Does Steve Jobs hate freedom - in forms beyond consumer choice?

This reflection on Steve Jobs and Apple by Gary Sternovitz is interesting but hyperbolic and quite misleading. Jobs has a reputation as a tyrant in person, and Sternovitz aims to tie that into a broader portrayal of Apple as an unfeeling company that ruthlessly exploits factory workers in its suppliers. 

A few representative quotes:

Contemporary China has found a way to combine, for outcomes positive and devastating, some of the most abysmal features of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism and 20th century totalitarian dictatorships. This is a combination that would seem to have felt very comfortable for Steve Jobs, as long as he was in charge. Apple has long been infamous for opposing open access and more collaborative computing cultures.

Jobs’s legacy as the lovably jerky Edison of our time ignores that he wanted us to believe that there is an escape from life into cleanly designed and efficient technology, and that only a ruthless dictator could show it to us.

Better an iPhone than Il Duce, of course, to make the trains run on time—or at least to tell you how to get to Penn Station—but totalitarian shadows probably should not fall over the products we crave, in how they are made or why we love them.

Sternovitz is overreaching in claiming without evidence that outsourcing to China was an ideological decision for Steve Jobs. Think about the volume of outsourcing by all Western corporations, many of whom presumably don’t have CEOs that are visionaries/jerks in his mould. And on the computing culture issue, Apple works with closed, controlled systems because it enables them to provide a better consumer experience (compare iOS to Android), not because Steve Jobs hated freedom. 

Sternovitz is also misrepresenting China as a place where a totalitarian government suppresses people to make cheap labour available to eager Western corporations. Wages in Chinese factories are on average three to four times higher than on Chinese farms, and assembly work is less dangerous than in heavy industry. Nobody is forcing anybody to work in a factory: the conditions are obviously worse than in the West, but so are most of the other jobs on offer, and factory jobs pay well enough that they offer a chance to work towards a better life in future. (Also, the Chinese government’s policy on the yuan actually helps manufacturing exporters, at the expense of Chinese consumers.)

Sternovitz argues that because of Apple’s high profit margins, it could afford to pay more to its workers in its foreign suppliers, like Foxconn. I don’t think it’s quite so simple. First, Apple’s profit margins are not solely the result of Foxconn paying people low wages, although they have pushed hard to cut costs in their supply chain. There are many other factors contributing to Apple’s dominance of several of the markets it operates in, so it’s not just a situation where they are getting rich by slashing the wages of its contract workers. But still, they do have a lot of money, so let’s think about what Sternovitz might suggest they do to help those workers.

Maybe Apple could play softball in its price negotiations for supply contracts, but then Foxconn could just retain the added revenue as profit if it’s already paying market wages and has such an oversupply of willing workers that it has no incentive to raise them. Maybe Apple could mandate that it will only buy components from suppliers that pay a particular wage - although typical factory wages are already well above the cost of living in China and most factory workers are able to save a large proportion of their pay. (Not to mention that Foxconn, for example, employs a million people; would all of them have to be paid the “Apple rate” for Foxconn to be eligible for Apple’s business? If not, is it really fair for workers doing the same work for different buyers to be paid differently?)

Maybe pay isn’t the issue and it’s more about poor conditions, like the extremely long hours that are definitely a negative of factory work. But Apple probably can’t mandate something like maximum working hours for factory workers, since many of them are content to work long hours, boosting their pay in order to save for the future. (I’m basing that assertion on a discussion in James Fallows’ book Postcards from Tomorrow Square - the relevant essay is available at the Atlantic). And beyond all of these, every Apple-mandated increase in pay or conditions for workers probably makes it more likely that Foxconn and other suppliers will relocate to Vietnam or another cheaper country, or cut jobs altogether by automating production - the Economist reported in August that Foxconn plans to install one million robots by 2013.

About all that Apple or any other Western company can do, as far as I can see, is ensure that suppliers do not put their workers in harm’s way. Sternovitz is correct in saying that more vigilance is needed in checking suppliers for things like dangerous chemicals. (His discussion of suicide is a bit off the mark - China’s number of suicides is only the world’s highest because it has so many people, although its suicide rate per capita is higher than the world average. The suicides at Foxconn, while undoubtedly tragic, happened at much a lower rate than the averages for Australia, China, or the world.)

Apple, like many companies that operate across borders in a global economy, has to deal with differing expectations in its suppliers and its markets. As Western consumers, afforded the relatively rare luxury to consider the ethical dimension of our purchases, it might seem obvious that we should avoid companies like Apple that use suppliers where workers labour for long hours for little pay. But I don’t think those Chinese workers, or farmers hoping to become factory workers, would thank us for doing so. We can pressure Western companies to maintain ethical standards and ensure that their suppliers do pay reasonable living wages and don’t require hazardous work - but we can’t require them to reshape the economies of entire countries to soothe our consciences.

And to then argue that Steve Jobs didn’t try to do that reshaping, not because it’s an immense task (which has not been tackled effectively by other multinational corporations), but because he was a “ruthless dictator” who enjoyed inflicting pain on others, is definitely a bridge too far.