Stories of Electronic Workers Suffering Toxic Exposures
The book contains stories about electronic workers suffering toxic exposures and fighting over it. From the Southwestern US and the Maquiladora region on the Mexico–United States border, to Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, China, and India.
The book argues that "far too (words) have been addressed to the downside of the (electronics industry's) revolution". Its co-editors, in a signed article titled "The Quest for Sustainability and Justice in a High-Tech World", say: "Although most consumers are eager to enjoy their latest electronic games, few relate the declining prices of these and other electronic technologies to the labor of Third World women, who are paid pennies a day."
Other issues focused on by the co-editors include environmental degradation, occupational health hazards, and the "widespread ignorance" of the "health and ecological footprints of the global electronics industry".
There are problems of contamination by hi-tech manufacturing (of workers, air, land and water) from all around -- Silicon Valley in the United States, Silicon Glen in Scotland, Silicon Island in Thailand, and Silicon Paddy in China. It contrasts the reality between the "CEOs and upper management" drawing "multimillion dollar salaries and 'golden parachutes'" as against the reality of the production workers living in packed dormitories and often facing sweatshop conditions.
Read more about this topic: Challenging The Chip
Famous quotes containing the words stories of, stories, electronic, workers, suffering and/or toxic:
“Stories of parents make good children.”
—Punjabi proverb, trans. by Gurinder Singh Mann.
“A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.
Still, you can’t listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“In former times and in less complex societies, children could find their way into the adult world by watching workers and perhaps giving them a hand; by lingering at the general store long enough to chat with, and overhear conversations of, adults...; by sharing and participating in the tasks of family and community that were necessary to survival. They were in, and of, the adult world while yet sensing themselves apart as children.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)
“America today is capable of terrific intolerance about smoking, or toxic waste that threatens trout. But only a deeply confused society is more concerned about protecting lungs than minds, trout than black women.”
—Garry Wills (b. 1934)