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The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents.

The horrific working conditions at the Foxconn factories in China are finally getting the national media attention they deserve. Foxconn is the company whose massive factories make electronic products for companies like Motorola, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple.

Apple has received the most scrutiny because the iPhone and iPad have generated so many sales, and the company has physical stores and a cult like following. Steve Jobs’s recent death received wall to wall coverage in the media, but very few reporters bothered to mention the power he had to drastically change Silicon Valley’s reliance on sweatshop labor.

Mike Daisey, an author who’s received widespread acclaim for his monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” wrote about this in the New York Times.

“Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to. If we view him unsparingly, without nostalgia, we would see a great man whose genius in design, showmanship and stewardship of the tech world will not be seen again in our lifetime. We would also see a man who in the end failed to “think different,” in the deepest way, about the human needs of both his users and his workers.”

Excerpts of Mike Daisey’s monologue were recently featured on Public Radio International’s This American Life. According to Daisey, who visited a Foxconn Plant in Shenzen, China, workers as young as 13 make less than $1 an hour and assemble products for up to 16 hours a day. One worker died after a 34-hour shift.

On his blog, Daisey writes that the This American Life episode was the most downloaded in the show’s history. He’s been inundated with emails and interview requests ever since, but very few of those requests are from technology journalists.

On Thursday, Mike Daisey joined members of Change.org to deliver petitions to Apple’s Manhattan store urging the company to stop exploiting workers. Demonstrators gathered in front of six stores around the world.

Over 250,000 people have signed the petition, which says, “The men and women in these factories work very long days spent repeating the same motions over and over, which creates amped-up carpal tunnel syndrome in their wrists and hands. This often results in them losing the use of their hands for the rest of their lives. This condition could be easily prevented if the workers were rotated through different positions in the factory, but they are not. Why? Because there are no labor laws in China to protect these people.”

As Daisey points out, most of the stuff we own is made in Shenzen, China, but most people have never heard of Shenzen. And that’s part of the problem. Most of us are completely disconnected from the people who make our stuff. Since 2007, 17 Foxconn workers have committed suicide. Last year, the factory surrounded its Shenzen building with netting to catch people who jump. Last month, over 100 workers assembling Microsoft’s Xbox in the Wuhan factory threatened to jump off the roof. The conditions are that bad.

Meantime, Apple’s stock recently hit $500 for the first time ever, pushing its market-cap to nearly $460 billion. The company is worth more than Microsoft and Google combined. And it pays the people making our gadgets less than $1 an hour.

But this is about more than wages. This is about human rights and dignity. This is also about all multinationals that exploit workers, not just Apple. This is about capitalism.

Chinese workers are tired of being exploited. At Tuesday’s White House meeting with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, President Obama said he welcomes China’s “peaceful rise.”
What you won’t hear in most media coverage is the people’s peaceful rise. Since November, a wave of strikes have taken place across China. Li Qiang, Executive Director of China Labor Watch, recently said: “Chinese workers are more aware of their rights and how they can work together to protect them than they have been in the past. It has been long in coming, but the era of Chinese workers’ rights may be close at hand.”