【纽约客20120326】中国工人真的想要ipads么？

woikuraki

【中文标题】中国工人真的想要ipads么？
【原文标题】Do Chinese Factory Workers Dream of iPads?
【登载媒体】纽约客
【原文链接】http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/03/iphone-factories-chinese-dreams.html
【译者】       woikuraki
【翻译方式】人工
【声明】       欢迎转载，请务必注明译者和出处 bbs.m4.cn。

对于制造工厂的内部环境，美国公众常常是非常愤慨的。在20世纪90年代，凯思琳•李•吉福德（著名主持人）就因被指责在海外的血汗工厂生产其服装品牌而遭到了强烈的批评。从耐克到沃尔玛，很多品牌都被指控过虐待工人。近日因一名名叫麦克的喜剧演员，工厂内的工人们又一次站到了舆论的风口浪尖。麦克记述了他在一家生产iPads 和iPhones的苹果工厂里面见闻，他的任务是采访工厂里面的童工和因工致残，因工中毒的工人，作为个人独幕剧和一档很受欢迎的公共电台节目《美国生活》的资料。根据公共电台节目《市集》的中国特派记者的调查，麦克伪造了采访中的人物和采访细节以夸大工厂生活的艰辛。随之而来的辩论围绕的就是新闻价值和真理本质。但是麦克的相对宏观的概念没有遭到质疑，即中国的工厂压迫他们的工人，而这种压迫是由我们对于廉价商品的渴望促成的。

麦克的这一行为并非惊为天人之举，在他之前已经有很多记者试图报道中国加工工厂的内幕。首先，先找到一家生产iphone或者芭比娃娃或者美国国旗或者任何一样能和美国读者联系起来的产品的工厂。再和这些工作环境让美国人无法接受的工厂里面的工人进行交流。接下来写出一篇文章，把读者与文章主题用全球供应链联系在一起。为你的跑鞋缝线的年轻女性每小时的报酬不到一美元。为你的ipad组装零件的年轻人因不堪过度工作从工厂的房顶跳楼自杀。这些商品很好地显示出了产业链的不公。《美国生活》的节目主持人埃勒在节目的最后说：“一个iphone组装线上的工人买不起一个iphone，这是怎样的一个世界？作为一个拥有这些产品的人，我是不是应该感到内疚？”

把美国人的需求与中国人的苦难简单地等同起来的确很吸引人，尤其是现在很多美国人都对自己给世界带来的影响感到内疚。不过这同时也是不准确的说法。把世界另一边的上千万人的痛苦归结到自己身上是一种极端自恋的行为。中国为包括国内市场在内的全世界的市场生产产品，这要归功于低廉的成本，众多且受过教育的劳动力和能积极对市场需求做出反应的灵活的生产体制。把世界想象成由我们自己的意识塑造是唯我主义。这也是对那些工人们的贬损。我们并不是这个故事的主线，我们只是别人故事的参与者。过于关注我们自己和我们使用的产品只能是把世界另一端的人变成和手机部件一样的没有存在感的可替换的部件。

中国的工人并不是因为我们对于ipod无止境的渴望而进入工厂工作的。他们离开自己的村庄到城市里面赚钱，学习技能，提高自己，见识世界。这种体验会改变他们的一生。在针对工厂条件的最新的讨论中，最缺少的就是工人自己的声音，下面提供一些。

"我妈让我回家结婚。不过如果我现在就结婚而不是等到我有了一定的发展，我就只能和一个普通的工人结婚。所以我并不着急。"

"我春节回家的时候，每个人都说我变化很大。他们问我，“你是怎么变得这么不一样的？”我告诉他们我有学习并且努力工作。如果你和他们说的更多，他们就不懂了。"

"我在下班之后学习英语，因为我们未来的顾客就不仅仅是中国人了。多以我们需要学习更多的语言。"

我在中国南方的工厂之城东莞待了2年的时间，一边去了解这些装配线上的工人，一边写一本描写她们生活的书-《工厂女孩》。有一些话题是被常常提起的，比如说：她们赚多少钱，她们老板是什么样的人，她们想找什么样的丈夫，她们是应该跳槽去其他工厂还是留下来。其他一些事情是她们很少提及的，比如说被大部分美国人看做与监狱生活差不多的居住环境：住10到15个工人的房间，50个人共用的卫生间，工厂严苛的作息时间。她们认识的每一个人都是生活在类似的环境中，而且这种环境还要优于中国农村的学校宿舍和农舍。这些工人很少谈及她们自己生产的产品。工厂是做什么的并不重要，重要的是她们个人收获到了什么，她们怎样挑战了老板的权威，怎样得到了加薪，怎样遇到了知心的朋友或者男朋友。她们根本不关心谁买了她们生产的产品。与之相悖的是，对于中国工厂的新闻报道总是把工人和他们的产品对立起来。
吕是我书中的2个女主人公之一，我一次遇到她时，她刚刚辞去了自己在一家电子厂装配线上的第一份工作。她因为字写得好在一家手机工厂得到了一个文员的职位。4个月后，她不顾还在家里务农的父母的反对跳槽到了一家橡胶制品工厂。她在一个香港手袋制造厂遇到了第一个男朋友，但在关系变糟之后离开了他。在一家软件工厂获得了一个收入丰厚的工作之后。她开设了自己的第一个银行账户并开始考虑自己的未来。随着我对她生活的不断了解，她工作过的那些工厂似乎都变得无关紧要了。这些工厂只是她戏剧化的自我改造的生活的背景陪衬，仅此而已。
那之后，吕嫁给了另外一个农民工，和他回到了老家生活并生下了2个女儿。她最近独自回到了东莞，在一家生产工程起重机的工厂中的采购部门工作，暂时离开了在家里的丈夫和孩子。这个月的早些时候她写信给我说，“人在年轻的时候应该有些追求，这样在老了的时候回顾人生时才不会觉得自己的一生是碌碌无为的。”

在中国全国范围内有1亿5千万农民工，他们中的三分之一是女性，他们离开自己的村庄来到城市的工厂，餐厅，宾馆和建筑工地工作。他们是人类历史上最大规模的流动人口；他们的经历改变了他们的工作，婚姻，生活以及思考方式。他们中很少有人想回到过去的那种生活方式。你会对此感到很内疚么？我不这么认为。

网友评论：

在文章中我们看到了15个人一个房间这一细节问题。很多地方看起来都很恐怖。这些人摧毁了我们的制造业和我们的工会，全球商业集团总是雇佣廉价劳动力，工作环境也总是十分恶劣。

就算不是大多数，很多美国人也都希望通过杠杆作用，利用低收入的中国人（或者其他亚洲工人）提升自己的消费产品。这才是反对血汗工厂运动的起源。你可以不屑这种“自我为中心的负罪感”，但事实证明这种运动还是有一定作用的。毋庸置疑，中国内部的这种人口流动是很棒的一件事，就像19世纪末20世纪初欧洲到美国的移民运动，非洲裔美国人从南方到北方和中西部工厂的移动一样。但是如果工人们和他们的联盟不迫使雇主们给他们提供良好的工作条件，这些工人的境遇就不会有好转。中国工人要频繁地跳槽来改善或者保持自己的生活难道你就不在意么？

原文：

Do Chinese FactoryWorkers Dream of iPads?

Posted by LeslieT. Chang

Every so often, the American public getsworked up over conditions inside the factories that make its goods. In thenineteen-nineties, Kathie Lee Gifford came under attack for allegedlymanufacturing her clothing line in overseas sweatshops. Brands from Nike toWalmart have been accused at various times of labor abuses. Now factory workersare back in the news because of a theater performer named Mike Daisey. Hisaccount of visiting a plant in China where Apple manufactures iPads andiPhones—where he supposedly interviewed workers who were underage or had beenpoisoned or maimed on the job—was the basis of a one-man show and a popularepisode of the public-radio program “This American Life.” It was also a fraud.According to an investigation by Rob Schmitz, the China correspondent for thepublic-radio program “Marketplace,” Daisey fabricated characters and details toexaggerate the grimness of factory life. The ensuing debate has focused onjournalistic values and the nature of truth. But Daisey’s larger point—thatChinese factories are oppressive, and that our desire for cheap goods makesthem so—remains unchallenged.

Far from being radically innovative, Daiseyapproached the story of Chinese manufacturing as almost every journalist beforehim had done. First, find a factory that makes iPhones, or Barbie dolls, orAmerican flags—anything to establish a connection with the American reader.Talk to a few workers laboring under conditions that no American could accept.Then write a story that neatly connects reader and subject, in a global supplychain of consumption and guilt. A young woman makes less than a dollar an hourstitching your running shoes. A young man jumps off a factory roof afterworking overtime to assemble your iPad. The gadgets embody the injustice of thesystem that created them: What’s wrong with a world in which a worker on aniPhone assembly line can’t even afford to buy one? As “This American Life” hostIra Glass put it at the end of the episode retracting the original Daiseybroadcast, “As somebody who owns these products, should I feel bad?”

The simple narrative equating Americandemand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time when manyAmericans feel guilty about their impact on the world. It’s also inaccurate anddisrespectful. We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine we have the powerto drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrateand suffer in terrible ways. China produces goods for markets all over theworld, including for its own consumers, thanks to low costs, a large andeducated workforce, and a flexible manufacturing system that responds rapidlyto market demands. To imagine that we have willed this universe into being is simplysolipsistic. It is also demeaning to the workers. We are not at the center ofthis story—we are minor players in theirs. By focusing on ourselves and ourgadgets, we have reduced the human beings at the other end to invisibility, astiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone.

Chinese workers are not forced intofactories because of our insatiable desire for iPods. They choose to leavetheir farming villages for the city in order to earn money, to learn newskills, to improve themselves, and to see the world. And they are foreverchanged by the experience. In the latest debate over factory conditions, what’sbeen missing are the voices of the workers. Here are a few:

Bao Yongxiu: My mother tells me to comehome 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 newyear, everyone said I had changed so much. They asked me, “What did you do thatyou have changed so much?” I told them that I studied and worked hard. If youtell them more, they won’t understand anyway.

Xiao Jin: Now after I get off work I studyEnglish, because in the future our customers won’t be only Chinese. So we needto learn more languages.

I spent two years getting to knowassembly-line workers in the south China factory city of Dongguan while writinga book, “Factory Girls,” about their lives. Certain subjects came up over andover: How much money they made, what their bosses were like, what kinds ofhusbands they hoped to find, whether they should jump to another factory orstay put. Other things they barely mentioned, such as living conditions thatmost Americans would see as only a step up from prison life: ten or fifteenworkers to a room, fifty people sharing one bathroom, days and nights ruled bythe factory clock. Everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances, and it wasstill better than the school dormitories and village homes of rural China. Theworkers rarely spoke about the products they manufactured, and they often haddifficulty explaining what they did. What a factory made was never the point;what mattered was what they had personally gained there, how they hadchallenged their boss or gotten a raise or met a best friend or a boyfriend.They could not have cared less who was buying their products. Journalisticcoverage of Chinese factories, in contrast, plays up the relation betweenworkers and their products.

When I first met Lu Qingmin, one of twoyoung women I profiled in my book, eight years ago, she had just quit her firstjob on the assembly line of an electronics plant. Good handwriting landed her abetter position as a clerk in a mobile-phone factory. Four months later shemoved to a rubber-components factory, against the wishes of her parents backhome on the farm. She met her first serious boyfriend at a Hong Kong handbagmanufacturer, but left when their relationship soured. A lucrative purchasingjob in a hardware factory led her to open her first bank account and thinkabout her future. As I got to know Qingmin, the factories where she workedseemed to recede from view. They were backdrops to her drama ofself-transformation—nothing more.

Since then, Qingmin has married a fellowmigrant, moved to his family’s village, and given birth to two daughters. Sherecently returned to Dongguan alone, to work in the purchasing department of afactory that makes construction cranes, temporarily leaving her husband andchildren at home. “A person should have some ambition while she is young,” shewrote me earlier this month, “so that in old age she can look back on her lifeand feel that it was not lived to no purpose.”

Across China, there are a hundred and fiftymillion migrant workers, a third of them women, who have left their villages towork in the factories, restaurants, hotels, and construction sites of thecities. They represent the largest migration in human history; theirexperiences have changed the way they work and marry and live and think. Veryfew of them would want to return to the way things used to be. Should you feelbad? I don’t think so.

Comments

We get snippets of info. 15 in a room from you. And most of it sounds horrible.These are the people who destroyed our own manufacturing and unions, globalcorps employing very cheap labor in conditions which always seem awful.

ms. chang many if not most American consumers would like to use their leverageas consumers to make things better for low wage Chinese( or for other low wageAsian workers) This is the origin of the anti-sweatshop movement You may sneerat this as "self-centered guilt" if you choose, but there is evidencethat it has had some effect. Undoubtedly, the modern Chinese internal migrationis an awesome event as was the migration from Europe to the United States inthe late 19th/early 20th centuries and of African Americans from the South tothe factories in the North and Midwest.....but things did not get better forthese immigrant workers until workers and their allies began to push back andforce the employers to provide decent long term working condition. Does it notbother you that Chinese workers have to constantly hop around to improve orjust maintain their status?

lilyma06

作者Leslie T. Chang,貌似跟何伟很熟吧。看过类似的报道