Slashdot Mirror
Apple To Release List of Companies That Build Its Products Around the World
mathfeel writes "Indulge me in some post hoc reasoning here: After last week's episode of This American Life 'Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,' a very interesting show, Apple announced that 'For the first time, Apple has released a list of companies that build its products around the world. In another first, the company also announced that it will allow an independent third party to check on working conditions at those factories, and to make its findings public.'
But before you celebrate Apple's gesture (or complain about the potential increase in electronic price): 'It doesn't appear that Apple's partnership with the FLA will increase transparency in this regard either. The FLA will audit 5% of the factories that make Apple products, but like Apple, it will not name which ones it checks or where it finds violations.'"
They will check working conditions and...then do what when they find violations? Is there any reason to think that Apple will stop doing business with factories that mistreat workers? Is this going to be another sham like Apple's treatment of the conflict minerals situation (where Steve Jobs basically threw his hands up and said that Apple could do nothing about it)?
Palm trees and 8
Look. Almost EVERY company that makes almost EVERYTHING in your home participates in the awful near-slave manufacturing that goes on in China and other third world countries.
Their motivation aside, Apple is by far one of the best and most responsible manufacturers, simply by doing the (very very) little that they do. Singling out Apple is just Apple hate.
A foreign country should not be able to sell goods in a country like the US (or any other) unless it follows the labour standards of the country it is selling its goods in.
How many steps?
Like many on /., maybe, I've purchased bare LCD modules. You know the type, HM(whatever it was) protocol, in the olden days you'd have to provide offboard neg voltage to control contrast. Anyway the relevant point is there's about ten companies between my OEM LCD modules and some dude digging stuff outta the ground. One company does nothing but turn purified chemicals into glass. Another company runs the refinery that makes the resin that gets mixed by another company with fiberglass and has a sheet of copper stuck on to it to make bare PCB material. Another mixes ingots of lead and tin (in the past, anyway) and a couple other elements and casts ingots of solder for the wave soldering machine (since replaced by reflow process using paste). I might have a window into the LCD board stuffing assembly plant, but I have no idea whats going on at ye olde tin smelter or the other 99% of the people who built my LCD modules.
I know many apple products are mostly OEM devices. They hardly make their own accelerometers in their own silicon foundries. I'm not sure if its relevant to even bother watching the 1% of the population at the assembly plant... In fact the further you are from final assembly, the worse things seem to be, at least in my factory experience.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
There is technically impossible and realistically difficult. All these things you mentioned were difficult but achievable through work and determination. Technically can you identify the origin of single particles in a smelt? In the world of Star Trek, all it takes is a tricorder but technically in the real world how do you do so? If you have theories please list them here or better yet, tell Apple and Dell and Panasonic (and all the electronic manufacturers). They would like to know.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I don't see Anobit on that list of suppliers. And, considering Apple just acquired Anobit for its NAND flash ECC firmware, it makes me wonder why they'd do that without having even used its product first. Or could this list from Apple be only what it's willing to reveal?
Anobit is an engineering company in Israel. If you are worried about their working conditions, shouldn't you be much more worried about the working conditions of software developers in the US gaming industry? Do you think they are subject to cruel treatment, like having to use Windows on a Dell computer?
Hi everyone, I'm afraid Bonch couldn't be with us today but in his absence I'd just like to assure everyone that Google factories are much much worse than Apple ones - in addition to inhuman working conditions the factory drones have to watch ads all day long, have to give up all their personal info and, worst of all, don't get a seamless experience. That's right, no seamless experience with Google. Hope that clears everything up. Bye.
I really enjoyed the This American Life episode mentioned in the summary, and one of the things I found really interesting was the second part.
The first part was all about the terrible conditions the guy found at Foxcon and other manufacturers. The second part was all about what we should take away from this.
The general concensus is that, yeah, these factories are terrible, but they're actually a step up from the abject poverty the 3rd world would otherwise be in. Even more surprising, things are improving. Factories are starting, ever so slowly, to compete with each other for workers, and that means they're easing off on hours and otherwise making incremental improvements to the workers' quality of life.
This isn't to say that we should be okay with how the workers are treated. Simply that, given a choice between no sweatshops or sweatshops as they currently exist, the workers are actually better off with the sweatshops. And sweatshops are really the first step on the ladder of development. The industrialized Western countries went through very similar pains during the industrial revolution. In a few generations, Chinese working conditions might actually look a lot more like turn-of-the-century American working conditions, even without outside pressure.
and then, have them ask the people who they bought if from
and then, they ask the people that they bought it from.
The first flaw in your scenario is that it ignores recycling and assumes perfect knowledge. While suppliers may know generally where they get original source material, recyclers have no idea where the original source of their material. At best they know the country of the supply of recycled goods, say the US. They cannot know that every single component in a ton of recycled materials did not come from a conflict source. Some of these conflicts have lasted almost 20 years. Looking at a stack of monitors that came from the US, can you tell which models and companies for the last 20 years have used conflict materials? No one in the world can tell you. Yet you say this is all possible.
what if someone lies?
ahh, well, you get a world wide system of tracking going. its not impossible. its done with fruit. its done with alot of stuff.
Tagging a shipment of fruit is vastly easier than tagging atoms. In a kg of gold (which is one of conflict minerals), there are 3.022E24 molecules of gold. How in the world do you tag that many molecules? That's the crux of the problem. You cannot know the original source of every gold atom as gold is recycled so often.
For the sake of argument we ignore recycling. You expect Apple to personally audit thousands of suppliers? How often? Unless you audit every one of them 24x7 for the rest of their contract, you cannot be sure that they used non-conflict materials each and every time.
I've asked you repeatedly for a technical way to do this. You've responded with nothing but unrealistic and impossible scenarios not based in reality.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.