Slashdot Mirror
Ninth Suicide At iPhone Factory
shar303 writes "A ninth employee has jumped to his death at Taiwanese iPhone and iPad manufacturer Foxconn, China's state media reports. The 21-year-old worker was the eighth fatality this year. This raises questions as to whether the shiny finish of the latest gadgets available from mega corporations are tarnished by such information, and whether the mistreatment of workers deserves to be highlighted when considering such firms."
Turns out there is an extremely high suicide rate amongst engineers who lost their iPhone prototypes.
One was in such despair that he shot himself 25 times, with several different caliber weapons.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
whether the mistreatment of workers deserves to be highlighted when considering such firms.
Workers killing themselves as proof their employer mistreats them? Seems just a tad presumptuous. Likely? Sure. Matter of fact? Of course not.
Whale
It's not unique to Apple; this is capitalism itself in action.
Any reputable confirmations that this is, in fact, even suicide, and not the government turning a blind eye when one of it's huge sources of technology hardware starts knocking off troublemakers?
noting that this factory's staff is over 400k employees -- or roughly the size of Cleveland -- and that this is not really news, and I tend to agree.
Don't know if you all saw this or if it was on Slashdot at all, but Engadget has a full, human-done English translation of the article written by a reporter who went undercover at the factory.
Living With a Nerd
Blood will have gone into my next phone. I will purchase it humbly.
Another victim of the iSuck symdrome...
Summary correctly states its the ninth fatality but then goes on to say it was the eighth this year. Fail.
Foxconn has over 400,000 employees. The suicide rate in China was ~13 out of 100,000. So that means Foxconn has a suicide rate (if the year continues on this pace) that is less than half of the country average.
Maybe one day the workers in China will get together and form a national union to ensure workers' rights. Maybe through their collective efforts they could make a workers' paradise. Heck, maybe they could turn the entire country into some sort of commune where everyone has to do their fair share and they all benefit from the profits.
I wonder if that could ever work. It's amazing that no people have ever tried it.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I fail to see if this is Apple's fault. It seems more like a 'generic strict factory' story than an 'Evil Apple' story.
I have never seen so much liberal-bullshit crammed into a single sentence as that last one. Congrats, you must be proud.
Yes, if you die because of good old-fashioned US-American values like capitalism, you deserve to; and you should be proud to die for such a heroic principle. Every death that makes somebody a few bucks is a good death.
So... is that where all the magic comes from?
It seems to be worse on Apple's factories. See these videos.
...Is there an app for that?
I am no Apple fan boy but you are not being fair.
This is Foxconn and not Apple. If Apple offered to pay more for the product what makes you think that Foxconn would pass that on to the workers or improve the workers conditions?
Also from the wikipedia.
"Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone for Apple Inc.;
Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.;
various orders for American computer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard;
motherboards for UK computer manufacturer Zoostorm;
the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo;
the Xbox 360 for Microsoft,
cell phones for Motorola,
the Amazon Kindle,
and Cisco equipment"
Apple is no more to blame than Nintendo, Sony, HP, Dell, Motorola, Amazon, and Cisco.
Why the heck don't we just make more stuff in the US. I mean really! At one time Apple made computers in the US as did other companies.
Or at least make them in countries that care a little about their employees?
If you are going to fire off blame put it first on China. China needs to put in labor laws to protect it's own people. Second lay the blame on Foxconn for exploiting those people. Then put the blame on all the companies listed.
Finally lets all take a little blame for not caring where we get our toys from.
I am glad to say that when I went shopping for a lawn mower I worked hard to find one that was not made in China. It was made in Canada.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
See the Chinese news reports cited below where the undercover reporter both connects the dots for you and, if you work for a living, gives you a terrifying glimpse of your future.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/19/the-fate-of-a-generation-of-workers-foxconn-undercover-fully-tr/
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The alternative to capitalism is subsistence farming for everyone, with all the misery and environmental destructiveness that comes with it. Or you could go with communism, which by necessity is state organized oppression of those who disagree with how things are done.
The sad fact is that life is naturally miserable. Solving that problem is not easy, and the answer isn't to dumbly blame capitalism when the problem is really so much bigger.
Qxe4
... maybe suicides happen every so often at all factories and we just notice this because it's the factory that makes iPhones?
I wonder how many Happy Meal Toy factory employees off themselves in a year?
Also: according to Wikipedia, Foxconn also makes "Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard; motherboards for UK computer manufacturer Zoostorm; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo; the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, the Amazon Kindle, and Cisco equipment."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
People like to blame Apple, Dell, or any other company that manufacturers gadgets in China (who doesn't nowadays?), but is this really their fault?
According to this URL:
http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suiciderates/en/
China and area have almost 55 suicides for every 100,000 people. Among the highest in the world.
Foxconn employs over 300,000 people according to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn
And has had 9 suicides so far this year, so lets extrapolate that out to 20 in a year.
Suicide rate for China in general.......: 0.00055%
Suicide rate for Foxconn employees: 0.00006%
While this is still too high, I think we should be asking what Foxxconn is doing that results in such an *improvement* over the rest of China.
The media is getting all in a panic over 9 people committing suicide yet ignoring the big picture, which is the thousands of people committing suicide in China just in general.
...then that only makes the article even more damning, because Apple does not come off well in this report. The article also provides a terrifying glimpse of your future if you work for a living.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
becuase in the US you have to pay a dropout flunky tens of thousands a year EACH, our lifestyles have put us on the downslide
remember that the next time you see someone making 50 grand a year for making a spreadsheet and filing paperwork
This is unregulated capitalism in action. China is like the US or Britain during the height of the Industrial Revolution. Demand for manufactured product from China has skyrocketed over the past couple of decades, and the Chinese have a seemingly unending supply of unskilled labor to do the work. Companies can work employees to death with no particular worries, since there are lots of people to replace those workers with and the government doesn't seem to care. Many of the worst abuses of 19th century Western labor are present today in China.
Hopefully someday the Chinese government will enact (and enforce!) the kind of health and safety regulations that put an end to this sort of thing in the Western world (for the most part), but it will take sustained pressure both from inside and outside the country to get it done. Unfortunately, the Chinese government ruthlessly puts down dissent internally, and the external forces with the power to stop it are too busy counting their profits to care about it. Consumer pressure could play a big role in forcing change, but most people seem too enamored with their cheap Chinese-made crap to care about the people who make it.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but until the Chinese government can be persuaded to regulate its industries we'll continue to see stories of this nature (the ones that aren't suppressed, anyway).
Everybody should definitely be buying products made in American manufacturing facilities so it is instead Americans that jump to their death.
...that makes me want an iPhone even more.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Why the heck don't we just make more stuff in the US.
Yes, sign me up to pay 10,000 dollars for my xbox and 15,000 for my ipad! Oh wait, nevermind I like cheap stuff. Now I am off to wal-mart! AMERICA F YEAH!
Oh yeah, let' s not forget they are one of the biggest manufacturers for cable connectors for use inside no-name computers.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Why the heck don't we just make more stuff in the US. I mean really!
How many Americans do you know who would really be willing to work on an assembly line? I did it once for a summer job, and it wasn't fun. Already we need to import immigrants to do things like yardwork, and yardwork is way better than assembly-line stuff. It would take a serious economic downturn before people would want to go back to factories.
Qxe4
I'm reminded of the IWW ("Wobblies") when I read "Maybe one day the workers in China will get together and form a national union to ensure workers' rights."
How did that work out of for the Wobblies? Long story short: not so good.
-kgj
another Apple 4G prototype was discovered left behind at a restaurant table during the Friday lunch hour.
Oh jeez, Canada? That's even worse. Those poor Canucks spend their days working in -40 CELSIUS, that's like I dunno -9000 Fahrenheit, for like 12 hours a day. Oh and their days are really dark since they are so far north. Their factories are just really big igloos and most Canadians have to forage for their own food. For instance, I had to go club a few seals the other day just to feed my family, and then PETA threw blood all over my igloo. Don't get me started on the epic trek it is just to GET to work, most men my age have to wear their fathers pajamas and make it to work through blizzard or polar bear.
Restrict access to the roof? Just saying... if you can't get access to get out of the building up high, you have a hard time jumping from the window you can't get out or from the roof you can't get to.
-- Terry
Debt-related suicide in Taiwan has been going up for some time and it's likely to just become worse.
Life kinda sucks there for the underclass, so maybe that's why. I don't think this is limited to just Apple. It's just business as usual in Taiwan.
Kinda a preview for what the growing underclass will be experiencing in the USA in a decade or so..
Here's the article about Debt-related suicides btw: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2259336/
What are consumers meant to do to avoid this? I would gladly pay whatever extra for my devices, if I knew the people making them had a decent standard of living. But its not an option. It's not something that can be like those phony "carbon credits" I've heard airlines offering http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/mar2008/db20080321_437700.htm . I dont think the solution is to "ask for a tip" just as you walk out the door with your iPad.
See, we complain about laws "arrgh, the government has all these regulations and red tape..." but living without them seems just awful.
What can the world outside China (and similar countries mind you) do to help the workers? We cant just make up some "weapons of mass destruction" and invade the joint. Do we just have to keep putting up with these shame stories? "Oh look! You know how popular and cool Apple are with their hit products! Look at the workers! Shame on Apple! Yeah, yeah, Apple is bad, oooh, they are evil!"
---
Fucking worthless troll parasite. Another Apple article to troll eh?
Fucktard. Do you get paged when an article is posted?
Oh and if you feel so righteous, you never seem to complain about Microsoft employing children in Asia. I know you never read the articles, but you could have done a small search using Bing (I know you hate Google) and you could have found out easy that Foxconn makes shit for pretty much every tech company in the US (Apple, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, etc...).
I was a little taken back because I thought this happened in Taiwan, as I don't remember hearing anything about 8 people in Taiwan killing themselves making Apple products. But no, it happened in China, so it's just business in China as usual
Whatever you say, comrade.
This isn't Apple's fault or any of the other companies who contract through Foxconn. This is China's fault for letting the companies get away with this crap.
I work for a government agency, if they could get away with it they'd work us this hard to, so it's not just a capitalism or Apple issue.
The alternative to capitalism is subsistence farming for everyone,
Um, no.
You're confusing industrialism and capitalism.
Or you could go with communism, which by necessity is state organized oppression of those who disagree with how things are done.
Um, no.
You're confusing communism and totalitarianism.
Steve jobs once developed a factory that was almost entirely automated, requiring a very minimum number of employees to build 20,000 computers a month. they spent alot of time and energy developing and refining the process, and it was an achievement that he was really proud of..
Except they didn't sell 20,000 Next cubes a month. Probably not even in the first year!
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990/02/26/73121/index.htm
From the article "Says Jobs: ''I'm as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.''"
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Holy false dichotomy, Batman! The choice is not, nor has it ever been, between pure unregulated capitalism and Soviet-style communism. What China has now is basically a political oligarchy that controls the people with an iron fist while allowing corporations to practice almost completely unrestricted capitalism.
The Gilded Age, in which a small group of elites grew enormously rich and powerful on the backs of people who remained incredibly poor, and the multiple market crashes and panics that happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries, taught us that unrestrained capitalism is not a sustainable economic model. Since then, we've struggled to find the right level of regulation that will encourage stability and maintain a robust middle class while enabling growth. Different people have different theories on how much and what type regulation is the most effective, but the idea that unrestrained capitalism is the way to go takes an almost willful ignorance of history.
A ninth employee has jumped to his death at Taiwanese iPhone and iPad manufacturer Foxconn, China's state media reports.
Using the mac OS has me wanting to do this at times, but it's usually all in jest. Usually...
Everybody was raving about the iPhones for a long time after their release. Recently, Slashdot has been printing nothing but bad press about Apple...
But I hated Apple before it was cool to hate Apple. Hmmph!
Thousands of people in this country would jump at a chance to do assembly line work.
As for the line that "we need to import immigrants to do things like yardwork", thats just the line pro-immigrant-explotation people spew. Yards were cleaned and grass was clipped before everything went to illegal and migrant labor in the 1990s. I should know, I worked yard crew in college, about the time the immigration laws stopped being enforced the illegals who would work hard and cheaper put us all out of business.
Have you ever seen films like Roger & Me?
There were Americans who were proud to work those kinds of jobs, proud to say they worked in such a factory.
Odd. Taiwan is not China. It's a full democracy and much more westernized than any Chinese cities. Workers are free to move to any other jobs, and the pay and standard of living in Taiwan is in some respects higher than it is in NA. I am VERY critical and cynical about Chinese human rights. And those issues simply don't apply to Taiwan.
Odd indeed.
Alternatively, you have a few pieces of anecdotal evidence pointing at the easiest target in the entire tech industry.
Maybe HP, Dell, Lenovo, ... don't appear in said videos because posting a blog saying "zomg, HP did something awful" doesn't get you the same sort of advertising revenue as posting one saying "zomg, Apple did something awful".
The factory in question supposedly employs 400,000 workers. The annual suicide rate in China (as reported by the WHO) is 16.7 per 100,000 people. That means that in a population of randomly selected Chinese the size of the factory workforce, we should expect to see 400000 people * 16.7 suicides/(100000 people * 1 year) * 5 months / 12 months = 27.8 suicides so far this year.
Can we conclude that assembling shiny gadgets makes it less likely that one will commit suicide? It meets the standards for publication...
Covers about a square mile per WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118677584137994489.html
Karoshi (Japanese) — Death from overwork
I wonder if this kind of culture is true in Taiwan too. Anyone local here to tell us a bit about it?
The weird thing is, that around here, Foxconn is only known for very el-cheapo mainboards and stuff. The kind that has a certain reputation... for half of it being defective, or things like that. I never knew that they were producing Apple hardware.
Is this a plus for Foxconn, or a minus for Apple? (Considering I very often hear stories about how the interior is actually not that shiny, etc, well...)
Sounds like a sweat shop to me. :/
And who’s the guilty one? Well, if the products were extremely cheap (like those mainboards), I’d blame the end-customer for being ignorant. But as Apple is not cheap at all, I blame Apple’s greed. But like the Catholic church and its crazy leader (Pope Kiddyfiddler XVI), I didn’t exactly expect good behavior from organizations with a beacon of reality distortion. :/
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
equals suicide right? I can understand these kind of blind statements when you want a "funny" modifier ... but on a serious story issue such as this - it's just plain ignorant.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Ahh, the good old TINA principle - There Is No Alternative. Preferred way out for the profiteers and their apologists. The problem is indeed really so much bigger - and you are part of it.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Why the heck don't we just make more stuff in the US. I mean really!
Because it costs more to treat people more humanely, which you are required to do in the US. That's literally the only reason. It's also the reason why there's hostility and vilification toward labor unions/movements in the US, because they fight against poor working conditions and dirt wages (which ends up costing corporations money, and we can't have that!). For more things to be made in the US, the US's labor system would have to become more like China's, or China's labor system would have to be made at least as humane as the US's. And don't believe for a second that corporations wouldn't prefer the former over the latter.
If you are going to fire off blame put it first on China. China needs to put in labor laws to protect it's own people. Second lay the blame on Foxconn for exploiting those people. Then put the blame on all the companies listed. Finally lets all take a little blame for not caring where we get our toys from. I am glad to say that when I went shopping for a lawn mower I worked hard to find one that was not made in China. It was made in Canada.
Everyone doing business with the Chinese government/system (legitimizing and empowering them) is to blame.
We outsource because slave labor is illegal in the US. You are only fooling yourself if you believe that companies will treat slave labor any differently only because it bears a different name or different location.
You're confusing communism and totalitarianism
How would communism work in the real world (ie. not everyone agrees) without totalitarianism ?
Centrally directed economy means that every object anyone has, anything at all, from underpants, socks, to phones, ipads and even computers only got to that person at the direct command of the government. How could such a system not be totalitarian ? In a theoretical "perfect" communism any call you make over the phone needs to get approved by the government (or one might even say that only calls initiated by the government would be legal).
Interestingly, the reverse is not true. A system can perfectly well be totalitarian without being communist. Though I suppose some communist tendencies (such as interference in everything) are unavoidable. They're (in Latin America, or Iran for example) generally not nearly as pervasive as in examples of communist states though.
The situation in China is hardly "unregulated". The problem is that the attitude in China is a bit more nationalistic. They view human casualties as an appropriate cost for ensuring the strength of the nation as a whole. Market competitiveness is very important to them as their world standing (particularly in manufacturing) is a point of pride for them.
"We're DYING to bring you the new iPhone"
"Look at the new DROP DEAD gorgeous iPad!"
Blood diamonds meet the iBloodPhones
The Gilded Age, in which a small group of elites grew enormously rich and powerful on the backs of people who remained incredibly poor, and the multiple market crashes and panics that happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries, taught us that unrestrained capitalism is not a sustainable economic model. Since then ...
Unfortunately that same age also taught us that "a little too much" socialism did not merely result in crashes, panics and lots poor people, but in gigantic massacres, starvation, totalitarianism and gulags.
I often think that Slashdot should not allow AC posts containing words like "fuck", "shit", etc. as it just encourages the trolls.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Do you mean to say that there is an alternative to liberty or death? Imagine that!
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
I did it once for a summer job, and it wasn't fun.
Just because you didn't like working in a factory doesn't mean everyone dislikes it. I'm sure there are factory guys out there that pay to have someone do their yardwork.
Work is also not always fun. It's good to have a job you don't hate, it's great to have a job you enjoy, but even jobs you enjoy and love will not always be fun.
and the external forces with the power to stop it are too busy counting their profits to care about it
What about all those people with ipads, iphones, apple laptops and so on. Don't those things show don't care people die for their entertainment ?
Apple is just doing the bidding of their customers, nothing more. Blaming the company for doing something everyone wants it to do, regardless of the consequences, is hypocritical in the extreme.
What is the blame on apple users ?
Apple should make them in USA now! This is what china mart gets us.
The blame on the users is in the very next sentence of my post (about people too enamored with their cheap Chinese-made crap to care).
It's certainly something to consider, but let's not forget that it was the outsourcing of computer manufacturing that brough drastic price drops in the late 80s, heralding in an era of purchases and the widespread adoption of PCs in homes and business.
Once could argue, and would be correct, that it was largely by virtue of out-sourcing of computer manufacturing that the ENTIRE US economy was able to grow throughout most of the past twenty years.
On the whole, would you rather a few hundred thousand manufacturing jobs, or would prefer the exponential productivity gains across every other sector that we can now afford computers as result of not having those jobs here?
They're clearly despondent over the lack of Flash on the iPhone.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Bollics on the unions.
Really. The US has labor laws to protect workers. Unions where useful in the past but the law protects workers.
Sorry but when my company had to pay a Union worker $200 to watch us plug in powerstrips and set up our booths at convention in Chicago any desire for Unions went out the window.
Also Toyota other manufactures have plants in the US that are none Union. The workers are well paid and seem happy.
I do not believe that Unions are part of the solution anymore.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Don't you mean "iBlood"?
"It's not unique to Apple; this is capitalism itself in action."
What, pray, was the active force in play during the Cambodian Genocide? Those running dog imperialists are everywhere!
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I work for a government agency, if they could get away with it they'd work us this hard to, so it's not just a capitalism or Apple issue.
And if nobody could get away with it, you wouldn't be able to afford a simple cell phone.
The world sucks.
A command economy requires a commander. It is fair to relate communism and totalitarianism.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
... because we polished it with the tears of our dead workers' families.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I don't know.
There seems to be a good number of them that work for GM, Ford, Toyota, and other car makers in the US.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I's go with the Scandinavian model. (It's called social-democracy FYI.)
Couldn't be worse conditions than working in a Chinese garment factory:
I watched this documentary.
http://www.teddybearfilms.com/chinablue
Workers are pretty much slave labor.
"You're confusing communism and totalitarianism."
And you seem to be confusing communism with something anyone else but you wants.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Foxconn makes components for HP, Dell and many other major manufacturers. Was this the ninth suicide for an iPhone-specific employee, or Foxconn on the whole?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I know quite a few Canadians here. We've seen huge manufacturing layoffs over the last few years and those people would love to be back on a line getting paid to do what they know how to do. I also know a ton of 20-somethings who'd be happier to have that option instead of instead of selling cell phones, front-lining at banks, becoming realtors, ... The few manufacturers that are still operating here have no trouble getting and keeping employees. In fact, a Germany company moved a small production facility here last year. Heck, most tech lines are cleaner, nicer, more reliable jobs than meat or seafood processing and those companies operate here.
I know a few of engineers who'd be happy supporting lines that don't exist either, or at least being able to move on to a new employer or lead a maintenance team instead of being stuck because the demand for their skills has gone to China. They don't want to be designers, project managers, or go to grad school to specialize and become consultants. It really burns the guys who got to do it as interns but can't find a similar job now that they've graduated.
Whether one job is better than another depends on the person considering them. I know lots of people who'd never be happy as programmers and plenty of people who are. You may have hated production but I found it far better than a cushy government research job without enough to keep busy.
They just can't live without an iPad.
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
Debt-related suicide in Taiwan has been going up for some time and it's likely to just become worse.
Just to clarify, are you talking about debt in terms of owed money, or are you talking about the debt owed to the common good for bringing more apple products into the world?
This is not about Steve Jobs. It's about consumers always going for the cheapest and shiniest things, no matter where or how they're made. I'm one of those consumers. So are you.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
It seems to be worse on Apple's factories. See these videos.
I did. I RTFA too. You might want to do that. The videos are in chinese, and the images are disturbing, but if you read the article, it's starts to make sense. And what you just said is apparently completely made up by you. From TFA you linked to:
This super factory that holds some 400,000 people isn't the "sweatshop" that most would imagine. It provides accommodation that reaches the scale of a medium-sized town, all smooth and orderly. Compared to others, the facilities here are well-equipped and superior, with employee treatment meeting standard specifications. Thousands of people flock here each day just to find a place of their own, to find a dream that they'll probably never realize.
This isn't a factory's inside story, but the fate of a generation of workers.
This isn't the norm. Sounds to me like Apple must have done something already, lit a fire under Foxconn's ass, because the job, besides being low pay, isn't at all bad. What I'm reading from the article is that the social culture is being blamed for these suicides, not Foxconn's treatment of their workers under Apple's direction, as much as you'd like to believe that.
The Admin and the Engineer
Here's the thing about Communism: it requires people to cooperate, to all work together. If you can get that, then great. Unfortunately, no group of any real size has ever managed to do that.
Now, you can start out with everyone agreeing, but pretty soon, people are going to disagree about how to do things. At that point, one side is going to have to oppress the other side, otherwise the whole system will break down (since communism relies on cooperation). That's why communism never actually works in practice. Capitalism provides a convenient way for each side to do their own thing, and still cooperate in a way (based on cash transactions).
Qxe4
Who the hell modded this "insightful"? It's a sarcastic joke about how this is what the Communist regime in China has supposed to achieve for much of the last century. It's not a plan for future action.
I guess you've bought every lie they could possibly sell a brave young consumer. But for the record, you're completely, utterly wrong. Your posts reflects only lack a well rounded perspective and a lack imagination.
For example, in the feudal era, your average peasant might say "well we live in a state near poverty while everything we make and produce gets gobbled up by a well armed aristocracy, but the sad fact is God wants it that way, otherwise he wouldn't have anointed the kings with a divine right to do as they pleased!" Laughable.
The guy was depressed as the Central Committee didn't let him watch porn on his iPhone.
They killed themselves while at the factory. It does not count (if any) the number of employees who killed themselves at home, while the overall China stat o f 13 per 100,000 counts all suicides.
One thing that I think most people forget is that it's not like people are rounding up Taiwanese or Chinese peasants off the farm, shipping them to the cities, and telling them to start making iPads at gunpoint (well, not usually...). They're working in these factories because the alternatives are worse. It's the same reason people got off the farms and went to the cities in Europe and America during the Industrial Revolution - as bad as it was in the mines and the factories, and it was bad , it still beat the pants off of trying to subsist on the economics of farm life of the time.
I'm not gonna argue with misery, but environmental destructiveness? You got to be kidding if you think subsistence farming is more environmentally destructive than building ipads.
And the alternative to your post is one without fallacy of false choice, or the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses.
And, life sucks- for slaves. Can there be less slavery? Yes when you realize that all the ruling classes have always done through the centuries is trying to wrestle control from the others. Like the nobles which left their place for Louis XIV versailles, we lost the ability sustain ourself in organizations called families and got in the shiny cities. Now that turning back is becoming impossible, city life needs not be shiny anymore. Coincidence? According to this trend, communism and capitalism are just meaningless propaganda. Capitalism and communism both contributed to the loss of culture, identity, and independence in different ways.
Finally, tying tech advancements to a political system is a post hoc fallacy. IRL advancements are made in free software (which apple based upon too) and in closed one.
I wonder if Steve Jobs feels proud of himself. Every Mac, iPhone and iPad is seriously overpriced and makes great profit for Apple.
I wonder if this post would have been made if Slashdot didn't reward these sorts comments with the word Insightful.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You're confusing communism and totalitarianism.
No, actually I'm not. I was implying that communism at large scale is impossible without totalitarianism, and in actual practice this has been shown to be the case. It would be fascinating in your rebuttal if you had actually shown a case where communism had worked on a large scale without totalitarianism, or even suggested a way that it could happen, but you didn't.
Qxe4
Totalitarianism seeks control.
Communism seeks to spread wealth equitably.
We only have bad examples of communism, because people in power became corrupt and/or crazy along the way. Actually, we also only have pretty bad examples of capitalism. I actually wonder which regime has killed, hurt, imprisoned more people (internally and externally), as a % of their population ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
That's not exactly true. The entire concept of marketing is to shape what your customers want. Apple markets its products so that people do what Apple wants (become its customers).
But that doesn't really make a difference.
You can't say that a hired assassin has no culpability because he is just doing what his customer wants. Apple must also take responsibility for its actions, whatever they may be.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
People act so surprised by this, as they buy their high-complexity electronics from wal-mart at dirt cheap prices.
Wow, I totally overlooked that "Don't Beat Your Workers" price tag at WalMart, as well my local "No Oppression Electronics" store.
OK, look, forgive my snark and the angry frustration that follows, but the general public is not to blame for the horrific way these factories are managed. Prices are set as high as the market will bear. Companies have entire departments whose whole job is to figure out "At what price are our profits maximized?" and costs do not enter into it. No company has ever said, "Wow, we could make a profit at $10, so even though we'd make the same number of sales at $100 for our widget, we just wouldn't feel right taking the extra money..."
The blood money these companies make does not go into my pocket. I paid plenty for my goods. At the price I paid, these workers would have full, meaningful lives if only management paid them their fair share.
Ever since Tiananmen, I have tried my best to boycott China. I routinely pay extra to buy "Made in the USA" only to find that label is a lie.
I have no way of knowing how the products I buy on a day-to-day basis were manufactured. I don't buy Nike. Guess what? Asics, Adidas and New Balance are manufactured in the same horrible places. Oh, "Quit buying yuppie crap," you say? All the generic goods say "Made in Godawful Horror" as well.
Fortunately, there is a man in America with the power to save these poor people. His name is Steve Jobs. I understand "Our CEO Below" has quite the sweatshop prepared for him. Given the shaky state of his liver, you'd think Steve would be a bit more worried about his soul.
Yeah, that was a cheap shot. Cheap shots are all I have left. My political vote seems to count for squat. I can't even say "Vote with my wallet" with a straight face. I'd be more than happy to join the protest, but protesting from the "free speech zone" in a chainlink box in the next town doesn't get it done. I'm not willing to hurt anybody.
So if reminding the man who is responsible for this blood of his own mortality is the only shot I have left, I'll take it.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
And where are the alternatives ? It's being harder and harder to find US made hardware nowadays. (Which by the way is great and I am not a US citizen)
There are lots of "third way" groups out there who advocate against both capitalism and communism/socialism.
One of the main principles of "third way" economic thinking is subsidiarity. This is a "first things first" mentality that puts the area of production and consumption as close together as possible. It also seeks the widest possible distribution of capital in the form of productive <i>private</i> property.
There have been back-to-the-land movements that fit nicely into third way thinking. A lot of these people place high value on individual and community trades, on craftsmen, artisans, farmers, etc., who all work for themselves and in local small businesses. One of the benefits of subsidiarity is in fact a reversal of "environmental destructiveness" because the emphasis is removed from production for the sake of profit to production for the sake of consumption. Production is naturally scaled to local needs.
The summary is a troll. If Soulskill had actually done any research it wouldn't have been posted. Even saying Foxconn is to blame for the suicides is a stretch, forget about blaming Apple. Well, I read one article, so I'm an expert now... and as it turns out, as Chinese companies and the treatment of their workers go, Foxconn is one of the best, and this evaluation is coming from the workers themselves. Foxconn is not to blame for the ancient social pressures that the Chinese seem to carry around with them... I don't want to start a war here, but it's like that country is run by a bunch of control freaks who just thrive on socially and economically repressing their own people. What that place needs is an old fashioned, rivers of blood revolution to replace a failed political religion with an honest to goodness, and dishonest as they come, representational democracy.
The Admin and the Engineer
Not really, no. Would you like to point out such a period?
There is a much greater correlation between poor governance and economic ruin than there is between any single economic policy and economic ruin.
If anything, what we have learned is that extreme capitalism and communism both have the same problem: they would work only if people did not behave the way they do. In light of that, neither system is a good idea, which leaves us with needing to find something in the middle. The problem we're having right now is that people are so shy of communism that they've relabeled ANYTHING other than unrestricted capitalism as extreme, and we're tilting heavily in the other way. It is unsustainable, and if people don't figure out the real issue soon enough (that the wealthiest people in our society are often the least productive, and that the occupations currently given the highest rewards are ones which explicitly do not create anything of actual value, just bigger numbers after the dollar sign) what has happened so far will look like a drop in the bucket. Real financial reform would bring back into balance the financial reward of shuffling numbers on paper with the value of producing actual things of real value... I am unaware of any current effort in any body of any government to do so, so at least for now I'd say to expect more of the same.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
The labor costs on most PC are really small. With automation I would think that it could really be doable.
And in the long run it may be a bigger benefit to the economy. A few hundred thousand jobs means a few hundred thousand more consumers with money to drop.
That was one of Fords reason for paying his workers more than the average factory workers. They became his customers as well.
The other reason was to keep them on the job.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Have you ever seen films like Roger & Me?
Sure, but generally I try to avoid the propaganda and focus on real research.
Qxe4
But if they start making them in cheap labour areas I stop buying them!
Bull.
Could you be any more fanboyish and defensive? The videos come from a Chinese news source, and they don't give a frak about Apple, HP, or anything else. They are reporting about a Suicidal factory and don't mention any brand names at all. Not even once. The Chinese reporters are talking about it, because there's a real problem at Foxcon that does not exist in their other factories.
Watch the video - workers are supposed to get a 10 minute break every hour, but the managers took away the privilege. No wonder they feel burned out
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Citation needed. I can pull platitudes out of my ass too.
http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2010-05-22/043017547713s.shtml Chinese media called it the "Xth jumping", since all suicide were jumping and the x goes all the way from 2 to 10.. and counting
I's go with the Scandinavian model. (It's called social-democracy FYI.)
In other words, export all your labor to developing countries? It's nice in parts, but they solve the problem by ignoring certain ugly parts.
Qxe4
Just like capitalism. Note that the largest captialist actors are constantly engaged in war, do you think the war in iraq is NOT about capitalism? America is just as bad if not worse then the soviets.
>>>the job, besides being low pay, isn't at all bad
The video shows a 24 year old woman committing suicide. She's so tired she can barely walk. It shows workers being denied their 10 minute breaks. It shows that 5% of the workers quit every month, and a diary where a man says he feels like he's living in workplace hell, day-after-day, year-after-year. Not that bad of a job? I certainly wouldn't do it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Bully for you. I, on the other hand, will purchase my next phone hungrily
|SPARKLE| |SPARKLE|*
* Vampires sparkle now, right? Or do they still brood palely in the corner while the Cocteau Twins' tender but dark lyrics float over the crowd? I can't keep my pop culture undead types straight anymore, what with all these kids and their newfangled** ways of representing the dark lords of the night.
**newFANGled... get it? Hah! Don't forget to tip your waitress, I'll be here all week, try the type-O negative!***
***Get it? I substituted a blood type for "fish". Because this post is about vampires. And there just aren't enough re-hashed vampire jokes on the internets, probably because they all suck***
****Not a joke about sucking blood. Stale vampire jokes really do suck. The freshness of our internet LOLs is at literally at stake***** here!
****OK, I'm done now. I'm not going to explain that one, though it crushes my heart to leave it a mystery.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Subsistence farming is not really sustainable. At the scale required to sustain the earth's current population, it WOULD be more environmentally destructive. We could kill a lot of people, but that is a different problem.
Qxe4
Look at the U.S. It's a combination of capitalism and communism. Our government collects portions of our income and disperses it into public projects: infrastructure, aid, health care...even the occasional direct payment which, as far as I can tell, is a completely political piece of nonsense used to pander to the masses. It works fairly well, but it should apply a little more taxation on the truly rich. Not giving money to the poor directly, but not forcing the poor to pay the rich person's prices.
The government in the U.S. would do well by subsidizing more things: farming is well subsidized; education needs a whole hell of a lot more money; alternative fuel research and implementation would help drive down gas prices as well as provide more economic means of transportation. I don't want to take your iPhone, nor do I want straight-up handouts. But why not tweak the market a bit more to bring down internet prices, deploy a better network infrastructure, etc.
Just ban the alternatives too!
And in response......you provide the useless post. If you had actually posted an alternative, it would have been interesting, and we could examine it. Unfortunately you didn't. What a waste.
Qxe4
only 9 lives were lost to give the world something like the iphone. it was worth it.
You're confusing communism and totalitarianism.
No, he's merely describing actual, real-life, real world communism rather than the fantasy-land, purely-theoretical "No True Scotsman" communism that only exists in the minds of Western college students who resent their parents believe in.
Depends on what value you give yourself, and how good you can make others believe in that value.
Sure. To a point. Every arena will have a champion. But even the champion doesn't live long. Successful, winning Thai kickboxing careers run about two or three years. Even Mohammed Ali -- and I practically worship the man -- ended up with brain damage.
Wouldn't it be better just to get along reasonably than to make everyone fight to the death?
Yup, actually I'd rather die than this kind of job. I have no problem with death.
That attitude and choice, and I shared it and have the scars to prove it, lasts right up to the moment she says, "Honey, I'm late." The second a child enters the picture, your freedom to go out in a blaze of glory disappears.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Isn't this how Apple keeps its secrets.... a secret?
Well... yes, that's kind of the point, isn't it? Look, it's absolutely true that many Americans would love to do factory work, especially in today's economic climate. Trouble is, at least until rather recently, most Americans that were "willing" to do factory work wanted to work half as hard as someone in China for five times the pay. I don't care how you slice it - that just isn't sustainable.
The good news is history has shown us that, over time, "developing" countries with underpaid labor usually turn into developed countries with modern pay structures, for better or worse. The Koreans are having nearly as bad of a time with their automotive unions as the US. The vaunted Japanese work ethic and company loyalty has been steadily eroding in the face of two decades of economic stagnation. Even Mexicans aren't half as poor as they used to be - in fact, Mexico's economy is the 11th largest in the world, and their GDP per person is in the top 1/3 of all countries worldwide. Granted, they're not rich - they're about the same economically as Eastern Europe - but they're certainly a far sight better than they used to be. Also keep in mind that the standard of living in the US is much higher materially than it ever was in the '50s, in no small part to various technological advances. Cars last longer than two or three years, so used cars are far more common, far safer, and far more reliable than they were back then. Food freshness and variety is vastly improved over anything the '50s dreamed up (they still thought frozen food was neat an novel). Housing is more expensive, but most new construction is also twice the size. Plus, we also have color TV, computers, and all that good stuff, and it's all affordable to just about everyone, especially if you put your toes in the used market.
Just hope and pray that Africa remains a disorganized, kleptocratic hellhole, otherwise we'll all just have to go through this again in another 20 years.
There are some right-to-work states where Unions don't have the sort of power they have in places like Michigan.
So which communist regime has not been totalitarian?
Communism has no government. The workers make decisions democratically about what items to make in their factory, and then make those items.
Of course such a system would never work outside of Marx's book. In the real world either there would be undirected chaos, or there would be a dictator (or oligarchs) who would take advantage of the situation and become the central leader --- which is what happened to the Soviet Union. In theory the "soviets" (groups of workers) were supposed to have a voice in their local factories and communities, similar to a democracy, but in reality it became a top-down system where the workers voices were ignored.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If we were to practice subsistence farming with technology and methods from two hundred years ago, I'm sure you'd be right. But we are limited to those methods, and if it were approached with sustainability in mind, I think it could be done with less environmental damage than you might think -- although usable water would be a huge issue.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Why not try something else like a Demarchy.
At the least it would make it harder for people to bitch about decisions made because it just might be them making the next big decision.
the multiple market crashes and panics that happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries, taught us that unrestrained capitalism is not a sustainable economic model.
Bullshit. What you're implying is that the natural economic business cycles are able to be avoided if we can just tweak the formula. I find it interesting that you blame "unrestrained capitalism" rather than "pure Socialism" on the market crashes. You realize Socialist countries experience these crashes as well, right?
Unions push for the laws that protect workers. Without a unified voice, the workers will be drowned out by the big voice that is the corporation.
Its not sustainable if the goal is to continuously pay your employes less.
High wage industrial assembly works in the semi-conducter industry in the US and Europe, the automotive and aviation industry, it is sustainable.
It's not unique to Apple; this is capitalism itself in action.
No, this is communism in action. In a capitalist country, like the USA, the correct course of action when you are mistreated by your employer is to quit and seek employment elsewhere. Workers in communist paradises often don't have that option.
We don't read about American workers jumping off their factory roofs nearly this often.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
If communism has been tried about a Dozen times around the world, and it failed each time due to communism collapsing and becoming totalitarian Dictatorships or Oligarchies, then the idea is fundamentally flawed. It is unstable and will end the same way each time.
At least with our capitalist systems, we have Constitutions to chain our governments from being abusive, elections to remove dickheds from said government, and Courts to protect the citizens from abuse by one another or the corporations.
BTW I think corporate licenses should be revoked. Let them operate as traditional proprietorships with full liability for their actions. (i.e. Toyota's CEO and management would stand trial for manslaughter.) (Ditto Ford's CEO/management when the 70s-era Pintos were exploding.)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Fascism is more like it. And I'm talking about the economic model. It's almost like you take the Capitalism in the US and use trade to combine it with the Nationalistic Communist government of China and you get some sort of perverted system of Fascism. It's a strange thing.
Cuba. But you likely can't visit there to see for yourself, so you are stuck believing the propaganda about the country.
Castro was/is far from perfect, and the place is had a utopia, but it is far from totalitarian. I'd argue that most of the 'democracies' today are far more closer to totalitarian than Cuba.
Could you be any more fanboyish and defensive? The videos come from a Chinese news source, and they don't give a frak about Apple, HP, or anything else. They are reporting about a Suicidal factory and don't mention any brand names at all. Not even once.
Right, it was the AC that attached the brand name to it, because it has more impact if it's Apple. This same factory makes electronics for Apple, Microsoft, LG, Sony, ........
Social Democracy eh?
- You work your ass off trying to earn money. .....)
- I sit and watch TV or internet all day, and then I suck the cash out of your wallet to pay my bills (food stamps, housing, doctors' bills, welfare, other free handouts,
You call that acceptable??? I call that legalized theft. Thank you very much (pockets YOUR money in my bank).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I seriously doubt that Jobs held a gun to their head and said "jump or die". You would have to be mentally deficient to blame Apple or Jobs for this. If you felt like blaming someone, you could blame Foxconn but that won't bring the suicidal workers back. It wasn't the company that forced them to jump, they did it all on their own.
Why is it that when someone wants to off themselves people get sad and protest-y, but when someone wants to end their life because they are old people think they should be allowed and that it's "mercy"?
Grow up and move out of your mom's basement.
Is 9 suicides / year out of the average for Chinese tech manufacturing facilities?
If it is, it might not necessarily be the lack of workers rights and grueling work hours.
There might be some chemical contamination in that factory affecting the worker's state of mind.
That's not at all an unreasonable idea.
I wonder if anyone's looked at that angle.
Troll.
Capitalism is someone (maybe even you) being free to start a business and make a living (and *gasp* perhaps even profiting) from meeting the desires/needs of others.
Everyone points to the biggest, baddest mega-company they can find when talking about capitalism (and we do need monopoly laws) but capitalism is a big part of individual freedom.
Says one stuck in the 1980s.
You could try actually learning what Marx et all were actually about. What Russia (and China, now) are displaying are [b][u]NOT[/u][/b] anything [i]close[/i] to communism.
I'm not saying it would work. But I am saying, well, exactly what I just said.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Could you be any more fanboyish and defensive? The videos come from a Chinese news source, and they don't give a frak about Apple, HP, or anything else. They are reporting about a Suicidal factory and don't mention any brand names at all.
And of course, Foxconn only makes products for Apple, and nobody but Apple, right?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Of course, had the economic system of China been socialism, the glorious workers of the factory of Progress would be far too motivated by the Bright Future to ever think of committing such a crime against the State.
To belive that we EVER have had unrestrained capitalism is willful ignorance of history.
Pics or it didn't happen.
On second thought - never mind!
Maybe he should have subcontracted with Commodore to make Amiga 500s (and later 1200s) instead. They sold about a million a year while his NeXT sold little.
Of course a lot of the Amigas were hand-assembled in Pennsylvania. Maybe that's why they only cost ~$500 while the next cost ~$5000. Labor's cheaper than automation?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
> but the idea that unrestrained capitalism is the way to go takes an almost willful ignorance of history.
So that's the reason we're heading straight back for it...
Taiwan's Suicide rate is 18.8 per 100,000.
Foxconn has 486,000 employees globally
Now I'm not sure how many employees are in Taiwan but that would make for 91 suicides per year at Foxconn globally to meet the Taiwanese norm. All in all, I think the news stories are just sensationalizing a normal societal trend.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
You're confusing communism and totalitarianism
How would communism work in the real world (ie. not everyone agrees) without totalitarianism ?
Communism is an overloaded term. Being both an economic term and a political movement makes it pretty difficult to discuss without first defining terms. Economically capitalism is individually owned resources, socialism is government owned resources, and communism is resources shared by a subset of society. Economically speaking, the atomic family sharing a home and groceries and electrical bills is communism with extremely small cell sizes. Co-op stores, monasteries, and traditional communes are communism applied with slightly larger communist cell sizes.
But I think what you're talking about is socialism. There is a connection between totalitarianism and socialism, in that the more socialism is prevalent in an economy, the more centralized resources are, the easier it is for someone to take control and establish a totalitarian regime. That doesn't mean you can't have extreme levels of socialism in a completely democratic system of government, it's just more difficult to maintain.
Do you have any idea what communism actually is? Well doesn't matter, if there is one thing that it isn't, its people working in capitalistic factories.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Has it been given a good run without totalitarianism? Probably not, because enough people don't want it, that it wouldn't fly well in any other situation as far as we can tell.
Though I'll be honest in my bias. My ideal system would be communist anarchy. Impossible to execute and keep it, but ideal in a perfect world... this is not a perfect world.
This seems to be a case where Western mores are being applied to the Chinese. Media here in the US and the West continually attempt to reinforce their guilty feelings...
Human rights are universal. My wife's Asian. She was endowed by her Creator with the same rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness that I was. My children, bearing epicanthic folds around their eyes, do not somehow possess fewer natural rights than I do.
Many of those who are working in those factories got lucky: they would be working just as hard or harder farming their own land for next to nothing.
Nope, sorry, try again. My grandparents were hillbilly subsistence farmers. Give a man a plot of land and the right to keep what he grows and he'll prosper. It's sharecroppers, constantly robbed of their harvest, who suffer. Read the histories of industrialization, particularly that of Britain and India. When factories and their need for labor enter the picture, government policies are soon implemented to drive farmers off their land.
I have loved ones in Asia. I'm offended at the suggestion that they should be grateful for simply being allowed to survive.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
You're confusing communism and totalitarianism.
I dunno, there seems to be a pattern...
The Foxconn plant issues are typical of plants in China, where the employees make dollars a day and work 80 hour weeks and the owner makes millions and drives a Mercedes-Benz.
This is not capitalism in action. This is greed in action.
A local Honda supplier plant here in Central Indiana that makes engines for North American Honda Civics and where the president of said plant makes less than 5x the amount of the workers is capitalism in action. Indiana automotive workers are part of capitalism in action and are not treated in the same manner as Chinese workers. Honda engines could be made in China for significantly less, but they aren't, and that is also capitalism in action.
...but it starts at marketing.
Ultimately, I am a non-consumer... or maybe an anti-consumer. This is not to say I don't consume -- I do -- I just don't buy the hype and marketing crap... in fact, I am so repulsed by it, that I factor in market hype as a negative when making a purchasing decision.
With all that said, I know I will never change the world with my wishes, but there can be some sanity brought in through legislative means. While I think the U.K. is over the top on many of the things they do, one thing I agree on is their laws regarding truth in advertising. Juicy fruit is NOT going to move me and shouldn't be allowed to say so... unless it also acts as a laxative. And drinking beer is not going to make my life just the people on TV... it may not "get any better'n dis" but it doesn't have anything to do with their selection of beer. We need some serious limitations about the things people can do in advertising. It makes people crazy.
We all buy loads of crap we don't need. Look around you now! Anywhere from 90 to 180 degrees of your current view will likely contain hundreds of dollars in crap you don't need. Give it away! Sell it! At the very least you will be able to make room for more useless crap, but hopefully you will collect and maintain only that which is actually useful or functional. As it is, people are convinced that if they don't have that "whatever" they will simply not be happy and so they buy it. This is how they build the demand requirement. Once there is demand, there will be more supply. The more demand, the more supply and the more they sell which is the purpose of marketing. But with more demand comes more need for the manufacture which is more pressure on those who make the stuff.
One could argue that it is our "consumerism" that drives the problem. But what creates and grows the consumerism? Exactly. Marketing... in fact, it corrupts is all in all kinds of ways. "Sex sells" without a doubt. And every year the envelope is pushed further and further until every 10 year old girl wants to look like a whore and prove that they are women too. It never ends, but it all starts at marketing. It needs to be reigned in. And seriously, if it is reigned in, who will be harmed by this? Certainly not the average consumer. Nope. Just the sales people who thrive on the insanity that is stirred up by marketing.
It's a little more complicated than that...
We actually make quite a bit in the US, though most of it is high-end stuff that we're not going to buy at Walmart. Much of the animosity toward unions has nothing to do with poor working conditions or "dirt wages" - honestly, if they stopped there, everybody would love them, myself included. The problem with American unions is that, back in the '30s, they got in bed with big business through the Wagner Act and created a bureaucratic nightmare that was explicitly meant to ensure that those who had jobs would be paid handsomely, while the larger companies could use the power of collective bargaining to bankrupt their smaller competitors. So, instead of worrying about "poor working conditions", you had unions instituting wacky work rules that said that a worker had to be "certified" for a particular job (say, "Door Hinge Installer III"), and that was the only job they could be certified for. No door hinges to install that day? Well, that's where the "dirt wages" part kicks in - you still have to pay the worker to sit around and not install door hinges. Move the worker to somewhere where there's work to be done? Oh, he'd have to be re-certified for that, and that takes time... plus, he'd lose his Door Hinge III certification. Can't have that. The result was a system that crushed competition and ensured there was a class of unskilled workers making great wages and a class of unskilled workers making less than so-called "illegals" make here now.
But, hey, it worked great for about a generation. Then Europe and Japan started to re-industrialize after World War 2 - suddenly our big companies weren't the only big companies and the sandbox. Worse yet, the Europeans and Japanese actually maintained a healthy relationship between their employers and their unions, instead of the strangely antagonistic yet incestuous relationship that our companies maintained with our unions, and, at least outside of the UK, they weren't interested in copying our "model". Checkmate.
Would American businesses love it if we rolled labor laws back to reflect the norm in China? Possibly, but I think you'd be surprised by how few would be thrilled about it. Labor laws or no, we do have a nominally free press here that enjoys "exposing" things like poor working conditions, so it'd be bad PR to treat American workers like cattle. Plus, happier workers really do work better - the quality is higher, if absolutely nothing else. As bad as American cars are now, they're still a far sight better than anything China produces natively. Heck, India has a stronger chance of breaking into the American market than China right now; in fact, Mahindra is a rather popular brand of tractors in the Midwest (yes, that Midwest) because they're durable and rugged. It's a little hard to make durable, rugged products of any complexity when your employees are too tired, depressed and ill to think.
Letting go of a single iPhone or iPad is heart breaking enough. If you ever had yours stolen or damaged you know what I mean. Withdrawal is hell.
Now, can you imagine a Taiwanese worker having to see hundreds, probably thousands of these units go through his hands, having to test them, love them, then having to let them go?
I'm sorry but I agree with commodore64_love Apple's factory is a particularly cruel place to work.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
er, whoops. all this new 'ajax' crap makes me want to use bbcode. Doh!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Ban subsidence agriculture on small, family-owned plots of land? Um... are you sure about this?
In capitalist utopias we prefer '' to your egalitarian square brackets . . .
The video shows a 24 year old woman committing suicide. She's so tired she can barely walk. It shows workers being denied their 10 minute breaks. It shows that 5% of the workers quit every month, and a diary where a man says he feels like he's living in workplace hell, day-after-day, year-after-year.
Sounds like my last IT job. There's a reason I got out of it. The military was paradise, in comparison.
Do you have any idea what communism actually is? Well doesn't matter, if there is one thing that it isn't, its people working in capitalistic factories.
You're right: it isn't people working in capitalistic factories. That's a tautology. My point is that capitalistic factories, like those in the US, don't have nearly these kinds of suicide rates. Read about the Stalin years to learn more about communistic factories and farms.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Wait what? 400,000 people inside that factory?
China's suicide rate is 13.9 per 100,000 people, so for this given subset of the population, the suicide rate is considerably lower than average.
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Catapultism?
It's 10 now.
its the law of averages. There are nuts in every group of people.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No, automation is generally much cheaper. However, Commodore had economies of scale in its favor. The money you get from sales also must pay for your R&D costs. If you're selling a million units per year to cover a quarter billion in annual R&D spending, you need to make $250 per unit above and beyond the manufacturing costs just to break even. If you're only selling 100,000 units, you need to make $2,500 per unit.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The Amish and the Hudderites are fairly Communist, and they seem to work out just fine. Granted, they're a much smaller group.
I disagree. You say "communism as only worked with totalitarianism", but I think communism as never worked at all, or at least as Marx and other early communist thinkers defined it. Because the lack of a government body is a condition of communism. Under Marx's theory, communism would be much more like a local direct democracyf, where you voted on issues and not people.
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You are right. The only solution is to ban poverty.
So between the time of the original article and the /. post another poor worker got fed up with Apple?
I completely agree. Our society has been infected with a diseases. http://vimeo.com/10707453
ayottesoftware.com
"Why the heck don't we just make more stuff in the US" ... because no one wants to pay $5000 for a pc anymore.
will the last Foxconworker still alive turn out the lights?
Well, the goal is always to pay your employees less, at least on a per-unit-of-production basis; that's why we can make more stuff with less people now. The reason the sorts of production you're listing is "sustainable" with a living wage is because they actually require skill - not just anyone can put a car together. On the other hand, women the world over can sew, which is why textile work doesn't pay much. It's the same market dynamic that explains why a brainless Geek Squad monkey makes $9/hour while a trained, knowledgeable IT Manager makes somewhere north of six times that.
Keep in mind here that part of the reason our low-end wages in the America are even remotely "livable" (and, I agree, it's pushing it) is because of dirt cheap off-shore labor. If we kept the jobs here, yeah, everyone would have more digits in their bank account, but everything would cost more. Clothes, for example, would either cost twice as much (or more) or they would be put together in illegal sweatshops. Many of our electronics would probably double in price, too. This doesn't get us started on what would happen to other consumer goods that presently rely on imported machines or parts to produce here (e.g. sewing machines, a lot of our industrial equipment, etc.).
Truth is, we've already been down that road - it was called the '70s. It didn't end well.
Literally that same factory makes stuff for Sony, MS, Nintendo, HP, Dell... It's not exclusively an Apple factory. It is easier to infer that though, with these sensationalist stories that claim to be about promoting the welfare of Chinese workers but are really about smearing Apple.
Victorian workhouse conditions are clearly not what we want to see, but it is in no way unique to Apple.
Let's declare a war on it!
I don't think Anarchy qualifies as a system. Anarchy is what happens when your system fails, or you decide you don't need a system. It's kind of like the null option (what should we do about the oil spill? 1: Cap it, 2: Siphon it, 3: Nuclear Bomb, 4: do nothing.). It's not actually doing something, but it's always good to compare the null option to the alternatives to make sure action is warranted.
If you wanted to claim it as a system you'd have to concede that the vast majority of all systems are anarchy.
You won't really be able to put any of the money in the bank. You would get what you'd need to survive. You wouldn't get welfare if you have any savings anyway. So you'd sit and watch TV or internet? You think you could afford cable? Tip: try the library, it's free and it's probably got internet. You wouldn't have much choice when it comes to housing either. It's actually not that big a problem, simply because such an existence isn't much of a life. You'll survive, potentially in reasonable health, but not much more.
The only way to stay sane in an insane world, is to be mad yourself...
No you fool!
It is due to the fact that when you get an Iphone, Ipad, or Ipod love and happiness spills forth from the interface into the user.
Now, WHERE do you think they get that love and happiness?
They are draining it from their workers!
Can you even think of a working conditions where you would rather end your life than continue working there?
Your post is completely nonsensical for the following reasons:
1. People with stable minds quit their jobs before committing suicide.
2. Apple does not run the factory. Foxconn does. Apple only has a contract with Foxconn as do many other US companies. In fact, the computer you are typing on likely has components from them. This is one problem you cannot blame on Apple, but rather on the Chinese commercial system.
Globalization(greed) is good.
Q: What is the "P" for in Steven P. Jobs?
A: Palpatine
Isn't it fun to argue over definitions? Try this on for size: China is a communist country, that's what the phrase "Peoples Republic" means. You say "if there is one thing that it isn't, its people working in capitalistic factories." In that case, how can it be that so many people work in Chinese factories?
The foundation of language is shared experience. If the most populous country in the world holds the understanding that communism means people working in factories, that's the only sensible definition to use. Unless you want a lot of people to misunderstand you when you're talking, I'd suggest you change your wording. May I suggest Marxism?
Any dictionary will show you what the word "command" means. If you want examples, any history book will illustrate this principle for you, too.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
It's in the best interest of the big voice that is the corporation to keep workers happy. When people started leaving our company because they were fed up last year there was a huge push from up top saying we need to do everything possible to improve morale. We all got payrises, the kitchens were filled with free cream biscuits to replace the normal ones, and they introduced a 9 day fortnight so we get every second Friday off on a flexible alternate roster. Why?
Because staff turnover costs a lot of money
Read that again. No don't just keep reading here, go up and read the bold bit again. It costs a dickload of money to employ someone, and train someone to the extent that makes them useful. I hear your argument all the time, but it falls down on the fact that in most western countries the job market is competitive. I agree that it sounds like Foxconn needs the mother of all unions but that's because the workers have no other choice but the western world is different. If you truck driving job sucks because they don't pay enough, go work for a company with better conditions, if your engineering job sucks, go do likewise.
When Australian introduced it's "Fair Choices" work laws it stripped away a lot of involuntary conditions that the unions have fought for. I remember the unions arguing against this saying when it's introduced it will be chaos, there will be wide scale firing and re-hiring of employees for worse conditions, the job market will crumble, blah blah blah.
From what I remember you could count the number of businesses which did this on one hand, and no major companies were involved. Makes me glad I don't pay union fees which go to some bloated idiot who is talking about the end being near on the news every night. If I wanted to do that I'd throw a coin to the crazies with their signs at the street corner.
Manufacturing assembly being replaced by service assembly is hardly an improvement. You must have thought so or you'd have quit the factory to work at McDonald's, the only type of job most kids can choose now.
Can anyone verify a comment to the article that claimed all the suicides were from a specific group of 25,000 or so employees from a particular factory? If I recall, the comment also hinted that there were additional attempts that were "suspicious" in nature.
[/quote]
[b]I feel your pain.[/b]
Really, why can't slashdot at least get with the 90's? ::evil::
As for the suicides, There's an App called [i]Paging Dr. Kevorkian.[/i]
You're confusing communism and totalitarianism
Is there a difference?
How would you consider using taxpayer funds to bail out billionaires not government abuse?
Or governments forbidding people to get married based on color (past) or sex (present)?
Capitalism is not necessarily democratic. It can be fascist - capitalists made money under the Nazis. (No wonder it's called "filthy lucre.")
And then we have the current state - corporatism.
Throw in shareholder liability. People will then have their own self-interest at stake in making ethical investments, instead of feeding the ponzi scheme of exploding mortgages.
Damn, I haven't even watched the videos, but... A ten minute break every hour - lost privilege (how much?), 36 hour work week, paycheck shallow enough to *beg* for overtime, if it wasn't for the 5% percent attrition rate I'd guess this was fast food. Anyways, working PC support I was considering leaving and going INTO fast food just last week, as a manager I'd make the same and nobody ever comes into McDonald's asking for a flying cheeseburger and throws a goddamn fit over it. They throw fits, but they don't ask for flying fucking cheeseburgers.
Yeah, you should try 6 days, 12 hours, labor in warehousing or 40hrs at a legitimate old hillbilly saw mill.
8 out of 400,000 = .00002%
I don't know if that's high or not and I don't mean to be insensitive, but maybe they should have quit. I dunno.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
to get out of that damn AT&T contract.
They had nine suicides and eight fatalities. If they've got undead zombie employees wanting to jump off the roof, restricting access isn't going to do a lot of good.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Mr. Furious: [talking about Carmine the Bowler] Seems there was a little controversy there regarding your father's death.
The Bowler: Yes, the police said he fell down an elevator shaft. Onto some bullets.
The Blue Raja: You know, I've alwas suspected a bit of foul play there.
The Bowler: As have I.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Is the real enemy here capitalism -- greedy, capitalist technology companies willing to outsource to anyone regardless of the local impact as long as it drives their costs lower?
Or is the real enemy a totalitarian socialist government willing to use its police state powers to suppress politics & labor organization that it doesn't agree with (ie, doesn't dump hard currency into party & party member's pockets)?
That statement is SO 90 years ago.....
There are a lot of logistics with the supply chain that makes it difficult to make small portable electronics in the US. Such as iPhone, Kindle, etc. There are huge benefits of working in a industry specific manufacturing hub like certain regions of Asia. You can get parts allocated and moved to your site more easily, and you have a wider number of suppliers to compete on pricing.
Cisco used to make some equipment in Fremont, CA and other places because they are less sensitive to pricing and Silicon Valley is/was acceptable for small quantities. Maybe they still do make some gear there, but I don't think they do. Cisco is worth mentioning because it is one of the top 5 tech supply chain companies. (in order: Apple, Dell, IBM, Cisco, Nokia. information from 2009 AMR Top25)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You might want to look into US history to see how the factories used to be. They were, and are, capitalistic, the conditions however have changed, mainly due to worker organization and government regulations.
I'm well aware of Stalin's atrocities and the problems with the Soviet Union. The factories and farms were owned by the an authoritarian state, certainly not by the workers.
Either way the factories in China are capitalistic, not state or worker owned. It's not about who owns the factory, but how it's run.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Today, we're introducing our new iCide, as an alternative to those who aren't enjoying iLife.
Jump right in folks. I've mixed up a special batch of Kool-Aid, just for you.
--
Steve Jobs
The statistic you are quoting is for the People's Republic of China, not the ROC where the factory is located. I suspect the Taiwanese suicide rate is lower, but couldn't find any recent stats.
So when he filmed the car assembly workers it was staged?
I appreciate Michael Moore has a bias, but you don't simply disregard a source because his agenda is different to yours. Especially when it's just raw footage of ordinary people.
unions are still needed but not for everyone. your right company's like gm let there unions get out of control and where paying there workers insane wages like 40$ a hr. sometimes its best to let them strike and hire replacements then it is to agree of wages that are just unreasonable. but company's like walmart desperately need a union to get involved with there company to force them to pay there employees living wage and offer health insurance they can afford. and your correct abought Toyota they pay there employees good wages and offer good health care somewhere around 13 to 15$ a hr. so Toyota needs no union and i would be angry with any greedy fuck who says they do.
The statistic you are quoting is for the People's Republic of China, not the ROC where the factory is located. I suspect the Taiwanese suicide rate is lower, but couldn't find any recent stats.
The factories in question are located in the PRC. The Foxconn corporation is headquartered in the ROC.
I gotta say, the iPhone has unleashed a fanboy within me that I have not seen since the days of waiting for Descent II to come out (I used to call Interplay every few weeks for a long time). I've been eagerly waiting to pre-order the 4G since seeing the "leaks". But this makes me seriously consider what's going on here. Are they facing increased pressure from Apple to keep the costs of the 4G down in fear of having actual competition in their own marketplace for the first time, from HTC and the likes? We'll never know, but it's tough to appreciate a novelty considering some kid found life not worth living in order to make it affordable for me.
I talk to 'ordinary people' all the time. What opinion do you want them to have? That Obama is not an American? I can find some 'ordinary people' who feel that way. Sure, there are some people who want to work on an assembly line, just like there are some people who run off into the woods for years to get away from it all. Doesn't mean it's representative of the population.
Michael Moore has an agenda, so he will show you what he wants you to see. If you want a clearer picture, you have to go elsewhere.
Qxe4
I think that labeling groups of people as "unproductive" is very hard to do. It's based around a bias and a hind-brained jealousy. "Those people in the suits upstairs just sit around and drink coffee and push paper around, yet they get paid the big bucks! How unproductive!" Anyone who points out that most of them are quite brilliant people with MBAs from expensive colleges and extensive knowledge about their industry is written off as "one of them" or "deluded." You can't really have an intelligent discussion with someone who is infected with this religion because like any religion it's irrational and founded mostly on fear and hatred. OMG Corporashuns!
Unfortunately the world is much more complicated than that. Most business people perform the most critical, high risk and toughest jobs in the company. They make sure that everything is working. This is management and it's much harder than doing anything else. Because without nothing will happen. And as anyone who's had bad managers knows, it's really easy to fuck up.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
China's suicide rate is 13.9 per 100,000 people, so for this given subset of the population, the suicide rate is considerably lower than average.
The national suicides are not distributed evenly among class and income. For example, a disproportionate number of suicides are rural women drinking pesticide! 9 suicides among 400,000 young, urban factory workers may very well be anomalous.
Ballmer didn't get loose in the factory did he?
Thinking the employees are chairs?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I was implying that communism at large scale is impossible without totalitarianism.
That's a paradox. Totalitarianism is against the principles of communism. On the other hand, communism at large scale is impossible given the human nature.
There has never been a truly communist state, totalitarian or not. Cuba, the USSR and soviet block, China, North Korea... None of those ever were actually communist.
On the other hand, communism at large scale is impossible given the human nature.
Huh, guess we solved that paradox then.
Qxe4
You could try actually learning some html tags
[ ] != <>
or at least use the preview button
i'm posting as AC because, well, i am.
Capitalism seems to invariably lead to asshattery such as intellectual property and patent law, and the pursuit of profit at any cost.
mediocrity rules, man
M-m-m-monster Kill!!
It's not that you really want everybody growing their own food without economy of scale. But if you adjust lifestyles towards "subsistence living", e.g. remove conspicuous consumption, then yes the environmental destruction could be reduced to the bare minimum needed to sustain humans.
However, you need some stand-in activity for subsistence farming to keep all those folks occupied. Otherwise, they'll develop new destructive hobbies and trash the environment anyway!
The factory is Taiwanese-owned, but it is located in Shenzhen, in the PRC. GP is correct.
No left turn unstoned.
I work for a big big company who solved these suicide annoyances. The building windows cannot be opened.
You are looking at it all wrong, the God of Jobs requires that each significant batch of new iToys is washed in blood of someone, who committed suicide while in deep depression. This is how the iToy gets its final touch, something magical that makes people want to continue buying iToys, regardless of any common sense and reason really.
Only 9 by now? The Gods are not too pleased.
You can't handle the truth.
The US has labor laws to protect workers.
Where the heck do you think those labor laws came from? What do you think is keeping them there? Unions are responsible for OSHA, the NLRB, minimum wage, overtime rules, and a host of other protections that you and most other Americans take for granted these days. And without unions applying steady pressure, you can be sure that a good portion of Congress would in fact quite happily vote to repeal those very same laws.
Unions are incredibly useful to the people who are in them. And for people who aren't in them, the threat of unionizing tends to keep management from walking all over their employees. Unions (or the threat thereof) give workers important protections against employer crimes such as unpaid overtime, wage theft, and dangerous working conditions, all of which are occurring regularly in non-union shops but are unheard of in union shops.
Regarding your experience of paying a guy $200 to watch you set up a booth - was he an IBEW electrician? If so, think about who you would have turned to the moment something went wrong with your power strips (e.g. all the booth electrical stuff overloaded a circuit). And also think about how expensive $200 was in comparison to the rest of the cost of that booth.
I am officially gone from
Either way the factories in China are capitalistic, not state or worker owned. It's not about who owns the factory, but how it's run.
I'm sorry, but the factories in the US are generally not state or worker owned, either. The difference is, in the US, the workers are allowed to seek employment elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with their job. Not so in a communist country. That's the difference. When you have forced employment, there's worker abuse: it doesn't matter if the factory is owned by the state or a private entity.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
It's all relative though. When you say, now, that "you certainly wouldn't do it" about the job, you say that from a completely different country and situation, I bet. (With a nick like "commodore64_love", I'm betting you're NOT living in China presently.....)
Workers being denied their 10 minute breaks? Not good, obviously, but I see people right here in the USA purposely skipping both their breaks AND lunch hours, because they feel they've got "too much business to catch up on" or what-not, too. Most of the time, they survive just fine ... even if they're a bit over-stressed and over-worked.
I bet I can also find a LOT of people working here who'd write similar things in their diary .... Workplace hell? That describes a TON of jobs around here!
If you're surrounded by a mentality that the worker never earns more than what they're paying there and things are "just that way" ... you're more likely to accept a job like that as just the "norm".
"a political oligarchy that controls the people with an iron fist while allowing corporations to practice almost completely unrestricted capitalism". Sounds like the USA, but only if you add "and murdering people in the Middle East for oil".
LUXURY!
Before this whole "global warming" thing, I had work in -80 CELSIUS!
You try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.
Ten minute break every hour? What country do you live in? Here in the U.S., that would be extremely abnormal for fast food workers.
Le français vous intéresse?
Actually, -40 Celsius is equal to -40 Fahrenheit! The more you know...
Hey, it works regarding gun control in the US. After all, if people are killing themselves by jumping off the roof, the smart thing to do would be to get rid of roofs. Then they'll all be happy and keep making our shinys.
> education needs a whole hell of a lot more money;
Nope. We spend more than Germany or Japan, and we don't get what we pay for. Adding funding to a broken system doesn't fix the system.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The alternative to capitalism is subsistence farming for everyone, with all the misery and environmental destructiveness that comes with it. Or you could go with communism, which by necessity is state organized oppression of those who disagree with how things are done.
What about a system like Norwegian socialism?
Communism is an economic system where workers own the means of production (the capital) instead of a third party (a capitalist). Forced employment is out of its scope. However I do believe that the workers can in fact quit (you made the claim they can't, so I assume you have some evidence). Whether they have any real alternative is a different question.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Why don't you jump out of the window in the name of capitalism?
Maybe Apple is not worse than other manufacturers, but why is the US condoning these sweatshops?
Why does the US not insist on more humane conditions? Why is China a "most favored" nation?
Why does the US not forbid US companies from using labor in countries that do not meet humane conditions?
Actually the soviets have anywhere between hundred million and half a billion dead corpses on their conscience.
Can you point to any single (serious) historian who claims the US killed even 1% of those numbers ?
Although on the internet one learns quickly not to expect anything remotely resembling facts from people like you.
At least with our capitalist systems, we have Constitutions to chain our governments from being abusive, elections to remove dickheds from said government, and Courts to protect the citizens from abuse by one another or the corporations.
Of course thats what those laws are for, to prevent people from being abused by things like fake DMCA notices, , litigation that is more or less 'legal blackmail', and no president would invade another country for no reason and highly support crimes like torture for fear of impeachment. Isn't it great?
If you think like that, and you truly believe that everyone is a brainless moron that just does what corporations want, then how & why would YOU be different ?
Quite frankly, if you are indeed correct, and apple users have no culpability, no control over apple, then you need to be locked up. Simply because of what you imply you'd do if you ever heard the "kill the poor" single.
Besides, if what you say were true, why would apple bother to actually build working devices ? If marketing has 1% the power you say it has, surely it wouldn't necessitate such hard work.
Apple users deserve at least a 50% share of the blame, especially since they're perfectly well aware of the way these devices are made.
Most business people perform the most critical, high risk and toughest jobs in the company.
That depends on what sort of risk you're considering. The business people often deal with a lot of economic risk, in that their decisions can win or lose millions of dollars (whether their own dollars or somebody else's). On the other hand, they face much less risk of getting impaled by a forklift or shorting out a 440V main with their face than a laborer does.
The business man and the laborer both think that they're the one doing the hard work... and they're both right.
Agreed. I've been to that facility and it is a town in itself. Over 250,000 people live on site and work for a minimum 2-year contract. They leave their village homes in the back country and come to make a lot of money woking extremely hard. Over time is highly sought-after and taken whenever possible. These 19 and 20 year old kids work 60 - 75 hours per week for two years and then go back home. Considering the population of this facility, over 350k total, the suicide rate is a lesser percentage than most major metropolitan areas. And, this has nothing to do with Apple or any other single company. The culture of work as hard as you can has its downside.
There were Americans who were proud to work those kinds of jobs, proud to say they worked in such a factory.
Is that sort of like how the average grunt is proud to serve his country? (Read: he would sell his left arm just to leave.)
Or how a school student, when filmed, says he enjoys going to his classes? (Read: he's contemplating suicide.)
Anyone proud of this work, is someone who has accepted his fate as a peon, and is trying to make the best of it.
Already we need to import immigrants to do things like yardwork, and yardwork is way better than assembly-line stuff. .
It isn't fun, but it must be done. Why do you think americans are too good to do these jobs, but foreign people aren't?
It's your country. Your people should be able take care of it. It's not even good for you.
It's no different than the article a month or so ago that bashed Microsoft for the pay the Chinese workers were receiving, and I think Microsoft only made up about 30% of the factory's orders.
That situation was nothing compared to this, people weren't killing themselves, they were actually making better than average wages (for China, mind you). They just treated the employees like prisoners with lots of options to run away - that was literally how you quit, you didn't go in and tell your boss you were leaving, you just left and missed out on your last paycheck.
This is the place where iPhones and iPads are manufactured. That's significant. More significant, I would argue, than the place Microsoft Intellimouse mice are manufactured, which was the case for the Microsoft example.
We've often held major corporations responsible for turning a blind eye to the conditions the workers endure in the overseas factories that produce their goods. Apple should be no different. Nike and Microsoft certainly aren't, and there is always hell to pay for them.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I've heard that but is that "more" per child or just more per country?
with these sensationalist stories that claim to be about promoting the welfare of Chinese workers but are really about smearing Apple.
Funny, the last one I read was about Microsoft, not Apple, and Microsoft only accounted for about 25-30% of the factory's contracts.
It's nothing new - pick the biggest name you can, and target it. It doesn't matter who. It's happened to Nike, Microsoft, Sony, Magnavox, you name it, if they've been the biggest contract at a Chinese factory, they've been the headline of one of these stories. Most of them you start out with "WTF! Who would do that!" then read a bit and think "Oh, well, that's not TOO bad, considering how poor everyone is there anyway."
Apple is just getting their fair share of the heat, that's all. Nothing to freak out about, Mr. Fanboi.
Frankly, it's difficult to put these stories into the correct context. It's true that nobody in the US or EU would take a job like this, but I'm sure there are thousands of people in Africa who would leap at the chance to get 3 square meals and a roof over their head, never mind actually getting paid too. A lot of what they do wouldn't be criminal in the US, or at least not criminal enough that the average US worker would risk losing their job over filing a grievance over it. Things like losing their break privileges and being made to work overtime are not uncommon over hear. There is usually better compensation involved, but that doesn't factor into whether it's right or wrong to make someone work 60-70 hours a week. People do it all the time, and they bitch about it, but it is still worth it. Same with these guys.
Some things are easy to recognize, like supervisors physically beating employees or denying them food or not permitting them to leave. A lot of what comes up in these complaints, though, is borderline or edge case for the factory. In that case it's hard to tell whether this is how the company is encouraged to run, or if it's just a bad supervisor who hasn't been caught and dealt with.
In this case, though, the suicide rate for the factory is about 1/4 the suicide rate for China in general, which basically means the premise of the story is utter bullshit. I think it's good to keep the companies that use these places on their toes, though. It helps keep them in line.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I always thought Communism sounded really nice on paper.
However, when I was a kid I did a research paper on Karl Marx, and found him to be a lazy, degenerate, good for nothing schmuck who would rather sit on his ass and muse about how "the common man" was being oppressed instead of getting off his ass, getting a job, and providing for his wife and kids. He lived his entire life as a leech. It's no wonder he came up with an impossible economic system where everyone in the world got to be leeches.
The guy was a serious loser, in every way, and since then I've wanted nothing to do with any idea that came from his head.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
i'm pretty sick of this shit about them being low paid just because they get a few bucks a day, how about we compare their pay to other workers pay in the same region? i make much less then someone working in manhattan but no one races around screaming about how low paid i am.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Mostly because they were making a product that they could be proud of, and equated doing a good job with exclellence, which is always something to be proud of.
The problem, was that there was a major disconnect. It became popular to use "cheaper" labor elsewhere, regardless of quality. Doing your very best didn't matter anymore, and you simply worked harder for no return. (where previously, being truly excellent would net you nice monetary rewards if you improved production.)
As such, the "Worker Culture" shifted away from excellence, and more toward "Do the very least amount of work possible, to shaft my employer back, for their continually shafting me."
About the ONLY industry in the US that still has some modicum of "Job pride" in quality is the US aviation industry, and it too suffers HORRIBLY from corporate assholes trying to squeeze nickles until thomas jefferson's boogers come out, and continually performing "Strategic outsourcing" probes with foreign labor (Sending "test batch orders" overseas to "cheap labor centers"). The *ONLY* reason why US aviation hasn't gone the same direction as US steel, US textiles, and US tech jobs, is because quality is NOT a "Non-issue" in aviation. If it is poor quality, aircraft fall out of the sky, and when that happens, the US Lawyers come looking for blood. If they could get "passable quality" out of some mexican or chineese sweatshop, they would drop the whole US production process like an ugly whore with leprosy.
Welcome to the dark side of the global economy kids.
Nokia is also worth mentioning (as you almost did; BTW, is this ranking about "stated, end-users price of goods"? The only way it can work like that, I guess?). Out of their 15 manufacturing facilities, only 5 are in the "Asian" hub (3 in China, 1 in Korea and 2 in Inia; the latter being in their own hub basically). Except 3 in Finland, which is somehow natural (but does Apple have even one in the US?), there's one in Mexico (even US companies typically escaped from there to China in recent years, right?), Brazil, UK, Germany, Hungary, Romania.
All of them owned; not some 3rd party sweatshops contracted to do stuff. And with Nokia devices being rather affordable.
But hey, that's not what "investors" like in our present world...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Wow, you are are in a sad state. Sorry. I had 5 W-2s to file last year because I was laid off from my 'good job' the year before. I immediately restarted at the bottom with temp jobs, shopped around, and am now enjoying my current job. It's full time staff in electronics at a university & a lot more enjoyable than the the one I had a year ago with the same pay. I'll probably stay here for a while.
Where does anyone say that? The factory makes iPhones and iPads. They make products for Apple. If they make other things too how does that excuse Apple from blame?
Or perhaps mostly because "investors" want easily understandable profit margins? Without looking at how their business practices work long-term and how they influence the landscape outside of the company...
The #1 mobile phone company does own all their 15 fabs. Only 5 of them being in Asia, 7 in the EU. With their phones being quite affordable.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Communism is an overloaded term. Being both an economic term and a political movement makes it pretty difficult to discuss without first defining terms.
Communism is not an economic term and a political movement, it is an economic system that requires by definition a stateless government run as a pure democracy. Marx envisioned the necessary totalitarian government that all modern communist countries function as to be a transition state before becoming a pure democracy. Unfortunately, he was completely wrong about communism being the most ideal economic system in the world, it is actually incredibly inefficient in practice, and no government has successfully transition into pure communism mode. Really, what we call communist countries should not be called such.
Obviously, Marx didn't read enough Greek philosophy or Roman and Greek history to recognize that pure democracy cannot function beyond a certain size, after which it simply becomes mob rule - the most oppressive form of government known to man. I doubt he ever envisioned a factory with more than a few hundred workers, let alone thousands. In such numbers there is no fairness, simply mobs. People gravitate toward leaders, who run campaigns to get their views enacted, and in short order the democracy is gone.
He viewed communism as the most stable form of government/economy possible, without recognizing that the purely democratic government upon which the idea was based is the least stable form of government possible. At sufficiently large sizes, it is little more than anarchy.
Economically speaking, the atomic family sharing a home and groceries and electrical bills is communism with extremely small cell sizes.
Most families have a definite leader, or at least pair of leaders. The family unit is pretty much always either a monarchy or an oligarchy, depending on whether or not one of the parents submits all authority to the other. The economic makeup of the family unit is fascist, not communist, as the parents own all the resources, and the children own nothing except what the parents allow.
Socialist, yes. Communist, no. For it to be Communist as Marx defined it, the parents would have no more authority than the parents, and every decision would have to be made with an up or down vote of the entire family.
Pure communism requires a stateless government and worker-owned resources, but not individually owned resources. It's in the definition. You could say everybody owns everything, but in truth everybody owns nothing. The workers decide democratically what products are to be produced. Anybody with moderate reasoning skills should be able to figure out how long that will last in the real world.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
In case it wasn't clear, my point is that fast food workers are not treated this well at all. I worked at McDonald's, and we got one 30 minute break no matter how many hours we worked.
Le français vous intéresse?
They already had "an old fashioned, rivers of blood revolution". Those are just chaos, tending to only strengthen the extremes present in given society, IMHO. And ultimatelly their political system is probably quite representational; systems of governance are, in the end, a reflection of society - from where do you think all the "opressors" come from?
Apple (and many other companies...) does choose sweatchops; it's how they ride with their high profit margins. Some companies do own their fabs; most of them being even not in China.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Our government collects portions of our income and disperses it into public projects: infrastructure, aid, health care...even the occasional direct payment which, as far as I can tell, is a completely political piece of nonsense used to pander to the masses.
That's socialism, not communism. The US is a long, long ways off from Communist, and every day we move closer to fascism, not communism. We are somewhat-socialist republic (not the way Communist countries like to abuse the term) with a strong capitalistic economic foundation. That capitalism is burdened by the socialist tendancies of the government, but it's still strong capitalism.
Communism, by definition, requires a stateless government. There is no truly Communist country in the world. The furthest any have gotten is the transition totalitarian oligarchy that Marx felt was necessary just before communism could be achieved. He didn't recon that the leap from totalitarian to stateless was pretty much impossible. A country simply cannot function without leadership, and Communism requires that there be no leader. It is literally impossible.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Did you respond to the wrong post? It wasn't related on one detail.
"I was laid off from my 'good job' the year before ..." and was that a factory job? Were you proud of the work?
"I restarted at the bottom with temp jobs ..." and were those factory jobs? Did you enjoy them? Were you proud of them?
"... and am now enjoying my current job. It's full time staff in electronics at a university ..." so it's not a dead-end grueling-labor factory job. What does this have to do with the discussion?
... one of the iPhones these people woked on for talking/texting while driving. The odds that any one phone will kill two people have to be vanishingly small.
Have gnu, will travel.
And yet you choose companies which do rely on Chinese sweatshops; ignoring other options.
Nokia is a nice example. By far the largest phone manufacturer in the world (except few odd places like...the US). 15 fabs; all owned by Nokia; two of them in China (hey, the local market is huge); seven of them in the EU (plus Mexico, Brazil, South Korea and India). Employs directly 125k people. Has durable and affordable products.
All of the above probably also adds noticeably to positive contributions of Nokia to humanity (the chief one being that they are greatly responsible for giving ~5 billion of present mobile subsribers a means to communicate; seems Nokia really took their corporate slogan to heart)
But not relying in sweatshops gives worse simple metrics like "profit margins", so "investors" are not pleased lately...
One that hath name thou can not otter
More related to TFA, I wonder how the last part you mention is responsible for the reputation (deserved) of Nokia devices being damn tough. Accidentally, they don't rely on Chinese sweatshops - Nokia owns all its fabs, most of them outside of China (with half in the EU)
One that hath name thou can not otter
They are only able to operate in such a way because they have the necessary trappings of government - things like defense - taken care of for them.
It only really works if you can do it in isolation, which is why communes tend to be out in the middle of nowhere. It also only works in small enough numbers that pure democracy works, and even then they invariably have natural leaders - like the pastor and deacons of the Amish church.
Pure Communism is pretty much impossible.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
OK. I'll burn some karma.
"It works fairly well, but it should apply a little more taxation on the truly rich. Not giving money to the poor directly, but not forcing the poor to pay the rich person's prices."
the top 0.1% of taxpayers by income pay 17.4% of federal income taxes (earning 9.1% of the income), the top 1% with gross income of $328,049 or more pay 36.9% (earning 19%), the top 5% with gross income of $137,056 or more pay 57.1% (earning 33.4%), and the bottom 50% with gross income of $30,122 or less pay 3.3% (earning 13.4%). US Tax Distribution
The "truly rich" pay their fair share of taxes already considering most of the poor pay NO federal income tax.
"The government in the U.S. would do well by subsidizing more things: farming is well subsidized; education needs a whole hell of a lot more money; alternative fuel research and implementation would help drive down gas prices as well as provide more economic means of transportation."
Yeah, more subsidizing is what we need. We already pay "farmers" to NOT grow food. That's subsidies in action.
We have increased funding to schools year after year and our test scores do not show a direct link to the amount of money spent. What we need is to get the teacher unions under control and overhaul the public school system. Teachers should be accountable for how well their students perform.
Yes, implementation of an alternative fuel that is actually an effective substitute for oil-based fuels would be wonderful. Let me know when we find one. We could be using nuclear power much more, but the far-left tree-huggers won't let that happen.
"Tweak the market" is your code for more governmental regulatory control or subsidies. Either way, the general public will suffer.
You obviously have no clue what you are talking about. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid that the socialist far-left keeps dishing out.
This is an interesting point, it would be interesting to see what the modern application of sustainable agriculture would do to subsistence farming. A big part of the problem would be a lack of fertilizer, which makes it harder to do farming over a long period of time on the same plot of land, so massive amounts of land would be needed.
I couldn't find any links talking about this. Everyone doing research on sustainable farming is assuming a modern economy. Maybe I missed something though.
Qxe4
More per child. Mostly, it gets wasted on bureaucrats who never see the inside of a classroom.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Duh. This thing is happening in mainland China, PRC.
Shenzhen is here
Taiwan is here
Don't quote me on this.
Thanks for pointing that statistic out to us! Without your well-written comment pointing out for the 27th time that 13.9 out of 100,000 people in China commit suicide yearly, I would've never believed it. We would have been lost without you, Xaositecte. If only there were more people willing to play the mimic game -- never for karma, but to assist the Slashdot crowd in remembering a numerical figure.
So do you like having a 6-digit UID and the ability to instantly persuade those with mod points that the sun rises in your ass?
He worked incredibly hard. Simply at something that wasn't remunerated (at the time.) If people didn't do that, there would be a lot less great art, music and literature in the world.
You may oppose both his ideas and his priorities, but laziness is not valid accusation.
There are many models of communism which are very decentralized - based on ground-up, local community ownership and management of productive systems, with factories running more like workshops (think of the way research labs are often organized.) Anarcho-syndicalism is an implementation of Communist ideas.
The EU actually provides a model of the "state after the state" - the nation-state being superseded by a collection of agreements, treaties, and organizations into which local governments buy-in or not as they feel fit. What I like most about the EU is its very "ineffectiveness" by the norms of the traditional nation-state.
The core idea of communism, the principle which ultimately distinguishes it from capitalism, is the claim that economics are not truly a separate sphere from politics, and that the separation of economics from politics is a trick - a convenient fiction - used to make people who effectively rule via economic dominance still look as if they are equal citizens in a "political" state. When the understanding of the polis includes the productive aspects of a society, you move toward communism.
Taiwan isn't China. Taiwan isn't in China.
Just a reminder, seeing as this thread seems to have been hijacked by some kind of capitalism - communism trollfest. It's a democratic, capitalistic state that is much, much more well off per capita than communist China. Beware of any story about Taiwan from a Chinese news outlet, because it's about 150% likely to be infused with an ulterior motive or slant; China has been trying to get Taiwan "back" since 1949. They're probably anxious to report conditions as being worse than China to encourage the idea that the people of Taiwan need Chinese intervention/reunion. They're probably eager to report capitalistic factory conditions as horrible to reinforce their own government status quo. Not saying it isn't true, however, just consider the source!
Where does anyone say that?
See the title of the slashdot article? See TFA which has a picture of an iPhone and iPad at the top? See how neither slashdot or the article makes any mention of Foxconn making products for other companies? See commodore64's post I was replying to, who calls someone a fanboy for merely mentioning the fact that the company makes other brands of product too?
If they make other things too how does that excuse Apple from blame?
It doesn't but it also doesn't prove Apple is to blame. If this has anything to do with working conditions, then wouldn't Foxconn have the lion's share of the blame? Also, wouldn't every other company that employs Foxconn be just as equally to blame as Apple? Seems like this is just another in a long line of articles trying to bash Apple.
There's not even any evidence that the suicides are even related to Foxconn (see other posts which suggest that the suicide rate at Foxconn is lower than the national average).
There could be any number of reasons. It could be poor working conditions, it could be mental illness. It could be cultural/societal susceptibility to suicide. Whatever the reasons, it seems like people are in an unseemly rush to point fingers.
... and then they built the supercollider.
This is the place where iPhones and iPads are manufactured. That's significant.
But the article doesn't indicate that the factory only produces iPhones and iPads. It might also make HP displays for all we know. It also doesn't indicate that the employees worked on Apple lines. It also doesn't tell us how these deaths are supposedly linked to Apple, other than their employer happens to be a company that makes products for Apple among others.
I mean seriously, what's the link supposed to be? Apple products are too shiny, or emit some sort of electromagnetic radiation that causes suicidal urges that other products made in the factory don't? Defective Reality Distortion Field? Perhaps Apple gets this iPad "magic" by harvesting a piece of each worker's soul to put inside the units.
... and then they built the supercollider.
So, here are the statistics for Taiwan (as of 2005, but I bet it hasn't changed by much):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2259336/
and the most relevant figure:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2259336/figure/F2/
So, for women 15-24 you have about 6 per 100,000 per year suicide rate and for 25-44 you have 15, which comes out to about about 10 per 100,000 per year (assuming there are the same amount of people in both age groups; I know it isn't necessarily so, but I'm not off by much). If they have 400K workers, this comes to about 40 suicides per year. btw, for males the suicide rates are higher for people 25 and older, so the fact that not all the workers are female doesn't weaken my case.
Anyhow, I am not trying to downplay the workers' condition in those factories, I'm just saying that 9 suicides in a year isn't so much, statistically speaking.
OTOH, this I think is much more disturbing:
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2007/10/xkcd-comic-reenactment-leads-to-100-deaths.html
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
Perhaps, but labelling me a "fanboi" for pointing out that we have seen two stories in quick succession about Foxxcon's plant that strongly infer that they only make Apple products.
That is not shoddy reporting, that is a plain agenda.
I'm not downplaying the nature of the conditions in general in industrial China, but as you pointed out, the suicide rate in the plant is 1/4 of the national average.
Has communism never been tried save in a hostile environment of rapacious competitive capitalism? Your confirmation bias is a work of art.
A guy I knew named Mark used to go on and on about how environmentally friendly Apple is, and how wonderful Apple is in every possible way. I guess maybe not so wonderful if you're one of the slaves who has to build their toys.
You just invented Robert's Rules of Order. Congrats. Now try reading the introduction to the original edition.
Ad hominem. Come up with an idea of how it could work, and maybe we'll have something. Otherwise I'll still operate under the theory that since communism requires cooperation, it must deal forcefully with dissent (too many dissenters doing their own thing and the system breaks down). Everyone has to work together under communism. That doesn't work on a large scale.
Qxe4
Any one considered fair trade, workers rights and maybe buying products from REPUTABLE CORPORATIONS if there are any left that aren't just ... greed machines.
This is just a little tiny symptom of all that is wrong in factories overseas today. If we American consumers aren't able to and willing to look into and pay for worker's rights, we can just buy bloody goods like these phones.
I'm guessin' there's other factors involved in a factory in Taiwan than *just* evil ol' capitalism... the popular whipping boy topic of the consumers who decry it while living from it's teat.
It couldn't *possibly* be that the Taiwanese are too chicken to enact a few labor laws, or anything approaching civilization, and none of their politicians are paid off by Foxconn... noooo. Certainly not.
+++OK ATH
The real truth is that ANY documentary, news story, or journalistic activity is going to be biased by the person/people creating the production, be it written, audible, or visual.
To really find the truth in any situation, you have to look beyond 'the story', and do your own research.
Hopefully that's what you were getting at.
http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/9318/blooddiamondx.jpg
OTOH, this I think is much more disturbing: http://www.bbspot.com/News/2007/10/xkcd-comic-reenactment-leads-to-100-deaths.html
Maybe it's really late, but have you ever heard of The Onion? You wouldn't take that news literally, would you? There are barely a hundred people who read xkcd, so there's no way anyone could get a hundred semi-intelligent GEEKS to attempt something so inane.
Besides, when you Google it, that's the only "news service" that picked up on it.
I feel like I'm deserving a hugh-grongo WHOOSH for pointing this out.
Indeed, you have to be careful with whatever you read or watch, but the topic here was Michael Moore. Some people do documentaries and try to portray a balanced view of all the evidence, and some of those do a fairly good job. Michael Moore doesn't really try. He tries to make an entertaining show that gets his point across. Which is fine, I guess, but it's not particularly useful.
Qxe4
Thing is, those tens of thousands a year go straight back into OUR economy. Those working employees also become your consumers and the economy then flourishes. That was what made the 50s so roaring; it wasn't the war, it was everyone being put to work.
Our government collects portions of our income and disperses it into public projects
Governments were doing that long before communism existed.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Are you serious, asking this question? Not only does it always deserve to be highlighted, it must be.
Do you want to own a product that was produced by mistreated workers? Or do you just not care about that?
I know that if I am to buy something, I want it to be produced by workers who are being treated fairly, with decent working conditions and decent pay. If that means paying more for a product, then so be it.
Economically capitalism is individually owned resources, socialism is government owned resources, and communism is resources shared by a subset of society. Economically speaking, the atomic family sharing a home and groceries and electrical bills is communism with extremely small cell sizes. Co-op stores, monasteries, and traditional communes are communism applied with slightly larger communist cell sizes.
Eh no, you jumped from the ownership of resources to the use of resources, these are two different things. In the "atomic family" one or two people own the resources and distribute them to the rest of the family. The main difference between co-ops and shares in a company is co-ops are comprised of several different interlocking companies, similar to the Keiretsus in Japan, and I don't think anyone would call them communist.
The reason communism and totalitarianism are so linked is because thats the only way it can work. If there are dissenting voices in your society that don't want to hand over their hard work, a totalitarian leader is required to extinguish them.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Thats still basically a microcosmic totalitarianism. Sure they let the young people out into the world for a while, and then they come back, because having been raised in a primitive environment they have no way to cope with the stresses of the modern world. Its just replacing communist dogma with religious dogma, and indoctrinating them from birth.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Those countries you mentioned were the only possible realistic implementations of communism. You need a dictatorship to squish all those who don't want to hand their resources into the common pool.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
That's completely unrelated to capitalism. You can have a non-capitalistic democracy, and you can have a non-democratic capitalism.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
[quote]
[/quote]
[b]I feel your pain.[/b]
Really, why can't slashdot at least get with the 90's? ::evil::
Probably because bbcode was one of the most useless inventions ever. Replace angle brackets with square brackets ... what an innovation!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
er, the important thing is to acknowledge that there is an alternative. see if you can get your head around that.
probably not eh - if you expected the gp to elaborate on economic systems then you're a bit daft, lets face it.
Communism, by definition, requires a stateless government. There is no truly Communist country in the world. The furthest any have gotten is the transition totalitarian oligarchy that Marx felt was necessary just before communism could be achieved. He didn't recon that the leap from totalitarian to stateless was pretty much impossible. A country simply cannot function without leadership, and Communism requires that there be no leader. It is literally impossible.
Communism is achieving 100% centrally controlled economic activity. Euhm pray tell, how can that be achieved without an entity to do the controlling ?
The "truly rich" pay their fair share of taxes already considering most of the poor pay NO federal income tax.
Yes, but we all know what socialists really want. If you believe socialists want to improve the lot of everyone by somehow making more money available to everyone, just go and look at the pay and benefits package of a university. That's how socialists pay their own employees.
It's enough to make Milton Friedman say "man this is unfair".
I submit that what the GP poster and socialists in general want is something totally different : their actions are far less inconsistent if you assume they want more power and more people under their direct command, and they want to use this power for massive forced social re-engineering projects (gulags in everything but the name).
Then their actions make sense. They want power, and they want to "re-educate" you.
But the sad fact is that if one looks at Halliburton or BP, they're a lot more charitable both in intentions and actual fact than any socialist individual I know.
If anything, what we have learned is that extreme capitalism and communism both have the same problem: they would work only if people did not behave the way they do. In light of that, neither system is a good idea, which leaves us with needing to find something in the middle
Or maybe that leaves us with the problem in any human society being the humans, and any society, no matter how it organizes itself, is only as good as the people which comprise it. Something semi-socialist, semi-capitalist could end up being just as bad as either extreme. Maybe there is no magic bullet for making groups of bad people into good societies, and all you can do to produce a good society is to somehow make the people better. Good luck with that.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Do these statistics count the age group working at that factory (around 18..25)?
Do these statistics include all suicides, or just suicides at work (the FoxConn suicides includes only those at work)
"Communism has no government." -- This is not true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat
It has government (at least in the transition period). This is one of the ESSENTIAL ideas in communism. Other one is world revolution.
Friedrich Engels said: “Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”
Also, from State & Revolution
". . . the dictatorship of the proletariat — i.e. the organisation of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of crushing the oppressors. . . . An immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the rich: . . . and suppression by force, i.e. exclusion from democracy, for the exploiters and oppressors of the people — this is the change which democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism."
People mix up the ideas Rousseau (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau#Theory_of_Natural_Man) with the ideas of communism. Communism is not about equality -- it is about giving the power to the proletariat.
Communism is one of the most dangerous ideas in the world, side-by-side with national socialism (which is also socialist!). In fact, it managed to kill more people at the end -- although during a longer timeframe.
The core idea of communism, the principle which ultimately distinguishes it from capitalism, is the claim that economics are not truly a separate sphere from politics ...
Nice way to put it, however you miss the gigantic advantage capitalism has. In capitalism the decisions are ultimately made by what might be called "reality", not by "the rich" as the rich don't choose who gets to be rich.
In small companies, inefficient policies lead to corporate death, cessation of activities, and obviously, to an owner in the poorhouse.
By contrast, as we all know, inefficient politics lead to more inefficient politics. Obviously this cannot last long.
Capitalism is how the real world works : limited resources, everyone try to use them as you see fit, and deal with the consequences. Attempting to force a different system onto people might work a little bit. Attempting to force a different system onto the world is the quickest route to total disaster I know of.
That's the essence of what socialists want to do, of course : change the world. Change the very laws of physics. And obviously, they're never going to succeed.
The only thing socialist policies do is translating the failure of a few into the failure of everyone.
Ultimately socialism requires a mild form of psychological disease : it is a refusal to accept reality as it is, instead trying to force a system that doesn't fit at all onto reality. Needless to say, reality has never cooperated with any such enterprise.
I'm glad you put that in your sig. There for a minute it seemed like you said poor governance of the economy was a cause for instability. I'd like to see a citation on that. Not because I disbelieve you, but because the history of a lack of governance seems to lend itself to bubbles and busts. Granted, you can over-regulate... But we're not even close to a government run economy. Regardless of what the scaremongers would have you believe.
Sig not found.
Suicides per annum in China: 287,000 - http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-09/11/content_6095710.htm
Population of china: 1,338,612,968 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Republic_of_China
Thus China Suicide Rate = 21.4 per 100,000 per annum
Suicides at Foxconn Shenzhen in 5 months = 9
Employees at Foxconn Shenzhen = 330,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn
Thus Foxconn Shenzhen Suicide Rate = 6.5 per 100,000 per annum
Conclusion: The suicide rate at Foxconn Shenzen is lower than the national average. Statistical innumeracy amongst journalists to blame. Along with the usual lack of scepticism by consumers of the news.
> they could offer their manufacturers and workers a lot better working conditions
They could, and arguably should.
But that wouldn't necessarily reduce the suicide rate. In fact, statistically, wealthier people and those living in countries with better working conditions are *more* likely to attempt suicide, all else being equal. (I'm not saying wealth and good conditions cause suicide, just that they don't seem to prevent it.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Maybe. In which case it is for the people making the case that Foxconn is to blame for something to show that. Until that happens, the fact that it is so much below the national average suggests that this is a simple case of statistical innumeracy amongst the accusers.
> nobody ever comes into McDonald's asking for a flying cheeseburger
In fast food, dealing with the public isn't the bad part of the job. Not that it doesn't have any problems at all, but it's really not the main issue.
Being around fast food workers all the time is what gets to you after a while.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> I worked at McDonald's, and we got one 30 minute break no matter how many hours we worked.
Interesting. That's a violation of McDonald's policy. You were supposed to get one thirty minute break for each multiple of five hours that your shift exceeded. So, if you work less than five hours, they don't have to give you a break; work more than ten, and they're supposed to give you two breaks.
Those are the rules for adults. Minors aren't allowed to work more than eight hours in a day, so they're never supposed to need a second break.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You might want to look into US history to see how the factories used to be. They were, and are, capitalistic, the conditions however have changed, mainly due to worker organization and government regulations.
"capitalistic" is an adjective describing a political system, not a god-damn factory. You could use "craptastic" "exploitive" "dangerous" etc. Until you grasp this error, you will remain in the dark. Even, then you will still be a dim bulb but with a slight glow. Whether or not whips and chains are used inside the factory is almost irrelevant. What matters is outside the factory: what are your alternatives; can you criticize the factory; can you criticize your government; can you seek regress for a grievance due to whippings; do outside forces (government entities, private groups) enforce a law or code of conduct within factory grounds?
No that's socialism.
"And of course, Foxconn only makes products for Apple, and nobody but Apple, right?"
You're missing the point. The point is that Apple isn't the point.
If you think it's sensationalist, it's only because reality can be quite sensational.
A wonderful book. However of course the situation is little different in America. Corporation bosses make all the decisions. Firstly by how they run the companies they own. And secondly by how they run the politicians they own.
The "transition period" is called socialism, not communism. Communism has no government just as the GP said.
Communism is the communal ownership of property. (Alternatively phrased as the abolition of private property.)
Native Americans appear to have had very stable communist communities. The only thing that spoiled that was the invading Europeans.
By contrast capitalism in a finite world is fundamentally flawed by definition. Capitalism requires that profits are used to invest in growth of production. But growth cannot continue indefinitely in a finite world. Once capitalism has burned off the primary source of it's growth, fossil fuels, then it becomes an unworkable system.
There was a window of opportunity for capitalism. A few hundred years. We were all born in that window, and it's hard to imagine what the world will be like when it closes. Some here will see that window closing, and the turmoil that creates. Who knows what the economic system will be after it.
"A command economy requires a commander. It is fair to relate communism and totalitarianism."
Except that communism is by definition a stateless, classless, egalitarian society (look it up).
So indeed: China is not communist, it's just that one upon a time they set out to create such a society and then got stuck in totalitarianism.
Force doesn't imply totalitarianism. Western capitalist democracies use plenty of force, in the upholding of the law, and on military escapades.
There's no reason why, under communism, a community cannot communally decide to take sanctions against a person that's acting against the best interests of the community.
Keep in mind that the 13.9/100,000 is an average which includes the cities with the higher standards of living, and the poor rural countryside. Within the urbanised areas, the suicide rate is much lower than that of the countryside.
. It shows that 5% of the workers quit every month
Although I do not agree with the other practices shown in the videos and article, according to my wife who worked in Mexico's sweatshops for about 2 years tells me that 5% worker rotation is normal in those types of jobs.
The reason is that people that enter those jobs are usually young guys who do not have any other obligation and want to do some quick bucks. As you usually do not need any qualifications to enter some of the positions, these guys enter thinking on doing some cash and they quit after looking that the job does not give a lot money and it is very demanding.
I disagree on something regarding the video, and something that is commented by an interviewed guy. The individuals that commit suicide are special cases. These guy in interview says "those who can bare the mental preasure stay, those who don't they commit suicide". I think, those who do not stand the pressure are the 5% that quit. It is only a really small percentaje that commit suicide. Thus, although the working conditions surely have some influence in the suicides, I believe there are other personal factors that made these people kill themselves.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
"The "transition period" is called socialism, not communism."
No. Communism (at least the Leninist line) is an _agenda_, a program, and a philosophy, not just a form of social structure. Part of this program is revolution and dictatorship (vanguard state) before the final stage of communism -- which was never ever achieved by any communist regime.
"Communism is the communal ownership of property."
No. "communal ownership" just one part of the communist program. You seem to be pretty brainwashed, as many people who defend communism. "Communal ownership" is the idea that people like, but this is more closer to the ideas of Reausseau -- and not Lenin.
Disclaimer: I am from an ex-communist country.
People here don't know a troll when they see one these days. How this can get a score of 4 is fucken pathetic.
You don't think Steve Jobs cares about this issue and that he doesn't try to get better terms for workers when negotiating contracts with companies like Foxconn? You think the conditions that cause these things to happen are easy to foresee from someone outside the company?
And are you really stupid enough to think it's only Apple that is the problem here? Foxconn makes products for many major companies. And there are more companies like Foxconn, too. But hey, why let that stop you from some good ol' Jobs bashing?
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/communism
communism [kom-yuh-niz-uhm] Show IPA
–noun
1. a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.
2. (often initial capital letter) a system of social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political party.
3. (initial capital letter) the principles and practices of the Communist party.
4. communalism.
Note how all versions of the definition use the word "state". Cleary such a thing exists ...
You don't get to make up the meaning of words.
If you don't agree : you qowerq q346oiod a8045k a;l4488ljk ! (and your mother too !)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn
You're the end customer. Put your money where you mouth is. Stop buying all these products or were you trying for a cheap bashfest on Apple alone?
Why the heck don't we just make more stuff in the US. I mean really!
How many Americans do you know who would really be willing to work on an assembly line? I did it once for a summer job, and it wasn't fun. Already we need to import immigrants to do things like yardwork, and yardwork is way better than assembly-line stuff. It would take a serious economic downturn before people would want to go back to factories.
We DON'T need illegals to paint houses and run leafblowers. There are plenty of unemployed people right now who will take that job... but they can't because illegals can do it for less than minimum wage and without having to pay the correct taxes and file the correct forms. Those jobs used to pay $7-$10 / hr fifteen years ago - I know because I did them - and now they simply aren't available to citizens.
Source?
It's OK, I know it was fake news story. Just tried to end my post on a humoristic note. I resist the temptation to use the W-word.
P.S.
Actually, where I am living it was really early not really late (GMT+2).
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
Communism was defined by Marx, not Lenin. It is the final state, and is without government. The transition state is socialism.
No you're not. Though you may be from an ex-socialist country.
Dictionary.com are not the ultimate arbiter of the definition of a word either. They are merely describing common usage from an American perspective. And there are few topics that Americans twist through ignorance than communism.
Marx and Engels came up with the concept of communism, not dictionary.com. Their vision of communism was without any central control, let alone 100% central control. They also described an intermediate step, socialism, which DOES have state control. Communism has never been implemented in a community the size of a country. That which American's refer to as communist countries or countries which have tried communism are in fact socialist countries, or countries that have tried socialism.
Eh no, you jumped from the ownership of resources to the use of resources, these are two different things.
Ownership and control are integral. We're talking about economics.
In the "atomic family" one or two people own the resources and distribute them to the rest of the family.
In the atomic family, one person could make all the decisions, or both parents could decide together, or the whole family could vote on all important decisions. That's more akin to politics, however, Economically speaking, they're all communism, because it is a subset of society sharing resources within the larger scope of society. The first would be communist totatilitarianism and the last communist democracy.
The main difference between co-ops and shares in a company is co-ops are comprised of several different interlocking companies
I don't know what you're talking about. I was referring to co-op stores, common in much of the US. None of the ones I've seen are comprised of several interlocking companies.
...similar to the Keiretsus in Japan, and I don't think anyone would call them communist.
No one would call the atomic family communist either, except for economists. The term "communism" has come to mean a number of different things, kind of like "republicanism". Few people would consider the Democratic party's primaries to be "republicanism" but in fact it does follow the model of a republic more closely than other parties in the US. When there came about such a things as the "communist party" the term became hopelessly mired in myriad and contradictory meanings that have nothing to do with "communism" the economic term.
whoosh
Communism is not an economic term and a political movement, it is an economic system that requires by definition a stateless government run as a pure democracy.
I know about the origins of the term, but we're not talking history here."Communism" and "socialism" are both political movements based upon philosophies. But then "capitalism" originally referred to a more oligarchical system as well where economy was controlled by a subset of extreme wealth. It has sense changed meaning in both everyday use and in terms of economics.
Most families have a definite leader, or at least pair of leaders. The family unit is pretty much always either a monarchy or an oligarchy, depending on whether or not one of the parents submits all authority to the other.
You're both missing the point and failing to see the distinction of economics and politics. The family unit may be governed in different ways, totalitarian, oligarchy, or democracy. Economically it is communism, because it is sharing resources together, but within a larger economy. By viewing it outside the context of the larger economy, you lose sight of what makes it communist in the economic sense. An atomic family may be governed like a totalitarian regime internally and exist within a larger democratic country. The fact that they share economic resources and bargain collectively with the rest of the economy, makes them an example of communism (the economic term).
Pure communism...
Again, you're talking about the political movement. Economically, all economies are a mix of capitalism, socialism, and communism. In economic terms, the degree to which these are prevalent. Economist talk about how many and what size of communist cells are in an economy. Ironically, the US has been becoming more communist of late, but just because extended family sizes are growing. Extreme communism is where cell sizes grow to very large, likely unsustainable sizes, but this is very rare. More common is extreme socialism, where the degree to which an entire economy is centrally owned/controlled grows to the point where it becomes easy for totalitarianism to take root in the government. Of course such a situation is often referred to as "communism" but only because that term is so overloaded.
It's a way to have a limited set of tags that don't necessarily have to intersect the set of html tags. It also means you can ignore all html when doing a tag substitution. In terms of performance, that second one gives an advantage to bbcode.
This is the place where iPhones and iPads are manufactured.
Do you have a citation for that? All the articles I've read just say a Foxconn factory, then talk about what Foxconn makes. None of them specify what Foxconn makes at that factory that I've seen.
This isn't the norm. Sounds to me like Apple must have done something already...
Actually, Apple has been one of the few companies actually holding their suppliers responsible for working conditions to some extent. The last series of articles bashing Apple for the treatment of workers at Foxconn were the result of Apple investigating working conditions, fining Foxconn, and requiring Foxconn to improve conditions (which was then spun in the press as "terrible conditions at Apple factories"). Other companies do business with Foxconn and haven't been as strict doing audits. They occasionally make the press when investigative reporters or human rights organizations find abuses, but I don't know any that actually publish regular audits of their policies.
Too bad that intermediate step killed at least 100 million people (and that's for the soviets alone) ...
And I seriously think that if state control is relinquished society will immediately revert - to capitalism (since the black market will simply move into the open to become the economic system. Presumably this is how the first human society "formally" adopted capitalism now 5000+ years ago. Besides, I've seen this happen in practice in Zimbabwe - whenever the authorities move out (and they're so undermanned they can't even maintain presence in every village), markets (the real kind in public squares) spring up. This is one of the few things that improve life in Zimbabwe. Oh and -dollars only- no Zimbabwean currency, please (I'm told some communities use gold, but it's harder to test for authenticity than dollars))
This has nothing to do with Apple specifically, this is what capitalism with its outsourcing & all it's other nasty features does to human beings.
Ownership and control are integral. We're talking about economics.
They might be integral but that still don't equate to use; children of a family might use resources but they certainly don't own or control them.
In the atomic family, one person could make all the decisions, or both parents could decide together, or the whole family could vote on all important decisions. That's more akin to politics, however, Economically speaking, they're all communism, because it is a subset of society sharing resources within the larger scope of society.
First off the "atomic family" is named for the hierarchical structure of the family unit, top down control. If you're letting a twelve year old vote on important decisions, such as whether to go with a variable or fixed rate mortgage, you've lost the run of yourself. Secondly, every organisation that exists is a subset of society sharing resources within the larger scope of society. So no, the "atomic family" is nowhere near a model for communism of any stripe.
No one would call the atomic family communist either, except for economists.
Yeah I get the varying views on the term "communist", just like "socialist" and "conservative". Can you clarify for us, what economist called the family unit communist (I know many Economics professors and do enjoy a good debate with them from time to time as part of my business), and please exclude any marxist ideologues trying to make out that their worldview is somehow natural?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
And then what? ;p
One that hath name thou can not otter
The problem with communism is that it is not just an economic system. It is an economic system that requires a certain type of government that is, frankly, impossible to achieve.
Ideal communism requires a stateless government where the workers democratically decide what will be produced. No country that has ever tried to become communist has ever achieved this. Marx described a stage just before Communism where a totalitarian dictatorship or oligarchy must be setup to facilitate the transition into a worker's democracy. That is where all communist countries have stopped - partly because once you gain massive amounts of power it's incredibly difficult to simply give that up, and partly because the leaders of the countries recognize, after they are in that position, that a worker's democracy is simply impossible. The key to Communism, however, was never the government, that was just to facilitate the change. The key is that the workers decide what is produced democratically, not management or the government.
China is not Communist in any way, shape or form. They are simply a totalitarian oligarchy that owns all property. It's definitely socialist, but all you need to see is that the workers are oppressed and you know it's nothing at all like Communism.
Soviet Russia tried to become Communist, but it ended up being the Government telling the workers what to produce, not the workers deciding it democratically. In other words, it was just another fascist dictatorship, it was never Communist.
The same is true of every other Communist country - North Korea, Laos, Cuba, you name it. Not one of them are even remotely similar to Communism as Marx described it. They've tried and failed, and all that's left is a totalitarian regime of one form or another.
Basically Communism is doomed because it is both an inefficient economic model and a terrible governing model, and it requires the governing model to implement the economic model. It just doesn't work.
that the wealthiest people in our society are often the least productive, and that the occupations currently given the highest rewards are ones which explicitly do not create anything of actual value, just bigger numbers after the dollar sign
Said just like someone who really doesn't understand the way the economy works. A capitalist society needs capital. It's in the name, so you've got to recognize that it's pretty darned important. The stock market facilitates moving capital from an area where it's less useful (i.e. some rich guy's bank account) to somewhere where it is more useful (a growing company). If that growing company is successful, the rich guy gets more money back than he put in. That means the company is able to do more than it could have without him. The stock market is not some betting game on the side guessing who will win or lose, when someone buys a stock, that money goes directly into the bank account of the company who's stock he purchased. They then use that money to produce more than they could have without it.
When you talk about risk and reward, people immediately think of gambling, but it's nothing of the sort (well, for those who don't know better it actually is). Companies analyze risk and reward all the time, particularly when deciding to bring a new product to market. The risk, of course, is that you invest millions of dollars in a product to get it out to stores and get good placement, and nobody wants to buy it, or they just don't want to pay what you have to sell it for. The billionaires in the stock market do exactly the same thing, and their money can mean the success of whatever company they invest in.
It's a very efficient system, and it automatically weeds out the idiots (i.e. the gamblers). The wealthiest people in our society are usually the most productive. The wealth they amass is evidence for that, not against it. Had they been unproductive they would have nothing.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
They might be integral but that still don't equate to use; children of a family might use resources but they certainly don't own or control them.
Sure they do. They control how much electricity or water to consume, paid for by the family as a whole.
First off the "atomic family" is named for the hierarchical structure of the family unit, top down control.
Actually, that's not true. The atomic family named for the model of a central pair of parents with children "surrounding" them. It was used to differentiate from the extended family.
Secondly, every organisation that exists is a subset of society sharing resources within the larger scope of society. So no, the "atomic family" is nowhere near a model for communism of any stripe.
Not all organizations share resources in a greater portion of the economy, certainly not resources significant enough to qualify as what is economically termed a communist cell. Lots of organizations have less cooperative models and few share the majority of resources in the way a family does. Normally communes or larger cell sizes are the model for communism, but families are the same model on a very small scale.
Can you clarify for us, what economist called the family unit communist
Sure, Bernstein mentions that in several of his works. I know I've seen it elsewhere too.
and please exclude any marxist ideologues trying to make out that their worldview is somehow natural?
I don't even know what you mean by that. Marxists certainly can be economists and communism is a fairly natural and basic concept of economics. I don't know anyone can claim to be an economist without having read and understood Marxism, even if they disagree with a lot of the models it puts forth.
Yup it's called slavery, and Patric Henry would rather die than be a slave.
Thus, the famous quote.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
It is important to note that there is a big difference between countries that call themselves "communist" and true communism.
China is communist in name only, it has none of the key elements of communism. Like all communist countries, they got stuck in the pre-communist stage (totalitarian oligarchy or dictatorship) and were never able to transition into actual communism. Then, in order to survive, they had to completely back out of their pre-communist economy and switched to capitalism. All that's left is the totalitarian regime, which was supposed to just be a necessary evil to transition into communism.
There is not now, nor has there ever been, a true communist country. It is too unwieldy on that scale. There have been a handful of pretty successful communities who practice the communist ideal (whether they subscribe to Marx or not). The Amish are probably the best example. They practice a form of minimal demarchy for the government structure, with almost all decisions made in a purely democratic fashion. Everyone in the society is completely equal, and this is enforced through tradition as opposed to any sort of rules laid down. In other words, everyone agrees together that this is how their society should be, and those who don't are shunned but not otherwise punished in any way. They shun technology for religious reasons, or they'd probably be significantly more successful than they already are.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I know the policy. The reality is that local managers try to cut corners, because they don't always realize that the scientists who designed the policy know a lot more about running a taylorist food factory than they do.
At least that is my experience where I worked. I usually got one break no matter how long I worked. I knew people who voluntarily skipped their break(s), even when working 12+ hours.
Le français vous intéresse?
Meh, if not for free global trade we probably would have simply automated more to boost the efficiency instead of relying on inefficient but cheap labor. Much larger initial investment, but with enough product moving through the door it can be offset by speed and efficiency.
Things would probably be a bit more expensive, but for most products I can't imagine more than 150% of Walmart's prices (initially much higher, of course).
And what a push for alternative energy there would be if we didn't buy from OPEC!
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
After all, if people are killing themselves by jumping off the roof, the smart thing to do would be to get rid of roofs.
That's just silly, even if we got rid of roofs people will still jump off bridges.
The correct solution is obviously getting rid of all the people. Only then will be suicide rate be 0.
The factory is in PRC, not ROC. I've been there.
Foxconn is a ROC-based company running most their manufacturing operations in PRC, just like most American corporations.
You've set a very low standard for liberty.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Perhaps, however if you RTFA, only the Apple workers are required (for IP reasons) to live on site. Foxconn's other workers can leave at the end of the day ... Apple producing workers ... not so.
Ouch
Hi Bottles,
You make such a wonderfully reasonable defense of Apple that I'm gonna to try to ratchet my rhetoric back a bit. :-)
Unfortunately, with pictures of Tiananmen etched forever in my head, I'm going to fail. Once you slaughter 3,000 kids on TV, I find it hard to give China's rulers the benefit of the doubt.
Sure, Apples runs audits and publishes reports. They might even make a few token changes. My disagreement with you is that I believe such efforts are window-dressing and PR spin. My support for that belief are the nine people who killed themselves on the job -- not nine random people who committed suicide out of a randomly chosen sample, but nine people who make the specific point that things are so bad here I would rather kill myself than continue, and then signed it with their own blood.
Apple found and stopped rights abuses at their factory.
Have you ever been "the foreigner?" I have. Nothing is easier than making "changes," waiting for the visiting boss to finish his tour, and then go right back to business as usual. If Apple were sincere, they wouldn't "make changes." They'd find new people to partner with.
People are literally killing themselves to send us the message through the PR spin.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
You might want to take that up with the BBC.
I remember seeing a documentary on Michael Moore. There is a shot in Bowling for Columbine that he staged to look like you could walk into a store, lay down cash, and walk out with a gun, with basically no checks of any kind. The truth was he had set the whole thing up a week in advance, and had been working on getting the gun the whole time, and the only part of it that he actually filmed was the part where he went in and picked it up after clearing all the checks and whatnot. In fact, the place he picked the gun at was a holding point for the purchased guns, they don't stock weapons, so there is absolutely no way to go in there and just decide to buy one.
Moore is a douche, plain and simple. He's gotten rich by distorting what other people do and say by framing it in a context that is completely different from reality. It's how he makes all of his movies - he has a specific agenda before making the movie, and he frames his questions and he edits the footage to achieve his goal. He is not a documentarian you can trust, and that matters a lot with documentaries.
I would not be surprised at all if the factory worker footage the GP is talking about is staged. I haven't seen it, so I really have no idea, but frankly I don't trust Moore to show me an accurate picture of reality. Suppose he had just handed those guys $1,000 just before filming and asked them to talk about how great it was? I don't think even Moore would be that blatant, but it's an easy example of a situation where he could get the workers to say it's the greatest job ever when in fact they ordinarily hate it.
If you can't trust that what he is showing you is accurate, you can't take any of his arguments seriously. That doesn't mean that none of his arguments have merit, it just means without the ability to personally verify them you can't trust a word he says unless someone more credible confirms it.
Credibility is very important.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Unions are still legitimate, however they long ago stopped being a group of workers banding together to protect themselves against management and have since become bullies themselves.
There are a lot of jobs that you simply cannot work unless you are a union member, and they treat non-union members like shit. The unions today are highly politicized, when they should be entirely politically neutral.
I believe most unions could be shifted from large, country-wide unions to much smaller, local unions. You only need a union that is about the same size as the company the members work for. It needs to be an equal balance of power. As it is now, unions like the AFL-CIO have the companies that must utilize their labor at a distinct disadvantage - even the largest corporations are smaller than the labor unions, so management gets no voice. In fact, within the union the members still have little to no say. It's only fortunate that the unions are fairly anti-management that it works out well for them.
I don't believe there is any legitimate reason for any union to be that size. They have far too much power concentrated into far too few people's hands. Unions shouldn't be eliminated by any means, the serve an important check against poor management like you see happening in China. However, what we have is unions gone wild, potentially causing more damage than they prevent.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
lol wut?
You have to guess the letters, guess wrong and the guy will jump ...
Are you French? Anyway, never mind. Just keep out your "communism" from my country.
You do realize there are a million ways to commit suicide, right? Closing off the roof does nothing.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
What's really sad is Foxconn's conditions are actually pretty good for a Chinese factory.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
So the capitalist First World will pressure Communist China into behaving in more communist way...?
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These suicides occured -in- the factory.
The number doesn't take into account suicides that happen at home or in other locations.
What's the China's average suicide rate -at the workplace-?
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Still, Apple could say "This is bad to our PR. We will give you $x more from which 70% is to go to the ground employees. If it does not, no deal."
This isn't like you arguing with a lady at a cash register in Wal-Mart that the can of oysters scould cost $13.56 and not $14.99 . This is big business and -everything- is a subject for negotiation.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Wikipedia has a pretty good rundown of our school funding situation here.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yes, but we all know what socialists really want.
What they really want is power over other people.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
YES! Mod parent up to +10000 insightful.
Le français vous intéresse?
Sure they do. They control how much electricity or water to consume, paid for by the family as a whole.
Sorry, its utterly futile trying to continue this discussion until you grasp this basic point - The use of electricity or water is paid for by the parents, not the family as a whole. And again you're conflating the terms "use" and "control", these are completely different things as already pointed out, you can't swap them around when it suits you.
I don't know anyone can claim to be an economist without having read and understood Marxism, even if they disagree with a lot of the models it puts forth.
Whats to disagree with, it would be like disagreeing with a creationist on evolution. Pointless and time consuming. The phrase "minor historical curiosity" springs to mind.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Please leave my internet, post haste.
Ogre Wedding Planners llc.
Please read my sig. There is a third choice!!!
Social Credit would solve everything...
This is not some kind of sweatshop. We're talking about Taiwan, not China. Those workers might even be making more money than you are. There are laws in place guaranteeing Taiwanese workers overtime pay, compensation for injuries, sick leave etc etc.
Yea and we had abolitionists and the underground railway to fight slavery. We don't need those in the US anymore as well.
Dude get over it. It was a scam union gig. That electriction never checked our electrical load or was seen again. We started to do our setup and where told to stop and wait "for well over an hour" for the union to show up. When he showed up he told us how much it was going to cost for him to stand their while we plugged in the strips.
Turned to if anything went wrong with our power strips? Probably use because they would have claimed our power strips where faulty or that we where drawing more power than allowed. At least that is what the contract said.
The laws give protection the unions force people to join to work in some states.
Which should be unconstitutional that freedom of association protection should come into play.
Sorry but while nothing is prefect the abuses of the unions and the connections with organized crime as well as the violence make them more of a problem than a help.
Not all unions are bad but several of the big labor unions are a burden on the US at this time.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You right it could but still to lay the blame on Apple is still IMHO unfair unless you lay the blame at all the other people that buy from Foxconn like Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo.... They are all customers of Foxconn. And I still say that China is the most to blame since it is the responsibility of a government too protect it's citizens.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What they [socialists] really want is power over other people.
Actually, what they want is what pretty much everyone wants: stability. Peace of mind. Not worrying that someone with a wallet 10 times larger than their brain and one twentieth the size of their ego is going to crash the system, screwing everyone but himself over.
Capitalists seem deathly afraid of being taken advantage of through social programs designed to better people less financially fortunate. Socialists are tired of being screwed by capitalist greed.
I don't think capitalism nor its benefits should go away, but eventually people will realize there's only one sandbox to play in and it's better all around if people learn respect of others.
The phrase, "Nice guys finish last" comes to mind. If you're ambitious to the point you're stepping on other people to get ahead, you'll finish first.
Cuba. But you likely can't visit there to see for yourself, so you are stuck believing the propaganda about the country.
Castro was/is far from perfect, and the place is had a utopia, but it is far from totalitarian. I'd argue that most of the 'democracies' today are far more closer to totalitarian than Cuba.
Tens of thousands of ex-Cubans currently living in Florida (after risking their lives to get there) would beg to differ.
I don't see many people trying to cross the Gulf on makeshift rafts to get IN to your communist paradise. Why do you s'pose that is?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It's possible to not need external sources of fertilizer for self-sufficiency farming. Animal waste (manure) works very well.
In terms of land area, generally, 1 acre is sufficient per person from what I've read and experienced.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I never claimed Apple users have no culpability.
I claimed that Apple has culpability. They are not mutually exclusive.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai