Steve Jobs, The Meaning of a Nonprofit, and The Moral Imagination

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I.

I remember my sense of anticipation some 18 years ago when I landed my first foundation job. None of my friends or colleagues had any inkling what happened inside these black boxes that consistently swallowed our proposals and issued polite rejections.

I had heard that foundations were about social change, that they were about marshaling private capital for the public good. I was excited by the idea of working with colleagues who had the time to think deeply about our community’s greatest challenges, who were not constantly passing the hat to pay the light bill.

My first day on the job, I met former activists who knew what it was like to grow up black and poor; I admired the view from my 28th story window of the city I loved. On my second day, I chided myself for my overly romantic idealizations of foundation work. Of course sexism, careerism, and other isms could exist here as elsewhere. But still, foundations were anointed institutions, set apart to serve as the conscience of the community. On my third day I was wondering what I had gotten myself into.

If my idealizations were so far off the mark, what then was a foundation supposed to be about?

One reader of a recent post commented thoughtfully about the purpose and identity of community foundations:

… [S]hould philanthropy uphold or challenge the status quo? I've always seen the role and purpose of [community foundations] as being one of brokerage between the two positions. We stand of necessity with a foot in both camps, and it is our specific function to interpret each side to the other and make them intelligible. A [community foundation] that plants itself squarely on one side or the other will betray its mission.  …  We serve mutually incompatible constituencies—proponents of social change vs upholders of the status quo. All over the world, I suspect, people in [community foundations] are deliberately muddying waters in order to satisfy both at once. It’s what we’re good at, and if we leaned too far in either direction we’d stop being [community foundations] and become something else.

So beautifully expressed. I immediately begin to wonder about the apparent cold-bloodedness of our hypothetical translator. Was he supposed to have no feelings one way or the other about what he was asked to interpret, and if so, why did he bother? Did he interpret ultimately for the sake of a paycheck or for the sake of justice? And did it matter?

It’s not only community foundations that struggle to keep one foot in two camps, to broker between the lived experience of poverty, say, and the privileged world of trustees.  Small and large private foundations struggle with this as well, as does every nonprofit intent on survival.  Can an organization interpret the world to everything and everyone except itself?

Perhaps a community foundation ceases to be a community foundation not when it sides with justice, but when it fails to understand what living in community requires of us.  Perhaps any foundation or charity betrays its purpose, its identity, when corporate thinking completely replaces moral imagination.

II.

I expect many observers of the nonprofit field have grown tired of arguments that pit values like efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability against more liberal values like adaptability, empathy, and justice. Organizations that embody the latter need a nonprofit chiropractor to straighten their spines, the argument goes; their stiff-necked corporatist cousins need to work on their flexibility. Those who make these arguments typically come to the triumphant conclusion that we need both kinds of thinking in our field.

Some go further and remind us that the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit, while still relevant to the Internal Revenue Service, has lost its meaning for a new generation of social entrepreneurs who have learned to think outside the IRS’s checkboxes. They argue that there’s a growing sector agnosticism in our field, and that it’s only a matter of time before the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit goes the way of the 8-track tape. They point to the jobs made possible by for-profit companies, to the services they provide and the products they create, and they ask, “Is this not also a kind of social value?”

In our headlong rush to let everything be everything, to embrace blended corporations and the like, it’s important to call to mind some values that cannot be so easily “blended.” Consider one of the stories currently in circulation about Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple.

III.

Here’s how the New York Times tells it:

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting.  He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

According to some contemporary hagiographists, here was the visionary Saint Steve looking out for you, the consumer. He was not content, as so many of us lesser men and women might have been, with just good enough.  A righteous anger, an uncompromising commitment to quality, a laser-like focus on getting it done: these are the marks of a wildly successful for-profit entrepreneur.

It turns out that reimagining the cell phone, under a tight deadline and under budget, required not only these enviable qualities, but also the mobilization of an overseas workforce at a facility where many employees worked 12 hours a day for six days week and earned less than $17 a day. After Apple’s engineers perfected the glass covers for the iPhones, they were quickly shipped to the factory, arriving in the middle of the night:

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to [one executive]. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

An accompanying New York Times report cited unfair and unsafe work conditions at the plant, alleging that Apple failed to act aggressively to address them:

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77.  Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

Not everybody has been moved by these reports. Tim Worstall, for example, contributor to Forbes magazine, puts it this way:

Essentially, the list of charges is that the near 1 million people who work for Foxconn (about 230,000 of whom produce products for Apple, the others assembling for Dell, HP, just about every electronics company in fact) have to work long hours for low pay in dangerous conditions.

Well, yes, they’re poor people living in a poor country. That’s what being poor means, having to work extremely hard to make very little.

And that’s the beauty of the market. Labor is pretty much stuck where it is, but capital can move anywhere in the world to use it to best advantage. That means money in the pockets of the poor and lower prices for you, the consumer.

I’m grateful for Mr. Worstall’s characterization of the poor, not because I think it’s any great model of human empathy, but because I think it’s a great illustration of what it means for there to be a failure of moral imagination.  This failure of moral imagination, I would argue, is endemic to very large corporations and their apologists, and threatens the not-for-profit entrepreneurs who unreflectively ape for-profit models.

IV.

The moral imagination is a muscle we need to exercise like any other. The one million Chinese who work for Foxconn are not simply means, but also, as Kant argues, ends in themselves. It’s not a given that being poor means having to work extremely hard in unsafe conditions to make very little. Fixing this in your supply chain needs to take priority over an on-time delivery of iPhones to eager consumers.  Cutting into profits is the cost of doing business while also embracing the values—empathy, love, justice—that so often characterize the charitable sector.

So yes, let us attend to the triple bottom line; let us serve in humility, drawing inspiration from wherever we can; let us straddle whatever worlds we must straddle, and translate as we must. Let us also be careful not to lose ourselves in the translation.

 

Comments

[Tyler Zey]

I'm still trying to reconcile my love for Steve Job's with the news from this press coverage. It's hard to imagine how he could be so ignorate in this one manner when he was so controlling in every other capacity.

[Max]

Uhh ... "ignorant"? How about "didn't care about the people who were working for him"?

Admiring someone who is successful, smart, and has changed the world in a way that's good for you (and me - I'm never without my iPhone, personally) is one thing. Loving someone because s/he has shown respect, caring and love for his/her neighbors is something else.

[Ernst & Ernest]

I am expendable. Ernst is disposable.

We applied for a single job and while we didn't qualify individually together we were "eminently qualified" and now find ourselves gainfully employed if a little cold and hungry at times.

Chin up! :-) :-)

[Prentice Zinn]

The parable of St. Steve is instructive.

We all need morals tutors - especially now that corporations are people.

Maybe we also need an app on our iphones to calculate a moral blindness index of our triple-bottom, social venture, blended capital social innovations.

WTC readers will enjoy Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory produced by NPR’s This American Life.

It explores the Dickensian dark side of the business of our beloved “tyrannical, stingy, tweaker”.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory

[Albert]

E & E, we are all disposable, our organs for sale on the international market even as we live and breathe. Very soon the powerful will conclude that it's more profitable to kill the middle class than give them jobs. The poor will be hired on a temporary basis to sing dirges and dig graves before they're shooed back into their tin shacks.

[Sally Wilde]

I'm getting blended with a glass of Pinot Grigio.

[philcubeta]

Albert, have you ever considered writing about Nozick versus Rawls in the light of increasing wealth disparity? Have our current arrangmenents lost their legitimacy? It strikes me that the free market has now exceeded the nation state, that the state is unwilling or unable to guarantee minimal rights to its citizens. You want a job? We have jobs in the factory/barracks at $17 a day, otherwise not. That is Freedom. Red China has come a long way and so have we.

[Albert]

Nozick famously countenanced adults entering voluntarily into non-coercive slave contracts, a conclusion he might have repudiated or reinterpreted as he grew older--I don't know. But you know all the moves in the philosophical game: after the first volley or two, we're splitting hairs over the felicity conditions for a fair contract, picking at the notion of coerciveness.

If we were back at the Academy, and there was a resurgence of interest in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, it might be worth the effort. Seems to me you take the wiser course as morals tutor, helping to mobilize those of us who intuit (correctly, in my view) that all that Nozick stuff is a shell game, a reductio ad absurdum of a philosophical enterprise that advances some careers while leaving the world morally impoverished. Rawls was feeling his way toward something good and fair. I don't know what Nozick was trying to do.

[Prentice Zinn]

Phil asks: "Have our current arrangements lost their legitimacy?"

This guy says its a done deal:

Sheldon S. Wolen. "Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism" (2010)

He bummed me out so much that I'm considering cashing in my social impact bonds and moving to a nice cave in the Sierra Tarahumara.