The Catch Me Net

Apple, Inc. has been getting more than its fair share of attention lately, possibly due to the fact that they may not (quite) have told the truth when they were supposed to. They boasted on their web site of rigorous standards that all of their suppliers were required to meet in order to work with the famed creators of the iPhone and iPad. Alas, either Apple, Inc. knew and lied to the public about the records of its suppliers, or else they were simply unaware of the horrid conditions that some of these suppliers work under. American journalism did its job right in uncovering the story, finding evidence suggesting that Apple did in fact know about the abuses for a long time and chose not to do anything about them.

In one case, which borders on the absurd and tragically comic, a Foxconn employee ended up on the roof of the facility, threatening to commit suicide by jumping because he had been treated so badly. Management was finally able to get the man down and they took steps to ensure that the suicide rate by jumping decreased. What steps, you ask? Not by improving work conditions. No, their solution was to install nets on the outside of the building in order to catch suicide jumpers.

It sounds (and is) ridiculous. But it is true. The catch-me net is their solution. Because apparently that was the only problem they were actually trying to solve, that people trying to kill themselves by jumping tended to hit the ground violently and die from blunt force trauma. If the blunt force trauma could be averted, everything would be all right. Right?

The Foxconn case is not much different than so many other cases of Chinese companies manufacturing goods for American consumers. The theme is the same: exploitation. Low pay, very very long hours, long weeks, no rest, lousy living conditions, promises of benefits that never materialize. There is no dignity in this work.

Where am I going with this? I am driving towards defining a word, and defining it correctly so that all the world knows exactly what I mean when I say it and that there is no misunderstanding. The word is capitalism. In defining the word, I shall follow the same path as author Thomas Storck does when he quotes Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno: "[T]hat economic system, wherein, generally, some provide capital while others provide labor for a joint economic activity." So one party provides the financing, the other party does the gruntwork for a wage.

What is so wrong with this arrangement? It seems normal enough on the surface. But there is hidden problem here: to paraphrase Mr. Storck, the problem here is precisely the separation of work and property (or capital.) As he says so eloquently, "the separation between work and the ownership of productive property ... tends to liberate the appetite for amassing wealth from the natural limits attached to it when that wealth is acquired by an individual with his own labor applied to his own productive property."* It is a situation ripe for the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. The minority party, the rich, can enjoy the almost limitless increase to their stockpile of wealth (which can never be properly utilized by so few people), whilst the majority party, the labor providers, only gain a tiny share in the wealth they help to create.

Radio talk show personality Neal Boortz likes to describe the poor in this country as basically the ones who will not work hard enough to make a good living; the lazy, lousy, stupid, uneducated poor. He claims it is mostly a mindset of entitlement that keeps the poor in their poverty. Former governor Mitt Romney speaks as if he agreed with those sentiments. Both men suggest that we don't need to cut the economic pie into smaller pieces to go farther, rather, we need a larger pie for everyone to have a bigger piece. In other words, we need more people to become wealthy so that they may spread their own wealth around. I think the two of them have missed the point, though, kind of like Foxconn and its catch-me nets.

They in effect suggest that we just need more capital providers in this country, more rich people to finance the projects. Except that this seems to be precisely the problem. As people become more financially wealthy, they are generally less inclined to do their own manual labor, or simply do not have the time to do it anymore. Therefore, they hire out the work since they have the money. But what they are paying for is labor, something which in effect Boortz and Romney are both saying that we should work our way away from towards greater ownership of wealth.

Boortz and Romney (and many a capitalist) would essentially have us devalue the proper place of labor and concentrate instead on acquiring capital. This concentration leads us, I imagine, to despise labor.

If there is uncertainty about the conclusions I have drawn here, I submit for your consideration the very Foxconn of which I spoke earlier. It is a monstrously huge company that provides dirt cheap labor to build Apple's iPhone. Apple makes most of the profit from the sale of said phone, the Apple company gets rich, American consumers (in a way the capital providers) get their iPhone cheap and everyone is happy except for the Foxconn employees who make next to nothing for their labor.

Unions in the United States and elsewhere have attempted to correct this monumental injustice by demanding higher pay for their members' work. But again, capitalism rears its ugly head by continuing to separate labor and capital. Take the United Auto Workers as an example. They demand unreasonably high pensions and benefits and pay because they need not worry about troublesome things like cash flow and profits. They just build the cars, not balance the company books. They work, they do not own. So the union and the auto manufacturer end up at odds because neither is in a position to really care enough about the others' true needs.

We as Americans either disdain labor, value it by its monetary value too highly, or subconsciously realize that our work is still valuable but that our capitalist system disallows it to have value. Thus much of our work becomes outsourced to those people who will actually still do the work. That is the reason we see Made in China printed on everything, and also the reason there are so many Mexicans doing the menial labor as janitors, dishwashers, lawn care specialists, etc. Capitalism gravitates towards the cheapest labor in order to produce the greatest profit, regardless of the conditions necessary to make the labor cheap in the first place.

This is a systemic problem, and will only become worse the greater the separation between capital and the labor which creates it becomes. More capitalism (or more capitalists) is not the answer. Reintegrating man's labor and productive property is the answer. There is more pride, accomplishment, and justice in being rewarded for the work you truly own than for making a profit off another person's labor.

This is the essence of Distributism.

*Thomas Storck, Capitalism and Distributism: Two Systems at War