’t saying something that’s true. You’re stating something that to the best of your knowledge is true.
If I want to stretch a point, I might even claim that I have to accept some doubt regarding my authorship. Memory does play tricks on all of us, and it isn’t beyond the realm of credibility that I read something else substantially like what I wrote, forgot that I’d read it, and then accidentally plagiarized the content.
But in the end, you are correct: When each of us honestly reports something from our direct, personal experience, we aren’t deluding ourselves when we consider it to be true. I’d also be willing to stretch this far enough to agree that there are some propositions that are so little in doubt that we might as well agree to call them true. 2+2=4 is an example, properly qualified with scoping statements that limit it to the axioms and definitions used in basic math: In principle someone might discover a flaw in the mathematical proof that establishes this “truth,” but it’s sufficiently unlikely that the point isn’t worth pushing very far.
That’s as far as it goes, though.