Workers Poisoned Making Touchscreen Hardware

SocResp writes "A chemical called n-hexane has been poisoning the nervous systems of Chinese workers who assemble touchscreen devices for Apple and other companies, an investigative journalist from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. It's scary to think that people are being damaged to pursue high production rates. For companies with soaring profits and share prices, and elaborate product development and marketing, it seems they should be all the more culpable if they fail to take care of the production workers."

Comments

This is part of why offshoring is cheaper:

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Production lines in other countries don't incur the cost of US worker-safety regulations.

Re:This is part of why offshoring is cheaper:

[causality]

You may not give a damn but I'm willing to bet the workers do. The problem is they're either not aware (very likely) or they're forced to choose between that and eating.

The fact that you're too much of a chicken shit to post your opinion with a name suggests that you do in fact give a damn, enough at least to not associate your own handle with your own oxygen wasting stupidity.

The root of the problem is the same blissful, ignorant indifference that is causing the USA to become a soft-tyranny style police state. The products' marketing don't mention the working conditions that made it available at that price, just like the politicians' campaigns don't mention that the removal of freedom is how many of their goals are accomplished. No one really wants to take a look beneath the surface. It's out of sight, out of mind as though there are no externalities, as though there are no secondary and tertiary effects.

Re:This is part of why offshoring is cheaper:

[postbigbang]

If you're a member of the human race, it's your problem. If you have a conscience, it's your problem.

Re:This is part of why offshoring is cheaper:

[russotto]

If you know something you're considering buying potentially directly hurts the workers making them, do you buy it anyway?

Yes. I buy products made on assembly lines with nonzero accident rates, made from metals mined under dangerous conditions (ALL of them are), made from oil drilled and refined under dangerous conditions, processed using energy from coal mined under dangerous conditions, transported over dangerous roads, etc.

Fact is, every product -- even those made entirely in 1st world Western countries -- required some danger somewhere in its manufacturing process. You can fairly claim that Chinese manufacturing is unnecessarily dangerous, but you can't set the bar at zero.

Re:This is part of why offshoring is cheaper:

[causality]

I am all for buying from free nations but that alone will not do much to solve the problem. Until China cares about the Chinese nothing will change. The rest is just unrelated.

Unfortunately the situation in China is the same as the situation everywhere. When the government fears the people, there is liberty. The problem the Chinese have is that they fear their government, and with very good reason. So long as their political elites are an "untouchable" group who can stomp on their own citizens with no fear for their own personal safety, that will remain the case. It's sad that it comes down to that. What you'd like to believe is that human beings with political power would help other human beings to prosper, that government can be your friend and your buddy who looks out for you. This is absolutely not the reality and never has been.

Right now Chinese people fear their government and justifiably so. Until and unless this changes, the government of China cares only for the numbers such as its GDP and does not care about the human cost necessary to achieve it. It has no incentive to sacrifice economic gain in order to safeguard things like good working conditions and basic human rights. If it did that, the numbers would not look as good to it.

The problem everywhere is that people don't understand a basic fact: government represents force and "might makes right" and seeks to maintain a monopoly on the use of force. That is the ONLY THING that makes government different from any other entity. You can dress it up in terms of polls and party affiliation and such, but ultimately government derives its existence from the point of a gun, from superior brute force or threat of force and not from superior wisdom or reason. It is therefore fundamentally untrustworthy and thuggish. More government equals more force and thus, more care that must be taken to ensure that such force is used within strict boundaries. Advocating more government to solve problems that don't require force to solve leads to more subjugation and less freedom.

The USA's Founding Fathers understood this reality. They knew that the only difference between a tyrannical government and a "good" government was size, managebility, and accountability. These three things are one as they are all related. As size of government goes up, managebility and accountability of government goes down. Eventually it has no purpose other than to perpetuate its own existence. The Chinese are finding this out the hard way, in the form of a government that will happily let them ingest poison so long as the money keeps flowing.

Re:Someone mod down this jerk

[eln]

It's insensitive, but it's essentially how the Chinese economy works. Chinese companies can afford to pay substandard wages and ignore safety concerns because they have a basically limitless supply of labor as a continuous stream of Chinese peasants make their way from the farmland into the cities in search of a better life. If one worker drops or quits, there are fifty more waiting to take his or her place. It's analogous to the US during the Industrial Revolution, except on a much much larger scale.

Capitalism

[Doc Ruby]

The market will fix this. Nobody will buy iPhones when they hear about this. And all iPhone consumers in the market will hear about it.

Right?

He didn't say it should be that way

[YesIAmAScript]

Just that it is that way. And I agree, I've been there.

When you have a lot of labor to throw at a problem, the relative value of that labor becomes less. If you can get more workers for cheap, you'll use more of them and less expensive equipment and you'll use less expensive safety equipment too.

And I've seen this in China myself. Even if the process is supposed to be safe, the line managers are rewarded for running the lines fast and at low cost, so shortcuts that don't seem to hurt anyone lead to bonuses at the end of the quarter.

And yes, some of these shortcuts do hurt people long term, but its not obvious. That's why we have safety rules in the US. It's why China has them too, but never enforces them.

Let me give you just one example. In China I saw a guy welding stuff using an arc welder and no mask. He had a piece of cardboard to shield his eyes and he'd move it aside and squint when he needed to see what was going on. Yes, he was destroying his eyes. And complaining about what people post on slashdot isn't fixing the problem.