What Henry Blodget Didn’t Get About Foxconn

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On Friday, China Labor Watch, a New York-based NGO that claims to be “dedicated to promoting workers’ fair redistribution of wealth under globalization,” announced that a “large-scale strike” had shut down a Foxconn factory that manufactures the iPhone 5. The group didn’t cite its sources for the story, but that didn’t stop several major news organizations (the credulous Reuters report was syndicated across multiple platforms) from parroting the press release, often verbatim. It was also picked up by several notable bloggers and commentators, including Henry Blodget, co-founder, CEO, and editor of The Business Insider. Below, a screen grab of Blodget’s Friday afternoon editorial.

On first glance, the photo is the perfect complement to the headline: young Asian women in red sashes marching through a factory zone. If they can’t stop iPhone 5 production, nobody can!

But now, let’s take a closer look at that photo (you can click to the original, here). I’ve blown it up and grabbed a representative sample, below.

Two things to note in this photo. First off, the characters on the red sashes very clearly spell out 奇美電子- Chimei Electronics, a company better known as Chimei Innolux, one of the world’s largest flat panel manufacturers. Now, as it happens, Foxconn is a major shareholder in Chimei Innolux, and it partners with Chi Mei to manufacture touch-screens. But Chi Mei is not Foxconn, and thus the above photo does not show Foxconn employees.

Second, those who read the China Labor Watch press release will note that it describes a work stoppage. Now compare that to the photo: these girls are smiling, walking in lock-step, and wearing red sashes. Nobody is wearing a Foxconn uniform (for a sense of what those look like, see Rob Schimitz’s film taken in the Foxconn Longhua facility a few months ago), or any other kind of worker uniform. Rather, they’re in their civilian clothes, and they appear to be engaging in a kind of parade. Is it a parade in support of Chimei Electronics? Maybe, but admittedly I have no idea.

But here’s the thing: Henry Blodget, or whomever he employs as a photo editor, did have an idea. And that idea, as tweeted by my friend Abe Sauer (who pointed out the photo and headline to me in the first place), goes a little something like this: “group of Asian people all walking in unison = protest action.” It’s not an uncommon way of thinking about China, and Asia, especially among commentators and correspondents with little to no experience interacting with Chinese workers. Nonetheless, common or not, you’d hope that organizations and individuals who aspire to some kind of role in commentating about China and its labor situation would have the good sense if not the dignity to avoid gross stereotypes (based on skin color, no less) and generalizations in their pontificating.

[UPDATE: I was just asked who took the photo in question. Answer: I don't know. Blodget/BI didn't run a photo credit.]

[UPDATE 2: Then there's the matter of the image that China Labor Watch posted with its press release announcing the strike - and which has been widely reproduced (for example, at PC World and Engadget). That image is below, credited - on China Labor Watch's website - to "Ye Fedao/worker for Foxconn Zhengzhou."

Does this image strike anyone as depicting a strike or work stoppage? In it, workers appear to be lined up and awaiting something. Note the girl in the foreground idly checking her phone. What is she and the others waiting for so patiently? A bus to the factory? A bus to the dorms? Whatever it is, there's little evidence in this photo to suggest that she and others are waiting for a strike. But that didn't stop China Labor Watch and others from running the grainy image. They, like Blodget, appear to be under the impression that when groups of Asian laborers gather, they must be protesting. The truth is far more normal than that - unless, of course, you insist on viewing China's factory workers as a perpetually persecuted class just waiting for a chance to rise up. But this has never been true, and is even less true now, as amply documented in several recent stories, of which Marketplace's series, End of the Great Migration, is one of the best.

In any event, over at Forbes, Tim Worstall has done a nice job breaking down the media flubs on what's increasingly looking like a non-strike, non-story. Way to go, China Labor Watch. For a more nuanced, and humanizing view of Chinese factory workers, see Leslie Chang's fine essay on the subject that ran last week on CNN.]

[UPDATE 3: Stan Abrams at China Hearsay just posted an excellent run-down and wrap-up of the confused coverage of the non-strike. Well worth reading, here. China Labor Watch, it seems, has much to answer for in this debacle.]

[UPDATE 4 - 12 hours after first post:  Henry Blodget has now replaced the Chimei photo with ... the China Labor Watch photo that ran with the press release. That is not progress.]

 

Four Shanghai Views on London 2012

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Here at Shanghai Scrap, we’ve always been sports fans. And, in our opinion, being a sports fan means being an Olympics fan. Sure, the games drive us nuts at times. The IOC’s hyper-vigilance against corporate logos that don’t have a financial relationship with the Olympics are just the start (we’ll never forget the Chinese archer who had to place yellow tape across the Chicago Bears’ ‘C’ logo on his baseball cap in the midst of competition at London 2012). But whatever. The Olympics are a blast for anybody who loves sports, and this year has been just as much fun as any other.

In 2008, Shanghai Scrap did its best to document the Beijing 2008 Olympics (both at the blog, and at the Atlantic). Alas, no invites were forthcoming for London 2012, so we did the next best thing: we documented Chinese reaction to the Olympics from the Shanghai seat at Bloomberg World View. In total, that encompasses four pieces that – we hope – display the complicated feelings that contemporary Chinese society has for sports, the Olympics, and the world in which it competes every day.

Indeed, despite the efforts by some media commentators to paint Chinese Olympians as joyless automatons performing for joyless, nationalist audiences, the reality is far more complex. The Olympics are, above everything else, fun here – as well as serious national business. I hope these pieces brought that out:

I’ll be writing more about these topics in the coming year, hopefully, and I’ll keep the updates coming here, and on twitter.

 

Is Delta Airlines Scamming its Customers With Change-Ticket Fees?

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The other day I purchased a ticket from Delta Airlines, the world’s largest airline, for international travel in the month of September. Then, as sometimes happens, something came up and I needed to change the dates of my outgoing flight by a few days.

I had no illusions: change ticket fees are expensive. Generally, they reflect the difference in fares between the one purchased and the one now desired, and a straight-up penalty. Nonetheless, when I called Delta I was more or less confident that I’d get a straight price for the change, and that’d be that.

How wrong I was.

So. Wednesday morning (Shanghai time) I called Delta’s premium help line (I’m platinum medallion with the airline) and informed the customer service representative that I’d like to move my outbound flight to a date four days earlier. Within two minutes, the operator quoted me a price – $360 – and then told me that she’d like to send me over to the ‘international desk’ where I’d likely get a better price. Sure enough, I did: $340. Still, it seemed odd to me that different customer service reps at the same airline were quoting different prices to change a ticket. So I decided to wait a day, and see if the price changed.

Less than 24 hours later I called the premium line again. This time I was told that the price for the change would be $560. I told the rep that it’d been $200 cheaper the day before, and to please transfer me to the international desk. Sure enough, at the international desk I was given a cheaper price: $540. Of course, that price was $200 more than what I’d been quoted the day before – a fact that I mentioned to the customer service representative.

His brusque response was to tell me that “prices change every day.” His tone, meanwhile, projected: “You are an idiot.”

I hung up the phone and immediately re-dialed the premium customer service line one more time. This time I reached the friendliest operator yet, and – go figure – the friendliest change ticket fee: $321. I immediately agreed to it. Nonetheless, I was sorely tempted to call back and see if I couldn’t find an operator who would bring it down further. After all, if five calls and five different operators had brought me my cheapest price yet, what could a sixth call do? Continue reading →

The Exxon Valdez’s Eco-Friendly Afterlife

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The ship once-known as the Exxon Valdez is about to become a bunch of structural steel in West India’ s Gujarat state. It a fascinating story about how the ship responsible for the second largest oil spill in US waters (since surpassed by the Deepwater Horizon debacle/disaster) is now going to end its life in a scrap yard located on one of the world’s most notorious beaches. My take on the matter is “The Exxon Valdez’s Eco-Friendly Afterlife,” just posted over at Bloomberg View. Some of the arguments made in that post echo the themes that I’ll explore in Junkyard Planet, my forthcoming account of the globalized recycling markets for Bloomsbury Press.

 One additional note. Along with e-scrap, ship breaking has an awful, environmentally-ruinous reputation. Some of that is earned, and some of it is over-played. But what’s also indisputably the case is that it’s possible to improve developing world ship breaking, and China is really leading this movement. Above, a photo of an environmentally-secure ship breaking yard not far from Shanghai, in part developed and managed by a major European shipper. I took this image on the deck of an automobile carrier in the process of being dismantled. In the distance is an oil tanker in the process of being reduced to scrap to feed China’s voracious need for steel.

More on this topic soon.

 

The Land of a Million Scrapped Televisions

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Below, a photo I recently took in a warehouse roughly 80 km from an inland Chinese city with a population around 8 million people. If it’s not clear in the image, those are televisions. Tens of thousands of scrapped, no-longer-wanted televisions.

So let me ask a question of you, dear reader: based upon the information just given, from which country do you think those scrap televisions originated?

If you are an environmentally aware European or American, your likely answer is … the United States or Europe! After all, two decades of extensive (if often shallow) reporting by journalists and activists have created a very compelling and believable story whereby the developed world “dumps” its so-called e-waste on developing countries like China. It’s a compelling narrative, and one that appeals to the developed world’s outsized need to feel guilty about its presumed effects upon the developing world.

The only problem is: that narrative is no longer the only one available to explain why a warehouse on the outskirts of a major Chinese metropolis is teeming with tens of thousands of televisions (the frame of this photo excludes perhaps another 40% of the inventory present).

That other narrative, which journalists and activists in the developed world have failed to tell (for reasons of their own) is this one: China has grown rich enough to start throwing away its own e-waste. According to China’s National Development and Reform Commission, China is now throwing off 160 million appliances (computers, televisions/monitors, washing machines, air conditioners, and refrigerators) per year that must be recycled, and that number is growing by 20% annually.

In other words: the scrap televisions in this warehouse were all used, and then thrown away, in China. There isn’t an imported – an allegedly dumped – scrap television in the entire lot.

But here’s the important thing: what you see in this warehouse is just a fraction of what’s been generated over the last couple of months in one metropolis in a country that has several dozen of greater size and wealth. You can multiply what you see here by 10,000 and you wouldn’t come close to approximating the number of Chinese-generated waste televisions and other appliances currently being generated, warehoused, and recycled, across China at this very moment. Imported scrap televisions don’t come close to equaling these kinds of volumes.

In Junkyard Planet,  my forthcoming book with Bloomsbury Press, I’ll explain the process by which these particular televisions are recycled. The technology is Chinese-developed, environmentally secure, and it actually recovers more re-usable metals, plastics, and glass that comparable systems in the so-called developed world. But more than that, it re-writes the very tired, very incorrect narrative that the best means to recycle old televisions, computers and other appliances is to keep them in the developed world at so-called environmentally secure recyclers (“environmentally secure” being a term that developed countries implement and expect developings ones – with less experience and resources – to follow).  That’s simply not the case, anymore. China, the world’s second largest consumer of consumer electronics, is very quickly figuring out how to be one of its best recyclers of them. The thousands of televisions in this warehouse are just the start.