On Friday 5 October, thousands of workers went on strike in a factory of the Taiwanese group Foxconn in China, which manufactures components for the Apple iPhone 5. This is not necessarily bad news, neither for the Chinese worker, nor for us in France...

What is happening at Foxconn is not a marginal phenomenon, but, perhaps, a warning sign, a signal, which some in trend studies would call "weak", when other popular adages might also say that it is the last straw.

Whatever the case, Foxconn or not, Chinese winter or not, the Chinese workers, "our" workers because they work for us, will accept their working conditions less and less, especially when they understand more and more the wealth created at the end of the chain. On the other hand, the popular class of peasant workers is inexorably becoming a middle class, which is gradually becoming gentrified, dreaming of or already equipping itself as a Western consumer, communicating and sharing on social networks, seeing the rush of consumers on the iPhone 5 and Apple's stock market capitalisation, complaining about its working conditions, and "unionising" as can be done in communist China. But the Chinese Communist Party will not subdue the Foxconn worker as it did the student at Tien an Men.

Times are changing, and so are the ways of expressing oneself, or rather, of making claims: Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, has a market share of 90%, more than 350 million users, and is causing anguish among Chinese leaders, both political and economic. The Chinese government is trying hard to control and censor the Internet and social networks, but it is very difficult and illusory to try to hold back the tide. Moreover, social networks are certainly powerful vectors for creating mobilisation and a sense of belonging, but they are only a channel of expression. If the medium can be gagged, "real life" remains. It is not Weibo that will make the revolution, but its users. 

The movement is underway, it's inexorable, and it's not necessarily bad news, either for the Chinese worker or for us: trade unionism in China could do some good in France. Globalisation is based on optimisation, optimisation of production costs. The higher the differentials linked to the cost of labour and its legislation, the more globalisation is economically 'reasonable', or let's say mathematically logical. The more wage or social dumping is reduced, the more the 'competitive' advantage is reduced. Consequently, if the world political class (or even just Europe) or international trade agreements struggle to create harmonisation and positive convergence (upwards), the market, which is otherwise accused of all the evils, could well, counter-intuitively, push it forward. By looking for the cheapest possible price (for which we are, each of us, private individuals or professionals, the first principals), the market creates the conditions for raising its production cost. Of course, the differentials are still colossal, they will always exist, and there will always be 'worse elsewhere', but as globalisation goes round the world, it goes up in stages, like the spiral of the Tower of Babel. And since at the same time this global ascent is also a race to over-equip the planet, it is an ascent into hell.

As Western consumers who demand respect and decency in working conditions, who aspire to a good work-life balance, who shout "down with the infernal pace", we are not really moved by the fate of the workers in the mines where we produce our sparkling high-tech but "low social" devices.

At the beginning of the century, Henry Ford's main economic principle was that every worker on the production line should be able to afford the Fort T he made himself. This principle is still valid today, as workers all over the world demand not only to be able to consume, but also to live and work like their "fellow consumer".