Photo from TED
Chang is a journalist, and of Chinese descent, and at some point she decided to investigate the idea that the factory workers in China were exploited, helpless, and trapped. As she says, the story didn’t make sense to her. How could millions of workers be moving from the farms of rural China to the cities just so they could suffer? There had to be more to it than that. She spent two years living in the industrial city of Dongguan, interviewing many employees in the vast number of factories there but focusing much of her attention on two girls, Min and Chunming. Her determination to pursue this story was laudable; she had to figure out how to meet up with people, how to get them to talk to her, how to stay in touch. It must have been very lonely for her much of the time. But she ended up with a story worth telling. Her book is titled Factory Girls; I’ve listened to about a third of it via audiobook and found it fascinating but then ground to a halt since it seemed as though the main story had been told. My introduction to Chang came from an interview with her on the TED Radio Hour on NPR; I thoroughly enjoy this program and have posted about it before. TED speakers are interviewed about their talks, with clips from the actual talk interspersed. I would recommend following the link above, listening to the program, and then watching Chang’s entire talk. If you’d like to go straight to her talk, the YouTube video is posted below.
And what does she say? Just this: When we assume that we know best about other people’s lives we often make mistakes based on our own misconceptions, preconceived ideas, and disrespect. Yes, disrespect: the attitude that looks upon someone else as inferior. Those poor, poor factory workers! They don’t know what they’re doing. We need to outlaw them, or give them money, or something. Guess what? Just because someone comes from a small farming village, and can’t read, and spends her days on an assembly line does not mean that she’s not a human being with the power of choice. No one held a gun to her head to get her to move to the city! For many of these workers, getting a low-level job gluing the soles to sneakers is the first step in climbing out of poverty and deprivation. Chang saw many success stories during her time in this noisy, polluted megacity.
Which is not to say that the factories shouldn’t be under safety regulations, an aspect of industrialization which is often sorely lacking. Nor is it to say that there aren’t plenty of con artists at work in the crowded streets of Dongguan. People get robbed and cheated, and there should be just and fair laws that allow the criminals to be punished and the victims to be compensated for their losses. The rule of law is the one thing that is of overwhelming importance in helping people pull themselves up out of poverty. (The film Poverty, Inc. makes this point very strongly.) And of course actual slavery, as opposed to perceived slavery, cannot be tolerated.
Having said all this, let me address the second part of my title, the “muddled guilt.” Westerners will say, “How unfair it is that a Chinese factor worker couldn’t afford to buy the iPhones he’s making! How unjust that she’ll never be able to wear a pair of Nike sneakers!” To which Chang replies, “Why do we have to assume guilt along with our purchases? This is simply the global marketplace.” Which is perfectly true, if you think about it. If no one bought cell phones or sneakers, there would be no factories where these workers could be employed. (She also makes the point that she works for a major newspaper but couldn’t afford to take out an ad in that publication; why does that make any difference?) It would be great if Apple or Nike or Coach executives made some decisions about how these factories are to be run and then enforced these decisions. Treating your workers well is not only a moral imperative but also good business. That being said, the worker cannot be reduced down to what he makes. As Chang says with refreshing common sense, Karl Marx’s idea that factory workers were being dehumanized because they were alienated from the products they made is simply wrong: concepts dreamed up in the reading room of the British Museum don’t always translate well into the real world.
One takeaway for me from all this: Don’t be impressed by luxury brands. The workers who make those products certainly aren’t. I cringe when I think of how I ran up a credit card bill many years ago, on my meager teacher’s salary, to buy a genuine Coach leather purse. I had stars in my eyes over that purse! How ridiculous. Be sure to catch Chang’s reading of the Coach product description; it’s a hoot. And then go out and make your purchasing decisions based on reality and not on either false glamour or false guilt.