Recently a number of gameblogs, followed by the associated press with the usual three day lag, reported that workers at a Foxconn plant in China had stood on the roof and threatened to jump off if they didn’t get a compensation payment they were promised. Itsounds a little extreme but the circumstances were a bit extreme as well.

There are two stories, first that the employees asked for a raise and were told to quit and receive compensation or continue to work with no raise, or second that the manufacturing line for Xbox 360’s was being relocated to another plant and given a similar,relocate for no wage change or resign and accept compensations. In either case many staff opted to resign. Then Foxconn reneged on the deal and refused to pay severance packages to the staff that resigned. As a result somewhere between 100 to 200 staff stood on the roof of the Foxconn plant in Wuhan and threatened to jump to draw attention to their poor working conditions.

There has been a lot of speculation as to whether or not we as consumers are responsible for a situation that leads to innocent people even threatening to do something like this, or whether Microsoft is complicit in the behaviours of its manufacturing partners. Several news outlets, notably MSNBC, even rant with the headline “Xbox workers in China Threatened Mass Suicide”, rather than naming Foxconn in the headline. We are talking about a company, and a country, whose notorious labour practices supply us with almost every electronic device in our homes.

In addition to building Xbox, Foxconn also manufacture the Playstation 3, Wii, iPad, iPhone and the Amazon Kindle. They’re other customers include IBM, Acer, Hewlett Packard, Toshiba, Sharp, Samsung, Nokia, Logitech, Netgear, Dell, Motorola, Intel and dozens of other electronics brands you’re likely familiar with. These companies, that are run like forced labour camps and have incredibly poor safety and health standards, of which Foxconn is only one (and rumoured to be of a comparatively higher standard), make everything we use, at home and at work.

Apple, and more recently Microsoft, have stressed that they hold their manufacturers to a high standard and investigate all allegations against companies such as Foxconn. But these standards must be pretty flaky, so flaky in fact that Foxconn employees are forced to sign a contract stating that they and their family will not sue the company due to work related injury or death and stipulating that should they commit suicide they’re family will not be compensated. Steve jobs stated in an interview over five years ago, when asked about the conditions of Chinese workers who assembled Apple products, that they lived in a ‘workers paradise’, with custom built theatres, restaurants and sports facilities. While it’s easy to take that statement and imagine them living in some delightful mall based community, the truth is things are more like a prison, with workers sleeping in up to six bunk beds crammed in a single room that offer little to no privacy. There are plenty of interviews and first hand accounts of working in manufacturing plants in China, none of them use the term ‘workers paradise’. When the companies we trust to be ethical in their business dealings have this level of disconnect from reality it’s hard to imagine change being possible at the corporate level.

So what are you supposed to do about this as an individual, stop buying devices and game consoles? Change careers so you don’t use a computer? Write a very strongly worded letter? It’s easy to feel outrage and point fingers but it’s incredibly difficult to offer a solution. Realistic answers to the problems of cheap foreign labour and exploited peoples are maddeningly difficult to find. I’ve read suggestions from people that they wouldn’t mind paying an extra dollar, or five, or even ten, for the peace of mind that the workers behind their device wouldn’t be exploited. While a fiscally noble sentiment, not one that would ever translate well in corporate and shareholder decision making which is what drives the decision on prices. I’m sure Apple, Sony and Microsoft would be more than happy to take your dollar, but would all of that dollar get to the worker for each device they assemble? Not likely.

Well, should we boycott? If we all stop buying these devices that’ll fix things right?

Sadly there’s an even worse example of consumer ignorance of the suffering that leads to a popular product we can look too. Let’s take a look at the example of the chocolate industry for a comparison.

There was a BBC documentary in 2000 about chocolate. The BBC staff had spent a lot of time on the Ivory Coast where the majority of the world’s cocoa beans are grown and witnessed horrific conditions. Children were forced to work in the fields for twelve hours a day, often paid only in food and locked in cages at night to prevent them escaping. Children are beaten, exposed to poisonous pesticides and generally abused. The US State Department believes over 100,000 children are working in Ivory Coast cocoa farms and over ten percent are orphans kidnapped from refugee camps in nearby warzones. Other children had been sent by their parents to work, sold to cocoa farmers under the belief the money they’re children earned would be sent home.

Afterwards in an interview the journalists who exposed the issues were asked if people in the UK should stop buying chocolate, boycott confectionary companies. But it was pointed out that the reason for the use of child slave labour on the Ivory Coast was the artificial lowering of the price of cocoa by the chocolate companies, Cadbury, Hershey and Nestle. Rather than competing for stock, they had gotten together and set a very low price for cocoa beans which had necessitated farmers using slave labour to pick crops. If people stopped buying chocolate suddenly and the value of cocoa dropped even further the situation could actually become a lot worse.

So what was the solution?

The international governments had to coerce the industry into regulating itself. Like a parent telling a bullying child to stop stealing lunch money, ‘...or so help me!’. The confectionary companies agreed to meet a target to reduce child slavery and exploitation by their suppliers by 2004. This target came and went without being met. An international committee was then set up to come up with a solution, in 2006 it disbanded due to lack of funding, unsurprisingly from the companies it was trying to find solutions for. Cadbury, sensing the winds of change, decided to do the least they possible could and announced in 2009 that their Dairy Milk brand chocolate would be fair trade. Initially this was only in the UK but in 2010 they stretched to Australia. They also downsized the bars but kept the same price.

Fair enough, you might say, that’s the cost of Fairtrade cocoa being offset. Sadly no. Only actual Dairy Milk blocks were fair trade; all other blocks and bars such as Marble or Peppermint still used the slave picked beans. In addition Cadbury changed the packaging so Dairy Milk was their major branding on all the chocolate blocks they sold, even though only actual Dairy Milk blocks had fair-trade beans in them. They also reduced the size and kept the same price on all these other products, just like the free trade Dairy Milk brand. A cynical person might suggest this was intentional to create the impression that Cadbury were more committed to fair trade beans than they really were. It that was the intent it worked, Cadbury managed to show support for fair trade and improve their bottom line with a little bit of corporate bastardry. This is why the chocolate industry is worth an estimate of over thirty billion dollars a year.

Fairtrade, note the logo on the bottom left corner

Not Fairtrade with the new cover design highlighting the Dairy Milk logo

What have we learned from this tale of child exploitation and corporate profit? That despite ten years of government sanction, industry oversight, goal setting, plans, promises, massive pressure from various special interest groups and public outcry, nothing changed. The situation is just as bad as it was a decade ago, people are still fighting against these companies and unconcerned governments but it’s a battle that thus far has produced few victories. And chocolate is just one example, there’s plenty of other commodities that we are available to us for a pittance because someone we will likely never meet suffered to provide the raw materials.

This is, very unfortunately, the world we currently live in. There are haves and have nots, and if you are reading this chances are good you are a have. Reading this may make you angry; angry at me, angry at yourself, angry at Microsoft and Cadbury, and that’s a natural reaction. But try and just see through that anger and put aside your guilt and resentment, and think about the answers to these problems.

Because I don’t have them, I’m just another privileged a-hole waiting for someone who does have a solution to the inequality an unrestricted free market economy has created. I’d suggest you live out in the bush, grow your own food and make your own clothes and hopefully not die of dysentery if you want a better peace of mind. But keep in mind that doing so is not going to make a difference. If you, and say a million other people in the world swear to never use another electronic device that was built by a worker paid less than your national minimum wage again it wouldn’t have any impact (Although you would find it incredibly difficult to get your money out of a bank or receive medical treatment at a hospital).

In the time since I first wrote this Apple has commissioned the Fair Labor Association to inspect Foxconn and several other manufacturing partners. The FLA inspectors have so far documented that conditions at these plants have improved, but also pointed out that it’s very difficult to identify underlying issues when you are only permitted into the factory on arranged and guided tours and staff refuse to speak to you. It’s difficult to connect an assessment method like that with producing any real results.

Things are not good in our modern world for the have nots (things are also pretty bad for a lot of have’s as well actually, discovering after the financial crises they were only ‘thought they hads’). But effecting real change as a consumer seems almost impossible. We can do small things though, we can start talking about issues of international inequality, we can start thinking about it, we can stop blindly worshipping corporations and deifying their executives, we can start being more active, learning more, signing petitions that are stuck under our nose and lending our support or vote to changes. I can’t say if anyone of this will have an impact change seems to happen very slowly. Or we could just ignore the plight of others, sure it’s a terrible situation but don’t feel bad about it. Have a Mars bar.