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High Tech Misery In China
theodp writes "Think you've got a bad job? Think again. You could be making keyboards for IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo and HP at Meitai Plastic and Electronics, a Chinese hardware factory. Prompted by the release of High Tech Misery in China by a human-rights group, a self-regulating body set up by tech companies will conduct an audit of working conditions at the factory. In return for take-home pay of 41 cents per hour, workers reportedly sit on hard wooden stools for 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. Overtime is mandatory, with workers being given on average two days off per month. While on the production line, workers are not allowed to raise their hands or heads, are given 1.1 seconds to snap each key into place, and are encouraged to 'actively monitor each other' to see if any company rules are being transgressed. They are also monitored by guards. Workers are fined if they break the rules, locked in the factory for four days per week, and sleep in crowded dormitories. Okay, it's not all bad news — they're hiring."
Horrible working conditions in China, film at 11.
Sad that this stuff is so common; let's see if it changes over time as the country develops
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Foreign companies that utilize this type of thing should be hit with heavy penalties. This would also encourage them to check working conditions before signing a contract with a manufacturer.
In return for take-home pay of 41 cents per hour, workers reportedly sit on hard wooden stools for 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. Overtime is mandatory, with workers being given on average two days off per month.
The alternatives being what?
Substinence farming or starving?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
And "free traders" say we should just "buck up and compete with" slaves. We are slipping backward into the early 1900's. Factory jobs used to pay better than the sales-clerk jobs that are replacing them, but they won't if your competitor is allowed slave labor.
Table-ized A.I.
What we are seeing here, my friends, is capitalism gone wild.
1) Government regulation (and enforcement) setting minimum working conditions.
2) Enthusiastic uptake of some kind of "no humans were exploited in the making of this product" sticker, in the free market.
I've found it heartwarming at work that the younger staff are all hugely in favour of "fair trade" products that purportedly don't exploit poor farmers and farm labourers, mostly as applied to coffee and sugar products. The aggressively seek them out and we have people coming from floors around to our "fair trade only" coffee station. We older folks are "for" this stuff as long as you stick it under our noses, shame us a bit, and it doesn't cost *much* more.
Which it doesn't, of course - that's the pathetic thing about these stories - the conditions in that factory, as opposed to conditions that might not pass muster here but at least wouldn't *disgust* you, are probably scraping $2 off the cost of the $60 "MS Egronomic 4000" keyboard that you could only pry from my cold, dead (non-RSI'd) fingers. I'd be happy to pay $65 if it came with such a sticker...the other $3 paying for the checking and enforcement of the rules from the sticker-issuing NGO.
Okay, so here's the thing.. The rest of the world needs to refuse to do any sort of business with China until business practices are brought in line with at least a minimal respect for human life. It would help Chinese workers because they wouldn't have to endure this kind of shit, and it would help the developed world because our factories wouldn't have to try to compete with stuff produced in this way.
Why pick on just PC manufacturers, but leave Apple out of it? Remember Apple's keyboards and almost everything else bar XServes are also made in China. Subtle bias against Windows by the Apple crowd?
Seems they can do no wrong for doing wrong.
It cost you $2.99. What the heck do you think?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
No, you're seeing totalitarianism gone wild. All of the shitty labor in China is backstopped by the government and its willingness to create political prisoners.
What really sucked about the Olympics wasn't the smog or anything else, it was the media broadcasting the fake news that China is just another free country. And the west sucked it down.
Capitalism can only work because it thrives on and creates the poor.
We wouldn't be in the mess we're in without it.
Call me a troll or flame me, but there has to be a better way than chasing the profit...
Sustainability perhaps?
Watch those corners
I read a story that quoted a farm automation expert who said it's probably possible to automate many more fruit-picking activities. However, there's no incentive to invest in such technology if the labor rates are low enough.
This is one of the reasons why the Roman empire didn't spark the industrial revolution: slaves were readily available from conquered lands.
Table-ized A.I.
The robot costs what it does, getting it delivered costs extra, electricity costs extra, having someone who can fix the machine if needed costs extra... And even automated robots need someone to give it parts, etc...
All compared to a few dollars per day per human. I know I wouldn't buy robots there.
However, there's no incentive to invest in such technology if the labor rates are low enough.
IMHO, that's one of the key reasons in favor of a minimum wage - not because minimum wage helps workers directly (some workers do get paid more but others are out of a job) but because it forces technology to be developed that makes the work more efficient. A worker can be paid a lot more in an economy where pushing a couple buttons makes an entire cell phone than in an economy where a day of banging rocks together results in a few sharp pieces of rock to cut the skin off dead animals.
Blaming this on the Chinese while still exploiting things is bullshit.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
my 'original' microsoft natural keyboard (bought in 1994, still working just perfectly) cost me $250 or so from what I remember, and the latest natural keyboard 4000 I bought for the office was only $60...
The 'original' says it's made in Mexico, I wonder when the production was moved... I also don't see why keyboards have to be so cheap, it's not like you change it every day: I can totally see myself using this keyboard for another 15 years easily (assuming that in 15 years I can find a ps/2-whatever converter, that is my only worry)
-- the cake is a lie
disgusting. what really upsets me - we chose to employ cheap labor instead of making progress in robotics. think you guys: in the past Americans invented a vending machine to distribute Coca-Cola or Pepsi - did not employ 20 million laborers to stay still and hold the cola for you - a vending machine was invented, mmmmk? what's the hell is wrong with us now, why we cannot innovate any more to assemble those damned keyboards?
Middlemen add costs. In a supply chain this aggressive, no costs are added without a good reason. What do you suppose the justification for these middlemen is?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Just letting you know, this is what we're competing with. This is what happened when we let the corporations go overseas after we 'freed trade'. They went to nations that don't have standards, filled with people that don't have standards, who slave away in factories run by people that don't have standards. When you let homegrown companies fly the coop for South American, Eastern European, African, or Asian nations, they're doing it for the starving, squalid, and perpetually eager slave laborers.
If you compete with the third world, be prepared to live in it. America and the rest of the West didn't get to where it is by being 'efficient', we got here by having standards. Westerners demand a certain quality of life that the less civilized people of the world are too timid to so much as ask for, much less fight for. They could learn a lot from us. Some of them already have. The rest will have to continue suffering until they begin demanding more. Until then, exploitative corporations will be all too willing to use them as cheap, disposable industrial machinery to keep the cogs of their uncivilized sub-nations whirling. (And to keep funneling away the surplus wealth of the civilized, Westernized world into the pockets of greedy transnational businessmen!)
It did in the USA, the UK, and every other country that went through a transition from a mostly agricultural to an industrial economy.
And by then, as the cost of labor raises with the working condition, instead of building the same hardware in better conditions, the big companies will relocate their production facilities somewhere else where the cost of producing the parts is even cheaper than everywhere else. Probably in Africa.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
no, people who know that they can get away with paying these low wages are the major culprit in the development of these sweatshops. if you stop giving away 'free' keyboards some of the slaves will simply be turned into homeless ex-slaves who use to work for a bowl of rice and now beg for a bowl of rice.
being willing to pay more for a product doesn't mean the manufacturer is going to pay the workers more to produce it. i thought you obama types knew this.
I prioritize the safety and health of humans above getting a $5 keyboard on NewEgg.com. I don't share your heartlessness which places profit above humanity. As a detail, it costs surprisingly little to make sure humans have a decent living, health care, potable water, food security, a safe place to live, and other things these keyboard assembly workers lack.
My problem with paying more is that I have no reasonable assurance that the additional money will get to the workers. I don't trust "trickle down" economics but I'm willing to pay more for the products and services I use so that workers get better treatment. If I said to any distributor or manufacturer to charge me more they might do it. But I think they'll keep everything as it is and then pocket the additional money. Not one penny of my money would go toward improving the plight of abused workers anywhere along the chain that gets me my keyboards.
To me, this is the hard part of an ethical sell on the public. Everyone has a pretty good idea of what a safe working environment is (it's why so many are appalled at the conditions described in TFA), and there's lots of people around the world who can go into well-researched detail to explain more on that (such as Charles Kernaghan's exemplary work; see "The Corporation" for more of his work. It's one of the best movies on this and its relationship to the larger picture of the problem with a system based on satisfying profit-seekers at all costs). As a result, when I watch what the corporate media doesn't want me to read or see, I get lots of talk about what to avoid.
But I don't know of a simple, practical, efficient guide for the consumer looking for computer parts. I need to buy a few USB compatible-with-everything keyboards I can plug in and use without any additional software. Furthermore, I need to have a reasonable understanding that these keyboards were manufactured and shipped without abuse to the workers. Where do I get these?
Digital Citizen
That's bullshit, the humans can do more important stuff and you get the productivity of both the robots and the humans.
Sure if you want crap jobs not worth shit and stop development ...
But most people like getting more for less and "improving life" (if you see more items as better life.)
Obviously it must be a decent amount of money locally if people are willing to put up with the working conditions.
No, that is not obvious.
What is obvious is that the amount of money is better than most alternatives locally.
There was a time in Russia when men were used to haul barges along the Volga river because it was cheaper to use men than horses: horses had to be fed; men didn't. The rate of pay was not enough to properly feed the men.
Yet men took the job even though it meant slowly starving to death because the alternative at that time and place was starving to death quickly.
When the choice is that or starve, it's slavery. Being born an American doesn't mean you're automatically a more deserving person; why not try a little empathy once in a while?
"Reform happened because it became economically feasible, thanks to capital investment that increased the productivity of labor."
We would like to think that we ended slavery and nasty labor conditions because we've grown more humane and ethical. The reality is that the wind sail put the galley slave out out commission because it was cheaper to buy and maintain the sails than it is to maintain the slaves. It's cheaper to use machines to use slaves or underpaid workers to mine.
I always laugh at those star trek or scifi shows where some advanced race is using living slaves to work hard labor. It hadn't occurred to the writers that even in the complete absence of ethics, it just makes no sense to use humans to do brute labor.
Could be worse, they could be making Zunes!
All bad joking aside, it really is horrific when you see these working conditions. However, there seems to be a great demand for jobs like this, as the alternative is working yourself to death on a farm. The fact that all those uneducated, unskilled laborers come to the factories in new busloads every day drives the price way down.
It's not really that much different to how it used to be in Europe, it's just that we had about 150 years to further develop ourselves. Sucks for current-generation Chinese, but their grandchildren can bask in luxury we won't be seeing in that age.
These kinds of comments that go along the line "we must stop this" and so on are so ignorant of other people's reality that get to the point of being disgusting.
Believe it or not, people in countries other that yours are not stupid nor masochistic. And tend to choose what they believe it's best for them, no matter how different that may be from YOUR personal choices.
The reality is that yes, working conditions are miserable. But they are not slaves. They may choose not to work in those factories. It is just that the alternatives are so bad (starving to death, for one... yes, that may seem incredible for you that feel STARVING after going 2 hours without a snack, but people DO starve to DEATH)that working in those conditions is actually acceptable!
And what is your solution? Penalize the asses out of the companies that operate this way, so that it becomes unfeasable to maintain operation in those countries, condemning the locals to a fate they had chosen not to have because YOUR WELL FED ASS decided what is best for THEM!
The sheer arrogance is unbelievable...