Slashdot Mirror
Repercussions of Reporting on Apple 'Sweatshops'
PRC Banker writes "Following the media attention over Apple using 'sweatshop' tactics to manufacture iPods, facts were disseminated making things seem not as bad as first reported. However, recent developments suggest that 'Apple Computer's iPod supplier FoxConn has decided to sue the media for mis-reporting on working conditions in their factories. Rather than sue the British tabloids, FoxConn sues a Shanghai newspaper. The reporter has a translated version of his personal experience and thoughts.' Powerful Chinese company threatens local media. Worrying indeed, especially given this company's track record. The president of Foxconn is the richest man in Taiwan, and the company has attempted to use coercion in the past."
What political terrorism?
Sueing for libel doesnt exactly count. (valid claim or not)
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
In the USA, truth is always a defense against libel. In China, the truth is what the government says it is and if you're the media there is often no defense if someone powerful is out to get you. The Taiwan connection is interesting, but not surprising: people living in free societies can be pretty feckless when it comes to depriving those in non-free societies of those same freedoms.
And we all know that Microsoft has never ever screwed people over.
Er, who mentioned Microsoft? I guess your point is that if one can find someone worse than Apple, then Apple must be all right.
But since you bring up Microsoft, at least MS doesn't sue people left and right. At least MS doesn't charge $129 for minor updates (note that updates for the last three years have been FREE). At least MS doesn't make bullshit claims in their advertising (e.g., "twice as fast"). At least MS and Bill Gates (separately) give away immense amounts to charity (Apple gives discounts to schools in order to cynically "lock them in" as future customers). MS is known as a wonderful company to work for. Apple is known as a sweatshop, where you're luck if you don't answer directly to Steve Jobs, who is known as a gigantic a-hole to anyone who's worked with him.
It's more like "media loses == I'm happy".
When bad things happen to the press it's a step forward for everyone getting the full story on what's going on instead of just the bits that feed the reporter's biases (even if the reporter has to make them up). The news in the newspaper has become less true and less balanced than the advertisements.
So mostly we benefit from these sweat shops. The low income have an opportunity to buy products. Everyone who has investment feels rich because companies can keep costs low, so the stock market isup and investors will buy more expensive things, like houses. People with houses feels better off than they are because they can leverage paper gains into real cash. The economy appears to be doing better than it is because in addition to the fake house cash, we also get loans from Asia so that we can afford to pay them for manufacturing in their swear shops.
But at the end of the day, it is the average persons desire for cheap stuff that drives the cycle. I wonder if Apple produced the 68K Powerbooks in sweatshops? I wonder if Dell could survive without sweatshops. Would we tolerate, would the american economy survive, the lack of sweat shops?
I certainly would want Apple to have a bit more dignity than say, Nike, but I don't hold my breath. As everyone says, Apples are too expensive, and the cost must come down. But think of this. I saw a documentary last year in which a european cell phone manufacturer audited their asian manufacturing facility. Overall it was not terrible. Many safety issues, but not unlike what one would see in the US. Most girls, cramped housing, but again not unlike the way young people live in the US. These workers were there earning a living and saving money, which, if you believe that a hard days work imbues dignity, could be a good thing. One interesting thing was that since the employees were living in company dorm, the company was officially much more responsible for their workers, like being liable if a girl got pregnant.
Which is simply to say that the simplifications made by most are simply useless. I believe we are in much more trouble than most will admit, and the solutions will require much broader adjustments in behavior, which will either be done voluntarily or by necessity. While much of this simplification is done to make it accessible to the common person, and the bias may often be unintentional, the fact that so often the blame lies elsewhere than the writer seem disingenuous.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Can you give examples, and how it actually affects people? I can claim the FSF is poisoning the water supply, but that doesn't make it true.
Who have they tried to "destroy"?
How do they lie in there advertising?
In my experience, they have always had good customer service. What are you referring to?
Apple isn't evil.
Microsoft isn't evil.
Google isn't evil.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
And you know who's to blame for that? You. That's right. Everytime you don't challenge your newspaper about a story, you're a willing participant in the charade. Everytime you turn on TV and watch a broadcast-and-run story that is patently false, you support the channel. How do you fix? Get your news from trustworthy sources. Oh, wait. You probably dont know how to determine if a source is trustworthy. Sorry, I can't help you there. Critical thinking is not something I'm willing to teach in the course of a slashdot post.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
And you think this lawsuit is going to *improve* the quality of newspapers?
I think almost all newspapers will go out of business in the next 15 years either way.
Newspapers will be even less likely to report on anything that might piss anyone off.
Maybe they'll have to double-check their facts. Maybe they'll have to get both sides of the story. Perhaps they'll have to take a skeptical look at the authenticity of their documents and photographs.
Why work hard and risk getting sued by reporting on corporate wrong-doing when you can reprint their press releases and spend ten pages talking about entertainment bullshit?
Why work at all when you can just make stuff up? Why find out the whole story when you can print "allegations"? Why be balanced when you can simply indulge your anti-corporate hatred? Why serve your readers the whole story when you can just use bumper-sticker terms like "sweatshop" to appeal to their juvenile emotions? Why bother with reality when there's a story to be told?
I would agree with you if you were talking about some time in the past (say 1900-1960). The news media has become a huge destructive force. The cost of their lies outweighs the value of everything else they do by a large margin. We have the internet now. We don't have to pay that cost any more.
...and American?
Before you mod me flamebait please realize that no one here has attempted to define what a "sweatshop" is,
or how these jobs compare to others in the Chinese economy.
I own a company that manufactures in China. We pay well above average, and there is always (and when I say always I mean 24/7)
a line of people at the gate looking for work.
None of this changes the fact that most people on this board would call the factory a sweatshop, because the hours are long,
the pay is low by US Standards and the working conditions are below ours in America.
But we're not talking about the US. We're talking about the entire rest of the world which is poorer than we are.
Yes, we have a moral obligation to provide clean, safe working conditions. But we do not have an obligation to elevate those
we employ abroad to US standards of living. And to wealthy Americans (if you're reading this you are comparitively wealthy)
those standards would seem terrifying.
Right now you are sitting in front of a computer surrounded by the products of cheap (and arguably exploitative) labor. Everything you own. Everything
you've eaten today. Everything you're wearing.
By what amazing gift of self-denial do people here condemn the system which makes them so wealthy?
The difference between American capitalists and those who would condemn them that the latter make weak protestations as they consume with the same gusto.
Flame away kids.
During the 1950's everything was made in the US with labor unions and a strong middle class followed. That was true prosperity and nothing was too far out of the common man's reach besides luxuries items.
To me this proves that the excuse to exploit people is to make more money and is based on greed. THe middle class is suffering while the upper middle class is getting rich and the gap is widening. Gas prices and rent more than doubled in 3 or 4 years yet our salaries have not and more and more factories are closing and heading to China for cheap labor.
Money trickles back with demand side economics.
http://saveie6.com/
You do understand that there is a fair trade market, right? That not everything you can buy is made thorugh terrible working conditions? Don't get me wrong, I know there are companies out there like American Apperel that claim "Sweatshop Free" yet still don't respect worker's rights (AA is notoriously anti-union, to the point of staging anti-union protests by forcing workers to pose for the media as being anti-union), but the fair trade industry does exist, and many of us relatively rich people do buy from them. Granted, America is slow to adopt ethical purchasing into our currently poor ethical boundaries, but we are making some progress.
And yes, it is hard to introduce worker's rights into an anti-worker environment. However, you don't have to have your shop in China. You could set up shop somewhere else, where the laws allow you to respect the workers. Don't blame the consumer when you haven't even tried everything you can to solve the problem.
Did you REALLY just say that?! Are you serious? Let's address the inaccuracies.
First, "updates" like Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger are not "minor". They are "major upgrades". They introduce new features. Jaguar introduced bayesian filtering, Quartz Extreme, system-wide accessible Address Book, Bonjour (né Rendezvous), iChat, Inkwell, CUPS, etc., etc. Panther introduced Exposé, Fast User Switching, FileVault, iChat video-conferencing, Font Book, system-wide faxing, etc., etc. Tiger introduced Jaguar, Spotlight, Automator, VoiceOver, RSS in Safari, etc., etc. Leopard is going to introduce Time Machine, Spaces, new versions of Front Row and Photo Booth, system-wide To Do service, etc., etc. Are you really calling these MINOR updates?
Let's see, in contrast, what are Microsoft's service packs? Pure bug fixes. No, the addition of a firewall and additional security aren't new features -- they're there because people were getting fed up with the viruses and worms that were (and still are) attacking Windows. That's bug fixing. Windows XP SP1 and SP2 are comparable to incremental updates like 10.4 --> 10.4.1, or 10.3.8 --> 10.3.9, not major updates like 10.3 --> 10.4 which Apple charges for.
Then you say that MS doesn't make bullshit claims in their advertising. That's a good one! Let's just take their latest "people_ready" advertising. If Windows were really "people_ready", then it wouldn't have all the viruses and trojans plaguing the platform.
Then you say, in an off-hand comment, that Apple gives discounts to schools to cynically "lock them in" as future customers. That's another good one! Microsoft doesn't offer any discounts to schools whatsoever? (Bullshit!) If you want to talk about cynical lock-ins, look at Microsoft's class-action settlements in California, where they attempted to foist Windows software on the claimants rather than giving them money. And that's not cynically locking people in? You've got a really short memory, it seems.
As for whether MS or Apple are great companies for which to work, I can't really comment on that because I've never worked for either. But I doubt you have either.
So let's tally up the points. 4 bullshit arguments. Oh.. *sniff* do you smell that? Oh, yes, I know that smell -- it's a Windows troll!
Sweatshop: (n) A working place where the conditions are shitty, the pay is shit, and, unless you want to eat shit, you have no choice but to work there.
Try pulling your head out of your ass long enough to read _The Jungle_ by Upton Sinclair. Then follow it up with _The Bitter Cry of the Children_ by John Spargo, and _How the Other Half Lives_ by Jacob Riis. The defining characteristic of a sweat-shop is its lack of even the most basic health and safety considerations. We're talking 'arms ripped off in machines with no guard rails' and 'dropping over dead from heatstroke' conditions.
Those conditions were normal here in the US a century ago. If you can show me documentation of conditions at the FoxConn factory that are even vaguely like the ones New York garment and factory workers tolerated in the 1900s, then I'll grant you the use of the word 'sweatshop'. If you can't, I'll call you a pompous little jackoff throwing loaded words around to hide the fact that he doesn't have an argument based on actual facts.
The fact is that, regardless of local median wage, the people working at this factory are picking up marketable skills. If they do decide to go look for another job, their time at FoxConn will A) allow them to acquire enough money to move to a different job market, and B) give them a much better chance of finding a job after they leave.
To understand that statement, you have to stop thinking in first-world terms, where we devote significant resources to instilling basic marketable skills into anyone who makes in through 8th grade. In third-world countries, poor people survive by picking recyclable materials out of garbage dumps.. and we're not talking about EPA-regulated American landfills. We're talking about miles of mixed household, medical, and industrial waste, complete with toxic fumes and sludge. 80-90% of waste-pickers are women, and most are the primary source of income for their family. Most have husbands who are alcoholics or drug addicts. Most support themselves, their husbands (and his habits), their children, and one or more extended family members. They have no marketable skills, they gain no marketable skills from picking garbage, and they can't stop picking garbage long enough to acquire marketable skills and still feed their families. To a person in that situation, the prospect of working for a company that provides housing, food, medical and recreational facilities, a climate-controlled non-toxic working environment, and gives them skills that will give them a fighting chance to maintain that standard of living even if they decide to leave the company.. well, that's a definite step up.
It's also a fact that the only documented 'abuse' in this whole story was a FoxConn policy that allowed workers to sign up for more than 60 hours of work per week, rather than capping their overtime at a maximum of 60 hrs/week. That's not "60 hours mandatory," it's, "not stopping people after they've volunteered to put in another 20." And that policy has now been changed, at least in the 15% of the plant that serves Apple. A related fact is that the biggest complaint among workers was that there wasn't enough overtime during the off-peak seasons.
As everyone says, Apples are too expensive, and the cost must come down.
Branded products do not cost a lot to buy, yet have to be made astonishlingly cheaply, because they are better. They cost a lot, and have to be made cheaply, because much more money is spent on advertising the product than making the product. This is the simple reason why unbranded products can be rediculously cheaper than branded ones - partly because the corporation that makes the cheap product doesn't want to insinuate its product is better through having a high price, and partly because it doesn't need to advertise its product because its target market knows where to get it, likes the fact it's cheap, and doesn't need to be told repeatedly that it's good.
No, maybe you didn't get my point. Windows is fundamentally broken, as shown by the sheer number of viruses and trojans that affect Windows. "Introducing" security "features" helps to alleviate the damage that viruses and trojans cause. But since those viruses and trojans were causing the problems, the "new" security "features" help to fix a problem that shouldn't have been there in the first place -- i.e.: a bug fix.
Zero-configuration networking doesn't fix a bug that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Exposé doesn't either. System-wide Address Book or To Do services don't either. These are REAL features, value added to the operating system.
It's funny, because I didn't even address the fact that Microsoft makes a broken product (Windows) and then even SELLS yet *ANOTHER* product that ostensibly fixes the flaws in Windows that shouldn't have existed in the first place! And the grandparent post calls APPLE "cynical"! Hahahahaha.
Unions cost money. They take money out of worker's paychecks to run the Union infractructure and pay the Union leadership. Like any other organization, the Union's #1 goal is to extend it's existence, including trying to attract as many members as possible.
Is the price of having a union worth it? The answer, like all things, is SOMETIMES! If your working conditions suck, joining a union may be worthwhile. If your working conditions are pretty good, joining a union may just increase the costs of labor to the company without increasing any benefits to you since the increase just ends up in union coffers. That puts the company YOU work for at a disadvantage to another company without a union, ultimately making it more likely your company goes out of business or moves your job to China to avoid going out of business.
Remember, the Union does not care if you need help. It only cares if you are paying membership dues, and will do whatever is necessary to make sure you pay membership dues. That includes offering help, but it also includes the same tricks any other megabusiness uses: Distorted marketing, false promises, etc.
Employers will use the same tactics to discourage unions forming at their companies. There is nothing good about a Union for an employer. Just like the Union is going to tell you you need them whether you actually need them or not, the employer is going to tell you that you don't need a union, whether you need them or not.
Sometimes the Union is right, and sometimes the employer is right. But anyone who says something like "The company is anti-union, so they must be evil!" is either a union shill or a union brainwashing victim. It is quite possible that unionizing is NOT in the best interest of employees. It is quite possible that when a union engages in a media blitz to slandder a company that doesn't want their employees unionized that the workers are actually fine - the Unions problem is just that the union employees arn't paying dues to be fine.
paintball