Hi. So I'd like to talk a little
bit about the people who make the things we use every day: our shoes, our
handbags, our computers and cell phones. Now, this is a conversation that often
calls up a lot of guilt. Imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less than a
dollar an hour stitching your running shoes, or the young Chinese man who jumps
off a rooftop after working overtime assembling your iPad. We, the
beneficiaries of globalization, seem to exploit these victims with every
purchase we make, and the injustice feels embedded in the products themselves.
After all, what's wrong with a world in which a worker on an iPhone assembly
line can't even afford to buy one? It's taken for granted that Chinese
factories are oppressive, and that it's our desire for cheap goods that makes
them so.
So, this simple narrative
equating Western demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a
time when many of us already feel guilty about our impact on the world, but
it's also inaccurate and disrespectful. We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to
imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other
side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways. In fact, China
makes goods for markets all over the world, including its own, thanks to a
combination of factors: its low costs, its large and educated workforce, and a
flexible manufacturing system that responds quickly to market demands. By
focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets, we have rendered the individuals
on the other end into invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of
a mobile phone.
Chinese workers are not forced
into factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods. They choose to leave
their homes in order to earn money, to learn new skills, and to see the world.
In the ongoing debate about globalization, what's been missing is the voices of
the workers themselves.
Here are a few.
Bao Yongxiu: "My mother
tells me to come home and get married, but if I marry now, before I have fully
developed myself, I can only marry an ordinary worker, so I'm not in a
rush."
Chen Ying: "When I went home
for the new year, everyone said I had changed. They asked me, what did you do
that you have changed so much? I told them that I studied and worked hard. If you
tell them more, they won't understand anyway."
Wu Chunming: "Even if I make
a lot of money, it won't satisfy me. Just to make money is not enough meaning
in life."
Xiao Jin: "Now, after I get
off work, I study English, because in the future, our customers won't be only
Chinese, so we must learn more languages."
All of these speakers, by the
way, are young women, 18 or 19 years old.
So I spent two years getting to
know assembly line workers like these in the south China factory city called
Dongguan. Certain subjects came up over and over: how much money they made,
what kind of husband they hoped to marry, whether they should jump to another
factory or stay where they were. Other subjects came up almost never, including
living conditions that to me looked close to prison life: 10 or 15 workers in
one room, 50 people sharing a single bathroom, days and nights ruled by the
factory clock. Everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances, and it was
still better than the dormitories and homes of rural China.
The workers rarely spoke about
the products they made, and they often had great difficulty explaining what
exactly they did. When I asked Lu Qingmin, the young woman I got to know best,
what exactly she did on the factory floor, she said something to me in Chinese
that sounded like "qiu xi." Only much later did I realize that she
had been saying "QC," or quality control. She couldn't even tell me
what she did on the factory floor. All she could do was parrot a garbled
abbreviation in a language she didn't even understand.
Karl Marx saw this as the tragedy
of capitalism, the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor.
Unlike, say, a traditional maker of shoes or cabinets, the worker in an
industrial factory has no control, no pleasure, and no true satisfaction or
understanding in her own work. But like so many theories that Marx arrived at
sitting in the reading room of the British Museum, he got this one wrong. Just
because a person spends her time making a piece of something does not mean that
she becomes that, a piece of something. What she does with the money she earns,
what she learns in that place, and how it changes her, these are the things
that matter. What a factory makes is never the point, and the workers could not
care less who buys their products.
Journalistic coverage of Chinese
factories, on the other hand, plays up this relationship between the workers
and the products they make. Many articles calculate: How long would it take for
this worker to work in order to earn enough money to buy what he's making? For
example, an entry-level-line assembly line worker in China in an iPhone plant
would have to shell out two and a half months' wages for an iPhone.
But how meaningful is this
calculation, really? For example, I recently wrote an article in The New Yorker
magazine, but I can't afford to buy an ad in it. But, who cares? I don't want
an ad in The New Yorker, and most of these workers don't really want iPhones.
Their calculations are different. How long should I stay in this factory? How
much money can I save? How much will it take to buy an apartment or a car, to
get married, or to put my child through school?
The workers I got to know had a
curiously abstract relationship with the product of their labor. About a year
after I met Lu Qingmin, or Min, she invited me home to her family village for
the Chinese New Year. On the train home, she gave me a present: a Coach brand
change purse with brown leather trim. I thanked her, assuming it was fake, like
almost everything else for sale in Dongguan. After we got home, Min gave her
mother another present: a pink Dooney & Bourke handbag, and a few nights
later, her sister was showing off a maroon LeSportsac shoulder bag. Slowly it
was dawning on me that these handbags were made by their factory, and every
single one of them was authentic.
Min's sister said to her parents,
"In America, this bag sells for 320 dollars." Her parents, who are
both farmers, looked on, speechless. "And that's not all -- Coach is
coming out with a new line, 2191," she said. "One bag will sell for
6,000." She paused and said, "I don't know if that's 6,000 yuan or
6,000 American dollars, but anyway, it's 6,000." (Laughter)
Min's sister's boyfriend, who had
traveled home with her for the new year, said, "It doesn't look like it's
worth that much."
Min's sister turned to him and
said, "Some people actually understand these things. You don't understand
shit."
(Laughter) (Applause)
In Min's world, the Coach bags
had a curious currency. They weren't exactly worthless, but they were nothing
close to the actual value, because almost no one they knew wanted to buy one,
or knew how much it was worth. Once, when Min's older sister's friend got
married, she brought a handbag along as a wedding present. Another time, after
Min had already left the handbag factory, her younger sister came to visit,
bringing two Coach Signature handbags as gifts.
I looked in the zippered pocket
of one, and I found a printed card in English, which read, "An American
classic. In 1941, the burnished patina of an all-American baseball glove
inspired the founder of Coach to create a new collection of handbags from the
same luxuriously soft gloved-hand leather. Six skilled leatherworkers crafted
12 Signature handbags with perfect proportions and a timeless flair. They were
fresh, functional, and women everywhere adored them. A new American classic was
born."
I wonder what Karl Marx would
have made of Min and her sisters. Their relationship with the product of their
labor was more complicated, surprising and funny than he could have imagined.
And yet, his view of the world persists, and our tendency to see the workers as
faceless masses, to imagine that we can know what they're really thinking.
The first time I met Min, she had
just turned 18 and quit her first job on the assembly line of an electronics
factory. Over the next two years, I watched as she switched jobs five times,
eventually landing a lucrative post in the purchasing department of a hardware
factory. Later, she married a fellow migrant worker, moved with him to his
village, gave birth to two daughters, and saved enough money to buy a
secondhand Buick for herself and an apartment for her parents. She recently
returned to Dongguan on her own to take a job in a factory that makes
construction cranes, temporarily leaving her husband and children back in the
village.
In a recent email to me, she
explained, "A person should have some ambition while she is young so that
in old age she can look back on her life and feel that it was not lived to no
purpose."
Across China, there are 150
million workers like her, one third of them women, who have left their villages
to work in the factories, the hotels, the restaurants and the construction
sites of the big cities. Together, they make up the largest migration in
history, and it is globalization, this chain that begins in a Chinese farming
village and ends with iPhones in our pockets and Nikes on our feet and Coach
handbags on our arms that has changed the way these millions of people work and
marry and live and think. Very few of them would want to go back to the way
things used to be.
When I first went to Dongguan, I
worried that it would be depressing to spend so much time with workers. I also
worried that nothing would ever happen to them, or that they would have nothing
to say to me. Instead, I found young women who were smart and funny and brave
and generous. By opening up their lives to me, they taught me so much about
factories and about China and about how to live in the world.
This is the Coach purse that Min
gave me on the train home to visit her family. I keep it with me to remind me
of the ties that tie me to the young women I wrote about, ties that are not
economic but personal in nature, measured not in money but in memories. This
purse is also a reminder that the things that you imagine, sitting in your
office or in the library, are not how you find them when you actually go out
into the world.
Thank you.
