26

Neglected Elements

Production, Labor, and the Environment

Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller

Only recently have we started to understand the negative impacts of digital electronic equipment worldwide. Most of us, overwhelmed by the technological wonders that these devices are capable of, forget to ask ourselves “How have they been made?” “By whom?” “Where?” “Under what conditions?”

The increasingly faster and more versatile computers, appealing mobile phones, high-definition TVs, Internet, tiny music players, ingenious photo cameras, entertaining games consoles and even electronic pets give us the idea of a developed, pioneering and modern world. It is indeed a new era for many; but the dark side of this prosperous world reveals a very different reality, that far from taking us to the future, takes us back to a darker past.

CEREAL (Centro de Reflexión y Acción Laboral, 2006, p. 4)

This chapter aims to expand the conceptual boundaries used by contemporary production studies to analyze the media industries' impact on the environment and exploitation of labor “below the line” – below writers, producers, executives, directors, actors, and managers. We consider a larger number of occupations within media production that are essential to digital electronics, from mining metals to assembling low-value parts. This broadens the scope of technologies that count in “media production” so as to include anything with a circuit board and any media process or device that uses water or electricity.

We hope to show that production studies can benefit from this material approach. In that spirit, we begin with a brief critique of production studies' residual idealism, which we think keeps the subfield from distinguishing itself within media studies and diminishes its independence from the industry it takes as its object of research. Then we address the media's environmental and labor impact and oppression, and we explain how a green, materialist analysis can employ supply chain research to widen the purview of production studies. Before we conclude with suggestions for further research, we offer a brief case study of the political economy of Mexican maquiladoras, a key site for international production studies. Along the way, we hope to model changes needed in the long, valuable history of cultural research into media production.

Production Beyond Consciousness¹

In writing this chapter, we were fortunate enough to benefit from the legacy of a remarkable group of scholars who have studied media production from a cultural perspective over the past 60 years. There is a voluminous literature about print and audiovisual newsrooms and documentary (Boyd-Barrett, 1995; Breed, 1955; Cottle, 2003; Gans, 1979; Ericson, Baranek, & Chan, 1989; Golding & Elliot, 1979; Jacobs, 2009; Riegert, 1998; Tracey, 1977; Tumber, 2000; Hannerz, 2004; Tuchman, 1978; Tunstall, 1971, 2001; Worlds of Journalism, 2006). Cinema and television have generated outstanding critical ethnographies, from the moment when Hortense Powdermaker (1950) bequeathed Hollywood the name of “the Dream Factory” through to John T. Caldwell's study of Hollywood's intersecting “production cultures” (2008). Media scholars have written about the proxemics and deictics of making horror movies, science fiction and documentary television, and soap opera. The most significant names are Edward Buscombe, Manuel Alvarado, Albert Moran, John Tulloch, and Todd Gitlin; but others have contributed a great deal as well (Abu-Lughod, 2005; Alvarado & Buscombe, 1978; Buscombe, 1976; Cantor, 1971; Dornfeld, 1998; Elliott, 1979; Espinosa, 1982; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, & Larkin, 2002; Gitlin, 1983; Goldsmith & O'Regan, 2005; Gregory, 2007; Moran, 1982; Ortner, 2007; Silverstone, 1985; Tulloch & Alvarado, 1983; Tulloch & Moran, 1986; Ytreberg, 2006).

Their principal focus has been on how meaning is encoded at the point of production and generally linked to the morphology of texts and their decoding at the time of reception. Production studies overlap with media, communication, and cultural studies more generally. Like mainstream textual analysis and audience studies, such research is trying to answer a riddle: Why do these texts matter – what makes them meaningful? If we revisit the venerable, stolid engineer's or quantitative surveyor's model of sender–message–receiver (SMR), we find coeval status accorded to all three points on the chain, in a pragmatic way that wants to understand the best way of getting a point across (Weaver & Shannon, 1963). The model offered by television studies goes further, specifying the people involved in the process and displacing the linearity of SMR with feedback loops that fold in on themselves to create “television's ‘hermeneutic circle’” (Michaels, 1990).

Production studies oscillate, depending on inclination, genre, and access, between the consciousness of this or that particular agent – from scriptwriters and journalists to members of the public. These forms of consciousness are inscribed in communications between writers and producers, business strategies, films, programs, ratings figures, and fan blogs. There is value in understanding how texts come to be, their contents, and what happens to them. But the idealism of privileging consciousness – of owners, producers, texts, and audiences – puts a fundamental limitation on production studies. As these theories seek to specify how production aims to create consciousness, they are drawn into a conceptual territory dominated by the media industries themselves.

At such moments we can understand Bart Beaty's comment that “media studies has found its objects of study seemingly dictated by Entertainment Weekly” (2009, p. 23). One of the pioneering figures in the cultural studies of media production, the late Manuel Alvarado, noted that, some decades ago, “producers did not want researchers and academics sniffing around their underbellies, uncovering and revealing their working practices (and maybe malpractices!).” Conversely, today “everyone in the media industries [. . .] wants to explain the significance of their role” (Alvarado, 2009, p. 309).

One way to check whether production research has been captured by the consciousness business is to ask whether it is governed by the criterion of economic growth, such that production is valued for amplifying pleasure and serving capital accumulation (box office, ratings, and so on). That approach is compromised, because it focuses on the consciousness of the actors who create growth. In such cases new technologies, new modes of media consumption, more screens, higher resolution, greater mobility, and promises of ubiquitous information, entertainment, and nostalgia streaming into pocket-sized devices appear as virtues. In this story of limitless growth, the principal goal of technology is to overcome scarcity by providing smaller, faster, and lighter media devices at ever lower prices to consumers.

The material origin and function of media technologies is easily forgotten in such digital abundance, overtaken as it is by the symbolic power of the technological sublime: the enchantment with the seeming magic of iPhones, flat-screen HDTVs, wireless communication, 3-D IMAX cinema, mobile computing, and so on. The technological sublime relates to what Karl Marx called “the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour” once they are in the hands of consumers, who lust after products as if they were “independent beings” (1987, p. 77). In everyday life, the sublime experience of electronic machinery conceals the fact that physical work and material resources went into their “being.” Mere mention of the political–economic arrangements that make shiny new things possible is rejected like bad medicine, an unwelcome buzz-kill of “cool stuff.” The technological sublime makes the idea that “more is better” palatable, axiomatic; even sexy. Such symbolic power underlies what Juliet Schor (2010, pp. 40–41) calls “the materiality paradox”: the greater the frenzy to buy goods for their transcendent or non-material cultural meaning, the greater the use of material resources.

A green political–economic approach to media production, predicated on regard for workers and for Earth, can disrupt the technological sublime. Marx often drew his readers to this ethical orientation through sarcasm and irony, as when he wrote that industrial progress was “progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil [. . .] ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.” Capitalist technology and associated social relations sap “the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer” (Marx, 1987, p. 475). An unlikely ally, Heidegger, noted the paradox of the “forester who measures the felled timber in the woods and who to all appearances walks the forest path in the same way his grandfather did.” Heidegger recognized that, “whether he knows it or not,” the forester actually works for the culture industries; “subordinate to the orderability of cellulose,” he is “challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 299).

There is ironic tension in the very pages you are reading, which have been printed by an industry that is responsible for deforestation and high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, on a par with mining and petroleum. Making paper poisons the environment with chemicals and their synthetic byproducts, including dioxin, the most dangerous human-made substance emitted through pollution. Print-shop working conditions also pose environmental risks to workers exposed to toxic smog, heavy metals, solvents, silver, film and paper dust, and wastewater (Environmental Protection Agency, 1995; Tripsas, 1997, pp. 124, 142).

One kind of labor is exalted in the technological sublime. Not surprisingly, it is well suited to propagating the ideology of growth. To 1960s anti-socialist ideologues like Zbigniew Brzezinski (1969) and Daniel Bell (1977), communications technologies promised the permanent removal of grubby manufacture from the First World and its mooring in the Third, provided that reactions to global business and the blandishments of socialism did not create class struggle and that the US continued its textual and technical dominance. Since the 1970s, “knowledge workers” have been recognized as vital to sustaining First World economies, thanks to information-based industries that promised endless gains in productivity and the purest of competitive markets (Bar, with Simard, 2006, p. 351). This is the “aristocracy of talent” (Kotkin, 2001, p. 22), which has attained pre-eminence through a discourse of progress, informatization, and the “creative industries.” Its high priests proclaim an epoch of knowledge workers operating through techniques, technologies, and networks. This neoliberal clerisy has a presence even within cultural studies, via a New Right faction dedicated to a discourse of “creativity” (Flew & Cunningham, 2010; Keane, 2009; Mattelart, 2003, pp. 177–178, p.43).

Labor is thus acknowledged within the technological sublime, but only when it is abstracted from physical, dirty work: on the left, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer to “immaterial labor,” which exchanges information, knowledge, and emotion, filtered through computer invigilation (Hardt & Negri, 2000, pp. 286, 290–292). The futurist Alvin Toffler invented the related concept of “the cognitariat” (1983), which has since been taken up and redisposed by progressives. Negri (2007) uses it to describe people mired in contingent media work who have advanced educational qualifications and facility with cultural technologies and genres.

The cognitariat plays key roles in the production and circulation of goods and services, through both creation and coordination. They are media producers, to be sure: using media technologies, they add value to property, and they operate close to the means of creative production. But they comprise a category of laborers delimited by a narrowly defined consciousness industry:

• artists, comprising musicians, directors, writers, and journalists;
• artisans, including sound engineers, editors, cinematographers, and graphic designers;
• impresarios, who connect proprietors and executives to artists;
• proprietors and executives, who control employment and investment and negotiate with states; and
• audiences and consumers, who pay for content, interpret it in order to give media meaning, and elide real barriers of entry to media production through their dubious anointment as producers/consumers (prosumers).²

These groups operate within institutional contexts:

• private bureaucracies, which control investment, production, and distribution across the cultural/copyright industries;
• public bureaucracies, which offer what capitalism cannot, while comporting themselves in an ever more commercial manner;
• small businesses, run by charismatic individuals willing to take risks; and
• networks, that is, fluid associations formed to undertake specific projects.

Conventional production studies see the world of media labor confined to a small patch of creative industries in which the consciousness of industry mavens defines the reality of production practices, mirroring the growth ideology and the kind of apolitical enchantment with media technologies found in trade publications and entertainment news outlets. In contrast, a growing body of critical research into media labor is generating information from below the line of elite industry research; and it does so by drawing on more diverse and independent sources, including labor unions and policy analysis (Blair, 2001; Chakravartty, 2007; Christopherson, 2006; Day, 2005; Deuze, 2007; Dex, Willis, Paterson, & Sheppard, 2000; Elmer & Gasher, 2005; Forum, 2010; Gall, 1998; McKercher, 2002; McKercher & Mosco, 2007; Miller, 1990a, 1990b; Miller, Govil, McMurria, & Maxwell, 2001; Miller, Govil, McMurria, Maxwell, & Wang, 2005; Mosco & McKercher, 2008; Neff, Wissinger, & Zukin, 2005; Ross, 2009; Rossiter, 2006; Sholle, 2005; Ursell, 2000).

By modifying production studies' fundamentals through an ecological and labor approach, we hope to see media, communication, and cultural studies leaven their fascination with growth with a focus on sustainability. This is by no means aberrant. Some extant research considers the physical nature of work and what it does to people and the environment; such are Luis Reygadas' (2002) account of how television sets are made, Jefferson Cowie's (2001) study of Radio Corporation of America's “seventy year quest for cheap labor,” and Vicki Mayer's investigation of electronics assembly workers in Brazil (2011). At the same time there is a rich vein of cultural studies interacting with science and the environment, and some of it is articulated to the media (Acland, 2007; Berland, 2009; Nixon, 2000; Ross, 1995). The following section examines media production and the life cycle of media technologies from an ecological materialist perspective, using supply chain studies to provide a more comprehensive understanding of media production work.

Labor and Environment in Media Production

In the factory, I assemble five computer cards per minute. More than 3,000 cards in my 11-hour daily shift. But I have never used a computer myself, I don't know how to; what's more, I don't even know what the computers I make look like when finished.

(Unnamed Mexican worker; quoted in CEREAL, 2006, p. 6)

I work like a machine and my brain is rusted.

(19-year-old female worker from Guangxi at the Compeq printed circuit
board factory in Huizhou City, China; quoted in Chan & Ho, 2008, p. 22)

Media production, information and communication technology (ICT), and consumer electronics (CE) are major sources of toxic waste, pollution, and labor injustice – this is their legacy and, for now, their future.

Consider the US motion picture industry. Its mass-produced raw film stock was derived from chemical processes for making cotton cellulose and silver nitrate emulsion. By 1926 Eastman Kodak was the second largest consumer of pure silver bullion, after the US Government Mint. Nitric acid baths extracted silver nitrate, and the cellulose film base came from cotton that was bleached and immersed in nitric acid and sulfuric acid, rinsed in water, and fed into mixers with solvents, so as to produce a honey-like paste (Blair, 1926; Reilly, 1991; Twilight City, 1936). Eastman Kodak's raw-film plant at Kodak Park in Rochester, New York exposed workers to acids and acid vapors as well as to other irritants – including abnormal levels of silver and cotton dust, which inflamed their upper respiratory tracts and eyes and increased the risk of their contracting byssinosis or “brown lung” (Bowden & Tweedale, 2002; Dartmouth Toxic Metals Research Program, n.d.; Test-Tube Love Seat, 1940; Viscusi, 1985). From the 1920s on, Kodak Park was sucking more than 12 million gallons of water daily from Lake Ontario and spewing the used water, along with chemical effluents, into the Genesee River (Blair, 1926; George Eastman House, n.d.). By the end of the century, Kodak was using 35 to 53 million gallons of fresh water a day. It was the primary human source of pathogens released into New York State's environment (United States Department of the Interior, 2008).

Down the road from manufacturing, in 2006, the motion picture industry was the biggest polluter in Los Angeles. Its toxic emissions from driving, flying, exploding, and electrifying reached the same level as the aerospace and semi-conductor industries, while offshoring production further stimulated ecological despoliation. James Cameron's claims to global environmentalism, for example, may be welcome, but they are insufficient to make up for the horrendous impact of Titanic (1997) in Mexico, while Leonardo DiCaprio's credentials as a green spokesperson should be revoked in the light of how The Beach (2000, directed by Danny Boyle) destroyed Thai habitats (Corbett & Turco, 2006; Maxwell & Miller, 2009; Miller et al., 2005).

Likewise, before ICT and CE begin their life cycles as finished goods brought to market by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) – the major brands like Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard (HP), IBM, Kodak, Sony, and so on – they must be assembled piece by piece, along a supply chain that stretches from the mines that supply the metals to the foundries and factories making parts, and on to final assembly and packaging. There is no point along the supply chain where the environment and workers are safe from harm. For example the semi-conductor – the heart of all electronic equipment – is produced by hundreds of companies around the world for a market dominated by Intel, Samsung Electronics, Toshiba Electronics, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, ADM, and other major brand component suppliers. Its production requires millions of kilowatt hours of electrical power, half a trillion gallons of de-ionized water, hundreds of millions of cubic feet of bulk gases (much of it poisonous), and millions of pounds of acids and solvents exposing workers to dangerous toxins and carcinogenic chemicals (Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, n.d.).

By the time the finished electronic products reach above-the-line producers and consumers, evidence of the supply chain's toxic history has disappeared into the technological sublime – the devices appear as environmentally benign, postindustrial wonders. Also invisible is the radiation emitted from televisions, computers, electronic games, computer monitors, cell phones, laptops, networks of telecommunication and electrical towers, and power lines (Brigden, Santillo, & Johnston, 2008; Environmental Working Group, 2009; Lean, 2008). Human-made electromagnetic fields (EMFs), the basis of electronic media, spread radiation that has “no counterpart in man's evolutionary background” (Massey, 1979, p. 149). The electromagnetic spectrum is comprised of ionizing radiation (ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and gamma rays) and non-ionizing radiation (extra-low and very low frequencies (electrical power lines), radio waves, and microwaves). Non-ionizing radiation occurs at the atomic level when energy excites electrons and molecules without knocking the electrons loose, as ionizing radiation does (ibid., pp. 109–111). By 1980, research into this topic led to policies that set parameters for human exposure to these forces; those parameters included the energy level of signal generation, proximity to signal source, radio wave frequency resonance with affected bodies (EMF absorption rates vary among species, sizes, and ages), pulsed versus continuous wave forms, and duration. Transmission towers and signal generators (and some consumer electronics) pose biothermal risks to media workers continuously exposed to radio, TV, and telecommunication equipment, as well as to office workers on the top floors of buildings within the range of high-power transmission antennae (ibid., pp. 121–125; National Research Council, 2005, 133–137).

When these media technologies are thrown out at the end of their life cycles, the resulting electronic waste (e-waste) generates serious health and safety risks: bone disease, brain damage, headaches, vertigo, nausea, birth defects, diseases of the stomach, lungs, and vital organs, disrupted biological development in children. These conditions result from exposure to heavy metals (lead, cadmium, and mercury among others) and toxic fumes emitted when burning e-waste (Leung et al., 2008; Ray, Mukherjee, Roychowdhury, & Lahiri, 2004; Wong et al., 2007).

It is important to note that the ecological problem of media technologies is not just “one for the scientists.” As research on environmental harms caused by media technology emerged between 1980 and 2000, membership in environmental groups worldwide more than doubled. Activists, public health advocates, workers, and policymakers publicized the impact of the electronics, electrical, and energy industries in Silicon Valley and elsewhere (Byster & Smith, 2006, p. 109; Dalton, 2005, pp. 453–454; Maxwell & Miller, 2009). Bodies such as the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the International Organization for Standardization asked for greater transparency and uniformity in the way ICT and CE corporations do business – and so have international legal agreements to reduce the toxic content of electric and electronic goods, for example the 2003 European Union's Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE) and the 2003 Directive on the Restriction on the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment. OEMs were forced to confront environmental problems in production and to devise internal codes of conduct that met ILO guidelines for worker safety (RoHS).

With the exception of Sony, which commenced environmental audits in 1994, the major companies only began to consider ecological impacts in the 2000s (van Liemt, 2007). To minimize state regulation and to gain green credibility with the public in First World countries, OEMs adopted a strain of public relations pioneered in the 1990s by textile and footwear industries in order to address labor exploitation and environmental damage. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) became a watchword as OEMs began to audit working conditions across their global supply chains and to disclose their findings and remediation efforts.

OEMs are the lords of the electronics supply chain; they control intellectual property, technological research, design, and marketing. Below them are the extractive industries, small-scale cottage assemblers, and contract manufacturers. The latter have grown massively since the 1990s, with about 75% of global electronics manufacturing and 60% of cell phone production outsourced to them by OEMs (GoodElectronics, Overeem, & CSR Platform, 2009, pp. 19–20). Five major contractors control this section of the chain:

• Foxconn Technology (Hon Hai Precision) of Taiwan: Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard (HP), Sony, Amazon Kindle;
• Flextronics of Singapore: Cisco, Kodak, Ericsson, HP, Microsoft, Motorola;
• Jabil of the US: Cisco, Philips, HP;
• Celestica of Canada: Motorola, Palm, Research in Motion, Sun Microsystems, HP;
• Sanmina-SCI of the US: Cisco.

These multinational ICT corporations operate factories in scores of countries, employing tens of millions of workers – a structural arrangement that emerged in the late 1970s, when big ICT and CE firms set about departing First World factories for the sweatshops of developing countries, in accordance with the New International Division of Labor (NIDL) (Fröbel, Heinrichs, & Kreye, 1980).³ While it is common to find environmental and labor codes within these companies' corporate communications, the pressure for them to adhere to safety guidelines has come largely from OEMs' implementation of supplier responsibility audits. In 2004 Dell, HP, IBM, and the contract manufacturers Flextronics, Solectron (bought by Flextronics in 2007), Sanmina-SCI, Celestica, and Jabil developed an Electronic Industry Code of Conduct, which set benchmarks giving watchdog groups like Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) tough standards by which to judge OEMs like HP (high marks) and Apple (low) (van Liemt, 2007, p. 15).

The main trade groups representing the OEMs are the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI). The EICC and GeSI have begun supply chain audits of labor and environmental conditions in the extractive industries. Metals used in electronics (tin, cobalt, palladium, gold, copper, silver, and aluminum) are extracted from mines (and obtained from recycling). They then travel the supply chain via buyers, brokers, and refiners. In 2008 the annual proportion of the global metal supply going into ICT and CE was 36% of all tin, 25% of cobalt, 15% of palladium, 15% silver, 9% of gold, 2% of copper, and 1% of aluminum (GeSI & EICC, 2008, pp. iii, 24–26, 34–36; Grossman, 2006, pp. 29–33). Roughly 11 million people work in the formal mining sector, which operates about 4,100 major mining companies (of which the top 150 control 80% of the global output). Tracking the number of workers in the metals supply chain is complicated by a globally diffuse informal sector – artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), a notoriously harsh, low-tech, poverty-driven form of mining – and by a large population of workers whose jobs depend on it (porters, buyers/transporters, smugglers, exporters, and so on). The ILO (2010) estimates that, while there are about 13 million workers in ASM worldwide, the total number of workers involved is 200 million.

Virtually all ASM is concentrated in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where about a million children labor in mines (GeSI & EICC, 2008, p. 56). In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, over 90% of mines are controlled by militias, who use threats, intimidation, murder, rape, and mutilation to enslave women and children, then extract profits to buy more weapons. This supply of “conflict metals” /” conflict minerals” is mixed with the rest of the global supply and sold on the international commodities market before ending up in phones, computers, games, and media production equipment (Global Witness, 2009). In terms of the environmental impact, over a quarter of the world's active mines “overlap with or are within a 10-kilometer radius of a strictly protected area”; one third is “within areas of intact ecosystems of high conservation value”; one third “in stressed watersheds”; one fifth in earthquake prone areas; and more than a third “in areas that may be predisposed to water quality problems” (Miranda et al., 2003, p. viii). This does not take into account the chemical waste and toxic effluents associated with refining.

The current proliferation of CSR strategies that use supply chain audits has opened up a critical juncture, exposing new information about ICT and CE supply chains. While not completely transparent, the new audits make OEMs more vulnerable to ecologically informed and critical production studies, if we undertake them (though there's no telling how long today's environmental perestroika will last). Still, there is no uniform pattern to these audits in media production, because film and TV producers and distributors have patchier CSR strategies for environmental reviews – by now we hope it is clear that media production must include ICT, CE, and film and TV manufacturing and studio “creativity” (van Liemt, 2007). And, with labor geographically so dispersed via international subcontracting, union density is “startlingly low around the world,” which makes it difficult to gather reliable information on working conditions and labor practices (Ferus-Comelo, 2008, p. 141). This might explain why existing audits have been unsuccessful in reaching the part of the supply chain where thousands of labor-intensive component makers provide contractors with resisters, capacitors, cables, switches, microchips, unfinished circuit boards, wires, connectors, power supplies, clips, screws, and so on. Part of this activity is internalized within large factories where it can be monitored, but a significant amount of work takes place in people's homes (GoodElectronics et al., 2009, p. 51).

Studies of the supply chain must also take into account e-waste, respecting methods developed by environmental science, public health, and engineering scholars, policymakers, and activists. An increasing number of firms address the problems of reuse and recycling of old or discarded electronics, while the EU's WEEE Directive and efforts to enlist manufacturers in recycling have brought greater pressure on OEMs to take responsibility for their products' afterlife. Until that happens, global working conditions in the informal salvage and recycling sector will remain marginal to CSR audits, and millions of workers who labor in the global salvage business will be ignored.

These inconsistencies in OEM audits are coupled with a lack of sociological and historical understanding of the socioeconomic changes that have accompanied the rapid growth of contract manufacturing in Asia and elsewhere. The internal audits give us the names of Dell's and HP's suppliers, for example, but they don't tell us that Apple petitioned the US Federal Communications Commission to hide governmental review of the iPad, which would have disclosed to the public the way in which it exploits multinational labor (see Federal Communications Commission, n.d., for Apple's letter to the Commission's inquiry, BCG-E2381A). Meanwhile, investigations into its Chinese suppliers have shown that Apple uses children to assemble its gadgets and that it is unresponsive to the chemical poisoning of workers at Wintek (an iPhone supplier) and to the searing conditions behind numerous suicides at a Foxconn factory that makes iPhones and the first iPads (Barboza, 2010; Chan, 2010; Moore, 2010a, 2010b). The suicides should be of particular concern for media production researchers, because they point to an ongoing clash between the twenty-first-century means of producing media technology and the mass mobilization of rural Chinese youth to work in these factories (the largest migration in history, by some measures). These stresses of factory life are symptomatic of contemporary industrial organization: we know that post-Fordist factory systems are geared to meet OEMs' demand for rapid design innovation and ever shorter cycles of new product roll-outs through just-in-time production. But there is also an ethico-political dimension to the way Chinese contract manufacturers implement this system: these young people are removed from virtually all the social resources that would help them adjust to their sequestration in high-tech, high-speed, high-security compounds – that is, resources like family, friendship, freedom of association (they can't even talk to one another on the assembly line), or forms of cultural enjoyment and release.

Workers losing their lives to meet production deadlines has been part of communication technology's history, from railways to integrated circuits. What's new here is that a vast population of young workers has been thrust into a low-cost, high velocity factory system whose output is increasingly driven by First World hyperconsumerism, with its manufactured desires for fast-changing fashions promoted by advertising and marketing. Apple's pressure on suppliers is not only an end-run to beat competitors to market, but also an incitement to the frenzied pursuit of the symbolic power of the device and its promises of instant gratification via the technological sublime.

Production studies must play a part in exposing these unsustainable systemic tensions in the ICT and CE supply chains, perhaps taking inspiration from a new generation of Chinese workers, who have begun to push back against OEMs through strikes and other forms of resistance, including by using mobile devices to document and publicize the inhumane working conditions at Foxconn and other contract manufacturers (Barboza & Bradsher, 2010, p. B1).

The example of such activists impels us to conduct studies of the total life of the commodity sign, from its manufacture to its decline, and of all the people who bring it to us and then remove it when we've grown bored with it or it breaks. Before we consider other ways in which production studies can train its focus on these issues, the following section provides a closer look at a key site of media production work in the global assembly line.

The Case of las maquiladoras

The National Coalition of Electronic Industry Workers declares that, five years after the publication of the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct, the same companies that signed the Code are the ones violating the human labor rights.

The Code states (part A-7) that the signing companies should respect the workers' freedom of association. This right, in our Federal Labor Law, is constantly violated. We recall two recent cases. The first one: the dismissal of more than 10 workers of Flextronics, only because they demanded transparency on the issue of profit shares.

The second case was the dismissal of Aureliano Rosas Suárez, Omar Manuel Montes Estrada, and Vicente de Jesús Rodríguez Roa, sacked because they demanded their right to have their wages leveled. They also worked for the company Flextronics.

We inform the International Electronic Industry that the members of the National Coalition of Electronic Industry Workers will continue to use this mask as a symbol of our repression. But the coalition will continue demanding and defending our human labor rights.

(National Coalition of Electronic Industry Workers; quoted in Centre for Reflection and Action on Labour Issues, 2009, p. 28)

This quotation comes from a group of Mexican workers in electronics. They stage protests in white masks for the media and around the employment agencies that govern casualized labor in assembly plants. The coalition stands up to this political economy. It is the solitary civil society voice that is organic to workers on the line (and to those who have been dismissed). The official trade unions that address working conditions in Mexican ICT and CE plants are neither representative of workers nor interested in worker grievances. Instead they help manufacturers bypass laws covering contract negotiations, and they prevent labor from forming independent unions. As CEREAL put it: “90% of workers belong to a trade union; but 90% of those do not know it” (2006, p. 15).

Mexican maquiladoras opened their doors in the mid-1960s, when the bracero (“strong-arm”) guest worker program between Mexico and the US was terminated. The Mexican state introduced import tax exemptions to stimulate in-bond input assembly,⁴ and Washington permitted the duty-free return of assembled components that had originated north of the border. What began as a temporary initiative attained massive economic significance during the 1980s and 1990s, when electronics became a core industry. The industry's warehouses, managers, and researchers are generally based in San Diego. Components are imported from there – and also from Germany, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Thailand. So “high value” is created in the US and elsewhere; dangerous, dull, and poorly remunerated work is done across the border. Tijuana was dubbed “TV Capital of the World,” because so many sets were assembled there. In 2002 Mexico accounted for 30.42% of television set and video equipment exports to the US, and China for 18.5%. But competition arose due to tax incentives and to low-wage and energy costs in China, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietam. By 2006 Mexico's and China's percentages were virtually equal (35.07% compared to 34.76%). Maquiladora employment fell each year, from 2000 to 2003. The global recession, evident by 2008, slashed employment and investment. The nearly 200 companies that assembled ICT and CE in Mexico decreased production by almost 40% from the middle of that year: Sony announced the closure of a TV plant in 2009, with the loss of 600 positions. The maquiladora slide slowed later that year, because firms looked to cut the time wasted exporting parts and importing sets across the Pacific. Production was boosted and job growth accompanied it, but not at pre-recession levels. In all, 144 plants closed in the 12 months leading up to October 2009, and 122 new ones opened (see Castañeda, in this volume; Centre for Reflection and Action on Labour Issues, 2009; Gaffney, 2010; García & Simpson, 2006; Mendoza, 2010; NOTIMEX, 2010).

It is not as though labor costs were high in the maquiladoras: wages consistently declined from 1993 to 2006, while productivity increased. Two full-time workers in a Mexican plant receive just two thirds of the wages needed to support a family of four, prior to medical and educational expenses. Not surprisingly, the people who make these gadgets can't afford to purchase them. Because a flat-screen TV sold in San Diego is exempt from customs duty, it costs less there than where it was made, across the border in Tijuana (Where Is “Away?” 2009). The key instrument of exploitation has been the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement/Él Tratado de Libre Comercio, because, despite technically including environmental and labor protections, the Agreement/Tratado ushered in low wages, violations of the labor law, and exposure to unhealthy chemicals and gases – a toxic life in every sense (Simpson, 2007, pp. 166–167).

The 1983 La Paz agreement between Mexico and the US mandates that maquiladora waste return to its country of origin; but enforcement has been lax, and statistics about the flow of contaminated goods and the environmental side-effects of production are spotty. Civil society groups on both sides of the border, notably Las Voces de la Maquila (http://www.lasvoces.org), the Colectivo Chilpancingo Pro Justicia Ambiental and the Environmental Health Coalition (see both at http://www.environmentalhealth.org), remind authorities of their responsibilities and encourage citizen activism (García & Simpson, 2006; Simpson, 2007). Greenpeace (n.d.) is also involved.

Women have long been at the forefront of the maquiladora electronic labor process. For instance, when RCA moved its radio and TV plants from New Jersey to Indiana and then to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, in search for ever cheaper labor, company elders sought a workforce of young unmarried women. This strategy had little to do with biological kinesiology (in other words, with the docile, nimble-fingered girls found in managerial playbooks); it was rather about gender and power (Cowie, 2001, pp. 17–18; Maxwell & Miller, 2008). The Centre for Reflection and Action on Labour Issues (2009) interviewed thousands of workers in 2008 and 2009 across the Mexican electronics sector, disclosing systematic sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination. Employees are often subjected to invasive interviews, body searches, and pregnancy tests; illegally excessive working time is common and uncompensated; women are sexually harassed; contracts are non-existent or highly precarious temporary agreements; some managers use psychological violence; workers are exposed to dangerous chemicals and fumes, having little or no training about the hazards or proper protection from them; and the freedom to form independent unions or other organizations is absent. Despite the fact that, in factories, each woman prepares more than a hundred central processing units per an hour, women are categorized as “temporary” employees, so employers can elude regulations and contracts that govern full-time workers (Paterson, 2010; van Liemt, 2007, pp. 12–14).⁵

Conclusion: Creative Production Is Theft

Remaining non-union is essential for survival for most of our companies. If we had the work rules that unionised companies have, we'd all go out of business.

(Robert Noyce, co-founder of Intel; quoted in Catholic Agency for Overseas Development [CAFOD], 2004, p. 3)

I was three months pregnant. I told them when I was one month pregnant; I asked my facilitator to move me, but she said no, not until they have found someone else. I worked from 3.30 to 12 p.m. On 17 November 2005, when I arrived at work, I started to feel unwell. I went to the lavatory and noticed I was bleeding. I went straight to the infirmary and the doctor told me it was nothing, that it was normal. I went back to the production line and told my supervisor I was feeling quite sick, and asked him for permission to leave. He talked with the doctor over the phone and then told me “I'm not letting you out, don't be a wimp. . .” [T]he baby wasn't growing properly. [The doctors] told me it was because of the lead, and I believe that; that's why I wanted to be moved when I found out I was pregnant, but I wasn't allowed. . . I lost my baby. . . I got very depressed and spent all those days crying. I was only given two days sick leave.

(Rosa, 21, ICT production worker for contract manufacturer Jabil, Chihuahua, Mexico; quoted in CEREAL, 2006, p. 23)

There are [. . .] plenty of girls with good eyes and strong hands. If we run out of people, we just go deeper into China.

(Manager of Chinese electronics factory; quoted in CAFOD, 2004, p. 31)

Foxconn's suicides are a reminder of the human cost that can come with the low-cost manufacturing US tech companies demand.

(Bloomberg Businessweek; quoted in Wong, Liu, & Culpan, 2010, p. 36)

Despite the evidence, conventional economic models persistently omit the environmental and human costs incurred by toxic chemicals, fossil-fuel energy consumption, plastics, pollution, and other harms that inhabit the supply chain and life cycles of media and communication technologies. Environmental and human “expenses” remain “off the books” when net revenues are tallied up to measure growth in media and technology markets, adding to the illusion that these sectors are ecologically benign drivers of economic expansion. Were we to consider ecological and human liabilities as vital financial information, then accounting in the media and communication sector would reveal “fictitious incomes and real costs that haven't been reckoned with yet,” demonstrating the need for sustainability and for regulated limits to growth (Schor, 2010, p. 18).

We have argued that, while the focus on consciousness and work in production studies generates worthwhile research at a particular level, the result is fundamentally indistinguishable from that of the ordinary science of media, communication, and cultural studies, and it makes production studies susceptible to industry self analysis/interest. Too often, we recycle a pro-growth ideology because we are dazzled by the aura surrounding media technologies and creative occupations – the so-called aristocracy of talent, which comprises the recognized ensemble of workers in production practices. Our aim here has been to throw some shade over that dazzle and to look instead at neglected labor through a more materialist, ecological understanding of the physical environment in which production takes place. Media production studies can help to establish a just system of environmental accounting that shows how and where creative production steals from the Earth and from the working people in the name of growth. We'll conclude with some observations on where future research is needed.

Given the scope and scale of media-related occupations across global networks, media production researchers face many challenges in studying labor and the environment. One difficulty concerns the definition of who counts as a media production worker. We have argued that conventional production studies have circumscribed this sector too narrowly and that more comprehensive research on media production labor is needed. As we have shown, before a director says “action” or an editor enters data that shape a narrative, a thousand assembly lines from all over the world have streamed into production vectors. By some estimates, there are nearly 200 million ICT workers, including professionals, software and services, assembly workers, and jobs that are enabled by the skilled use of information technology (Raina, 2007, pp. 18–25). Future research must be increasingly comprehensive, so the field of production studies needs to adapt and to design quantitative methods to help identify organizational relationships, geographical bonds, and interlocking occupations in media production supply chains, which currently link computer scientists, engineers, designers, marketing researchers, miners, mineral brokers, refiners, chemists, factory laborers, server-warehouse employees, telecommunications workers, truck drivers, salespeople, office clerks, and anyone whose job has been “informationalized” with ICT tools, or who has contributed innovation, time, blood, or sweat to the making, distribution, and reception of a media device or text.

Another difficulty arises when we try to look beyond settled patterns in the NDIL to discern new formations in the structure of global labor at different sites around the world. For instance, the late twentieth-century pattern that set poor regions to make the “low-value” constellation of pieces and parts of a device and the richer regions to produce “high-value” research and development remains largely intact; but the rapid pace and expansion of outsourcing is making stark distinctions of this kind increasingly unreliable as guides for present-day production research (Bottini, Ernst, & Luebker, 2007). By 2004, 35% of ICT and CE manufacturing jobs were in China (as compared to 7% in the US, 9% in Japan, and 10% in Western Europe). As the case of the maquiladoras shows, the trend suggests further concentration in Asia, at the expense of jobs in competing countries like Mexico, which was once a standard site for outsourcing low-wage ICT and CE manufacturing (Carrillo, 2009, p. 14; van Liemt, 2007, p. 8). Production studies must continue to track these macrolevel changes in the international division of labor and to be alert to their effects on ecosystems and on workers' lives.

Finally, low levels of unionization in the global supply chain have severely hampered research on the working conditions and environmental hazards associated with media/film, ICT, and CE production. Without widespread union representation and improvement in the exercise of associational rights, production workers lack independent institutional sources of information – a situation that is “casting doubts on the prospects of raising labor standards through [CSR] codes of conduct alone” (Ferus-Comelo, 2008, p. 157; Centre for Reflection and Action on Labour Issues, 2009). As long as political–economic arrangements militate against free unionization, it will be difficult to find reliable and representative statistical analyses of workers' exposure to toxic materials and of other workplace hazards. To meet this challenge, media production studies must do more to internationalize its fieldwork and research methodology, placing researchers and doctoral students on the ground in the global supply chain. In the meantime, research will rely on a patchwork of non-governmental organizations, local activists, policy-oriented journalists, and CSR audits. Reports made by SACOM (Chan & Ho, 2008), by the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD, 2004) and by the Centro de Reflexión y Acción Laboral (CEREAL, 2006; Centre for Reflection and Action on Labour Issues, 2009), for example, have provided instructive accounts of the conditions in Chinese and Mexican plants (see also Nautilus Institute, Natural Heritage Institute, & Human Rights Advocates, 2002). As we have seen, such sources depict a system with weak labor protection, which is dependent on poverty-driven, gendered, immigrant labor. The majority of workers are young, single, female migrants aged between 16 and 25, laboring in factories for seven days a week and for 16 hours a day, in compulsory residency, in sequestration from friends and family, and with no social freedoms. Some are fired at 21, when they attain their majority. Men are often not hired because they are seen as potentially militant (Chan & Ho, 2008, p. 8).⁶

This is a sobering corrective to celebrations of media “freedom.” So, as we track the lives of commodity signs that fascinate us, we need to forgo the comfort of the consciousness paradigm, striving instead for a more complex and nuanced approach, which is as broad-minded and expansive as the work of the activists, corporations, unions, and scientists who study labor and environmental processes. That means forming teams with environmental scientists and labor sociologists; reading environmental audits; and learning technical languages – in short, being as nimble as an activist or policymaker is.

We are confident that the methods and ethics of media, communication, and cultural studies can contribute to a more just and sustainable world, if agile media production analysts are prepared to go back, back, back – like a similarly agile baseball or cricket outfielder or football goalkeeper – to control the signs they love.

NOTES

1 Several terms and phrases are used to describe the media industries and their analysis, all of which connect to the notion of consciousness. They include “creative industries” (used by industry policy and the New Right of cultural studies); “culture” or “cultural industries” (used by the left and by some policymakers); and “copyright industries” (favored by US capital and its allies and handservants).

2 For a useful account of the prosumer, a preferred concept of cultural studies' New Right, see Ritzer and Jurgenson (2010).

3 We have seen this tendency in film-and-television production as well (Miller, Govil, McMurria, & Maxwell, 2001; Miller, Govil, McMurria, Maxwell, & Wang, 2005).

4 In-bond (or maquila) assembly refers to the requirement that maquiladoras post a bond equivalent to the value of the imported, duty-free components. This is done to force the factory to export all finished products containing the imported inputs, at which point the bond is returned.

5 For an explanation of this conduct as systematic and built into the architecture of certain sites rather than as individual conduct, see Salzinger (1997, 2000). This research is from an earlier time, when these practices may have been less common.

6 One of us spent time with Chinese factory workers during the only afternoon a week when they were allowed to move beyond factory walls.

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FURTHER READING

Attali, J. (2008, Spring). This is not America's final crisis. New Perspectives Quarterly, 25, 31–33.

Basel Action Network. (2007). JPEPA [Japan–Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement] as a step in Japan's greater plan to liberalize hazardous waste trade in Asia. Seattle, WA: BAN.

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Clapp, R. W., & Hoffman, K. (2008). Cancer mortality in IBM Endicott plant workers, 1969–2001: An update on a NY production plant. Environmental Health, 7(13). Retrieved March 30, 2009, from ukpmc.ac.uk/classic/articlerender.cgi?artid=1516365

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