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The Forbidden City of Terry Gou
ElvaWSJ writes "Hon Hai churns out iPhones and Wiis, and provides a window into China's secretive world of outsourcing and manufacturing. With a work force of some 270,000 — about as big as the population of Newark, N.J. — the factory is a bustling testament to the ambition of Hon Hai's founder, Terry Gou. In an era when manufacturing has been defined by outsourcing, no one has done more to shift global electronics production to China. Little noticed by the wider world, Mr. Gou has turned his company into China's biggest exporter and the world's biggest contract manufacturer of electronics."
He's done so without attempting to poison or kill his own customers.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I really do wish that buying electronics wouldn't mean supporting companies whose workers have to live in slum conditions.
Ok, humanitarian perspective aside. Those workers are now able to provide a their families 2 square meals a day. If companies stop using them, then they go hungry, continue living in slums and you pay more for your beloved techno-gadgets. Right now they are better off than they were earlier and you are happier since you can have the privilege of using an iPod and listening to your choice of music on the go. See win-win scenario...
Something to consider here is that in many cases though the job conditions and pay looks terrible to /you/, the actual workers love it compared to what they had.
This is not to say that we nor they should be satisfied with their present lot in life, but rather to say that things are improving. Their economy is primitive by modern standards. It will grow, rapidly, and working conditions will improve - just like they did in our country.
The answer to helping these people advance is not to stop buying their products, which puts them right back where they were - with nothing. The answer is to continue to buy their products, which empowers them and gives them options.
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Well he did say conditons have improved. This may not mean much to us, but it was already well known that foxconn had some of the best factory conditions in the entire industry over there. Do these conditions really meet what we would consider ideal? No, but an improvement is an improvement. I would submit that most Americans have no idea how bad factory work is, even without our own country. If you want to be truly disgusted by the treatment of workers and the quality of their environment take yourself to the nearest chicken factory or any other "plant" with is obviously skirting the edges of legality.
China moves slow traditionally but as they develop a real middle class, the lower class conditions will improve becaue of increased internal spending and more attitudes similiar to those in more developed nations.
--- I do not moderate.
Easy- start buying the products that are $5000 instead of $500....that is, the ones that you can verify were made in the USA out of components created from raw materials in the USA.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I remember my history teacher telling us about working conditions during industrial revolution times in England. Workers (some of them children as young as 6 years old) toiled from sunup to sundown six days a week in dirty noisy horribly dangerous factories for the lowest possible wages.
The point that stuck with me was that hordes of people flocked from the farms to the cities, because horrible as it may have seemed to us, it was still _better_ than the conditions they left behind. On the farms you toiled (men, women and children) from sunup to sundown 7 days a week. Conditions were no less dangerous; farm machines could kill you just as dead as machines in a factory. And on the farm if it didn't rain at the right time, or rained too much, or the bugs came your crop was wiped out and you starved. At least in the mills, as long as you could work you knew you were not going to starve. While "not starving to death" is a pretty minimum standard of living, it sure beats "maybe starving to death"
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Or you could consider that the US company could easily double their salary, reduce work week to, say, 60 hours and fix the most grievous safety hazards - all at the cost of cutting compensation of top executives by half. Just like we are prosecuting ordinary citizens for patronizing child prostitutes in Thailand, we should start going after companies (and their CEOs) that break US labor laws abroad. 5-7 bucks minimum wage per hour is not to expensive for a company, will help 3rd world countries stand up on their feet rather than being cheap slaves and will give US workers at least a slight chance to compete for jobs.
If they were actually all getting better standards of living, we wouldn't be objecting on humanitarian grounds. Yes, they get a better standard of living, we get products. Everyone wins. The fact that they do it for a fraction of what it would cost here, I guess one lives with because it's an actual opportunity for them and they get to move up the economic ladder. Such things are relative to where you live.
But, when one hears stories about what is outright slavery, workers not getting paid at all, and all of that stuff, then one tends to be a little more worried about how ethical these products are. There are regular stories about appalling things happening in Chinese factories, as well as a lot of shady dealings from sub-sub contractors who nobody seems to be accounting for (like, lead in kids toys for instance).
Personally, I would like a little more assurance that the products I'm buying which are made in China actually have a little fairer labour practice than the worst case we tend to hear about. And, I don't think it's too unrealistic to basically tell the companies using these manufacturers that they really need to be sure of such things. I don't begrudge the workers a chance to make a living -- but, I do expect the parent companies to do more than the most superficial due-diligence to Do The Right Thing.
This is an unfortunate side effect of outsourcing (well, one of many) -- you really have no assurances that the people making the stuff you buy aren't being subject to really awful conditions.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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There are *far* more than 13 mainstream dialects of spoken Chinese. For the most part, you need to know Mandarin, and if you want to live in Hong Kong, Cantonese would be an asset. However, there are close to 30 mainstream dialects of Chinese (more, even, by some counts) -- one for each province. Better yet, counting regional dialects (which are different enough to be counted as dialects and not accents), there may be well over 100 dialects of Chinese. Learning Mandarin, though, gives you the ability to converse with about 95% of the mainland Chinese population more-or-less fluently. Tonality in Chinese is probably the hardest thing to learn. Grammar in Chinese is quite simple, as parent noted.