Tag Archives: ethics

Labour Ethics

In this article, Brooke Crothers tries to argue that one should not have an ethical dilemma in purchasing products made by Apple. He is mostly speaking about the increasingly public investigations into the third party assembly factories which Apple (and other tech-sector companies) use for their products. In a somewhat joking acquiescence, Crothers even mentions that these factories often treat their assembly line workers as chattel — that is, as privately owned property. Let that sink in: he sees no issue in a company treating its workers as slaves as long as they continue to be industrial juggernauts (perhaps ‘too big to fail’?). The point many are making against Apple is not limited to Apple as Crothers suggests in his ‘don’t stop there’ attitude. What he is not expecting, though, is for people to agree with the sentiment of ‘don’t stop there’ and actually accept the ethical implications of their consumption. Instead of pushing companies like Apple to use factories which treat their workers as human beings — whether that is in the US or elsewhere — Crothers thinks such is ‘a pipe dream’.

Why? Why can’t Apple and others pay their workers fair wages, accept a ‘healthy’ work-life balance, etc? Crothers suggests its because these companies would not find enough employees who ‘live in dormitories and make a 24/7 on-call commitment to Foxconn for low wages’. No shit, Sherlock. That’s because such commitments are mostly illegal in industrialised countries for a reason. If the issue holding Apple back from having factories which comply with US labour laws (we’ll leave Europe’s labour laws out of this for now) is that they wouldn’t own slaves who can work the assembly line 15+ hours a day, 7 days a week (over 100 hours a week!), then perhaps they shouldn’t be in business. That’s not a employer-employee relationship; that’s an owner-slave relationship. It’s this lack of respect towards humans that, at best, borders on the sociopathic (at worst, it crosses well over that line).

Crothers’s final excuse is that there are US-based plants which are less ‘worker intensive’ that utilise high tech equipment rather than millions of workers who live in on-site dormitories and are at the beck and call of an owner 24/7. Why can’t, for example, Apple use such assembly line equipment (like other US-based factories)? Why can’t they employ multiple shifts of people who work 40 hours a week at a livable wage? Oh, that’s right: profit and consumption. Perhaps Apple thinks they would not sell as much if the price of their products rose to afford ‘ethical labour practises’ while keeping the same profit margins. But then, perhaps that’s because the primary markets of consumption are filled with the very people who are out of work and are told they could not afford the real cost of they themselves being employed. That is, Crothers’s article implies that industrial jobs are incompatible with current US labour laws because people might actually be paid for their work. And that is something which frightens companies like Apple because it means that they wouldn’t be simple, mindless consumers willing to sell their kidneys for a new toy.

What I’d like to see is someone take up Crothers’s rhetorical question and begin to list companies which utilise labour practises akin to slavery and the products (and parts) which are made in these conditions. Sure, Apple would be on that list. As would Motorola, Amazon, Intel, Wal-Mart, etc. However, perhaps that kind of list will make people think twice about what they buy. Perhaps, it’ll lead to a revolt against treating humans as property and resources to be used then discarded.

Categorical Imperative

This is part 4 of 5 in the Sunday responses series

I heard a few weeks ago that people should ‘do for one what [they] wish [they] could do for everyone’. My first reaction was that this was an adaptation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. For this illustration, I will focus on one of Kant’s formulations: ‘every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends’ (from the Metaphysics of Morals). What Kant suggests in this formulation is that one should act as if every action were to be made into a universal law, applicable to everyone. This is exactly the sentiment expressed above. The first version, though, was used as a critique against inaction which supposedly argues along the lines of ‘do such to none because you cannot do it to all’. The final part of the original argument was that one should do what one can, even if it means that one may be slightly unfair for not extending one’s actions to everyone.

In the original argument, the context was of giving support to those in need. In other words, it argued that the common understanding is that people don’t give because they are unable to give to everyone equally, while the new response should be that people should give despite not being able to give to everyone equally. In other words, it is the iconic debate between Kirk and Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: what is the balance between the needs of the many and the needs of the few. Spock argues that, logically speaking, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (a phrase that runs throughout their dialogues). Both the criticised common understanding and the Categorical Imperative paralleled Spock’s argument. Yes, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, but the CI argument was to give to a few because the needs of the many (i.e. those in need) outweighed the needs of the few (i.e. those in need that would benefit from ‘selective giving’). In other words, the goal is to reduce the number of those in need in order to remove poverty.

However, the logic of this is turned on its head in the next film (Star Trek III: The Search for Spock). Without the logical Spock to control Kirk’s ‘humanity’, Kirk and the crew sabotage friendly ships, hijack their own ship, and disobey orders in order to find and save Spock. At the end, Kirk’s response to Spock’s logical inquiry is that the needs of the few sometime outweigh the needs of the many. In other words, the two films create a tension between community and individual, and I believe this tension disrupts the simple logic of Spock’s. There is something missing in the logic, something that cannot be quantified materially: a sense of community and love. I can give $30/month and feel good about myself because I’ve helped one live another month. What we rarely realise is that there is an actual human being receiving that and could perhaps want something more than food and shelter: love, friendship, community, etc. Perhaps we’ve reduced the number of people in material poverty (yay!), but that’s nothing if we haven’t also shown people love. I don’t mean a particular religious love because there is no such thing as ‘Christian’ love (or ‘Jewish’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Hindu’, etc love); there is only love in the generic sense.

Here is where the Categorical Imperative breaks down: love cannot be a universal maxim, it cannot be dictated or made into a law. It does not come easily because it requires time and effort. In short, love must be personal and individual, cutting across any sort of logic. One cannot love everyone in the way that one loves a dear friend or relative. I’m not saying that one cannot ‘love the world’ but that such love is qualitatively different from the love one has for, say, a partner, child, or parent. Here is where the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. It doesn’t mean spending money, buying from a corporation that supports charities, etc. Rather, it means constructing a relationship with others that goes deeper than meeting material needs. Anyone can give the same $30 — which is why such organisations are able to operate — but not anyone can give the same relationship.

To return to the original statement, then, it shouldn’t be ‘do for one what you wish you could do for everyone’ because very few people (if any) truly wish to love everyone as family. Rather, it is a return to the golden rule: ‘do for one what you wish one would do for you’. Even better, ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. That is the ethical imperative for humans.