Hannah Hecht's Blog

This week’s assignment was completely horrifying. The fact that there are still people in the world who work on a factory line at all, doing one menial task day-in and day-out, is disturbing in itself. But, the fact that American companies are employing these people to make our technology at $.31 an hour is an outrage. How can these companies make people work like this, knowing that such a situation would be an abomination in our own country? Every aspect of these workers’ lives seems like a living hell: assembling one piece with one motion hour after hour, working 12 to 34 hour shifts, living in a cramped dorm room with eleven other people, losing the use of your hands after years of repetitive motion, the inability to form a union and have a say in your own life, and the knowledge that there really is no escape, not even death, as the factories prevent suicide by installing nets between buildings. If I were in that situation I may work to organize a union, not to actually improve conditions, but to get myself thrown in jail, which would offer much better living conditions.

The story that really stuck with me from the NPR broadcast was the one about a man who lost the use of his hand in a machine. He lost his job and the company didn’t pay him anything for medical expenses. The man’s job had been to assemble the metallic back covering for iPads. The craziest part was that he had never even seen an entire iPad before! As we Americans, indulge in technology and consumerism, we never really stop to think about where our technology is coming from. I, like Daisey, thought that phones, computers, and iPods were assembled by robots in factories, and would have never imagined that every single piece was made in an old-fashioned human assembly line. Just because these workers aren’t don’t live in our country doesn’t mean, as employees of American companies, that they don’t deserve the same worker’s rights as we do.