A Man Is Not A Piece of Fruit

"I put 34 years into this firm, Howard, and now I can't pay my insurance. You can't eat an orange and then throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit" - Willie Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

In the play, Willy Loman lives in a world of illusion, a world in which loyalty and long-term service are rewarded by one's employer. Of course, even when the play was written, that ideal was already on the wane to the point that we are now witness to the return of unfettered capitalism worldwide, where workers are yet just another disposable commodity.

In her column today, Heather Mallick writes about how all of the electronic tools that we so highly prize for both our productivity and our diversion are made in China under conditions that are eerily reminiscent of those that gave the Victorian Era such a bad name.

About Foxconn, the electronic company that makes about one-third of all of the electronic devices we use today, she writes:

Cameras watch the line workers and supervisors throughout non-stop shifts of 12 to 16 hours ... the workers wear uniforms. They are not allowed to speak to each other at work. After a recent string of suicides, Foxconn installed nets on the upper floors and made workers sign documents promising not to kill themselves.

When you work as hard as Foxconn employees do for dimes an hour, the joints in your hand disintegrate ... Workers don’t switch from job to job, as Canadian workplace standards would demand. They make the same motion hundreds of thousands of thousands of times until their hands are used up. “When you start working at 15 or 16, by the time you are 26, 27, your hands are ruined.”

And finally, in a slip that reveals much about how the workers are regarded, the head of Hon Hai (Foxconn) last week said:

“Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide . . . to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes, however, words are just as effective.