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![Mike Daisey]()
In a huge and startling scandal, the public-radio program "This American Life" (TAL) is retracting a whole episode that it aired about Mike Daisey's investigation of Apple's manufacturing processes.
TAL says that it has discovered that much of the episode was "fabricated."
And it is quick to lay the blame on Mike Daisey, saying that he "misled" them during the fact-checking process.
And Daisey apparently did "mislead" (lie to) TAL. On his web site, Daisey is now saying that he allows himself to take "dramatic license" with his material.
(Translation: I made it up.)
And Daisey also now says that he "truly regrets" pretending that his theatre show was journalism.
But when the original TAL episode aired, one of the reasons it created such a stir was that the show said that it had carefully fact-checked Daisey's story.
Here's TAL host Ira Glass in the original episode:
When I saw Mike Daisey perform this story on stage, when I left the theater I had a lot of questions. I mean, he's not a reporter, and I wondered, did he get it right? And so we've actually spent a few weeks checking everything that he says in his show.
TAL spend "a few weeks checking everything" Mike Daisey said ... and it has now retracted the entire episode?
*UPDATE: "This American Life" has released a full explanation of what happened and what was fabricated. In other words, they've done the "serious explaining" that they needed to do. And with the exception of the sentence above, this does sound like it was mostly Mike Daisey's fault.
Daisey was busted for his lies by Rob Schmitz of NPR's Marketplace, who has been reporting on Apple's supply chain for the last year and a half. Schmitz describes finding Daisey's translator and then confronting him here.
Here's the full fact-checking section of the original TAL transcript:
When I saw Mike Daisey perform this story on stage, when I left the theater I had a lot of questions. I mean, he's not a reporter, and I wondered, did he get it right? And so we've actually spent a few weeks checking everything that he says in his show. We invited Apple to come onto the program and respond, and they turned us down. We invited Foxconn to come onto the program and respond, and they also said no. Mike, however, was willing to come in and explain his methods at Foxconn's gates and in the factories that he visited.
Mike Daisey
I had talked to about 100 workers, a little over 100, over a number of different days.
Ira Glass
Staying outside the gates?
Mike Daisey
Outside the gates. And I went to about 10 different factories when I was posing.
Ira Glass
When you met with the union workers, how many of those did you meet with?
Mike Daisey
There were three of them.
Ira Glass
And then the workers who came through to meet you?
Mike Daisey
God, there were like 25, 30 throughout the course of the day.
Ira Glass
As for Mike's findings, we have gone through his script and fact checked everything that was checkable. In one instance, we think that his translator may have misunderstood or mistranslated a fact for Mike. He says in his show that workers told him that the cafeterias at Foxconn seat 10,000 people, but based on press accounts, we think that it's possible that they serve 10,000 people, but seat only 4,000 at a time. Foxconn wouldn't answer the question for us directly.
When it comes to the suicide rate at Foxconn, there were about 12 suicides at the Shenzhen plant in 2010. It was actually hard to get the exact number. Some people have pointed out that 12 suicides for 400,000 workers is actually much lower than China's suicide rate as a whole, as China has an unusually high suicide rate of 22 suicides per year per 100,000 people. That would work out to 88 suicides for 400,000 workers. Mike Daisey points out that we don't actually know if these were the only suicides at Foxconn.
Mike Daisey
And the biggest problem is that it isn't the quantity, it's the cluster. If there was any company in America where a sizable chunk of your workforce went up over a period of time, especially close to one another, and killed themselves in the same way very publicly, it would be an enormous news story because it's far outside the norm.
Ira Glass
Overall, we checked with over a dozen people. Those would be journalists who cover these factories, people who work with the electronics industry in China, activists, labor groups, about the working conditions that Mike Daisey describes in his show, and nobody seemed very surprised by them.
Ian Spaulding
Well unfortunately I think some of these conditions sound actually quite common.
Ira Glass
This is Ian Spaulding, who estimates that he has been in or worked with about 1,000 factories throughout China. The company that he founded and runs, INFACT Global Partners, goes into Chinese factories and helps them meet social responsibility standards that are set by Western companies so those companies are ready when outside auditors come and check on working conditions. He has a staff of 45. They do hundreds of factories a year, including electronics.
Ian Spaulding
There are hours in factories that are often too long, and are excessive, and required over time. Things like cramped quarters can also happen, and repetitive motion injuries can be quite common.
Ira Glass
Another thing that Mike Daisey says that's disturbing to hear is he says that the companies will deceive the auditors when the auditors come in. Have you seen that?
Ian Spaulding
Yeah, that actually is quite common, and I think many other people have also exposed this problem.
Ira Glass
Now don't get the wrong impression. Ian Spaulding did have a few quibbles with Mike Daisey. He said that if a worker gets injured and then is fired by his company, he or she can sue the company, and he said that lots of people were doing that these days. He said electronics companies have been improving their handling of toxic chemicals.
And his only real objection to anything that Mike Daisey found had to do with child labor. Ian Spaulding said yes, there definitely is child labor in China, but not at the top tier electronics manufacturers. Other people who we talked to agreed with this. Even people who are critical of Foxconn for all kinds of things agreed with this. He said maybe a stray worker here and there might get in on a borrowed ID, but it is not a widespread problem.
Mike Daisey
Well I don't know if it's a big problem. I just know that I saw it.
Ira Glass
Again, Mike Daisey. He says sure, maybe it's not prevalent.
Mike Daisey
I know that I met people that were there, and I know that I talked to them. I mean, there weren't very many as a proportion of the total group. I talked to more than 100 people. I met five or six who were underage.
Ira Glass
And they were over the course of days?
Mike Daisey
No, they were together in a group.
Ira Glass
So it's basically the girl who you describe who deals with the iPhones--
Ira Glass
--who wipes off your thing, and then her friends?
Mike Daisey
And then some people that were with her. They seemed like savvy kids, honestly.
Ira Glass
The one source that I could find that backs up Mike on this one at least a little bit is Apple. Apple has released a report stating in the year that Mike was in China, 2010, Apple's own auditors went into 127 facilities around the world that make its products and say they found 91 underage workers. It doesn't say which facilities the workers were at. The report states that Apple helped install systems to verify ages, educated suppliers on recruiting practices, made them return underage workers to school, and made them pay for the kids' education. And then it stopped doing business with one supplier that has 42 underage workers and showed no commitment to addressing the problem.
All this research that we did did fill in some interesting details about working conditions at Foxconn that are not in Mike Daisey's show. There's an advocacy group called SACOM, which is Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior. They're based in Hong Kong. And since the suicides at Foxconn in 2010, they have put out three reports investigating conditions at the company. Each report surveyed over 100 Foxconn workers.
And they even had a researcher go undercover and take a job at the Shenzhen plant. Debby Chan Sze Wan is a project manager at SACOM. The surveys that she did of workers depict a company where many employees have to stand all day long.
Debby Chan Sze Wan
Because there's some research in the industry that workers who stand during work is more efficient than those who sit. And workers, they are regularly yelled by the supervisors. And if they make some mistake then they have to write confession letters, et cetera.
Ira Glass
In your documents, you call this military-style management. Why is that what you call it?
Debby Chan Sze Wan
I think it is the word given by some of the workers.
Ira Glass
According to SACOM's surveys and reports, the wages at Foxconn are not much more than the Chinese minimum wage. SACOM claims that it's only with tons of overtime that the money approaches what SACOM calculates is a decent living wage for a family.
But probably the most surprising thing I learned about Foxconn and other Chinese electronics manufacturers from Debby and from Ian Spaulding had to do with the turnover rate. Ian Spaulding says that it could be 10% to 20% turnover per month. He says it's a huge business problem these days in China.
Ian Spaulding
So you imagine the number of employees that you're hiring and that leave after one week, two weeks, one month on the job, and you're constantly trying to re-hire people into those positions.
Ira Glass
With so many workers quitting, why doesn't that lead to companies changing conditions and raising salaries so they don't have to go through the hassle of hiring new people?
Ian Spaulding
Well that's the good news, is it is. Nowadays a lot of people talk about what should companies' brands, US and European brands, do to make conditions better? And the reality is is that actually what's proving to be more effective is this bottom-up labor market that's emerging where employees are speaking with their feet. By leaving a factory, they're forcing factories to improve wages, improve working conditions, and improving dormitories to make things more attractive for employees.
Ira Glass
When Apple turned down our invitation to come onto today's radio show, in a rather Orwellian gesture they told us that they are 100% transparent-- as they refused to come on the air. They referred us to these reports that they've been issuing every year since 2007 on working conditions in the factories that make their products overseas.
And these reports, I have to say, are remarkable documents. You can find these online at Apple's website. Apple, like many companies, has a code of conduct that suppliers have to commit to before they can do business with them, and each year Apple audits many of the suppliers to make sure that they are complying with the code. If they don't, then there are corrective action plans, and there's training, and there's follow-up audits. It's very elaborate. And if it all fails, Apple stops buying from the supplier. Or that's what they claim, anyway.
Apple monitors pretty much all the working conditions that Mike Daisey talks about in his show. The report covering the period that Mike was in China. Talks about what Apple did in the wake of the suicides at Foxconn. They say they did an independent review. They asked for mental health counselors and other changes, which Apple says Foxconn has implemented.
The report also has a whole section on n-hexane, which workers, not from Foxconn but from another plant, told Mike that they were exposed to, and he talked about it on his show. Apple says that it found 137 workers had adverse health effects after exposure to n-hexane. It says that the supplier using the stuff was told to stop using the chemical, and it's been audited since then to make sure it has happened. Mike Daisey has read these reports.
Mike Daisey
I'm glad Apple does this. It's unfortunate more companies don't do it, and I do respect them for doing it. But it doesn't change the fact that the situation on the ground, even in their own reports, is not good. And then every year the numbers are roughly the same in terms of people who are non-compliant with overtime.
Ira Glass
Yeah, I would say that in the 2010 report, Apple found that only 32% of suppliers that it audited followed its standard about working hours, though Apple doesn't name the companies that they audited in the report.
Mike Daisey
And I really question the wisdom of that. I think that if they have a serious commitment to changing how things are done in the special economic zone in Shenzhen, then they would name those companies, and then those companies would begin to be held responsible.
Ira Glass
As it is, Daisey says, Apple is basically saying, trust us, we're taking care of the problems. But without supplier names, nobody can independently verify any of it. Should we feel weird about the computers and phones we use, all the clothes that we wear that are made in faraway factories in Asia under harsh working conditions?
SEE ALSO: "This American Life" Retracts Whole Apple-Foxconn Episode
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