GRALBUS/GRALINT-TED Talks-Leslie T. Chang: The voices of China´s workers

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Transcript: Hi. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the peoplewho make the things we use every day:our shoes, our handbags, our computers and cell phones.Now, this is a conversation that often calls up a lot of guilt.Imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less thana dollar an hour stitching your running shoes,or the young Chinese man who jumps off a rooftopafter working overtime assembling your iPad.We, the beneficiaries of globalization, seem to exploitthese victims with every purchase we make,and the injusticefeels embedded in the products themselves.After all, what's wrong with a world in which a workeron an iPhone assembly line can't even afford to buy one?It's taken for granted that Chinese factories are oppressive,and that it's our desire for cheap goodsthat makes them so.

So, this simple narrative equating Western demandand Chinese suffering is appealing,especially at a time when many of us already feel guiltyabout our impact on the world,but it's also inaccurate and disrespectful.We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that wehave the power to drive tens of millions of peopleon the other side of the world to migrate and sufferin such terrible ways.In fact, China makes goods for markets all over the world,including its own, thanks to a combination of factors:its low costs, its large and educated workforce,and a flexible manufacturing systemthat responds quickly to market demands.By focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets,we have rendered the individuals on the other endinto invisibility, as tiny and interchangeableas the parts of a mobile phone.

Chinese workers are not forced into factoriesbecause of our insatiable desire for iPods.They choose to leave their homes in order to earn money,to learn new skills, and to see the world.In the ongoing debate about globalization, what'sbeen missing is the voices of the workers themselves.

Here are a few.

Bao Yongxiu: "My mother tells me to come homeand get married, but if I marry now, before I have fullydeveloped myself, I can only marry an ordinary worker,so I'm not in a rush."

Chen Ying: "When I went home for the new year,everyone said I had changed. They asked me,what did you do that you have changed so much?I told them that I studied and worked hard. If you tell themmore, they won't understand anyway."

Wu Chunming: "Even if I make a lot of money,it won't satisfy me.Just to make money is not enough meaning in life."

Xiao Jin: "Now, after I get off work, I study English,because in the future, our customers won'tbe only Chinese, so we must learn more languages."

All of these speakers, by the way, are young women,18 or 19 years old.

So I spent two years getting to know assembly line workerslike these in the south China factory city called Dongguan.Certain subjects came up over and over:how much money they made,what kind of husband they hoped to marry,whether they should jump to another factoryor stay where they were.Other subjects came up almost never, includingliving conditions that to me looked close to prison life:10 or 15 workers in one room,50 people sharing a single bathroom,days and nights ruled by the factory clock.Everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances,and it was still better than the dormitories and homesof rural China.

The workers rarely spoke about the products they made,and they often had great difficulty explainingwhat exactly they did.When I asked Lu Qingmin,the young woman I got to know best,what exactly she did on the factory floor,she said something to me in Chinese that sounded like"qiu xi."Only much later did I realize that she had been saying"QC," or quality control.She couldn't even tell me what she did on the factory floor.All she could do was parrot a garbled abbreviationin a language she didn't even understand.

Karl Marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism,the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor.Unlike, say, a traditional maker of shoes or cabinets,the worker in an industrial factory has no control,no pleasure, and no true satisfaction or understandingin her own work.But like so many theories that Marx arrived atsitting in the reading room of the British Museum,he got this one wrong.Just because a person spends her timemaking a piece of something does not meanthat she becomes that, a piece of something.What she does with the money she earns,what she learns in that place, and how it changes her,these are the things that matter.What a factory makes is never the point, andthe workers could not care less who buys their products.

Journalistic coverage of Chinese factories,on the other hand, plays up this relationshipbetween the workers and the products they make.Many articles calculate: How long would it takefor this worker to work in order to earn enough moneyto buy what he's making?For example, an entry-level-line assembly line workerin China in an iPhone plant would have to shell outtwo and a half months' wages for an iPhone.

But how meaningful is this calculation, really?For example, I recently wrote an articlein The New Yorker magazine,but I can't afford to buy an ad in it.But, who cares? I don't want an ad in The New Yorker,and most of these workers don't really want iPhones.Their calculations are different.How long should I stay in this factory?How much money can I save?How much will it take to buy an apartment or a car,to get married, or to put my child through school?

The workers I got to know had a curiously abstractrelationship with the product of their labor.About a year after I met Lu Qingmin, or Min,she invited me home to her family villagefor the Chinese New Year.On the train home, she gave me a present:a Coach brand change purse with brown leather trim.I thanked her, assuming it was fake,like almost everything else for sale in Dongguan.After we got home, Min gave her mother another present:a pink Dooney & Bourke handbag,and a few nights later, her sister was showing offa maroon LeSportsac shoulder bag.Slowly it was dawning on me that these handbagswere made by their factory,and every single one of them was authentic.

Min's sister said to her parents,"In America, this bag sells for 320 dollars."Her parents, who are both farmers, looked on, speechless."And that's not all -- Coach is coming out with a new line,2191," she said. "One bag will sell for 6,000."She paused and said, "I don't know if that's 6,000 yuan or6,000 American dollars, but anyway, it's 6,000." (Laughter)

Min's sister's boyfriend, who had traveled home with herfor the new year, said,"It doesn't look like it's worth that much."

Min's sister turned to him and said, "Some people actuallyunderstand these things. You don't understand shit."

(Laughter) (Applause)

In Min's world, the Coach bags had a curious currency.They weren't exactly worthless, but they were nothingclose to the actual value, because almost no one they knewwanted to buy one, or knew how much it was worth.Once, when Min's older sister's friend got married,she brought a handbag along as a wedding present.Another time, after Min had already leftthe handbag factory, her younger sister came to visit,bringing two Coach Signature handbags as gifts.

I looked in the zippered pocket of one,and I found a printed card in English, which read,"An American classic.In 1941, the burnished patinaof an all-American baseball gloveinspired the founder of Coach to createa new collection of handbags from the sameluxuriously soft gloved-hand leather.Six skilled leatherworkers crafted 12 Signature handbagswith perfect proportions and a timeless flair.They were fresh, functional, and women everywhereadored them. A new American classic was born."

I wonder what Karl Marx would have made of Minand her sisters.Their relationship with the product of their laborwas more complicated, surprising and funnythan he could have imagined.And yet, his view of the world persists, and our tendencyto see the workers as faceless masses,to imagine that we can know what they're really thinking.

The first time I met Min, she had just turned 18and quit her first job on the assembly lineof an electronics factory.Over the next two years, I watched as she switched jobsfive times, eventually landing a lucrative postin the purchasing department of a hardware factory.Later, she married a fellow migrant worker,moved with him to his village,gave birth to two daughters,and saved enough money to buy a secondhand Buickfor herself and an apartment for her parents.She recently returned to Dongguan on her ownto take a job in a factory that makes construction cranes,temporarily leaving her husband and childrenback in the village.

In a recent email to me, she explained,"A person should have some ambition while she is youngso that in old age she can look back on her lifeand feel that it was not lived to no purpose."

Across China, there are 150 million workers like her,one third of them women, who have left their villagesto work in the factories, the hotels, the restaurantsand the construction sites of the big cities.Together, they make up the largest migration in history,and it is globalization, this chain that beginsin a Chinese farming villageand ends with iPhones in our pockets and Nikes on our feetand Coach handbags on our armsthat has changed the way these millions of peoplework and marry and live and think.Very few of them would want to go backto the way things used to be.

When I first went to Dongguan, I worried thatit would be depressing to spend so much time with workers.I also worried that nothing would ever happen to them,or that they would have nothing to say to me.Instead, I found young women who were smart and funnyand brave and generous.By opening up their lives to me,they taught me so much about factoriesand about China and about how to live in the world.

This is the Coach purse that Min gave meon the train home to visit her family.I keep it with me to remind me of the ties that tie meto the young women I wrote about,ties that are not economic but personal in nature,measured not in money but in memories.This purse is also a reminder that the things that you imagine,sitting in your office or in the library,are not how you find them when you actually go outinto the world.

Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)

Chris Anderson: Thank you, Leslie, that was an insightthat a lot of us haven't had before.But I'm curious. If you had a minute, say,with Apple's head of manufacturing,what would you say?

Leslie Chang: One minute?

CA: One minute. (Laughter)

LC: You know, what really impressed me about the workersis how much they're self-motivated, self-driven,resourceful, and the thing that struck me,what they want most is education, to learn,because most of them come from very poor backgrounds.They usually left school when they were in 7th or 8th grade.Their parents are often illiterate,and then they come to the city, and they, on their own,at night, during the weekends, they'll take a computer class,they'll take an English class, and learnreally, really rudimentary things, you know,like how to type a document in Word,or how to say really simple things in English.So, if you really want to help these workers,start these small, very focused, very pragmatic classesin these schools, and what's going to happen is,all your workers are going to move on,but hopefully they'll move on into higher jobs within Apple,and you can help their social mobilityand their self-improvement.When you talk to workers, that's what they want.They do not say, "I want better hot water in the showers.I want a nicer room. I want a TV set."I mean, it would be nice to have those things,but that's not why they're in the city,and that's not what they care about.

CA: Was there a sense from them of a narrative thatthings were kind of tough and bad, or was there a narrativeof some kind of level of growth, that things over timewere getting better?

LC: Oh definitely, definitely. I mean, you know,it was interesting, because I spent basically two yearshanging out in this city, Dongguan,and over that time, you could see immense changein every person's life: upward, downward, sideways,but generally upward.If you spend enough time, it's upward, and I met peoplewho had moved to the city 10 years ago, and who are nowbasically urban middle class people,so the trajectory is definitely upward.It's just hard to see when you're suddenlysucked into the city. It looks like everyone's poor anddesperate, but that's not really how it is.Certainly, the factory conditions are really tough,and it's nothing you or I would want to do,but from their perspective, where they're coming fromis much worse, and where they're goingis hopefully much better, and I just wanted to givethat context of what's going on in their minds,not what necessarily is going on in yours.

CA: Thanks so much for your talk.Thank you very much. (Applause)