Inside the Foxconn "Prison"

I present to you, friends, unadulterated, the horrors witnessed by French journalist Jordan Pouille and recorded in his video, “Inside the Foxconn Prison,” are truly manifold. In what will soon be the The Jungle of its day, Pouille’s video of Chinese factory workers living their oppressed lives while shopping for food, listening to pop music, and meeting for lunch reminds us that jobs suck everywhere and that factory jobs suck the most.

Actually the images are fairly innocuous. It’s the tone of Pouille’s breathless piece that sticks in my craw:

And in case any social outburst happens, Foxconn may rely on People’s Liberation Army’s support. The folks are setting up a small artillery regiment… just two blocks away from Longhua factory’s main gate. Merry Christmas !

Obviously Pouille definitely knows about social outburst, given France’s success with the Banlieues.

As you recall, I’m of a mind that this is a job, these people are working, and that the factories are not, as we like to pretend, labor camps. Ask any of the grandparents of these workers and any survivors of WWII and the Stalinist purges what labor camps are really like. That said, we do owe these people a debt of gratitude and we should also hope that when their children become an economic juggernaut while we forget how to manufacture even the most basic of items that they will think back fondly on how supportive the Western world was of their “plight.”