John Wood, self-described phone geek, had a problem. He couldn’t “upgrade with confidence,” he confessed on his blog. The “ethical implications” of the globalized, labor-exploiting manufacturing process confounded him. The more he knew, the more constrained he felt. In his capacity as campaigns and new media officer for the Trades Union Congress in the United Kingdom, it was his job to be a voice for the labor movement online. But in his personal life, just getting online meant trampling all over the workers of the world.
Wood’s dilemma extended far beyond the well-publicized abusive working conditions at Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant that assembles Apple’s iPhone, along with countless other consumer electronic devices. Labor and environmental abuses are endemic throughout the global electronics industry, from the mining of the minerals used to make the basic components, through their assembly and all the way up to (and beyond) the disposal of last year’s obsolete model. There’s no getting around the hard truth: right now, there is no such thing as an “ethical smartphone.” Or, for that matter, an ethical flat-screen TV, digital camera or any kind of personal computer.
Wood embarked on a quest to see if he could find, at the very least, a smartphone that wasn’t quite so badly compromised as all the others. He started contacting major smartphone manufacturers — Apple, HTC, Samsung, Nokia — to ask what their policies were regarding labor abuses and supply-chain monitoring. He pondered East Asian government reports detailing labor law violations at individual links in the outsourcing chain. He weighed whether to reject Nokia for also outsourcing production to Foxconn, or to give the Finnish company points for thinking more deeply about sustainability issues than its competitors. He wondered whether he should cut Samsung a break because the company kept more of its manufacturing in house in South Korea — where the labor laws were better enforced than in China or Vietnam.
He finally settled on a Samsung Galaxy Note, primarily on the basis that Samsung had managed to steer clear of a Taiwanese LCD screen component manufacturer under investigation for multiple labor law violations. But barely a week after purchasing the phone (which, of course, he loves) he discovered that Samsung has been criticized as both a union-buster and for failing to protect its workers from dangerous industrial chemicals.
In his attempt to find nuance that would salve his conscience, all Wood discovered were varying “shades of gray.” As he conceded in an email, there is “no ideal solution.” For every smartphone manufacturer, “the model of globalized production is fundamentally similar.”
So if you are looking for shopping recommendations, you will be disappointed. But that doesn’t necessarily imply despair — or that there isn’t any chance at all of improving working conditions for electronics workers around the world. If enough people organize and apply pressure, anything’s possible. And ironically,
via www.salon.com
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