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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."
It's not unique to Apple; this is capitalism itself in action.
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.
Blood will have gone into my next phone. I will purchase it humbly.
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 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.
...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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.