Mike Daisey’s unrequited agitation

In a blog post today, Mike Daisey bristles at critiques of his fabricated story that aired on This American Life in January. Daisey performs the story—about appalling labor conditions at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, that he visited in 2010 where Apple manufactures some of its products—on stage as a theatrical monologue.

But many of the details simply aren’t true or rely on fabricated anecdotes. When This American Life (TAL), a decidedly non-theatrical outlet, discovered the truth behind Daisey’s story, they ran an entire episode retracting the original one.

Daisey says that he takes “dramatic license” in the way he tells the story. Most people call it lying or at least misrepresenting the truth. Despite saying, for instance, that he met workers who’d been poisoned by a neurotoxin called Hexane while working on an iPhone assembly line, Daisey never did, even though people producing Apple products elsewhere in China apparently have been poisoned by the substance.

In his post today, Daisey writes:

In the last forty-eight hours I have been equated with Stephen Glass, James Frey, and Greg Mortenson. Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers.

Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before.

Except that we all know that isn’t true.

He implies, as he did in the “Retraction” TAL episode, that the ends of making people aware of what happens in Chinese factories justify the means of fibbing.

If people want to use me as an excuse to return to denialism about the state of our manufacturing, about the shape of our world, they are doing that to themselves.

According to the “Retraction” episode, a huge part of Daisey’s motivation to tell the theatrical story was because around the time he visited Foxconn there was lots of attention in the U.S. news about working conditions in Chinese factories. Then, the hyperactive news cycle moved on, and people seemingly forgot about the issue and stopped caring. He is agitated. He is raising awareness. He is on a something of a crusade, which led him to Ira Glass and millions of TAL listeners and to great exposure for and of his story.

Daisey comes across as weirdly indignant at times during the retraction episode. He does admit that he never should have let the monologue be excerpted on TAL as journalism but also seems to think that the good he is doing by preaching about Apple’s manufacturing practices in China should outweigh the negatives of his untruths.

He would like to believe that his listeners, many who probably listened to the original episode on an Apple device, are as agitated as he is about how the company makes its products. Except that we all know that probably isn’t true.

Apple just sold three million of its new iPads in three days.

Craft manufacturing, from Brooklyn to Africa

Today at the Planet Money blog, Adam Davidson writes about Kings County jerky, an all-natural beef jerky operation in Brooklyn. Founder Chris Woehrle, who Davidson describes as “an artisanal food craftsman,” quit his corporate job one day to start pickling things and eventually decided he could corner the high-end jerky market.

It’s an example of what Davidson calls craft manufacturing. “Ignore low-priced commodity products,” he writes. “Focus instead on customizing high-quality goods for a select audience willing to pay a premium.”

The venture reminds me of another Brooklyn-based company that I covered for GOOD recently. Madécasse is an artisanal chocolate company that sources cocoa and processes chocolate in Madagascar, before shipping to markets in the U.S., Europe, and South Africa.

Its gourmet chocolates command a premium that ultimately makes the business’ model viable. And since the company makes chocolate in the country instead of shipping its cheap commodity, cocoa beans, abroad for processing elsewhere, most of the value is added in Madagascar and stays in local economies—just as Kings County Jerky provides a marginal boost to Brooklyn’s economy.

Olibérte Footwear, a Toronto-based shoe company that manufactures high-quality footwear in Ethiopia and exports to the West, relies upon a similar premium-quality model.

On craft manufacturing, Davidson concludes:

It’s one of the best alternatives to competing with China and other low-wage countries, which have perfected the commodity business of turning out lots and lots of identical products as cheaply as possible.

Forget that model. In America, we can focus on craft. That’s where the money is, and that’s where the hope lies for American manufacturing.

The same could be true for a segment of African manufacturers, and both sectors might rely on the same set of consumers: people in places like Brooklyn who are wiling to pay a premium for artisanal beef jerky, gourmet Malagasy chocolate, or high-quality Ethiopian leather shoes.

Made in Africa: Oliberté Footwear provides jobs to the continent in lieu of charity

For GOOD, I profile Oliberté Footwear and its Made in Africa manufacturing model:

‘Why or how could anyone want to make shoes in a place full of so much poverty and corruption?’

That’s the question many people asked Canadian Tal Dehtiar when he founded Oliberté Footwear, the first company to make premium shoes in Africa using African materials and explicitly linking shoes sold by Western retailers to job creation on the continent. Dehtiar started the Toronto-based company in 2009, and sales increased from a mere 200 pairs initially to 10,000 in 2011. He projects sales of between 20,000 and 25,000 this year.

“At Oliberté, we believe Africa can compete on a global scale,” he says, “but it needs a chance. It doesn’t need handouts or a hand up. It needs people to start shaking hands and companies to start making deals to work in these countries.”

Read the entire thing here.

Photo courtesy of Oliberté