【新闻周刊20120401】在谴责富士康之前，美国人要好好回忆一下自己的劳工历史

新工人网

【中文标题】在谴责富士康之前，美国人要好好回忆一下自己的劳工历史
【原文标题】Before Condemning Foxconn, Americans Should Examine Their Own Labor History
【原载媒体】新闻周刊
【原文链接】http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/31/before-condemning-foxconn-americans-should-examine-their-own-labor-history.html
【译  者】新工人
【翻译方式】 人工
【声  明】本翻译供Anti-CNN使用，未经AC或译者许可，不得转载。
【译文】
It’s easy to condemn Foxconn’s labor practices, but Zachary Karabell argues that we should bear in mind that not so long ago those same conditions existed in another emerging industrial power—the United States.

谴责富士康的用工做法是很容易的，但扎切里•卡拉贝尔认为我们应该记住，就在不久前，同样的用工情况就存在于另一个新兴的工业国家——美国。


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Apple has made waves this week, but not for its products or its stock price. Instead, it has once again been the center of damning revelations about labor practices in Chinese factoriest hat make the iPad and the iPhone. But while Apple certainly deserves the criticism, this story is not as simple as it seems. It’s not just about Apple and working conditions; the other story is U.S. anxiety about China, double standards, and an American tendency to forget our own history and how we have evolved.

苹果这周引起了轰动，但不是因为其产品或股票价格，相反，它再次成为中心——与生产iPad 和iPhone的中国工厂里的用工行为有着无法逃避的关系。谴责苹果理所应当，但事情并不那么简单。这不仅关乎苹果及其用工环境，背后关联的则是美国对中国的担心以及双重标准，还有美国试图忘记我们的历史以及我们是如何起家的。


Over the past two years, Apple has come under intense scrutiny because of questionable working conditions at factories run by Foxconn, a Taiwanese equipent maker with mega factories in Shenzhen and elsewhere in China. A rash of suicides at Foxconn plants in Shenzhen last year provoke dinter national outcry, and served as a direct rebuke to the famously secretive Apple and Steve Jobs.

在过去的两年里，由于富士康科技集团——台湾的一个拥有深圳和中国其他地区众多工厂的集大成者——旗下工厂里受质疑的用工环境，苹果遭到了严查。去年深圳富士康工厂里的自杀潮激起了民众的强烈愤怒，直接谴责了原本遮掩很好的苹果和史蒂文•乔布斯。


Under new CEO Tim Cook, Apple commissioned the Fair Labor Association to assess conditions at the Foxconn plants, and then released those findings yesterday. The report—which was especially critical of safety conditions and of labor violations ranging from excess hours worked to insufficient overtime paid—received extensive attention and in many ways supported Apple and Foxconn’s critics.

在新总裁蒂姆•库克的领导下，苹果委托公平劳工协会对富士康工厂的用工环境进行评估，并于昨天公布了结果。报告——尤其批评了安全设备和劳动剥削情况，范围从超时加班到加班费不足——从多个方面证实了对苹果和富士康的批评，受到广泛关注。


In releasing the report and vowing to make immediate and extensive changes, Apple and Cook were praised for dealing with the issues head-on. Foxconn’s chairman, Terry Gou, who is as much a celebrity in China as Steve Jobs was in the United States, promised to increase salaries substantially and to limit hours worked in accord with both international norms and with China’s own laxly enforced labor laws.

通过发布报告并誓要做出快速而广泛的改变，苹果和库克能够这样正面的处理问题，因而受到称赞。富士康总裁郭台铭，就像史蒂夫•乔布斯在美国一样，他也是中国的名人，承诺要大幅增加工资并缩短工时，从而符合国际规定和执行不力的中国劳动法规。


By embracing transparency and responding to legitimate criticism, Cook clearly moved Apple away from the insularity of Jobs and took a cue from an earlier visionary company led by a strong-willed CEO that almost lost its brand luster because of abusive working conditions: Nike. In the 1990s, under CEO Phil Knight, Nike faced its own factory-conditions-in-Asia scandal and that led to a transformation of its corporate culture that has since established the company as a world leader in both sustainability and innovation. Cook seems poised to do the same for Apple, and in his own very public embrace of change, so has Foxconn’s Terry Gou.

通过增加透明度以及回应合理的批评，库克明显将苹果从乔布斯的偏执中引领出来，并从耐克的先例中吸取了教训：由一个意志力强大的总裁领导下的梦幻公司曾经因糟糕的用工环境几乎砸了自己的品牌。20世纪90年代，在菲尔•科耐特总裁的领导下，耐克所面对的自己在亚洲用工环境的丑闻促使自身的企业文化发生了转变，这使其在可持续和创新方面确立了世界领导者的地位。库克似乎也能为苹果沉着应战，而且他有着非常开放的改革胸襟，富士康的郭台铭也一样。


Staff members work on the production line at the Foxconn complex in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, May 26, 2010, Kin Cheung / AP Photo

2010年5月26日，南中国深圳富士康集团的全体员工在生产线上工作，Kin Cheung / AP 照片


But what about the conditions in the first place? Who or what allowed for working weeks in excess of 60 hours, insufficient safety controls, and conditions that led to that bizarre wave of suicides? It’s easy to say that greed on the part of Apple and Foxconn and reckless disregard for the millions of workers eager to get a job in a fast-moving and economically tumultuous China were the cause. Easy, but not quite right

但起初的用工环境是怎样的？是谁或是什么允许了周周工作60小时以上，安全管控不足，和导致怪异的自杀潮的环境呢？很容易说成是苹果和富士康这一方的贪婪，在快速发展、经济纷乱的中国毫不顾忌那数百万的求职工人就是答案。这很容易，但不十分正确。


A bit more than a century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York ruled that a New York state law limiting the workweek to 60 hours violated the contract rights of both workers and employers. Not until the late ’30s was that decision overturned. The New York legislature had justified the law as a public-safety measure to protect the health of workers, but the court viewed it instead a sin fringement of economic freedom.

一个多世纪之前，在洛克纳诉纽约州的美国高级法院裁定，一条禁止每周工作60小时以上的纽约州州法侵犯了工人和雇主双方的合同权益。直到20世纪30年代后期才取消该规定。纽约立法机关调整法律，将之作为保护工人健康的公共安全手段，但法院却将之视为自由经济边缘有罪的替代品。


In their outrage over working conditions in China, most Americans probably do not recall just how recently things changed in the United States. That is not a justification for conditions in China, but it is quiet rebuke against the veiled and not-so-veiled accusations that China is somehow beyond the pale when it comes to labor conditions. In the past 40 years, Chinese society has gone from anagrarian economy with almost no individual freedoms and severe scarcity to a messy, complicated mix of authoritarian and capitalist. Factories such as Foxconn have been a source of substantial mobility of young workers away from subsistence farms and stultifying collectivism.

尽管在中国的用工环境方面罪行累累，但大多数美国人可能不记得美国的这类事情是如何刚刚才发生改变的。这并不是为中国的用工情况找借口，但一提到用工环境，中国好像有些夸大其词，这的确是对这类暗指或明指控告的反诘。在过去的四十年里，中国社会从几乎没有人身自由和物质极度匮乏的计划经济中脱离出来，成为专制主义和资本主义的复合体。年轻工人们从维持生计的农村和愚蠢的集体主义中走出来，而富士康这样的工厂则成为他们实际流动的一个资源。


Foxconn employs more than a million workers, 230,000 in one of its Shenzhen facilities alone–equivalent to a midsize American city. Audit after audit has shown abuses such as poor safety conditions, overcrowded dormitories, and discriminatory pay practices. But take the most troubled midsize American cities, with high rates of violent crime, drug use, in carceration, and yes, suicide. In fact, while the17 suicides at Foxconn plants between 2007 and 2010 sent tremors, the suicide rate was actually less—substantially so—than the suicide rate in the general population in the United States.

富士康雇佣了超过一百万的工人，单是深圳厂区中的一个就有23万，相当于美国一个中等城市规模。反复审计后呈现出诸如恶劣的安全环境、拥挤的宿舍、歧视性的支付行为这类弊端。但是以美国最糟糕的中等城市为例，也伴随有高犯罪率，吸毒，癌变，当然还有自杀，事实上，尽管在2007到2010年间富士康的17例自杀引起哗然，但实际上自杀率是很低的——基本如此——与美国相同人口的自杀率比起来。

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