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Some Critics Suggest Apple Boycott Over Chinese Working Conditions
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that Apple's image is taking a dive after revelations in the NY Times about working conditions in the factories of some of its network of Chinese suppliers and the dreaded word 'boycott' has started to appear in media coverage of Apple's activities. 'Should consumers boycott Apple?' asked a column in the Los Angeles Times as it recounted details of the bad PR fallout amid detailed allegations that workers at Foxconn suffered in conditions that resembled a modern version of bonded labor, working obscenely long shifts in unhealthy conditions with few of the labor rights that workers in the west would take for granted." Read on, below.
Pickens continues: "But Apple has come out fighting, which is no surprise given the remarkable success that the company has seen in recent years with its reputation for 'cool' among hip urban professionals and a generally positive corporate image. In a lengthy email sent to Apple staff, chief executive Tim Cook met the allegations head-on. 'We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern,' Cook said. He went on to slam critics of the company. 'Any suggestion that we don't care is patently false and offensive to us ... accusations like these are contrary to our values.' So will we see some kind of movement to boycott Apple products, akin to the campaign several years ago to pressure Nike to improve working conditions in its factories asks Sam Gustin in Time Magazine? "You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards," an anonymous current Apple executive told the Times. "And right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China.""
If the sheer number of Apple devices at any given Occupy protest are any indication, it would seem the professional protestors who usually lead this kind of thing are going to bend over backwards to give Apple a free pass on just about anything. Christ, there were Occupy protestors CRYING the day Steve Jobs died--even as they rallied against our corporate overlords (with no sense of the irony at all). So unless you can sell them on the idea that Tim Cook has somehow corrupted their beloved Apple in the last few months, I would say your chances are pretty much nil.
And this isn't meant as flamebait. Seriously, go to an Occupy protest sometime and just look at the sheer number of Mac's, iPhones, and iPads you'll see. It's fucking creepy. They've been for shit at organizing on any other point, but they've apparently almost all agreed on at least *one* thing.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
To those who have been watching Apple for years, this is just a long list of transgressions that make it obvious to avoid Apple.
- Walled gardens, vendor lock in
- Taking down applications from the App Store and including versions in iOS
- Spurious litigation and anti-competitive lawsuits in Germany and Australia
- CarrierIQ, GPS tracking privacy gaffes
- Planned failure just after warranty period (ever since the original pod)
When you think of products that are so anti consumer (not necessarily anti-usability), Apple comes to mind. As for many here, it's just business as usual as I will never buy an Apple product (especially after the first pod) anyway.
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Next, boycott anyone who can't guarantee their workers receive a decent standard of living...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wow. Poor working conditions in a Chinese factory? I'd never have guessed.
The question is, how does this compare to other factories in China? Better or worse? Because if the working conditions at Apple's Chinese partners are on par with or better than the conditions at other Chinese factories, then we had better boycott *all* Chinese-produced products and not just those shiny Apple toys.
Yay! Linux is free... but it still runs on hardware produced in a Chinese factory.
"Dude you're a barista"
What a ridiculous article to single out Apple when all the manufacturers take advantage of cheap labor. This has been going on for hundreds of years and is really nothing new.
Unless everyone is willing to spend a significant more on almost product (tech or non-tech based) this won't change.
Your flame bait rant aside....Just read the comments from Apple executives. They're enough to make you smash Apple products you own.
The NYT article brings to light conditions and tragedies that many people did not know about. It's hard to ignore these images.
If the sheer number of Apple devices at any given Occupy protest are any indication, it would seem the professional protestors who usually lead this kind of thing are going to bend over backwards to give Apple a free pass on just about anything. Christ, there were Occupy protestors CRYING the day Steve Jobs died--even as they rallied against our corporate overlords (with no sense of the irony at all). So unless you can sell them on the idea that Tim Cook has somehow corrupted their beloved Apple in the last few months, I would say your chances are pretty much nil.
And this isn't meant as flamebait. Seriously, go to an Occupy protest sometime and just look at the sheer number of Mac's, iPhones, and iPads you'll see. It's fucking creepy. They've been for shit at organizing on any other point, but they've apparently almost all agreed on at least *one* thing.
I am surprised that the Apple community does not go after Apple about wages like other did about the Nike plants outside the USA. Some recent article about Steve Jobs quoted an Apple executive saying paying US wages in mainland China (instead of $17/day) would only increase the price of an iPad by $70.
Home of The Suki Series
These articles regarding Apple's labour practices have been fairly regular for years, now. It's not that many people did not know about it; it's that many people choose not to care about it.
All of these articles about Apple's supply chain seem to ignore one fact: Apple's aren't the only products made in these factories.
Want to boycott horrific working conditions? Stop buying everything. Even Made in America products have parts or raw materials from overseas sweatshops. Electricity in the United States is typically powered by coal, which routinely ignores safety regulations.
The problem isn't Apple. The problem is lax governmental regulation that allows this to happen. Want to stop Apple from using sweatshops? Want to stop Google and Facebook from tracking your every move? Make it illegal, and enforce the damned law.
I am really confused about this. My Android handset was made in China under Foxconn like condition if not at Foxconn itself. If we are going to boycott Apple on this, shouldn't we boycott every Android handset\tablet, along with a shit ton of other electronics that we all know and use daily?
Seriously, I don't understand why boycott just apple on this. Shouldn't we boycott ALL chinese manufactured electronics? A broader movement maybe?
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"All these other plants are horrible as well so we should just accept the perhaps slightly less horribleness of Apple's plant conditions."
Nope. If true (and it very well could be), that means the problem is bigger, which means we need to fight harder to solve it, not just roll over.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
There is no reason to single-out Apple. Foxconn et al do not manufacture exclusively for Apple.
You could make the argument that Apple makes a lot of money off it but you should then move to ban all outsourcing of manufacturing to regions that are not that keen on worker conditions.
Guess what: not gonna happen. Everybody from left to right wants to have their cake and eat it too. Including myself.
"And this isn't meant as flamebait. "
And yet it is.
Apple isn't getting a free pass, a lot of people are just not very well informed about the matter. Now that Apple's manufacturing practices are becoming better known, there is a growing back lash. Will it last? Maybe, maybe not. The truth is that the electronic devices like smart phones, computers and tablets are a part of everyday life in the US for a very large part of the population. Convincing people that they need to pay more for these devices isn't an easy cause to champion.
I am not even sure what the point of your comment was outside of a thinly veiled stab at a political movement that you obviously disagree with. Should everyone give a free pass to Apple just because you produced an anecdote that occupy protesters use too many apple devices?
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Unfortunately, people boycotting this do not care about chinese condtions; they care about THEIR conditions. That fact is that for Chinese working for apple (or foxconn) is a huge win. For people boycotting them it would be a loss; however, if foxconn moves their operation to some place with a different productivity/cost ratio, because low prod/low cost would be prohibited, the chinese would be worse off; but the 'wealthy' people boycotting apple might get a job; they may end up better off.
I won't boycott apple for this, I applaud apple for doing this and I want more companies invest and building sweat-shops in these countries. The people out there are incredibly poor; I want them to be better. And they do get a better life by working in these factories. BTW: they _CAN_ refuse and continue to live in the abject poverty they live today. They do have an option. I want them to have the option; by boycotting and otherwise fighting against sweatshops I am stripping them of these options.
Before the NYT article (and CBS Sunday Morning yesterday), NPR's This American Life helped break the story. It's a good listen: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory
An interesting point made at the end of the NPR program is that, although working conditions are bad, the availability of these jobs is *still* a step up from working a subsistence living in the rice paddies. In particular, these jobs have given reasonable salaries to, and hence empowered, women.
I used to think that people wanted American products without American price tags. Apple has convinced me that the problem is a lot more difficult to define. People will pay outrageous prices for certain things, but everything else has to be dirt cheap.
Just searching for "apple margin iphone" shows that they are taking maybe 35%, down from 60% earlier. I find it hard to believe that hiring US workers would bring it down considerably. The design and development cost wouldn't change, just the profit margin.
Of course, the stock is ridiculously high due to these margins, so some Americans are benefitting. The ones who already have money to invest, that is.
Alot of what was mentioned in the NY Times is new information. Describing worker dormitories, describing what Apple expected from the company to make a last minute product line changes; quoting Apple executives praising the working conditions.
Combined with this news and Apple's 4Q financial reports, show's Apple in a very bad light. A very profitable company that doesn't care about the conditions of workers.
The problem is the companies are attracted to the WalMart prices for labor... or more precisely, "manufacturing services." The companies pay for results and get them. It doesn't matter that they murder kittens in those facilities does it?
The boycott, if any, should be against China... more specifically, Chinese manufacturing. This is precisely how they can cost so little. If they were to raise their standards, they would be more expensive and suddenly less attractive. And the only real way around this is to call for government support and sanctions.
The US government is well aware of the conditions in China. They still have favored nation status where trading is concerned. Everyone wants their WalMart prices badly enough to look away when faced with violations of human rights and simply bad and unhealthy working conditions.
These cost savings enjoyed by Apple doesn't seem to translate well into lower prices though...
Nope. That's Chinas problem to solve. It none of our business.
What's idiotic about this is that every tech company gets its products made by the same factories. Why are they proposing boycotting apple, not boycotting all tech companies?
Oh, that's right, because boycotting all tech companies would be impossible to make happen, and apple are an easy scapegoat.
Better. You just need to cross the street to go to foxconn's competitor. Literally. And yet most people go for it - because it pays better, and it is a little better, too.
Supposedly communism was a way of taking power from capitalists so that all people are treated equally with the expectation that worker would be better off. But it always seems strange to me that China today (and always) has been associated with harsh working conditions.
What is the purpose of comunism if the working conditions are worse than in capitalist countries?
Is there an alternative?
I doubt there are any gadgets/laptops/computers aimed at the general consumer assembled by workers making a living wage.
There are just too many people who live in total squalor and dream of getting a 60 hours a week, 100$ a month job.
The Chinese sweatshop Apple employs for the iEverythings is Foxconn. Other stuff Foxconn works on/componies Foxconn works for:
If you're not buying from a company that uses Foxconn, you're not buying tech.
I'm a psychologist (amongst other things).
Offset the slave labor jobs by paying for a Silicon Valley cool job.
To quote:
"Apple is not alone among electronic companies employing Foxconn and other such plants."
However, Apple (and to a lesser extent other electronic companies) can insist on certain standards. I believe that Apple looks at the cost model (wages, part costs etc) and then dictates how much profit companies like Foxconn can make per assembly. If Apple insisted on a certain standard of welfare and provided money into their costing specifically for this ( I believe HP do this), then this issue would go away.
What has surprised me is that Apple have not set up their own manufacturing bases in China/Brazil. Then it dawned on me. If Apple partner with Foxconn et al, then they are able to blame their partners, even though Apple are intrinsically involved in dictating precisely what these partners are allowed to charge Apple for producing their products.
Apple's margins are 40-50% in some of their devices, and by accepting the profit margins common thoughout the industry, or marginally increasing their own prices, they could all be built in the US. Instead of being a good citizen (corporations are people too!) and helping get our economy back on its feet by increasing domestic manufacturing, Apple is simply pocketing the difference. That's why they have one hundred billion dollars in the bank.
Additionally, Apple is very brand conscious. If people start boycotting and picketing Apple Stores, the protest could actually work. The other manufacturers like Lenovo and Dell and Microsoft have some retail presence, but nothing like Apple.
Some recent article about Steve Jobs quoted an Apple executive saying paying US wages in mainland China (instead of $17/day) would only increase the price of an iPad by $70.
And if you were going to pay US wages you could always, I don't know, build the damn thing in America?
I'm not exactly a Buy American nazi, but if the flagship products of greenwashing high-end manufacturers can't be built here, then what can?
Although I partially agree with you on your statements (as I am brazilian myself), and given the fact that most people die slowly from the day they are born, I wonder what was the intention of this comment.
Just to play Devil's Advocate here, while you may be willing to pay $70 more does that mean everyone else will? A standard of living is effectively defined as being how much money you make versus how much of that money you have to spend to acquire goods. To pay more for electronics is tantamount to a decrease in the standard of living for westerners, and no one is going to be in favor of giving up their standard of living.
I was recently having a conversation with some co-workers about developing mobile apps. I was told that if I want to make money I should give up on Android and develop apps for the apple app store.
I realized that I have never purchased an apple product in my life and don't intend to. It's not that the products are bad, it's that apple itself is bad. If I bought any apple product, no matter how small, I would feel as if I were a part of the problem.
Even if I don't have much power to be part of a real solution in this world the least I can do is make sure I'm not part of the problem.
I think a boycott would go far to send a message to Apple, that being said I still wouldn't buy any apple products even if they cleaned up their act and started behaving civil toward the rest of humanity because I'd know that the only reason they did so was to increase sales.
The problem isn't specific to apple but they are the poster child and a protest there would produce the most press. With record breaking profits, it would be awesome if apple spent more to improve working conditions in china.
This American Life did a piece earlier this month on working conditions at Foxconn called "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory":
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory
I don't remember the details, but a couple economists at the end shrug off the horrible conditions because the whole process of industrialization benefits the population overall. It sucks, but they're better off for it. They note that while the manufacturing industry made it over to China, workers rights didn't go with it, but conditions ARE improving. It's a good listen if you have an hour.
Heath and safety is expensive.
In china, someone dies, you have a funeral.
In the USA, someone dies, you have a court case, a huge investigation going on for months, and the media turns and bites you.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
I'm willing to bet the source for the allegations has an Android or Windows phone in his pocket.
As a side note, several years ago, it was reported that a company in California was busted because the workers were wearing adult diapers so that the manufacturing line didn't have to be stopped for piss breaks.
Actually, it wasn't very nice of the NY Times to not put the stats they used to suggest a boycott of Apple into any sort of context. So I'll do that for them ...
18 suicides per million workers at Foxconn? OK, that's very sad, but the Chinese national average is 220 per million. More than 12X higher.
7 fatal workplace injuries per million workers at Foxconn? Agains, tragic. But the US(!) national average is 35. 5X more.
Average salary for production workers at Foxconn only $6,000? To us privileged Westerners, that seems like a pittance. The average for China as a whole? $4,500 or 25% less than Foxconn workers.
I'm not suggesting that Foxconn is a dream job, without harsh conditions etc etc. But to not provide context for your statistics is disingeous at best, and deliberately dishonest at worst. And what, exactly, would a boycott actually do?
DaveyJJ
Never owned an Apple product, never will.
Garbage, pure and simple... You know the old saying, Garbage in, Garbage out? That's Apple to the core.
Now, put a slave/sweatshop import tax on those products equivelent to $1000.00 per device and let's see how cheap chinese manufacturing is...
It's based on the idea that by switching from one brand to another, the costumer has freedom and power.
That's not the case if the whole market is shaped by a race to the bottom. Foxconn does in fact produce many of the Android devices, and their competitors are no different. You won't get far asking an individual maker to fall on their sword to make positive changes that their competitors won't. Those that do usually go into niche markets.
It takes a societal agreement with government-enforced teeth to do anything about this. I want my devices produced free of toxins for fair wages with a long life expectancy and a recycling plan, and the manufacturers should be able to do this without expecting to be undercut.
I need to know what the cheapest Apple product is, please? The reason is, I'm pretty penniless right now so boycotting e.g. a MacBook would be an empty gesture as I can't afford one anyway. However if I can refuse to buy something that I could afford e.g. an iPod Shuffle or an iPhone dock or something then I'm right behind you, sisters.
No one boycotted them for supporting SOPA. Why do you think something that doesn't affect white america will make the Apple sheep put down their lattes and take action?
A Chinese commenter to the NYT site said that if people had known the lives of these people prior to Foxconn, they would come to the opposite condition and call Apple philanthropists.
Your flame bait rant aside....Just read the comments from Apple executives. They're enough to make you smash Apple products you own.
Agreed. It's one thing to make your products in factories operating under those conditions, but the apple exutive seemed to be so proud of the fact that they have near-slaves building their products when he described the condition under which they work. I can't even imagine what he was thinking when he described all that the way he did. A normal person holds back when talking about something they know other people probably wouldn't approve of, especially when it's a major corporation with a public image to uphold. He seemed oblivious to the fact that people might not approve. I couldn't decide if he was clueless or a sociopath.
I wouldn't find it strange that there is a finger or two from their competitors...
not true. Many electronics are made in democratic countries, though, most in asia. For instance, my smartphone (samsung) is made in korea. My computer is made in Taiwan. I try to avoid chinese made goods when possible.
Unfortunately this entire "outrage" is an example of your typical American Latte drinker peering out from their ivory tower and all agreeing that "something should be done" without understanding the basic market principles or the context of that which they judge. Are the conditions are Foxconn bad? Compared to American standards, yes. Compared to Chinese standards the workers at Foxconn are privileged and it is an amazing job to have. Before you start punishing companies that rise above the average in working conditions, you should go after the sub par and average companies if you really want to exercise your heart-bleed.
I am not even sure what the point of your comment was outside of a thinly veiled stab at a political movement that you obviously disagree with.
Quite the contrary. I strongly support the idea of fighting corporatocracy. But if the movement is ever going to achieve anything it's going to have to be much more CONSISTENT and MAINSTREAM. Consistent means that selected corps like Apple and Democratic politicians don't get free passes. Mainstream means that the movement has to be more than just the standard hippie and drum-circle crowd (and no hippies guarding the gates with a "We don't want to let in any poseurs who don't even own a hemp shirt" attitude).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Crazy talk.
Note that it isn't just Apple using slave labor. Dell, Samsung, Levono, HP.... the list is endless.
There were several articles about why Apple doesn't build its hardware in US any more- I'm too tired to google them for you right now. It's not so much about wages, but more about scalability of production, flexibility and supply lines. It was completely impossible to set up manufacturing quickly and do last minute changes scale it up rapidly the way Foxconn did anywhere in US- sometimes at human cost. One of the reasons was that Foxconn had workers living in barracks to be woken up and shuffled into the factories when needed. And they had A LOT of workers, including qualified engineers available. Another reason is that almost all of the suppliers of components are in China already, so supply lines for parts are much shorter.
The article even mentioned Obama personally asking Steve Jobs what it would take to get manufacturing back to US, and the answer was it was no longer possible.
--Coder
What's idiotic about this is that every tech company gets its products made by the same factories. Why are they proposing boycotting apple, not boycotting all tech companies?
Oh, that's right, because boycotting all tech companies would be impossible to make happen, and apple are an easy scapegoat.
Apple is becoming insanely rich off of these factories, which makes them the easiest target.
How long before people American's can't afford the product at "Made in China" prices? If nobody has a job. the boycott will come to Apple. Like it or not.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I'm sure apple will sell 20 millions of ivibrator in 2 weeks time even if it was made in some shady factory filled with child labour.
iPods, iPads, Macbooks, iPhones, etc all cost significantly more than the competition then and mostly now(yes, you can get a years old 3GS for 1 penny on a contract, but not a 4S). You can charge $70 more and I'm sure you'll do okay. I mean, if people will pay $200 for an iPod when you can get a Sansa that plays even more formats for 25% of that, why not $250? It's not like they don't have a ridiculous margin per device to operate with.
$17 a day? http://m.cnet.com/Article.rbml?nid=20006559&cid=null&bcid=&bid=-37 suggests salary is about $170 per month so more like $5 a day, and how many hours do they work? 100 hours a week would not be unusual for Chinese factory labor. So hourly rate is many times less than US equivalent.
Did you read the NYT article?
You didn't? I'm shocked.
If you had, you would have realised that the other tech companies often pay these manufacturers more money to be spent on improving work conditions, whereas Apple chooses to squeeze them for every dirty brown penny, which inevitably leads to cuts in worker pay and conditions.
If you'd read the article you would also know that whilst Apple has a very pretty code of conduct for their suppliers, it is common for them to simply ignore infractions of that code of conduct, with fewer than 15 suppliers terminated for non-compliance since 2007, even though there are scores of the most serious breaches of that code of conduct recorded every year.
Apple does a lot of talking about worker safety, but they don't do a whole lot of walking.
I find it funny that Apple supporters, fans, users, most of whom are liberal twats, supposedly for "the worker", blah, blah, blah, don't give a shit about anyone but themselves.
Just read their smug comments, "It's just the Apple haters looking for another excuse to hate. As you noticed, all they need is the excuse, it doesn't even have to be logically coherent.".
-translated
I'm better than you. I always will be. I'm a union member. I'm a Liberal. I have a cat. I know everything. Everyone is evil except me. The logo is green so I am too!
My phone says it was made in Hungary but I imagine it was only assembled there and the components were made in China. The battery was made in China. Unfortunate but an improvement over a completely Chinese manufactured device.
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It may be true that all products from China are produced under similar conditions so the people building samsungs and acers have it just as bad as those building iStuff. However, some of Apple's success is attributed to the massive quantities they purchase and how they hold great power over manufacturers to drive their cost down. I'd say this also makes apple the most effective target for a boycott. Their control as the single buyer of vast numbers of parts puts them in the unique position to be able to improve working conditions. Instead of saying "we'll buy 50,000,000 LCD screens if you reduce the cost by 3% or sell to us exclusively" they could say "we'll buy 50,000,000 screens if you stop making workers live in pens and let them have friends/unionize". Of course, the only reason they would do such a crazy thing would be because of a massive boycott. It would seem that if you care about how your stuff is made, your best bet is to go after the biggest fish.
Maybe the Apple fanboys don't have to sit at home fixing and patching their computers all the time... They actually can go outside and do something.
To the point though, I think they are going after Apple because if they change, it will hopefully change everyone else too. Or start a 2nd worker revolution...
Ah so you state that people are not totally consitent in their behavior. While they have accepted that corporations are not working in the public interest (at least their motivation is not the public interest, but their own pockets), they are still bound by their desires and wishes and they live out their projections. This is definitely true. but it is true for all of us. Some people even do not accept simple facts, like we have an energy consuption and a resource consumption problem. And we have to change our way or it will become problematic to have such thing as our present society.
The real thing is, we have to change (not the others, if we wait for them, they will wait for us). Meaning I have to change how I live. And you should change how you live. And doing these changes are hard. And yes we should thin twice buying anything from Apple again as long they have that production agenda and they have their locked plattforms. However, it might be complicated, because Samsung, HTC and others manufacture their devices i nthe same or similar shops.
The best thing to do, do not buy a new phone unless the old is broken. And if possible, replace the battery if you can instead of throwing the thing away.
The good thing about that occupy movement (as far as I can see it from over here), they might be open to arguments. Therefor, they might understand the arguments againts Apple.
while you may be willing to pay $70 more does that mean everyone else will?
I would, but it's is moronic to think that paying a US worker $20-$30 an hour as opposed to paying a Chinese person $17 a day would only increase the price of the iPad $70.
More importantly, there is currently NO organization in the United States that could manufacture 10,000 devices a day, like they do at Foxconn. The backlash against supply shortages would be more damning than a $70 price increase.
HAH, I'm pleased to see the first post in my view contained exactly what I was going to write concerning the Apple devices at the Occupy protests. Thank you for that.
You know what will fix this and bring jobs back to the USA? Accountability.
Accountability for what your outsourced partner is doing, accountability for the third party you hire, and accountability for their working conditions on the same level with the USAs internal standards.
Boycott? pppffttt... how about real punishment.
I note that few of the Apple fanbois have chosen to defend Apple here. Rather they just bleat that 'everyone does it', as though that's ever been much of a justification for appalling behaviour.
Yes, the Occupy protesters demanding that people be paid a more decent wage, and executives and financial speculators less, are a bunch of hypocrites for using products made in sweatshops that grossly underpay their workers and keep them working in horrible conditions.
And so are the rest of us if we care about the issue of fair labor practices but still pick the "Made in China" product for 10% cheaper than the "Made in Country X with Sane Labor Laws". Welcome to "globalization" of markets, which we've been told for going on 20 or 30 years would be better for everybody. In reality it is much better for the people at the top, and it is the same or worse for everybody else, because companies will gladly exploit their workers when the law allows them to do so. This occurs despite promises that the economic value would "trickle down" to everyone: not if labor laws let you dam the natural flow of money to employees that should occur as a business thrives.
This is a deeper problem than Apple and underpaid workers in China, and every time we settle for a less-than-or-equal-to-inflation pay rate increase or buy the cheapest product regardless of where or how it is made, we're feeding into the attitude that the biggest economic benefits are mainly for executives and investors, not for the employees. While it is very difficult as a consumer to make informed decisions about purchases when we don't know how employees are treated, it could be done with more rigorous international labor laws and standardized labeling of products to reflect the labor laws in the relevant country. Give people the ability to choose a product that meets the highest labor standards, and maybe people will be willing to pay a little more for it. Keep them in the dark, and they'll pay the same price the market will bear, but most of the money will go to the people at the top. We need to change things so that the power of consumer choice can start to influence labor practices, because the current law obviously isn't up to the task. This gives some countries an unfair market advantage because they can treat their employees like !@#%!%^. All companies, not just Apple, should have to face consumer opinion about the labor practices used to make their products.
Too many "want to be like everyone else" people in the world so obsessed with fitting in, being trendy like everyone else. This "boycott" wouldn't happen. Gen X & Y types have to have: The right car The right house The right starbucks coffee bla bla bla. You think these self absorbed idiots will give up "their status symbol" phone?
It's not the one I read (I think I read either New york times or Forbes), but content is 90% similar:
http://www.catholic.org/technology/story.php?id=44500
There are several others
http://open.salon.com/blog/steve_klingaman/2012/01/25/lets_not_kid_ourselves_about_manufacturing_jobs
http://gizmodo.com/5878209/why-apple-doesnt-make-the-iphone-in-america
--Coder
Apple should own there own factories and have them in the usa or at least there own factories in other places as works at Foxconn have sold apple prototypes to others for small amounts of cash in US teams but big cash in china. Now if they had good paid works with good working conditions then leeks can be cut down.
Also killing a worker and makeing it look like a suicide is not the way to go.
A corporation promises to do something. That is what the CEO said. I will believe them (as much as I will believe Samsung) when they actually do it. If I see that they are changing their ways, I will admit that. But as long as they are only talking, I do not believe them. Why should I?
BTW: Same applies to Samsung or HTC or any other company selling devices.
Pay them a quarter of a US wage then. That will only add $20 to the price, and still be a lot more than they're currently getting. Additionally, it will mean that a lot of them will actually be able to afford Apple products, increasing the size of the potential market.
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And Apple's not alone on this. Dell, HP, Sony, Microsoft ( Xbox360 ) all use Foxconn as well. I'm not being an Apple apologist... I believe that Apple knew full well what it was getting in to and the new plant in Brazil is an effort to distance themselves from Foxconn, but that's not enough. Apple should be taking a stand and stopping this treatment of workers. It's not their fault... that's Foxconn's faul and China's fault, but Apple should use its prowess to make change.
( And FYI All that info about worker dormatories etc isn't new.. The Register has done multiple pieces on the horrible working conditions for years... since 2006 even. )
From what I hear from people that know better: If you ever experienced American working conditions, you would never find Foxconn working conditions acceptable or even humane. However, if you have never left China, Foxconn may be the best chance at avoiding starvation. Other factories are far worse. In fact, the only reason we hear from Foxconn issues is because of its link to Apple. If we actually cared, we would be hearing about Aigo’s Shenzhen factory, or Samsung's OEM factory in Tianjin, that pays way less to their employees than Foxconn.
A recent episode of House actually did a good gaze on the topic, where the new philanthropist doctor is against a company move to Asia while the Asian doctor insist that is the best chance most people have of a better life relative to their current situation.
We have a choice (as a country not really as consumers) to stay out of China. That choice, though, will just result in forcing a worse life on those employees. But hey, better have them suicide or starve in a farm where only the family has to worry about the corpse!
Let's face it: the press does not care. The press just wants to print articles that get clicks to show ads, and they know Apple related news gets traffic, especially bad news.
Sorry for the rant but this Foxconn hypocrisy really gets to me.
The Economist ran an article about China's balance of trade last week which included a breakdown of the value (price) of an iPad. Just over 50% was costs, the rest was profit, of which 30% to Apple (the rest to others in the supply chain). Chinese labour costs were minimal at 2%. They could perhaps reduce their profits to redistribute wealth from their execs/shareholders to the workers.
http://www.economist.com/node/21543174
Western countries, and particularly the UK during the first heady rush of the Industrial Age, had working practices that would horrify the most suicidal Foxconn worker while they moved from a rural to an industrial economy. The USA actually practiced slavery during this period of their development. This is nothing new and while it is horrible, it's an essential part of the development of an economy.
The only thing a developing country can do to lure investment from the more developed economies is sell cheap labour. Luckily, there is a progression from cheap labour to educated workforce that means it's usually only a single generation that has to work in conditions like this. Korea is the best most recent example, where the younger generation are firmly building a knowledge economy on the back of the education that their parent's factory work paid for. [citation coming if I can be bothered digging it out]
You can see a pattern of modern manufacturers chasing cheap labour moving around the globe, building factories and industrial knowledge and infrastructure, then moving on as the local workforce becomes more knowledgeable and expensive. It does leave behind a country that is industrialised and capable of building a manufacturing base that doesn't rely on cheap labour and has better working conditions.
If we insisted that all labour in developing countries was paid the same wage as the average US or European worker, and had similar working conditions, healthcare, life expectancy, educational prospects, and so on, then no developing country could afford to develop. We would be stuck with a developed world that had all the money and an undeveloped world that could never compete or take part in the global economy, wedged forever in a poverty trap that they couldn't get out of.
So yes, bizarrely, it's a good thing that Chinese workers are working under horrific working conditions, just like our great-great-grandparents were, so that they can bring up kids like us who won't have to.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
$17 a day? http://m.cnet.com/Article.rbml?nid=20006559&cid=null&bcid=&bid=-37 suggests salary is about $170 per month so more like $5 a day, and how many hours do they work? 100 hours a week would not be unusual for Chinese factory labor. So hourly rate is many times less than US equivalent.
Posted a link on this thread from a NYT article. It quoted an Apple executive for the $17 number and that iPods built paying US wages would only be $68 more.
Home of The Suki Series
Tim Cook met the allegations head-on:
'Any suggestion that we don't care is patently false and offensive to us ... accusations like these are contrary to our values.'
There you have it, "we care because we say we care, and therefore those workers are obviously cared for." Wow, Tim, way to keep the reality distortion field alive!
People keep saying that it's more than just Apple. This is true, but only ONE company made 14 billion dollars profit in one quarter, directly as a result of paying very little for its parts and labor. Not only that, but Apple is well known for squeezing companies like Foxconn even further to produce more, faster, and for less. Ask yourself, at the point in history when companies like Nokia or RIM sold more phones than Apple, were any of them making 14 billion in one quarter?
Are there other companies manufacturing in China under horrible conditions? Yes absolutely. However, these other American based companies are not held up for all to see as the great American success story.
Someone needs to be boycotted, and Apple is just the obvious choice. Boycotting anyone else wouldn't have an effect. And really, how else can regular people make a statement than with their wallets?
Other companies use Foxconn for their products too, but if Apple says 'enough is enough' don't you think those other companies will follow suit? No company would knowingly commit suicide by backing Foxxconn if Apple goes on record and does the right thing here, by forcing their manufacturer to not treat employees like cattle.
Recently over 300 workers at the Foxconn manufacturing plant threatened suicide if working conditions didn't improve. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57357444/xbox-360-workers-reportedly-threaten-mass-suicide/
Its gotten so bad that the employees are forced to sign contracts when they are hired stating they won't kill themselves while at work.
With 98B in cash, Apple is also the only company capable of effecting a change. As they've always said, "Apple leads the way", so lead on Apple...
"I don't care"
But people work next for nothing.
"I don't care"
We should boycott Mac products and hopefully improve working donditions in these factories.
"I don't care".....
But the larger problem is that, for many of the workers, the option is keep the job at the factory, or go back to dirt farming.
The factory is actually the better option. The problem here is that poverty in China is massive.
Like it or not these plants represent opportunity for those working there. Now, it is debatable that the plants should give the workers more opportunity and less work, but their options if they leave the plant are likely worse.
The NYT article is nothing but a flame piece. EVERY other major electronics manufacturer is either heavily contracted with Foxxconn, a subsidiary there of, or a company somehow connected with their plants via contractual obligations held by parts suppliers. There is no way around it. Some part of the device you are reading this on was likely manufactured by Foxxconn or inside one of their plants at some point. Guess what? Parts in your kid's Little Mermaid themed MP3 player and digital camera were made in the same places. Your camera. Your TV. Your stereo head unit. So were pats of your computer monitors, motherboards, graphics cards, USB hubs, power supplies, cable/dish set tops, blu-ray....need I go on? Steve Jobs said it best. It's not Apple's job to fix what's wrong with this country, It's their job to produce high quality products. We get a choice here. We can either have sweet gadgets for cheap...or we can bring fair manufacturing practices back to the states. We don't get both in our current ecosystem and we sure as hell won't be forcing China's hand on the issue any time soon.
In my view, the real question should not be "should we boycott iPhones" but "which smartphone do we boycott". There is no reason Apple should be the only smarphone manufacturer under inspection, and I haven't read anywhere a comparison.
And in case they're all bad, you will never get enough people to boycott all Smartphones. But compare the manufacturers: RIM, HTC, Apple, Samsung, SONY, Nokia and you can find the worst offender. Then, you can put pressure on the worst offender.
That way, you can raise the manufacturing conditions by the bottom, which makes sense. But I somehow doubt Apple is one of the worst offender. I may be wrong.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
also cutting corners on safety helps keep costs down.
Apple should build a US based production using robots.
Apple cannot manufacture in the US without at least doubling their prices. It's not just wages.
Boycotting apple is a good idea, yes everyone is using the same factories but it is unrealistic to boycott everyone at the same time. So why not pick the bully in the group and lay him out? Apple is used by people who claim to care, so force apple to care. Then once they are forced into it, move the next company down the line. I bet it would not take long and no one would be using the appealing worker conditions.
just my thoughts on the situation - Vlad
Because singling out one company would be stupid when all the other companies are also using the same companies to assemble their products as well. Often without the checks that Apple is doing - which are also clearly not enough to stop abuses in the name of profits (for the manufacturer).
The solution is to assemble the products in your own country, which has several issues - (1) the cost of the goods would go up; (2) how many people want to work doing this type of role in the West, doing fiddly, repetitive factory work? Unions would inevitably occur, and then it's all rubbish; (3) Hundreds of thousands of people are employed to make Apple's products alone. What western city can provide that level of labour force within a year?
(1) isn't an issue if all companies have to do the same, as it results in a level playing field, even if every computer/tablet/phone gets 50% more expensive. That isn't going to happen without government intervention, namely an import tariff on Chinese-made electronics. That's not going to happen either because of politics.
https://www.bsr.org/en/our-insights/blog-view/letter-to-the-new-york-times-from-bsr
Rebuttal from BSR, one of the NYT's sources for the article. NYT misrepresented the situation. Took advantage of Apple being popular to read about, and ignored all the other companies that are Foxconn customers and are not doing as much as Apple to improve working conditions.
Yellow journalism, plain and simple.
The ones prohibiting import of products produced by forced labour:
http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/uscode/19/4/II/I/1307
What's idiotic about this is that every tech company gets its products made by the same factories. Why are they proposing boycotting apple, not boycotting all tech companies?
Oh, that's right, because boycotting all tech companies would be impossible to make happen, and apple are an easy scapegoat.
I would say it's because Apple is the proverbial 800 lb. gorilla. They make more units, more cheaply, than any other OEM out there, and when they say "jump", the Foxconns of the world generally ask "how high?". So if the critics can get Apple on board, then a good portion of the factory owners will be forced to come on board, and that will drag the Samsungs of the industry (i.e., the secondary players).
You gotta be a bit slow if you think Apple is the only company doing this. Because it's 100% legal, and *encouraged* by our laws, almost every US company does this. Almost every man-made object in your every day life relied on near-slave labor at some point to create it. More Americans need to understand that objects aren't created from magic by Amazon.com.
I don't respond to AC's.
Why is Apple being singled out, anyway? Is the implication that Apple is worse than EVERY OTHER electronics-manufacturing company? I can't remember the last time I bought something electronic NOT made in China (my old Fujitsu laptop was made in Japan... can't think of anything else)
And working in an average factory in China is Beverly Hills compared to life in a place like rural Jiangxi.
The people who usually care more about events in oppresive countries and spouting things like "free tibet" are usually the people who buy macs. Oh the sweet sweet irony.
How about increasing wages in other countries that sell things to the US. All the mines and factories in Africa, South America, and Asia owned by American/Western companies should pay US wages and have American working conditions too. I'm sure that consumers would be willing to pay more for their diamond rings and gold jewelry. The living and working conditions of miners in places like South Africa I'm sure are worse than those at Foxconn.
This is a key point, and absolutely correct. Cursory research will substantiate lambent's assertions.
All that was new in the recent Foxconn disclosures are some details. What this boils down to is that the consuming public would rather not be bothered by the harsh realities of how consumer goods are manufactured. It takes a lot of the fun out of playing with your new iWhatever if you know that human beings are being treated like dirt to manufacture them.
Convincing people that they need to pay more for these devices isn't an easy cause to champion.
Try "Convincing people that they need to play more for AND wait 20 years for the infrastructure and employee pool in the US to get to the point to where it can even come within a SHADOW of where China is now".
your samsung phone is only made in korea if you sought out a korean produced product. Most of them are made in China.
The Economist ran an article about China's balance of trade last week which included a breakdown of the value (price) of an iPad. Just over 50% was costs, the rest was profit, of which 30% to Apple (the rest to others in the supply chain). Chinese labour costs were minimal at 2%. They could perhaps reduce their profits to redistribute wealth from their execs/shareholders to the workers.
http://www.economist.com/node/21543174
That is more what I was thinking, instead of adding to the price. If those #Occupy people practiced what they preached, Apple stores would be under siege instead of being mobbed by weeping customers at the loss of Dear Leader.
Home of The Suki Series
Now that Apple is popular and trendy, any mention of Apple in a news story is sure to attract attention, clicks, viewership, listeners, etc. News media doesn't care about working conditions in China any more than the average American, otherwise they'd be complaining about/to every tech company in the country. They just want the ratings that come with putting "Apple" in a story.
On the other hand, if any company were to take an active stance on the working conditions of its production labor, I really think it'll be Apple. A couple years back when environmentalists picked up the "let's pick on Apple to gain attention" tactic, Apple responded with efforts to make their products greener and promote recycling. Obviously international labor laws aren't as easy to fix but Apple cares enough about its customers' opinions and its image to try.
I'd just be tickled pink if we went back to the old fashioned stakeholder concept, and less on shareholders. Yes, offshoring to a sweatshop might be profitable for this run of widgets, but long term, when the widgets lose their cool factor, it may be a company killer.
Additionally, Apple is very brand conscious. If people start boycotting and picketing Apple Stores, the protest could actually work. The other manufacturers like Lenovo and Dell and Microsoft have some retail presence, but nothing like Apple.
Plus it gives the other manufacturers an economic incentive to employ Americans in American facilities.
"DELL: computers built in America, by Americans, for Americans." i.e. "Hey, Apple employs a bunch of foreigners! Sounds awfully un-American, don't it?"
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I've got to ask , why just apple?
something like 1/4 of the U.S. economy is run products that come from Chinese slave labor and or Asian "slave labor'.
Countries where workers aren't allowed to complain or they can be jailed or killed.
We SHOULD pass a law that says any product imported into this country must have been made under similar OSHA and EPA and FDA , standards as things made here. Including labor laws honoring a 40 hour work week and some kind of adjusted minimum wage.
We won't though. We like , our cheap stuff from , wall-mart, k-mart, and best buy ... WAAYY too much for that. Not to mention the fact is would probably tank our economy for a generation.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Whenever I hear of something like this coming up someone always makes the point that other corporations do similar things. As far as I am concerned, that doesn't matter. Protesting against Apple will send a strong message against this sort of thing........a message that the upper management in other corporations will see too.
Thanks for posting this so I didn't have to.
Apple doesn't outsource engineers or tech support overseas, so they aren't above spending money on American employees. There aren't any companies in America that can produce 10,000 devices a day like Foxconn. This is the main reason Apple (and like you said, EVERY OTHER TECH COMPANY ON THE PLANET) uses them.
The fact that "everybody is doing it" is irrelevant. People made the same claims about Nike too. But bad press and market pressure made Nike change their ways. Overall, this led to better work conditions for Nike workers.
If you want to improve working conditions for everyone, you've got to strike someone first. Apple has benefited immensely from Chinese labor. Once Apple has caved and improved work conditions for their employees, THEN you can go after the rest (by threatening to only buy Apple products if they don't mend their ways).
It's called leverage.
Wired had this in the print version months ago, maybe even a year. You're smart, look it up. Pictures and all.
And predictable, since Foxconn was accepting migrant workers from farm regions that got terribly homesick and realized they had not found the gravy train after all. Returning home would be disgrace, so cashing in on insurance looks darned good.
And mind you this is an example of the trained workforce China is accused of having. Essentially these workers are meat-based robots taught to do the assembly that can't quite be done mechanically with the current state of the art, for the same money. Noodles are cheaper even than McDonald's, or these jjobs would have a chance here. But that's not happening until we can more fully automate assembly. And assuming Japan/Korea/etc don't beat us to that.
We should not be focused on making consumer electronics. Making the guts yes, but final assembly is not where the money is. Designing and perfecting is the money.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Because they have the biggest marketcap and probably the best profit margin.
I been boycotting them for years and now everyone thinks its cool do it now.
Alot of what was mentioned in the NY Times is new information. Describing worker dormitories, describing what Apple expected from the company to make a last minute product line changes; quoting Apple executives praising the working conditions.
Combined with this news and Apple's 4Q financial reports, show's Apple in a very bad light. A very profitable company that doesn't care about the conditions of workers.
Western customers don't care one whiff about working conditions in cina.
They're like drug addicts, as far as they can get a hold a shiny new i-toy on a 1-2 year cycle it is all groovy.
Start putting the real price on the i-gadgets and you'll see that producing in the west isn't so antieconomic as many believe.
when you cross the Obama regime. If you read Issacson's book you also read that Jobs was harshly critical of Obama. Obviously this is payback and the democrats are using the NYT as their pit bull. This also helps their labor union cause. America is in the toilet precisely because of leftist labor and democrat policies. Jobs saw it clearly. Unfortunately Obama cares more about slush funds for his friends and murdering his enemies. This is the most corrupt administration in this country's history.
Seriously boycott Apple for poor working conditions in China?
What next? boycotting Apple for using metals, because they were mined, causing pollution? While pretending this wasn't the same for every manufacturer on earth.
Remember the Foxconn workers threatening mass suicide. They were Xbox 360 workers:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45969515/ns/world_news-asia_pacific/t/xbox-workers-china-threatened-mass-suicide/
Or how about the Android products made by Foxconn, like the new Amazon Tablet:
http://phandroid.com/2011/07/14/amazon-chooses-foxconn-to-manufacturer-their-10-1-inch-android-tablet/
Would any of those pushing an Apple boycott add Amazon/Android/Microsoft products to the list?
It isn't even just tech products, in fact the lower down the price/technology scale, the worse the conditions likely are.
Where were your jeans made? Go watch China Blue:
http://video.pbs.org/video/1488092077/
...we need to fight harder to solve it, not just roll over.
I re-read the post you are responding to a few times. Nowhere is anything that can be construed as "just rolling over". The only argument in the original post is that singling out Apple is pointless, unless your goal is simply to attack Apple.
I love how it's hip to add "ocracy" after anything in an attempt to seem intelligent (or even simply valid). The worldwide trollocracy agrees, which, of course is in stark contrast against the fanboytocracy... or not.
Either way, everyone knows that the REAL power behind all this is the Anonymous Cowardocracy! (In shadow conjunction with the Slashdotocracy!)
You are being rational and using facts. Stop that!
Christ, there were Occupy protestors CRYING the day Steve Jobs died [...] So unless you can sell them on the idea that Tim Cook has somehow corrupted their beloved Apple in the last few months [...]
Given the evidence presented and the short-sighted reputation of Apple cultists, I'd say your hypothetical scenario isn't as far-fetched as you'd think. Maybe you can toss in suggestions that Tim Cook killed Saint Jobs, too, they might fall for that in their grieving...
Don't let the fact that the main reason this topic is in the news is because Apple released its audit of worker conditions to the public get in the way of a good Apple hate. No to mention they released the list of their major suppliers or that they increased their number of audits by 80% from the previous year to 229.
Also Apple will grant access to an independent auditing team from the Fair Labor Association in an effort to overcome criticism regarding working conditions at factories in its supply chain.
Sure let's boycott the tech company that IS doing everything in their power to correct worker conditions in their supply chain. I'm sure the alternative device manufactures, who happen to use Foxconn too, are just as open and spending just as much money as Apple. Oh wait... maybe not. We don't know because they aren't as open.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Apple would need to drown puppies in the blood of circus clowns while wearing a Mister Rogers costume before anyone will seriously consider a boycott of their products.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
"Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
I don't think we consumers can get out our responsibility quite that easily.
You can throw in MIcrosoft as well http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-01-10-workers-at-xbox-360-plant-threaten-mass-suicide
plus pretty much every other gadget and consumer electronics company...
I don't have any Apple products. You can't call me a blind fan. I felt nothing the day Jobs died.
But how is it just Apple that's being singled out here? WE PRACTICALLY GET EVERYTHING FROM CHINA and somehow ONLY APPLE is the offender?
I'll go ahead and give it to you... down with corporate interests!! Booo corporations! HAVE ANY OF YOU ASS HATS HEARD OF WALMART?!!! Shit, name a corporation of note that isn't deep into China's questionable manufacturing practices. Boycotting Apple is stupid you need to start thinking a lot bigger than that. Next time you go to the store try and restrict your purchases to products not made in China. Also buy a globe and a few text books to figure out if you can buy from most other Asian countries without contributing to the poor working conditions.
Fuck'n Americans are stupid. You can't even respond to this post without using something that doesn't have a "Made in China" stamp on it. Get a fucking clue already.
Either (1) workers take unpleasant jobs in sweatshops because it is the best employment option they have or (2) Asian sweatshop workers are persons of weak intellect who have many more attractive job offers but choose to work in sweatshops instead.
-Wheelan et al "Naked Economics"
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-Scott Adams
If you'd read the article you would also know that whilst Apple has a very pretty code of conduct for their suppliers, it is common for them to simply ignore infractions of that code of conduct, with fewer than 15 suppliers terminated for non-compliance since 2007, even though there are scores of the most serious breaches of that code of conduct recorded every year.
In other news, the US government just shut down all hospitals where anybody worked more than 60 hours in any of the last thirteen weeks. Oh no, they didn't! According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours "While keeping the ACGME's recommendations of an 80-hour work week averaged over 4 weeks, the IOM report recommends that duty hours should not exceed 16 hours per shift for post graduate year 1 trainees (also known as interns). The IOM also recommended strategic napping between the hours of 10pm and 8am for shifts lasting up to 30 hours. The ACGME officially recommended strategic napping between the hours of 10pm and 8am on 30 hour shifts for residents who are post graduate year 2 and above but did not make this a requirement for program compliance. The report also suggests residents be given variable off-duty periods between shifts, based on the timing and duration of the shift, to allow residents to catch up on sleep each day and make up for chronic sleep deprivation on days off."
Apple wouldn't be able to undercut the competition on price if they didn't cut costs in manufacturing. Who would buy something from Apple if it was expensive?
Like most protest movements, anti-Apple activism is likely unproductive and too focused.
HP, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle... do you really think all the other tech companies are innocent in such matters? Given that the problem extends beyond the tech sector -- are you willing to boycott your refrigerator, or your car, or your shirt? Picking on Apple is targeting an easy mark, one that probably has more to do with disliking Apple's image than it does with any real desire to help people.
I don't own or buy Apple products for a lot of reasons. Their use of asian semi-slave factories will not be solved by a boycott, simply because most people don't give a rat's rump. Consumers want their cheap toys, and the "don't give a shitters" outnumber indignant Slashdotters by hundreds of thousands to one.
If you feel that boycotting Apple is some sort of stand against naughtiness, knock yourself out. Delude yourself that buying an Android phone or a Samsung computer makes you holier the Jobs' army..
However, if you want to make a difference, get involved in the political process, as people did with SOPA/PIPA. Make a stink on the broader issue of companies selling product created by near-slave labor in dangerous facilities.Anything less is playing at activism, as if it were a shiney toy, puffing your ego because "I'm doign something" that costs you little and helps the problem even less.
All about me
The Hamlet approach. I like it. "Tim Cook murdered your FATHER, dear fans! We must avenge him!"
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yes it doesnt make sense to single out apple on this issue. It makes about as much sense as buying apple instead of some other device. People buy apple because it makes them feel special, so they single out apple for similar reasons. Nothing to do with this companies present* success is entirely reasonable. What we see with the current factory condition stuff is a side effect of the culture they've made.
*present, because initial success was due to slick product and interface design - which still remains but doesn't explain their massive performance I reckon.
Let's go high-end here, and say we're paying US workers $240/day and Chinese workers ... nothing, because I don't want to do math for a difference of $223.
So, we're basically paying $1 per two minutes to use a US worker over a Chinese worker. Now the question is... ...is there more than 140 minutes of manual labor required to assemble an iPad?
That's unlikely.
paintball
My standard of living is not defined by electronics, toys basically. I have a computer and internet access. Even that is not necessary but that's gives me basic access to the information and media I may want or find useful online. Just about anyone can afford a couple hundred for a computer, or a free/dirt cheap second hand machine... Along with a DSL or other $15/mo internet. A $450 tablet does not define standard of living.
This that define or may adversely affect my standard of living are food prices increasing, gas prices increasing, heating oil costs increasing, electric rates increasing, etc. These are the necessities and while I can cut back some in all of those areas, what I consume and waht it costs me will not change significantly. These things define how much I have left for fun things. The cost of those fun things, whether it be $450 for an iPad or $50 for a dart board doesn't matter much as if it's too expensive I'll spend that money on other fun things instead. Point being, those are all optional purchases with a monetary and quality of life affect I can control. The necessities I can't... If I don't eat, I die. If I don't put gas in the car, I lose my income. If I don't heat my home, my pipes burst. etc... Those are fundamental standard of living costs.
It is just wages. We're not talking about mining everything in the US too (but eventually, that would be good, if just for national security purposes).
Apple is free to manufacture wherever they want and charge whatever they want, but American consumers are also free to buy what they want, and boycott what they want, and picket where they would like. Whining about informed consumers is the sign of a company who knows they are doing wrong.
I suggest we reduce demand for their product until they change their tune. Apple would not be possible without the significant investments we have made in our country and infrastructure for decades. If they don't know how reinvest the fruits of American ingenuity into American workers, let's put them out of business and find someone who does.
They absolutely should not boycott Apple over working conditions.
They should boycott China over working conditions, trade and money policies.
They should boycott Apple over the iPad/Phone walled garden and exclusive contracts with AT&T.
Take a good look at this.. this is how was here in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And that is what all the political class wants to go back too.
"And this isn't meant as flamebait."
Oh, I see now, that must make flamebait ok.
Just to play Devil's Advocate here, while you may be willing to pay $70 more does that mean everyone else will? A standard of living is effectively defined as being how much money you make versus how much of that money you have to spend to acquire goods. To pay more for electronics is tantamount to a decrease in the standard of living for westerners, and no one is going to be in favor of giving up their standard of living.
You wouldn't have to pay more. Even with $70 extra production cost Apple would be very profitable selling at todays prices.
This article comes via the Guardian. This is a UK dead tree press company, which has survived mainly due to being funded by a network of hedge funds.
It's wise to look deeper into what those funds are invested in. It wouldn't be too difficult to trace those funds to companies who also have a Chinese manufacturing base, and who will thus inevitably have workers that are considered exploited by most western consumer standards.
Thus, boycotting Apple, makes as much sense as boycotting the Guardian. At least Apple aren't being hypocritical about it.
Ok, you are Apple. It's 2005, and you are building a new phone, and you think demand for it will be huge. You know you need it made for market in 2007, i.e. in two years. What do you do?
a) Start building a new factory in USA paying for everything UP FRONT. You'll be lucky if you get planning permissions & foundations for the factory done in 2 years, never mind complete tooling and the people to run it. Besides shipping times for components that are already being made in china are 35 days. So if you find out that chip X needs to be changed to chip Y because of some issue, you'll have to wait for 35 days to get a shipment of chip Y. Shipping components by plane costs 10x more and is unfeasible.
b) Contract it out to Foxconn. They have the factory and the people to run it RIGHT NOW. It's tried. It's tested. It works. If your phone is successful, they'll get more factory space and people on manufacturing it in a matter of days or weeks, not months. Components are shipped by train or truck over a matter of hours or days. You don't have to pay them much until manufacturing starts.
What would you do if you were Steve Jobs?
I'm all for getting as much of manufacturing as possible done by robots. I haven't worked in a car factory, but I imagine robots are LESS flexible than people, so if you want to do a new model 6 months later, you'd find it very hard to reconfigure the factory to produce it. I believe having a robotic factory FLEXIBLE is possible, but right now its probably hard and expensive. And even then for electronic devices, unless all of your suppliers are in USA, it is not going to happen.
--Coder
I Agree with you, except that the Occupy movement intends to address this issue in the United States of America and not necessarily the entire world. I agree that the way these people are treated in China is horrendous, but there really isn't much we can do here. There are a lot of idealist ways we could contribute, but none of them are realistic. Do you really think a large enough boycott is likely to happen in the US, that Apple moves production? What about in Europe, where people are supposedly more progressive -- do they abstain from buying Apple products because of how these workers are treated? Shoot, do the Chinese themselves?
you just rationalized/justified slave labor. whats next ? death by stoning and tar pits ?
Read radical news here
They're singled out because they're the most visible. That's the price you pay for being at the head of the pack. If they don't like it - maybe they should do something about the factory conditions.
"Everybody else is doing it" wasn't a valid defense when you were 7, and it's not a valid defense when you're running a giant corporation.
Okay sure, boycott because of mistreated workers yes. But really, I mean let's face it, the problem seems to be Foxconn, no?
You should probably boycott Dell and a shitload of other brands too.
Seriously. Foxconn parts find their way into damned near EVERYTHING.
If you want to be part of a global economy made up of competing sub-economies tied to nations this kind of worker abuse is simply unavoidable unless you want to try to police the world (assuming the world permitted oversight).
In my view, the real question should not be "should we boycott iPhones" but "which smartphone do we boycott". There is no reason Apple should be the only smarphone manufacturer under inspection, and I haven't read anywhere a comparison.
And in case they're all bad, you will never get enough people to boycott all Smartphones. But compare the manufacturers: RIM, HTC, Apple, Samsung, SONY, Nokia and you can find the worst offender. Then, you can put pressure on the worst offender.
That way, you can raise the manufacturing conditions by the bottom, which makes sense. But I somehow doubt Apple is one of the worst offender. I may be wrong.
No, the way to raise manufacturing conditions is to put pressure on the most VISIBLE company. That puts pressure on everyone. Apple is the most visible, so start with them and when they reform, the others will have to follow in order to compete.
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do all the Apple haters have?
Let's say a Chinese worker gets $1.50/hr ($17 for an 11.3 hr day).
Let's say "US like wages" are 10x - $15/hr. So, $170 in wages or $153 more per day.
That's just a little more than TWO iPads that cost $70 each, more, to produce. This implies a worker only makes 2.2 iPads a day? Something doesn't add up. I know there is more than one worker needed - just a WAG, let's say there are 100 workers on an assembly line - surly you get more than 220 iPads out the end of the line per day, no?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
call it a hunch, but maybe because they just posted a 13 billion dollar quarterly profit on the backs of these people. No other company did that last quarter.
Theoretically, if enough damage can be caused to an industry leader and they have to change their approach, other manufacturers will fall in line. Spread out the pain, and there may not be enough of an impact to make a difference. Target an industry underdog, and no one will care.
while we're at it, we may as well just stop buying everything. ALL the crap we buy is made under horrible working conditions in China. Why single out Apple?
While I don't have sufficient information about the gadget demographics of the various occupy movements to respond to the truth of your post one way or the other, I'm a bit confused about why that is relevant here.
Although broad and rather amorphous, the major focus(or foci) of 'occupy' seems to have been situations where the non-plutocrat Americans have been stuck playing a rigged game. The immediate flashpoints tend to be areas where it is nakedly obvious that a game of "heads I win, tails you lose" is being played by some sort of besuited gambler who has managed to privatize the gains and socialize the losses of whatever Gordon-Gecko stuff he is engaged in. More broadly, the offshoring of much of the skilled-blue-collar segment certainly hasn't helped the situation; but that seems to have taken something of a back burner, important; but not quite as blatant as the overt taxpayer-dollars-into-finance-sector-coffers schemes...
In terms of offshoring, Apple is pretty much identical to the computer industry as a whole(and their labor practices also aren't much different, they just have more hipster cred, which makes them look dissonant).
While I suspect that, if asked, the 'occupy' demographic would, indeed, be against exploitation of Chinese workers, it is hardly their primary concern, so it seems odd to invoke them. It seems doubly odd because the exploitation of Chinese workers is also the concern(in a slightly different fashion) of people who wouldn't be caught dead hanging out with the hippie liberal scum. The more downmarket parts of the right wing(which is to say an overwhelming majority of its population) have been hit very, very hard by the losses in the American industrial and manufacturing sectors. They may be less likely to have a bleeding-heart concern for what Chinese kids are breathing; but they also have a great deal at stake in the fact that American firms can get workers offshore to work under shit conditions for absolute peanuts. That drags down their employment options and working conditions as well...
Apple's halo among the young and hip certainly isn't deserved on labor relations grounds; but in an industry as ugly as the tech one, they aren't exactly facing stiff competition on that score, so it hasn't really hurt them much. It isn't as though anybody is ignoring a True Blue competitor by buying Apple...
The Occupy Movement is about inequality in the USA, and not about the entire world. It seems like that should be obvious, given that the average annual income across the entire globe is roughly equivalent to $7,000 USD, yet in the USA that's well below the poverty level and the average income is about 5x higher.
If you want to complain about them using Apple products, it's probably more pertinent to point out that they are buying very expensive products and then complaining that they don't have enough money to pay their bills. Then again, that wouldn't be on-topic here.
Note: The $7,000 figure comes from here: http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2007/10/07/average_earnings_worldwide/
The data is a few years old, but I suspect is pretty similar, given the economic ups & downs during that time frame.
No, that won't work. The regulatory regime in this country is simply too overbearing. Compliance is too expensive. Get Apple to switch away from Foxconn, and they will just move to another Chinese manufacturer, likely one that treats its workers better. Raise a ruckus over Chinese manufacturers, and they will move to some other country other than America. It will be hard to complain when they move to Germany, where the regulatory regime is industry friendly even with high taxes and high wages.
Pretty much...
Nike's profit margins actually rose with mass expansion. Perhaps people thought they were getting a better value? :)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike,_Inc.#Human_rights_concerns
"Everybody else is doing it" wasn't a valid defense when you were 7, and it's not a valid defense when you're running a giant corporation.
I fail to see a good reason to boycott the most visible company for shoddy labor practices while ignoring others. My point wasn't "don't boycott Apple, everybody else is doing it". My point is "boycott Apple AND everyone else who exploits Chinese workers".
I suspect that the second, less hypocritical, option is not being called for because we would have to use wooden tablets to achieve it (as nothing electronic is made outside of China any more).
Shit, name a corporation of note that isn't deep into China's questionable manufacturing practices.
Honestly? Toys "R" Us.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I am against how closed Apple is and been a major advocate for open source, I have boycotted them for a few years.
I hate to tell you, but the same is true of consumers EVERYWHERE. That is human nature, and it is a good thing. The workers can stand up for themselves. It is nice to use boycott to support them, if you can muster the support, but it isn't necessary. This is the reason that unions exist--to protect worker's rights in developing countries (and in developed countries during severe depressions).
You know what will fix this and bring jobs back to the USA?
Nothing. Steve Jobs was right. Those jobs aren't coming back, and not just because of wages. Tim Cook sold Jobs on moving the manufacturing to China for a number of reasons, many which make sense (one huge reason is that America has largely abandoned the kind of job training that makes both good electronics assembly workers and the foremen that oversee them). There's a pretty good podcast here laying out most of the justifications. It sucks, but it'll likely never change. The change in education, labor laws, and factory investments would be so huge... in the trillions of dollars, on a truly industry-wide and nation-wide scale... that it'll almost certainly never happen.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Excactly. When you look at the way how Apple reacted to the Foxconn suicides, we know that the DO care about their oversees workers. Heck, Apple even decided to add 30% to workers wages when the problems at Foxconn became apparant.
I don't really understand why Apple is the target for this sort of heat. They did NOT create the economic situation of cheap overseas assembly. In the seventies and eighties, Apple was happily assembling computers in California, in contrast to the IBM clone market which used cheap overseas labor. Even well into the nineties they had assembly lines in first world countries like Ireland. Economics of scale eventually did them in, they almost went bankrupt because of lack of competivity. Remember when people were complaining that Macs were too expensive? What do you think it was exactly that MADE Macs more expensive?
Why did Apple chose to assemble in china instead ? BECAUSE EVERY OTHER PC MANUFACTURER ALREADY DID. Its simple business economics, its not like Apple has a sensible choice in it in the first place.
So cut them some slack, OR nail each other PC manufacturer like HP, Dell, et al to the same cross you're nailing Apple now. Justice for all, please.
they would have if they could have
Except it's really China's manufacturing practices. Foxconn makes parts and subsystems (as well as finished goods) for thousands of companies. Calls to boycotting Apple, in that context, are absurd, and in some ways suggest and even less informed (by way of thinking you know something now, but only knowing part of the story) position.
It's not absurd at all. Apple is, by far, the most visible customer of Foxconn and therefore the best place to start pressuring them. Boycotting Foxconn directly is impractical because no one knows which products have Foxconn parts and/or assemblies and Foxconn isn't a household word. Apple on the other hand, is a household word and everyone would understand what is involved in an Apple boycott.
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I don't have any Apple products. You can't call me a blind fan. I felt nothing the day Jobs died.
But how is it just Apple that's being singled out here? WE PRACTICALLY GET EVERYTHING FROM CHINA and somehow ONLY APPLE is the offender?
Why was Nike singled out and boycotted? Because going after high-profile high-profit brand names that need to protect their image is an effective strategy to drive change. Is it unfair for these profit machines to be singled out when somebody else also is bad? Cry me a river.
Since they all outsource to other companies for manufacturing, they may all be exactly the same. Apple is probably being targeted because it has the largest market share for smartphones; although its not as if buying a droid instead of an iPhone is going to change the overall working conditions in China. The real truth of the matter, is that Chinese citizens need to stand up to their government. Seems difficult, but its already happened in many countries in the middle east.
Profit margins. Apple can afford to pay their Chinese workers double, and use less dangerous chemicals.
What's idiotic about this is that every tech company gets its products made by the same factories. Why are they proposing boycotting apple, not boycotting all tech companies?
Oh, that's right, because boycotting all tech companies would be impossible to make happen, and apple are an easy scapegoat.
No. It's because Apple is the most visible target and also has enough clout to make changes in the industry. It has nothing to do with scapegoating and everything to do with strategy.
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Are other news outlets jumping on the bandwagon?
Do slashdot posters ignore anything that Apple may have done to improve the situation?
http://www.dailytech.com/Report+Apple+Cuts+07+Percent+of+iPad+Profit+to+Give+Factory+Workers+Big+Raise/article18571.htm
"What's the point of going abroad, if you're just another tourist..."
"otherwise they'd be complaining about/to every tech company in the country. They just want the ratings that come with putting "Apple" in a story."
Of course there is another, more likely possibility, though I suspect you missed it because your post really sounded just like a thinly veiled "I love Apple and they can do no wrong!" post.
The more likely possibility is that reporters quite often do actually take an interest in human rights issues, and that they're focussing on Apple indeed partly because it's the most prominent target right now, but by hitting the most prominent, and most profitable target you're hitting the firm that has the most clout available to make the required changes, and the most to lose if it doesn't. You open the door for other firms to advertise their more ethical businesses if they take a stand and Apple doesn't, you basically leave Apple an ultimatum - change, or risk being outflanked by any competitors that do.
This doesn't mean it'll work, if all firms decide to hold their ground and none are willing to change then it's of little benefit, but this tactic by reporters has worked well before. Your latter paragraph is evidence enough of that - Greenpeace was very vocal in pointing out Apple's poor track record on pollutants, and despite Steve Jobs initially telling them to f off, he was eventually left with little choice but to start changing things, as other firms started getting positive headlines because they were more green, whilst Apple was seeing continued negative press on the issue. Since then Apple has changed, but also the industry as a whole has upped it's game on the issue, so if it has the potential to work, unless you're one of those people who throws a fit if the press dares mention that Apple could improve in some area, then what's the problem?
I'd spend exactly the same amount of money with Apple I've spent in my life, and partly for this reason. It's not exactly a secret that Apple uses labor so cheap to practically qualify as slavery.
Reference: http://www.buzzfeed.com/thedombones/samsung-burns-iphone-hipsters-161l
I believe that Apple knew full well what it was getting in to and the new plant in Brazil is an effort to distance themselves from Foxconn, but that's not enough.
The plant in Brazil *is* a Foxcon plant, so no, they are not distancing themselves from Foxcon. Foxcon is just building a new plant where they can source cheap labor and benefit from government tax subsidies. From PC World, "The Junai, Brazil factory was made possible through a partnership between China-based Apple manufacturer Foxconn and the Brazilian government." http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392962,00.asp
Do you think that it is only smartphones manufactured in Chinese factories?
feature phones, radios, dvd players, computers, mice, blenders, toasters, coffee makers, frying pans, spoons, scissors, pens, padlocks, and on and on. They are all made in Chinese factories and many have worse conditions than a Foxconn factory. Its nearly impossible to avoid buying things made in China.
Customer in the store looking at over priced product: If it cost a lot of money it's got to be worth it. And Dan and Jessica have one and are proud of it. The store guy says it's good to. I'm gonna do it! Customer after purchase: I spent a lot of money on it so I'm going to be defensive when my peers tell me it was a dumb thing to do. I will convince myself that I was justified in spending the cash. See! Others sent that much on it too... I'm not crazy! I belong to a community!
Believe it or not, an expensive price tag is a selling point. Yes it's a good quality product but the price overage is simply to turn it in to a status symbol. Like shooting a barrel of fish. They know their marketing. At least you get a decent quality product out of it (unlike some other marketing techniques).
But lets not kid ourselves. Given that so much of our stuff is made in China, it's not the fact that any particular product is made by abused workers. You probably can't buy much of anything that doesn't have some poor working conditions in some part of the chain. We just feel more guilty about it when the product happens to be a status symbol.
I want this account deleted.
I think apple is ripping off people it's got like the most expensive devices out there yet, it's produced in the most horrible circumstances, .. I mean if it was cheap, I'd understand but this is pure greed.
Oh, boo hoo, hoo! Another smug and soft spoon-clanger who just discovered products are made in foreign countries, while banging out his little cyber foot stamping on a computer in the suburbs.
You people (oh yeah, I said it, "you people"!) are dilettantes, shedding your moral outrage when it suits you. Your whole product and distribution models are bigger villains than some stupid company in California.
And if I were you (self-loathing aside) I'd be more worried about the foodstuffs that come from China and the lack of regulation there before bib-dribbling about shiny toys.
Google corporatocracy. It's a valid term. The others, not so much... yet. lol.
The conditions at Foxconn are actually a lot better than what you'll find at most Chinese factories, and the pay is a lot better. That's why there are people constantly flocking to their factories looking for work. Usually it's even worse at the factories making stuff for the domestic market.
But then foreign companies aren't aware of what happens there on a day to day basis, nor do they care. The whole point of making stuff in China is because it's cheaper, they're not going to add expense by instituting an oversight program and forcing the manufacturer to ensure better working conditions. And I'm sure they'll rationalize things by pointing out the situation I've described above. At least conditions at their factories are better than what those workers will find elsewhere.
Then again, as this article in the Economist points out, the Chinese people are starting to stand up for themselves. So the government is walking a fine line between trying to address complaints and keeping the people in check. The fundamental problem is that it's in the Chinese government's interest to keep factories churning out products quickly and cheaply. I'm sure they're very aware of the threat higher wages and better conditions present to the nation. So what's been happening over the past couple of decades is that factories have been migrating West across the nation, moving where it's cheaper.
Once the cost advantage of manufacturing in China evaporates foreign companies will move out. If we're lucky some of that will go domestic. But far more likely, it will migrate into Southeast Asia and the rest of Asia. Actually, China has been doing a lot of investing in Africa. So we may see a day where Chinese companies continue to handle our manufacturing from Africa. But either way it would still deal a very serious blow to the Chinese economy. Despite all the stories of a burgeoning China they're extremely dependent on the rest of the developed world.
I do find the anti-Apple bias a bit weird here. Apple, Kindle, PSP 3, Xbox,Nokia, Samsung, Wii, IBM, Intel, MS all made at Foxconn. Apple is currently getting all the flak and yet are the only firm actually addressing it.
But redistributing wealth isn't fair! God forbid we allow fairness and decency to get in the way of an executive sitting is a baby seal leather chair on a mega yacht while on a Thailand sex tourist vacation.
I got here through a series of tubes
They are a special case given they are a Toy Store. Granted Wal Mart sells toys too but they sell so many other thigns it is a lot easier for consumers to overlook.
"Only" $70? at more than 50 million ipads sold that's $3.5 Billion in additional costs.. And the cost is probably more -- the 50 million number is from a while back.
The new plant in Brazil has nothing to do with Apple trying to distance from bad PR. The plant is a subsidiary of Foxconn and the major goal is to supply brazilian market, through a HUGE discount on taxation, but enough only to appeal to internal market. Because of this, an iPad, for example, will cost in Brazil "only" 50% over US prices, instead of the usual 100%.
Apple isn't getting a free pass. The opposite! They're getting singled out. If you want to be consistent then we need to boycott almost all other electronic products and everything in Walmart, yet the only company that comes up in these discussions is Apple.
They're singled out because they're the most visible.
Maybe, but also because Apple is making ridiculous amounts of cash with very large profit margins on iphones & ipads.
Apple is more than able to provide decent wages & safe working conditions for these employees. It would be less than $5 per iDevice. Apple could easily absorb the cost. Or just raise their prices by $10 - fanbois will still line up to buy them.
RDF collapsing Captain Cook!
Route all auxilary power to the Reality Distortion Field! Fire PR releases on my mark!
That is all.
ITT people who don't understand the difference between labor costs, capital costs, and regulatory costs.
Here's a hint: labor costs are very low compared to capital costs. Capital costs in America are LESS than in China, but that gap is rapidly diminishing. But regulatory costs are much, MUCH higher in the US. This is why manufacturing has been fleeing America.
Thanks for a little bit of sanity.
The workers in the factories were not marched there from their towns and villages under gunpoint.
They willingly went to the big cities because there are BETTER jobs there than at home.
At home they maybe had an acre of rice paddy, and they spent all their time walking behind a water buffalo through the rice paddy. Subsistence farming.
By comparison, working in a FoxConn factory is not a whole lot worse, and you do get fed and sometimes even paid. Recall that as recently as 1960 something around 25 million Chinese in the hinterlands starved due to crop failures and poor planning. The parents of today's workers remember this, and they almost certainly encourage their children to get GOOD JOBS in the cities. Lousy jobs and lousy pay by OUR standards, but that's the wrong criteria. Those are great jobs, compared to 19th century England or even 20th century China.
"I couldn't decide if he was clueless or a sociopath."
Probably both!
Corporations (in finance, mostly) have long used kind of reverse Voight-Kampff test to find sociopaths. Having ethics can hinder making money, you know.
And Apple's not alone on this. Dell, HP, Sony, Microsoft ( Xbox360 ) all use Foxconn as well.
That's true, but boycotts don't have to be fair to work. If a boycott is organized against manufacturer A, it might cause people merely to switch to manufacturer B, and B might be just as bad. However that wouldn't reduce the pressure felt by A, and A could be moved to improve their workers' conditions because of that.
Once that's been successful the boycott could be switched to manufacturer B.
And boycotts can definitely work, we've seen that happening.
Nobody's saying it's a valid defense. They're saying that everyone else is getting a pass. Where's the outrage against Dell or Microsoft?
Next time you go to the store try and restrict your purchases to products not made in China. Also buy a globe and a few text books
That won't work: most textbooks are printed in China these days. And of course you can just forget about the globe.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
In the past this effort has simply led to the demise of the leader or good guy.
I could mention several examples from the past but to pick two: televisions and CB radios (going back some way).
There were Buy America and Buy Union drives for both of these and a few people supported them. The vast majority of people just went with what was cheaper.
I'm sure you can generate your own list of "things you can buy at Walmarts that are no longer made in America"
Other approaches are valid, but what I believe would work is to focus attention on working conditions and encourage each country (OK, China) to do the right thing by its people.
If China did not have a history of failed economic planning, leading to mass starvation, the workers would not be so desperate to get work of any sort. It is not enough of course, but the current situation is better for the Chinese people that it was in the past.
We won't though. We like , our cheap stuff from , wall-mart, k-mart, and best buy ... WAAYY too much for that. Not to mention the fact is would probably tank our economy for a generation.
No, that is not true. It would IMPROVE our economy. With equal labor laws in China, a lot of things that are built over there would be too expensive to build, manage and ship from over there and would end up getting built in the U.S. instead. Prices would go up, but that is okay because people would have jobs now.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Not necessarily. If the point is to improve the workers' living conditions, then a boycott of just their largest customer would produce the appropriate amount of pressure to force change in the entire industry (as wages and working conditions are competitive). Even just changing the conditions throughout Foxconn would be a big enough achievement, as they make electronics for pretty much everyone.
Why isn't anyone calling for boycotts of LG? Samsung? Has anybody sent radio reporters to THEIR factories?
Charles Dickens was a real busybody, wasn't he? Funny thing is, the actions he wanted old Scrooge to take actually harmed society more than they helped the few lucky people who benefitted from his charity.
http://mises.org/daily/573
There are a couple of hole in your nice, pat theory. First, those western countries reformed their work environments from within, because at the time manufacturing was mainly a local or region endeavor. In the US, in the 30's, labor finally organized to begin to reform working environments *with the support of the government*. In essence, it was a free and fairly democratic society that provided the means for the worker to stand up and demand rights.
Manufacturers are not chasing cheap labor, they are in search of cheap governments that don't have pesky environmental regulations or troublesome labor laws. They get into these countries and they stick, perhaps even helping to prop up the government so the labor force has no ability to force change. The Chinese laborer, whether it be farmer or factory, is merely chattel for the government to use. A "middle-class" is presented to show progress, but it tightly controlled and can be struck down if they get to strong to support the status quo.
Certainly there is a relative aspect to life around the globe. I would not expect a worker in a developing country to have the same living environment, the say pay, or the same life style as I. What I would expect is that the worker has rights to a regulated workplace, one the respects a human life through decent hours, balanced wages, and a respect of work/life. I would expect that the worker has the right to assemble, to form an organization that gives them some power against abuse in the workplace. I would expect that humans be treated humanely.
Now the notion of a boycott is foolish in part for reasons stated throughout this thread. It is not just Apple eating from the poison fruit, it is many companies and we all share in that guilt. The only effective way to change is to demand that our "civilized" governments enforce humane work environments for goods that come into the country or monetary penalties will be assested for each violation of human rights. Apple wants to use slave labor to build iPads, fine, but it will cost more to get them back into this country. Don't just boycott, write to representatives and demand that we stand up for human rights be making it costly to abuse humans in the manufacturing of goods.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Sony, Samsung, Nokia, Toshiba.......
Many people and companies have known about it. As if APPLE is the big baddest boy in town over the years in this area.
They're not. And singling them out while ignoring the rest is hypocritical. Are you ready to dump the rest of your consumer electronics made in Foxconn?
Uhh, what you just described is exactly a scape goat – targeting the people who are the easiest target and most likely to change.
It's called "making an example out of someone". Nothing hypocritical about it. Punishing all the guilty parties is not practical, as you just said, so we just punish the most prominent one. Often, that's enough to scare the others into changing their behavior.
Why do you think that paying FoxConn better would automatically mean the workers get better pay? I for one haven't heard of any business contracts where a buyer gets to decide what the money they pay the seller i used for.
I am not even sure what the point of your comment was outside of a thinly veiled stab at a political movement that you obviously disagree with.
Quite the contrary. I strongly support the idea of fighting corporatocracy. But if the movement is ever going to achieve anything it's going to have to be much more CONSISTENT and MAINSTREAM.
So, have you shown up to add mainstream credibility?
Consistent means that selected corps like Apple and Democratic politicians don't get free passes.
I kinda despise Apple's attitude, but what phone is not made in China under dubious conditions? I bought a cheap (Android) phone, and plan on not replacing it for as long as possible. Same with my computers, I keep them as long as possible so as to not support the manufacturing conditions and electronic waste that the replacement cycle encourages.
Also, seems to me the Occupy movement has decidedly not taken the side of the Democrats. You sure you're not arguing against strawmen in your head?
Mainstream means that the movement has to be more than just the standard hippie and drum-circle crowd (and no hippies guarding the gates with a "We don't want to let in any poseurs who don't even own a hemp shirt" attitude).
You keep banging that "hemp shirts and drum circle" drum, pardon the pun, but they're free to protest too. And if you won't go out there and be part of the mainstream protesters, you'd serve your supposed allegiance to anti corporate abuse better by just shutting up about the whole thing. Or is it just the "professional protesting hippies in hemp shirts" that should shut up?
I read about those dormitories more than two or three years ago. I'd have a hard time pinpointing when I first heard of it, but it's most definitely more than two years ago. Google "foxconn dormitories", and you'll get pages and pages of hits dated between May and September of 2010. I'm looking for stuff dated further back, because I know that I heard of suicides much further back than that.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/06/06/14/photos_inside_foxconns_ipod_city.html ...
Jun 14, 2006 – One photo shows shows a dormitory within E3 -- a Foxconn-owned manufacturing facility responsible for churning out iPod nanos -- packed
More than five years old. I can't say that I became aware of conditions there in 2006 - maybe I did, maybe I didn't. But, the news has been out there.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Where do we buy competing products not manufactured with the same or worse working conditions? Also, among the firms producing their stuff in China, Apple is probably paying one of the highest tax rates in the US (definetely higher than Google and MS, 24% says this source), so they don't seem a particularly good target to me. The idea of boycotting Apple alone is so pointless that one has to question the motives of the journalists who are blowing that horn ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I'd like to see how things play out. I happen to believe that Tim Cooke will do a better job of destroying apple than any boycott. That's my prediction of course.
I also think it would the the United States a lot of good for apple to produce their products domestically.
" America has largely abandoned the kind of job training that makes both good electronics assembly workers and the foremen that oversee them"
A lot of us said as much when the fools in Washington first uttered the words, "service economy". Services, such as fast food restaurants, are somewhat important to the economy. But, you don't BUILD a freaking economy around something that amounts to nothing more than a support industry.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Tariffs would do this too and are a large part of our US history. Tariffs are sanctioned by the WTO if your trade imbalance is >10%.
So why don't we do it?
love is just extroverted narcissism
The regulatory regime in this country is simply too overbearing.
It will be hard to complain when they move to Germany,...
The EU is extremely overregulated. The USA doesn't even come CLOSE.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Perhaps because Apples products are obscenely overpriced?
love is just extroverted narcissism
gee it sucks that working and living conditions suck in china. but it's up to the chinese people to stand up to their oppressive government and oppressive employers.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
So when (or if) that happens you do something about it. Bring production back home. And of course you milk it for all the PR you can.
The public are fickle, have short memories and are easily distracted by shiny things.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What other station would have risked their ad funding and aired Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory | This American Life to ignite this whole shit storm.
"Your flame bait rant aside....Just read the comments from Apple executives. They're enough to make you smash Apple products you own."
Yeah right, like the time the UK tabloids printed pictures of people exercising and called it torture? I suppose it's not entirely surprising that people on this side of the Pacific would not recognize exercise but the fact is that life at Foxconn is still much better than the alternative for the thousands of people that line up ever time there's a job opening at the factory.
Guess what, most of them love their jobs. I suspect that less than 1% of the readers here has ever been to one of these factories, and likely 0% have ever talked to one of the workers. They don't need your "protection", and any such suggestion is almost certainly based on prejudice.
And while you're feeling all high-and-mighty, a tip of the hat to all the black lung and asbestosis victims in the USA. I realize this might not ring any bells for the average /. reader, who post-dates the original Palm Pilot, but the fact remains that this side of the Pacific is in a very bad position to pull a holier-than-though.
It doesn't excuse Apple, but are their workers worse off than others in the industry in China? I doubt it. If anyone is seriously proposing a boycott, what is the "ethical" alternative?
My point wasn't "don't boycott Apple, everybody else is doing it". My point is "boycott Apple AND everyone else who exploits Chinese workers".
As with any boycott, you've got nothing if you don't have alternatives. I'd be interested to know who I should buy from, in laptops, servers, phones and other electronics.
You should also smash your HP, Dell, and Sony computers and phones, and your Xbox 360, because Foxconn makes them all.
Do you know of any manufacturer that does not use or exploit workers in nations like China or Thailand or Brazil?
This is just a bunch of wind from journalists who have been paid off by (likely) Microsoft or another one of the usual players. By the way, Microsoft now employs thousands of third world coders.
"They just want the ratings that come with putting "Apple" in a story."
Worked for Greenpiece.
Please mod parent up, this is the most relevant information: Chinese manufacturing represents 2% of the cost of an Ipad. i.e 10$ for the $500 Ipad, whereas Apple profits represent 30% !
It would be fairly trivial for Apple to improve working conditions in China.
These days, even if Apple wanted to, due to economics of scale, they couldn't manufacture their devices in the USA. The sheer amount of appropriately trained labor force simply isn't available.
You know what will fix this and bring jobs back to the USA? Accountability.
Those jobs are only coming back to the U.S.A. if you are prepared to pay $3000 for an iPad or an iPhone, because a U.S.A. based factory has too high a salary for its workers, and too high an expense of disposing toxic according to a protocol. Go where people will work for food, dump waste to a river near by, and suddenly production costs are reduced by a twenty-fold.
Economics is not about ethics, it is about numbers adding up or not.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
I inferred a lot of sarcasm in the initial post. If I'm wrong about that, I apologize, but when the parent said
...then we had better boycott *all* Chinese-produced products and not just those shiny Apple toys.
I interpreted it as a sarcastic excuse to not care.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Are you implying that Apple aren't one?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You have to start somewhere, and a large, profitable, visible company is a good place to start (and I am a huge fan of Apple products, if not this recent news). They should do better. There are tiny, almost invisible, barely profitable companies who do better. Here's one. Check their catalog, note how most products list where they were produced.
Alot of what was mentioned in the NY Times is new information. Describing worker dormitories, describing what Apple expected from the company to make a last minute product line changes; quoting Apple executives praising the working conditions.
You're joking, right? http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1
That's from February of last year, and it includes a picture of their dormitories, a detailed description of their working conditions, and further information on what is expected from the workforce. Hardly anything new came to light in the NYT article; the only real revelations of late have been from Apple executives themselves, as they dig their hole deeper and deeper.
I look forward to seeing someone modded up for discovering climate change in the next Slashdot article, because hey, it's news to them!
Professional protesters? You mean I can get paid for protesting?
But you're right; Occupy isn't about working conditions in China, it's a protest against a corporate culture of greed and double standards. There's no reason at all to think they'll protest Apple, even if they were all using androids instead of iPhones.
Free Martian Whores!
Wow. You probably thought that flatly stating, sans citation or reference of any type, that it has long been the practice of industry to use the "reverse" version of a fictional machine to read people's minds--for the purpose of weeding out the mentally healthy, no less--would get more of a response. I guess folks are a bit sluggish because it's Monday.
Nice try, though.
I think it's silly that Apple always ends up being the target of this sort of complaint. Are any of our electronic devices manufactured in quality, safe facilities where workers are given 40 hour (or less) work weeks, vacaction time, full medical benefits, and a 401(k) plan? Is your Droid or Windows phone manufactured any differently? How about your TV, PS3, or Blu Ray player? This is a commentary on 2 things: 1) Working conditions in China For this, the Chinese government will need to be persuaded to change their policies to protect their workers more. Either the people of China rise up and demand better working conditions, or people around the world stop buying their stuff. Without that change, the horrible working conditions there are essentially legal and will continue. 2) A company's desire to produce their electronics cheaply and very quickly. Cell phone makers can't produce their hardware in the US. It'd be a beautiful gesture if they could, but it's impossible. The cost to do so would mean that your $200 cell phone would suddenly cost $500 and your $500 cell phone would go for maybe $1000? Beyond that, the US, and many Western countries lack the necessary infrastructure to manufacture technology at the speed and volume that occurs in China. Will the US make the dramatic changes necessary to "bring jobs home", as everyone always asks for? Would US workers be willing to make $5/hour to support this new industry and guarantee a shift in global industry? I for one don't like the fact that everything I buy comes from somewhere in southeast Asia, but our society has been embracing this change for decades, and to change it from what it is now will require immense effort by many people for many years in order to know that all of these great toys we buy aren't the product of underpaid, overworked, tortured people.
Apple does not pay their salary, FoxConn does. Apple can add $20 to the price to pay FoxConn more, but will the workers see any of that added payment?
Wow, you Apple fanatics sure know how to circle the wagons!
The "But every other tech company does it!" defense doesn't resonate particularly well coming from a company whose corporate slogan tells us to "Think different".
If Apple doesn't want to be relegated to "just another tech gadget company" status, perhaps they should seize this opportunity to take the lead in reforming the tech manufacturing industry.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Yeah, I think some of them tried that about 20 years ago. Quite a number of them were slaughtered by the Chinese Army, as I recall. It's a bit tough to stand up and protest when you're dealing with a ruthless dictatorship willing to kill to get its way.
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
This isnt an Apple only issue, but Apple is an excellent target due to its popularity and image. Do you really think the cheaper competitor products can provide for any better working conditions?
Lots of other high tech companies like Dell, HP, etc that arent as popular as Apple operate in China as well as small no name companies that put out lots of cheaper products. The working conditions of these companies go un-noticed, but it dosent take a math genius figure out that lower the price, even lower the working conditions has to be.
Sure boycotting Apple will help to some extent to create the news, but ultimately its the consumer that is responsible.
1. You are forgetting that Gross Margin != Profit. Given that Apple's profit margin is usually about 40%, the costs for everything besides manufacturing costs (such as salaries for Apple's 60,000+ US employees) would be roughly 15%, so using the figure above, an iPad would actually cost roughly $668 (618 + 50), leaving an 8.5% profit margin, not 15%.
2. Apple hires plenty of US workers who are paid well.
3. Apple used to manufacture in the US, most recently iMacs, and couldn't compete. NeXT also manufactured in the US, and nobody wanted to pay the price premium.
I think it's because Apple does the UnAmerican thing of generating a profit, while the other manufacturers like HP and Cisco finds way to make profits "go away". So the others have the excuse that they don't have the excess cash on hand.
After all, with its federal minimum wage, strong unions etc., USA is more of a Worker's Paradise than top-down bureaucratic China.
There are tiny, almost invisible, barely profitable companies who do better. Here's one
That's a bicycle company. Probably not ready to produce laptops, phones, etc.
Beating up Apple when they're not obviously worse in their practices than any other company IN THE SAME INDUSTRY is a bit hypocritical. If the idea is to improve the treatment of workers in China, then that's what should be proposed. And that should be done by China, protecting its own workers. If you give up Apple products for no-name products, you may actually be rewarding one that treats its workers worse, but is just less in the spotlight.
I've been boycotting Apple since 1983.
You're comparing 60 hour weeks to inadequate ventilation in Aluminium workshops?
Don't tell me, for your next trick you're going to compare running with scissors to drinking bleach?
There's a scene in Enemy At The Gates where the Russian sniper doesn't take an easy shot. When asked why, he says it wasn't worth giving away his position for such a low ranking soldier.
This tactic is hardly new: smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered: and I will turn mine hand upon the little ones.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Walmart at least takes advantage of Chinese manufacturing to offer low prices and maintain a thin profit margin; Apple, not so much.
It is hugely relevant if you're coming from living in a dirt-floored hut without enough food, no electricity, no sanitation.
"Slavery"? wtf. Nobody at Foxcon is working under gunpoint.
Did it occur to you that, all things considered, Foxcon could be a step or two above the alternatives?
Probably not - that sort of stuff is "irrelevant".
Unless you're opening your wallet to personally feed, clothe & shelter everyone in China, why not have a tall glass of STFU and let them grow their economy and make things incrementally better.
pro-tip: alleged "First World" countries like the US and large swaths of Europe would do well to looking at how to grow their own economies and make things incrementally better.
That's irrelevant, though. We shouldn't move production offshore under working conditions that we consider to be barbaric. If China improved the conditions to the point that we *wouldn't* object, then the goods coming out of China would cost *more* than American goods. We're essentially saying "NIMBY" to something almost as bad as slavery.
Translation: American workers won't work long hours for low pay under dodgy conditions doing monkey work on assembly lines.
Seriously, it doesn't take any special or complex training to be an electronics assembly worker on anything less important than, say, the Space Shuttle's guidance system. It's mindless rote work like any other assembly line job. What they're really dodging are labor laws and unions.
It appears from this story that some of the actual workers don't agree with you.
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
Plus, Foxconn would improve worker conditions in any way Apple was willing to provide funding for. And Apple, being a company who profits $400,000 per employee certainly has the resources to provide funding for better worker conditions. Other companies who have far fewer resources at their disposal may not be able to measurably improve conditions and remain solvent. Apple's only excuse is greed, not survival.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
"Everybody else is doing it" wasn't a valid defense when you were 7, and it's not a valid defense when you're running a giant corporation.
It's not a defense, it's a fact. Everyone else *IS* doing it.
So stop saying it's not a valid fact to point out Everyone who is at fault.
Unlike yourself, we are trying to change the horrible working conditions in China, not just change what Apple specifically is doing.
Saying it doesn't matter is admitting you want to blame Apple for what China does, but are perfectly A-OK with HP, Dell, Microsoft, IBM, and thousands of other companies doing the same thing.
Why are you OK with other companies outsourcing to places with such horrible conditions? Why do you encourage such human abuses to continue?
And yes, you did just say that. You admit you don't care about the human rights violations, since you are happy the rest of the industry does it. You ONLY care about what Apple specifically is doing.
If you DID care about the human rights situation in China, you wouldn't dismiss that others are taking advantage of them as well.
Stopping Apple and Apple alone will NOT solve any problems. You have to stop everyone from utilizing such outsourcing services.
Wouldn't you be more likely to fault Gucci for making $5000 purses in sweatshops than Hanes for making $1 T-shirts? With 2-5 times the profit margin of other companies Apple is 2-5 more exploitative.
EVERY consumer electronics manufacturer uses Foxconn. Why are you not complaining about Dell, Amazon, HP, Motorola, etc etc. Apple is the only one of these that lists the suppliers, has a code of conduct, conducts audits and now joined the FLA.
Do you have good reason for singling out Apple or are you just a hypocrite?
Those jobs are only coming back to the U.S.A. if you are prepared to pay $3000 for an iPad or an iPhone.
If the jobs were here than they would have to compete for labor, meaning higher wages, meaning more disposable income for people to buy those iPads.
The middle class is the key to a strong economy. When our middle-class was at it's strongest, 1945-1980, the buying power of a dollar was much higher than it is today. By allowing companies to offshore all the middle-class jobs, they're effectively crippling the very market of consumers they're trying to sell shit to. This is why these tech companies are looking to the growing middle-classes in Eastern countries to make up the difference, because even making shit in China is not cheap enough for them to turn the profits they expect here, and we let them bring the shit in for nothing...
We need to either put more protectionist measures in place, such as tariffs, like the EU and Canada does, or we need to be pushing for a global economy where these companies aren't able to take advantage of the weaker currency in production and then turn around and sell the product in the stronger economy and make a fortune. Think about it: these mega-corporations can shop around all over the world to find the cheapest place to produce a material good, but can consumers in the U.S. shop in that cheaper market to buy it? Nope, there's region-locks and all sorts of red tape preventing the consumers from take advantage of this. You can't even physically go to another country and buy a bunch of shit and bring it home without all sorts of hassles when you're coming back into the U.S.; there are strict limits.
The system is totally skewed, and until we reach economic parity with the countries producing these goods, it's only going to get worse. If a company can region-lock it's product, why can't we region-lock the labor required to produce it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9S8JS1qyRM
They went out of their way to make 1984 real.
Just to point out the difference between a 7 year old and an executive. The 7 year old doesn't know right from wrong, the executive doesn't care.
Deleted
That's a bicycle company. Probably not ready to produce laptops, phones, etc.
What does their manufacturing output have to do with anything?
I think we should take the money from all the rich Americans and air-drop it over the poor in China! That is obviously the solution!
Apple has become so attached to FoxConn in the media that when workers at a Microsoft XBox plant went to the roof and threatened mass suicide, it was "the Apple manufacturer" then, too...
I once heard EXACTLY the same argument for why manufacturing jobs would never leave the U.S., but guess what?
Look at this picture in the article: http://english.sina.com/technology/p/2012/0128/435327.html (yes, it's a chinese paper, but whatever)
these people, crawling over each other are trying to get a job in Foxconn! What does that tell you? That they are forced into it? Doesn't seem that way to me.
Suicide rate? Way less than chinese average.
Workplace accidents? Way less than average workplace accidents in factories in the USA!
Come on, people. Please try to see the forest for the trees and realize, that wealth and well-being is not absolute, it can only be compared and stop comparing it to yourself. Compare it to conditions on site. It's not really that hard.
And never, EVER forget that newspapers exist to sell you advertising. Provocative headlines sell a whole lot of advertising via more readers or clicks. (This also applies for slashdot btw.) so, please try to think about what they are actually selling.
The best thing you can do to help these people to better living conditions? Buy more apple products, so a part of your money will go to better the lives of people in china.
I am SO cool I can keep meat fresh for a WEEK!!!!
Absolute nonsense. With modern mechanization, I'd be amazed if there is more than an hour of moderately skilled labor in the assembly of an iPad. We most certainly do NOT pay $1500/hr here (assuming the factory makes 50 points).
I find it completely retarded, and flamebaity, that only Apple is targeted in this shit, when the entire rest of the industry does it too. Is there going to be a boycott over Xboxes? Microsoft makes their shit with Foxconn too.
The simple solution is to slap these companies with import tariffs for outsourced work...
Are you saying that billions in profit won't pay for better salary and waste disposal? 10k workers at 50k$ is 0.5bil$ per year.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
No, that won't work. The regulatory regime in this country is simply too overbearing. Compliance is too expensive./quote.
That is absolutely, positively not fucking true, and you know it.
Apple invited the scrutiny by the way they portray themselves. The other companies also deserve some scrutiny over this, but the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. They can have their turn under the hot lights once Apple is corrected.
Because we can't enact tariffs in a vacuum. The second you place a tariff on goods from another country, that country, and possibly others, will slap tariffs on yours, making it much harder to export your goods.
Apple is not alone in this, via Wikipedia:
Foxconn manufactures products for companies including:
(country of headquarters in parentheses)
Acer Inc. (Taiwan) [27]
Amazon.com (United States)[28]
Apple Inc. (United States)[29]
ASRock (Taiwan)[citation needed]
Asus (Taiwan)[citation needed]
Barnes & Noble (United States)[citation needed]
Cisco (United States)[30]
Dell (United States) [31]
EVGA Corporation (United States)
Hewlett-Packard (United States)[32]
Intel (United States)[33]
IBM (United States)[citation needed]
Lenovo (China)[citation needed]
Microsoft (United States)[34]
MSI (Taiwan)[citation needed]
Motorola (United States)[31]
Netgear (United States)[citation needed]
Nintendo (Japan) [35]
Nokia (Finland)[29]
Panasonic (Japan)[citation needed]
Samsung (South Korea)[36]
Sharp (Japan)[citation needed]
Sony (Japan) [37]
Sony Ericsson (Japan/Sweden)[38]
Vizio (United States)[39]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Major_customers
You have to start somewhere. Since Apple depicts itself as floating about an inch off the ground with a halo over it, they go first. If/when Apple caves to the pressure and actually fixes their problem, the other companies will be beaten over the head with that until they follow suit.
Of course there is another, more likely possibility, though I suspect you missed it because your post really sounded just like a thinly veiled "I love Apple and they can do no wrong!" post.
No, it didn't. It's pretty fucking obvious that this story is a "Let's pick on Apple because they're big, even though the entire fucking industry does the same shit."
Labor costs are a very small part of the final cost to create an iPod/iPad.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
It's still absolute bullshit that they are being singled out for what everyone else is doing. If "Everyone else is doing it" isn't a valid defense, then why does everyone else get a pass?
Protesters with clever apple signs... iSlavery iSuicide..etc..... camera zooms out to protester wearing a pair of nike sneakers.
It's completely fucking hypocritical. What good does it do to say, "We're gonna boycott Apple because of their shitty labor practices!" if you just turn around and go buy shit from Dell, HP, or Microsoft who does the same exact shit?
Honestly, to me, the wage itself isn't the problem. As you've said, they already make a decent wage for China, and I can't really expect them to make US level wages just yet. What I'd want is for them to be able to improve working conditions in the factories, and get them to stop spewing so much shit into the environment.
Excpet Foxconn's employees are already some of the best paid in China.
Make sure to ban these companies too. (Why is Apple the only one mentioned?) Acer Inc. Amazon.com Apple Inc. ASRock Asus Barnes & Noble Cisco Dell EVGA Corporation Hewlett-Packard Intel IBM Lenovo Logitech Microsoft MSI Motorola Netgear Nintendo Nokia Panasonic Philips Samsung Sharp Sony Ericsson Toshiba Vizio
And how does the fact that Foxconn's employees are some of the best paid in China fuck with your little equation?
No more than Dell is.
I find it really funny that people accuse Apple of being the "toy" computer, yet when you ask people why they stay on Windows, one of the most common responses is "for games".
Incidentally, Apple already did exactly this.
Foxconn workers on Apple lines get paid more than other workers on Apple's dime.
For all the bullshit about how awful Apple is, they've done more to try to correct the problem than any other company ever... Whether it's enough is up to the individual but to demonize them is just ignorant.
t here is kept low, nobody will notice the added cost of consumer electronics because their pay will actually increase faster than inflation for the first time in a decade.
Except Foxconn workers are some of the best paid in China. If you're gonna beat up on a company, maybe you should beat up on a company who's practices are worse.
Of course you can, it's called State capitalism and it is what the the USSR and other so-called "real socialist" economies were all about.
Check out my cross-platform apps
Why is Apple somehow special ? Foxcon makes majority of cisco gear? Given % of IT people here are you guys planing to stop buying cisco? apple pays Foxcon $20 to make a $500 phone Cisco pays fox con $100 to make a 50K router what is the difference?
Then GTFO and run your business in another country.
If you're going out of your way to do an end run around regulations, you obviously don't support the goals of the regulations. When I was temping, the law said that I could not be employed on a single job for more than 6 months without them hiring me permanently. So what did the agency do? They required a "break in service" for 3 days every six months so they could "re-assign" me to the same job.
It's bullshit. They know it's bullshit, but the loopholes allow them to keep making money, so that's what they do. It's un-American, I tells ya!
No, they won't. Not unless you actually put pressure on those companies too. If you boycott Apple, but then turn around and buy from the other companies who have worse conditions, you're sending mixed messages that won't actually get anything done.
I suspect that the second, less hypocritical, option is not being called for because we would have to use wooden tablets to achieve it (as nothing electronic is made outside of China any more).
Oh please. I only wish I'd chosen more carefully when picking a mobo for my home server, then I could say that none of my computers contain any Foxconn components.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Certainly there is a relative aspect to life around the globe. I would not expect a worker in a developing country to have the same living environment, the say pay, or the same life style as I.
Would you be happy if Europe banned all goods from the US because we here all don't get 1 month of paid vacation?
your nation is the pinnacle of modern slavery.
I think the idea is to go after the worst offender to make an example (Apple is pretty bad by volume, and especially bad considering their retail prices and "enlightened" PR image). If people were to get pissed enough at Apple that their legendarily loyal fanboys were to boycott them, other companies need good PR would notice and flee unethical manufacturing like rats from a sinking ship.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yeah, right.
Of course, the stock is ridiculously high due to these margins
No, the stock price is relatively high because a relatively large number of shares have been purchased recently. Stock price has nothing to do with the company's profitability.
I don't respond to AC's.
You know what will fix this and bring jobs back to the USA? Accountability. Accountability for what your outsourced partner is doing, accountability for the third party you hire, and accountability for their working conditions on the same level with the USAs internal standards.
Public corporations have very good accountability mechanisms, but the things to which management are held accountable are not in line with what someone striving for global social equality might like. The company is accountable to shareholders for growth and profit. For a consumer backlash to change a company's operations would require it to interfere with management's ability to show the shareholders that continued growth and profit. Perhaps it's theoretically possible for the government to enforce that Apple (and all US corporations operating globally) to have working conditions "on the same level with the USA's." The essential problem with this is that it would essentially defeat the whole point of outsourcing the operations in the first place -- they're in China because appropriately-skilled people will work there for cheap.
Remind me when was the last time a boycott was really followed by consumers ?
In some areas we're already there. Income inequality is at least as bad now as it was in the gilded age.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's like five boys--Jimmy, Jaimie, Joey, Jack, and Rob--picking on a girl, and some teacher telling her dad that it was Jimmy picking on the girl.
You don't single someone out when there are many at fault. That's irresponsible and should not be justified. Ever.
I can't believe you made me log in for this.
The system is totally skewed, and until we reach economic parity with the countries producing these goods, it's only going to get worse.
won't be long before they start making the product here to sell over there. :-)
Your typo is fitting: Compared to starving as a subsistence farmer, getting factory work for a salary is "appealing".
Agreed. It's one thing to make your products in factories operating under those conditions, but the apple exutive seemed to be so proud of the fact that they have near-slaves building their products when he described the condition under which they work. I can't even imagine what he was thinking when he described all that the way he did. A normal person holds back when talking about something they know other people probably wouldn't approve of, especially when it's a major corporation with a public image to uphold. He seemed oblivious to the fact that people might not approve. I couldn't decide if he was clueless or a sociopath.
The uber-wealthy live in a different world where this stuff is considered acceptable and they often ARE completely oblivious to how offensive it is, you'll find quotes like that in any business magazine.
See also: Newt Gingrich on poor kids as janitors.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Apple is an amoral, profit-driven company. who's surprised? it's what western (especially American, MBA-infested) business culture is all about.
what's surprising is that confronting this fact creates a surprising amount of cognitive dissonance among those who hold a romanticised image of Apple (free-thinking, genius designer/artistes who are the underdog of the computer and CE worlds. wrong in so many ways...)
what makes all this coverage more piquant is the fact that the harsh labor practices constitute a remarkably small portion of the BOM for Apple products. for instance, ~10% of the cost of an iPad2 is the enclosure (ie, foxcon aluminum polishing):
http://www.isuppli.com/PublishingImages/Press%20Releases/2011-03-12_iPad2_BOM.png
these numbers show apple's markup is about 120% over cost; if they doubled what they pay for the enclosure, their markup would drop to a mere 100%.
I mean, if people will pay $200 for an iPod when you can get a Sansa that plays even more formats for 25% of that, why not $250?
Because not everyone gives a rat's ass how many "formats" the device can play? Some people have other things that are more important to them.
I would, but it's is moronic to think that paying a US worker $20-$30 an hour as opposed to paying a Chinese person $17 a day would only increase the price of the iPad $70./quote.
The study that came to this conclusion simply said paying the Chinese "US Level wages". I don't know if that means just minimum wage here, or the average factory wage.
But regulatory costs are much, MUCH higher in the US
Probably because we don't like letting companies rape our environment and treating workers like shit.
Except Foxconn workers are already some of the best paid.
Consistent means that selected corps like Apple and Democratic politicians don't get free passes./quote.
And yet, you want them to concentrate on one company, while throwing their support and giving a pass to every other company that does this shit.
I care way more about American factory workers with no jobs, than the working conditions of Chinese factory workers who took their jobs. In the US we had this big battle to improve working conditions for our own people, the battle was won after riots, police initiated shootings and general chaos reigned almost 100 years ago. WW2 and the cold war provided a nice distraction from that and we were prosperous (we can argue the reasons for such prosperity elsewhere, but in spite of unions and factory condition improvements, we were prosperous), but as the cold war wound down we started undoing those gains by sending work overseas to people who had no such protections and cost less. Rumor has it this same movement started elsewhere, earlier, to roughly the same effect.
Now I'm supposed to care about some people in China who took our jobs by undoing exactly the same things that have now become their problem. Nope. I hate to see anyone suffer, but hurting Apple which at least DESIGNS the things in the US strikes me as both not helping the Chinese, not helping Americans, and not solving a problem I care about. HP and Dell have all but outsourced their design with a few skeleton teams being expected to keep entire lines of products afloat, mostly through a lot of paperwork and screaming. Hurting Apple helps the management of those companies continue to outsource. Smart move.
Every other computer brand is manufacturing and usually designing in China (or worse), at the same companies Apple uses. If you want to boycott, you have to boycott computers period.
I specifically used the term "developing country" because this is where the worst abuse occurs. You second thought does not make sense. When you compare Europe's working conditions to the US they are not that dissimilar. Pondering 1 month vs 2 weeks vacation is minor compared to forced labor, unsafe working conditions, and inhumane living conditions. I also did not state banning goods, I suggested that extra costs be added to imported goods from offending countries.
To sanction basic workers rights does not vastly impact either productivity or cost. It is not done, because consuming countries like the US, like Europe take a blind eye to these hell holes. Most of the politicians are bought off by the captains of industry so they can earns massive profits and we get our toys at a slightly cheaper price. We put a ban on Blood diamonds, why not at least take some stand on blood tech.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Maybe you need better reading comprehension, being Brazilian does not excuse you from that. I'm not a native English speaker myself.
Re-read the last paragraph of the comment you commented to.
It's not absurd at all. Apple is, by far, the most visible customer of Foxconn and therefore the best place to start pressuring them.
Microsoft is also a large customer of Foxconn. So are most of Apple's competitors. Tell me, what fucking good will it do to put pressure on Apple only to turn around and give that money and support to companies that do the exact same shit?
And how do you actually guarantee that the workers are seeing the improvements, and not just the executive's pocketbooks?
And everyone else isn't? Do you honestly think that Dell, HP, et al wouldn't be doing it if they weren't making money off it?
If you had, you would have realised that the other tech companies often pay these manufacturers more money to be spent on improving work conditions, whereas Apple chooses to squeeze them for every dirty brown penny, which inevitably leads to cuts in worker pay and conditions.
And you're gonna have to give a citation to actually back up your claim this actually happens, and that the executives just don't pocket the difference. Remember, Foxconn makes a lot of shit for Microsoft, too.
...in the exact same factories, using the exact same pool of workers, but without even the basic attention to human dignity that Apple shows when they do their supplier audits.
Why would we care? We don't export much to China anyway. On its face it would hurt them more than us.
At this point, it would hurt us too without a doubt. For most consumer products, there's no choice but to buy something made in China, regardless of tariffs. The time for tariffs would have been 20 years ago when we still had domestic consumer production.
What good does it do to punish the #1 company? It makes the #2 company think "shit, we're next".
Look, I hear what you're saying. But this isn't a moral decision, it's a tactical decision. The fair solution would be to boycott all the big electronics companies. Or better yet, get Congress to pass laws that would eliminate this shit in the first place. But neither of those things is gonna happen. So you think we should do nothing?
It isn't practical to Boycott Apple.
What is needed is the reinstatement of Tariff's on goods, so Americans can make the products.
it is not required or nessacary for people to live like slaves for companies to make a profit.
We can have easily what we had in the 1950's, where Americans can hold one job per family, and make a living.
The only sacrifice will be that companies won't have CEO's making hundreds of billions. Just maybe a couple hundred million at most.
The rest I am afraid has to go to the workers.
This scales much better by the way as well. If only one person _has_ to work, to make ends meet, the unemployment situation will virtually fix itself over night.
Oh and one more thing. Globalism has to die. If we give that up as well as an economic policy then that is just a good thing all around. I don't want one country making one thing, and another making another thing. A single disaster in one country kills the economic market place for products that are manufactured in such a myopic scope.
Latest example I can point to this nonsense is the Hard Drive disaster and the floods in Thailand.
Another problem with globalism, which is why it must die: It is a completely failed economic policy benefitting too few. I would point out examples, but most of my audience reading this already knows them all. If you don't believe me, watch the chaos insue as these globalist bearucrats meet in Chicago this spring,
Lots of people know the story.
Everything is too centralized economically. I favor using tariffs to encourage countries to make things themselves and to be self sufficient.
This would mean the end to trans national corporations as well.
I say good riddens.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
So getting mad at bad working conditions is hypocrisy now? we used to call it "altruism".
I could care less about the press, but they finally showed to everyone the shit that goes there. and yes, boycott is a good answer - and a right every consumer have. It will plunge Apple into debt? I doubt it, but will send a nice message anyways, and not just to Apple, but all manufacturers. "We can uncover your shit, and can make you pay for it, so you better stay in line".
About China, let's face it. It's not new factories that are going to make life better there. The legislation allows absurd things and the exploration will continue. no, the problem there are the G-men.
When you're paying $500+ for a toy computer I don't think another $70 will hurt. You might as well be worrying about the economic and societal ramifications of a price increase to the BMW Z3.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"DELL: computers built in America, by Americans, for Americans." i.e. "Hey, Apple employs a bunch of foreigners! Sounds awfully un-American, don't it?"
That ad campaign will work so well in Europe.
Your flame bait rant aside....Just read the comments from Apple executives. They're enough to make you smash Apple products you own.
The NYT article brings to light conditions and tragedies that many people did not know about. It's hard to ignore these images.
Who the hell modded you interesting? Smash Apple products? Really? Listen pal, if you owned Apple products and no longer wanted to own them then you could "resell" them on ebay. What you suggest would be both environmentally and economically foolish.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I have no doubt that the ability to audit manufacturing facilities is part of the contract they strike with a manufacturing company. Do you think Apple has no Q/A presence in the factory? Existing Q/A oversight can be tasked with overseeing working conditions as well, perhaps with additional staff for that purpose.
Company executives might be inclined to pilfer some off the top, but this sort of contract tends to have provisions for penalties when they fail to make expectations. The company risks for more in penalties than the potential reward.
Seriously, making sure your workers are well treated in foreign countries is not a new problem, nor one unique to Apple. If Apple can't figure it out, maybe they can hire someone who can. I've heard they have some remaining discretionary budget available to themselves.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
I supposed you typed this on something that was created on a 100% China-free device right?
Unless you're typing from a Heathkit computer you're FULL OF SHIT.
The reason for the factory in Brazil is to get around the high tariffs for electronics in Brazil. And the factory will probably be built by Foxconn.
D'oh just realized I needlessly quoted the entire parent post -_-
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The question is, how does this compare to other factories in China? Better or worse? Because if the working conditions at Apple's Chinese partners are on par with or better than the conditions at other Chinese factories, then we had better boycott *all* Chinese-produced products and not just those shiny Apple toys.
The conditions are comparable to other Chinese factories, but the Foxconn workers assembling Apple toys are, from everything I've read, given better pay and benefits. I've been to China a couple times and have friends there; it's quite common for companies in the manufacturing sector to provide on-site dormitories where workers sleep during the week, only going home on weekends - even office workers, who might only work 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. And although I haven't seen worker dormitories, some college girls took me back to their dorm, and what would be a 2-bed dorm room in America, in China has 6 bunk beds, sleeping 12 people total. (No desks, television, mini-fridge or video games, though.)
Here in the US, I work 12-15 hour night shifts in hazardous conditions, 3-7 nights in a row, and sleep in a dormitory room, but I don't have to share the room with 11 other people, and I don't have to do it every week. My Chinese friends have it rough.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
That's what the 11 other people in their bunk room are for, silly.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
You don't have to tell me twice. Or even once for that matter.
A bank is a support industry but according to the US it IS the economy. Weird but true.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I just love faux anti-American rage. For the record, you know how I know you're an "American" as well? Besides using "we" several times. Because you referred to the USA as "America". There's rather a lot of Americans which aren't citizens of the USA.
And, pray tell, what did you write your AC post with? And, pray tell, what good is a globe for telling me what the working conditions are in a country?
The difference between doctors/residents and factory workers is the doctors/residents aren't working in a hazardous environment.
But even given that, two wrongs don't make one right. Both conditions should be changed in regards to their respective problems. Apple appears to not care about the issue.
So let's not only screw people trying to buy cheap Chinese products that there are no locally manufactured alternatives to, while at the same time eliminating a growing market (read: jobs) for stuff we do make here by making it more expensive for a billion potential customers?
I'm glad that you're not an economic advisor to the White House.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"$3000" :)
Are you that bad at math or just overly dramatic?
Isn't it rather likely, especially given that he's an Apple exec, that he's both?
Why this obsession about worker dormitories? They're considered quite normal in developing countries because they're a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem of housing vs. jobs. How do you attract people to jobs at a new factory if there's inadequate housing nearby? How do you encourage builders to create housing nearby if there are no jobs?
It also provides a means for a company to insulate their workers from rapid housing price inflation as the area surrounding the factory becomes more developed. You have to realize that unlike developed countries, most people taking a job at the factory do not have a financial nest egg or credit history with which to buy or rent housing. The dormitories are basically guaranteed fixed-price housing for such workers. When the government does it, it's called low-income housing; but when a company does it it's bad?
And there's also differences in population density between Asia and Western Europe, and especially the U.S. and Canada. Each family at a new factory having their own tract home with a garage, white picket fence, and 2.2 kids is simply unrealistic in most Asian countries. At best, on average everyone is going to own a block unit in a high rise apartment.
Is it because Western countries don't have them? The concept seems to recur frequently in developing economies. It goes through several give-and-take cycles as management vs. labor struggle with each other, until eventually the working class develops enough of a financial base and negotiating power not to need them anymore. While the pendulum is on management's side right now, swinging it back is something which has to happen internally. If foreign countries apply pressure and get it changed, it's never going to feel genuine. Chinese management is going to feel that it happened because outsiders forced them to make it happen, not because it came about naturally as a consequence of poor labor conditions. So they'll always be striving to change it back behind the scenes, instead of accepting that that's the way it's gotta be.
Developing an economy is not like jumping quantum states. You can't take a third world economy and instantaneously convert it into a developed first world economy. There's a long, meandering path you have to take as the economy gradually builds up, and worker dorms are just a milestone along that journey. It's a step up from shanty towns.
If those wages were paid in the US, more people could afford the device AT the higher price. It is the old Ford idea, if you want the people to buy your cars you got to pay them wages so they can afford to pay for them. The modern US has gone the other way, we take the salaries out of the US to make products cheaper and cheaper so the jobless can afford them and gosh, don't there just happen to be a lot of jobless around.
But then again, a lot of people believe you can run an entire economy as a service industry because money comes from trees and everyone selling everyone hamburgers and insurance is somehow viable.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The reason they have a factory in brazil is brazil will not buy unless they do, there is no other reason
According to NYT and this blog post about the NYT article:
"The least expensive part of the process is manufacturing and assembly." Approximately $6.54 and "workers are paid less than a dollar an hour to solder, assemble and package products". Say manufacturing is two hours of labour the rest is overhead, if non-Chinese workers were paid $30/hour then the increased cost is approximately $60, depending on overhead.
Apple could easily reduce the $360 that goes into design, marketing and profit so that prices could stay the same. Some combination of increased price and reduced profits would be a good trade for reduced suffering and local manufacturing.
occupy is protesting WALL STREET, who got rich destroying the worlds economy and have stayed rich thanks to 1 trillion + in taxpayer bailouts. why would they have a problem with apple? did they destroy the worlds economy?
Everyday flowers are send around the world by airfreight... and last time I checked buying a dutch flower in the USA was not as expensive as buying a moon rock.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A good citizen? To whom? Yes, those poor people in the US. My God, someone should help them! Meanwhile the Chinese can just live off of our e-waste.
It is not Apple's responsibility to bring back manufacturing to the US. The citizens of America are the reason it left in the first place and now you want it back. Gee, perhaps if you would have been willing to pay a bit more during the last 40 years for American made products then perhaps Americans would still make things. As it turns out, you weren't willing. Time and time again you chose cheap foreign knock-offs to save a buck and this is the result. See? Little actions you thought were inconsequential really weren't. Maybe you could apply this newfound wisdom to other areas of your society?
But by all means, boycott Apple because they do exactly what they are supposed to as a multi-national corporation. Thought I doubt that is the problem. The problem is that they do what they are supposed to do so very, very well. I would think one would want to reward such exceptional performance. I guess mediocrity suits you better?
These articles regarding Apple's labour practices have been fairly regular for years, now. It's not that many people did not know about it; it's that many people choose not to care about it.
Why is Apple being singled out, anyway?
Because Apple, with its record profits and profit margin, clearly benefits financially the most from the current system. They could slash their profits in half, still lead the industry, AND improve working conditions.
But they would rather keep profits through the roof - with legions of iFans cheering them the whole way - and simply pay lip-service to "good worker conditions", when they in fact have the resources to change it.
It's awfully hard to ignore Apple with $10+ billion in profit, and castigate Motorola as "just as bad" when they lost money... Who do you think could stand to give back a few billion dollars for improvement in worker conditions?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I don't like buying and upgrading to the latest stuff. I still use my 20" Sharp CRT TV from 1996, VCR from dotcom days, Casio Data Bank Bank 150 watch, etc. I agree, I only buy/get new/used ones to replace since I am forced.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
On the flip side, Apple appears to be the only Foxconn customer who's doing audits and actually pressuring Foxconn to improve workers' lot in life - so maybe it makes more sense to get HP (Foxconn's second-biggest customer, from what I've read) and all the others up to that level of responsibility, instead of perversely punishing Apple for actually caring more than the rest of the industry.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I see bumper stickers going "If you are not outraged then you are not paying attention".
But the problem is if you pay too much attention to everything you are going to be outraged about everything and just make your life worse.
If you dig and get information on anything you will find something deplorable about it that you need to feel the need to correct.
The problem is you can't fix all the wrongs in the world, and what is happening and making it worse, activist groups are beginning to loose focus thus diluting their effectiveness.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Apple has (at the time of this post +-3 mins) $30.16 billion USD in the bank. They could take 3% of that and make everyone at Foxconn rich, or give them Apple stock and have them retire rich while retaining current work force. Seriously, what penalty couldn't they pay right now? Out of pocket. Tariff? Ha! They could cover just about any tariff and STILL have tens of billions in the bank. Trust me, something will be done, but China's gonna have to enforce whatever it is and that ain't gonna happen or change much. China does not want a new elite class in society that came from factory workers. The establishment in China would shite itself! Hong Kong movie stars get enough grief now, and most of them are products of the establishment. Not sure where this might go. Can hope for a Silicon Valley happy ending, but something tells me that Foxconn isn't going to change China like that no matter who we as consumers squeeze.
RIM products are made in Canada.
Pointing out that Dell, HP, Sony and Microsoft also uses Foxconn, and that noone is calling out for a boycott against them, is not a "Everybody else is doing it" defense. It's pointing out that if a boycott is a legitimate action (and I can certainly side with this opinion), that there are other companies who, while they may not be as visible as Apple, could not be called small fries either. I'm all for a boycott against Chinese slave labor conditions, it's just extremely difficult to boycott everybody who benefits from Chinese workforce' blood, sweat, and tears, since it seems like all the major companies do so. Seriously - how can you boycott Sony (if you bought a digital camera [or any devices containing a digital camera, like a phone for instance], a movie, an album, or made use of services that rebroadcast movies or music, you've just added to Sony's coffers, since they have so many movie and music labels, and their technology is in use in a lot of cameras). So how do we solve this problem? By just blaming Apple? Or should we stand back and realize that the problem is bigger than just one individual company, and is systemic in our "get rich by any means necessary" model.
If they want to sell 30 million iPhones in a quarter, they need U.S. market, there are no ifs or buts about it. If the condition on which they will have access to that market is to produce iPhones in U.S., they will do so, even if it costs them an extra $60 (from the current profit margin of what, $300?).
Heck, it seems that they consider Brazil an important enough market that Foxconn is building factories there to manufacture iDevices locally to dodge their import tariffs!
Stop cowtowing to corporations, and realize that they need the First World more than it needs them. They can outsource manufacturing and even R&D to India or China, but they can't outsource their customer base. Well, not yet - if you keep shipping jobs overseas at that rate, in a couple decades they will have enough customers there that they won't have to bother with U.S. and Europe anymore. And then they will, indeed, pack up and leave, and it won't matter what you say or do then.
Completely agree. Apple is actually probably the best of the tech companies in terms of monitoring working conditions in China, but a bit of heat will make them try much harder. One piece of evidence that news media don't really care about the issues is the recent coverage of the workers who threatened mass suicide at a Chinese factory making Xbox's. This was almost universally reported as, "workers at Apple manufacturer Foxconn..." without even mentioning Microsoft.
I'm also dismayed at the way that this story is linked to bringing jobs home. Poor Chinese desperately need these shitty jobs to stay alive and to find a path out of poverty, and keeping the devices they make affordable has stimulated a lot of really good jobs here. For example, Apple has paid more than $2 billion in the past year to hundreds of thousands of software developers in their App store.
Even by the most pessimistic calculations, an iPhone manufactured entirely in U.S., using American labor and materials, would still be priced below $1k. A more realistic estimate is about $100 more expensive.
If you want to believe even part of the article, then the main cause for Apple being the most to blame, is that Apple is forcing Foxconn into these conditions. Apple repeatedly demands cheaper prices, which forces the suppliers to cut safety, eliminate breaks, mandate longer shifts, etc.
It would be interesting to compare the other areas and employees of Foxconn, to see if they are all treated the same way, or if it's just the Apple production lines that are inhumane.
Personally, I've never bought an Apple product, can't stand them, and don't want anything to do with them. I like the fact that my phone and tablet have a micro-sd card slot, and that I can load my own apps that I develop. I don't need to be told what I should and shouldn't do with hardware that I own, and that maybe a one-size-fits-all OS doesn't really. For a more informed point of view, check out Steve Wozniak's comments on why he loves Android.
Back to my original point, I'm sure not every factory in China operates the way Apple is portrayed in the article. In other words, just because something is made in China, or is sold at Walmart, doesn't mean it was created with slave labor in sweatshop conditions.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
Again, read the NYT article.
Not only will corporations try to maximize profits, they are forced to do so by law! The board's only accountability is toward it's shareholders. If they decide to give away money to improve the workers' conditions, they expose themselves to be sued by the shareholders...
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
except you forget that apple was already actually more green than the other companies,
they just didn't have the PR glossy meaningless shit. It was stupid then and stupid now.
This is what I was wondering too. Everyone that knows electronics knows that Foxconn has a hand in just about every piece of consumer electronics. Good luck boycotting an entire industry.
The middle class is the key to a strong economy. When our middle-class was at it's strongest, 1945-1980, the buying power of a dollar was much higher than it is today. By allowing companies to offshore all the middle-class jobs, they're effectively crippling the very market of consumers they're trying to sell shit to. This is why these tech companies are looking to the growing middle-classes in Eastern countries to make up the difference, because even making shit in China is not cheap enough for them to turn the profits they expect here, and we let them bring the shit in for nothing...
Very much this. I am surprised that so many people in the West don't realize that the present arrangement, where goods are manufactured in China and are sold in USA, is not a stable system. It will inevitably lead to a situation where fewer and fewer people in US can afford to buy those things, while creating more and more people in China who can. When the latter number grows larger than the former, guess what happens?..
And don't hope that, once the scales turn, there will be outsourcing from China back to US. For one, even if their middle class grows bigger than the entire US population, they will still have plenty of people in poverty to exploit at the factories. For another, they would outsource to where labor is significantly cheaper, meaning places like Africa - and Chinese companies are already preparing for this, heavily investing into new infrastructure in many African countries or just buying local assets outright.
What we really need is a WTO-like arrangement, but only for the countries that "play by the rules", and punitive tariffs on everything that comes outside.
They're enough to make you smash Apple products you own.
And replace them with "untainted" electronic products from . . . which company?
That's a bicycle company. Probably not ready to produce laptops, phones, etc.
It has nothing to do with the industry. The fact is that a _small_ percentage of consumers is willing to pay extra for buying "politically correct" whatever that means. So if you are a small company, you can jump on that band wagon and make some good money. You would easily find hundred buyers for laptops that cost twice as much as identical products but produced in a "politically correct" way - but you won't find hundreds of thousands.
The issue is not the prison-like dorms, abmysally low pay, lack of social interraction or pathetic employee support at Foxconn factories. The real problem is that workers have grown used to working under the Microsoft Windows system. The Foxconn model of working is far more intuitive and natural.
To pay more for electronics is tantamount to a decrease in the standard of living for westerners, and no one is going to be in favor of giving up their standard of living.
Shipping jobs overseas decreases the standard of living for Westerners, too.
If I wanted to write scathing satire targeting Randism, I probably couldn't have done better than the article you've linked to.
So getting mad at bad working conditions is hypocrisy now? we used to call it "altruism".
When applied selectively, it's hypocrisy. Get mad about working conditions, as long as you are equally willing to research and be mad at the poor working conditions at the factories handling Samsung, HTC, and Sony's devices.
Oh but I forgot... no one calling into this made any research, not even bothered asking a chinese citizen about the working conditions in general. They just ate what they saw in some article and used it as ammo in a personal anti-specific-company agenda.
That's just it. Too much education, and people don't want to do mindless assembly line work. Not lack of education.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
You should listen to the This American Life program Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory?
That's the surprising thing about these huge factories. There is no automation. Full of workers, and totally quiet - no machines. Why pay for automation when you can get super cheap labor to put the damn things together by hand?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
factory work is not supposed to be fun, it is supposed to produc chit and should only be judged by how well it does that. and i am retired from many years of it, quite a few rather hair raising if one cares about living to see the next day.
ok, so if foxconn wants more money for their employees they are free to renegotiate the contract, but apple can't just *decide* to pay somebody else's employees more. or did you think you could walk into walmart, buy one of their many chinese-made bathmats, hand the guy at the register an extra two bucks and tell him to be sure that it gets to the chinese slave labour that made it?
do not read this line twice.
I couldn't decide if he was clueless or a sociopath.
Why do you have to decide? The two are not mutually exclusive.
Free Martian Whores!
> No, the stock price is relatively high because a relatively large number of shares have been purchased recently. Stock price has nothing to do with the company's profitability.
The high demand for Apple's shares has absolutely nothing to do with their staggering profitability. Not at all. Totally unrelated. People would be willing to pay just as much for Apple shares if they were losing $13bn a quarter rather than making $13bn.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Steve Jobs did give a shit about how his worker feels. He just wanted it done his way. He lacked empathy. So, what would you expect to come out from his clowns/clones?
A lot of us said as much when the fools in Washington first uttered the words, "service economy". Services, such as fast food restaurants, are somewhat important to the economy. But, you don't BUILD a freaking economy around something that amounts to nothing more than a support industry.
Was that Regan by any chance? Buecause Thatcher did exactly the same to the UK economy - destroyed manufacturing in the name of "service industries".
I hope you have the same response for all of the other companies who are using cheap Chinese/Korean/wherever labor to give you cheap electronics.
This isn't just Apple, its pretty much all electronic gear (and non-electronic, and food items, etc. -- look at canned food and see if you can distinguish between canned in China/distributed via US front company and canned in the US)
"Everybody else is doing it" wasn't a valid defense when you were 7, and it's not a valid defense when you're running a giant corporation.
"Valid", whatever the hell that is! If you must ascribe moral values to a legal entity then fine, but understand that a giant corporation is much more sociopathic than a child could ever be.
To be honest - I think that I first heard that nonsense when Carter was president. Not quite certain, but I believe so. But, Reagan most certainly was onboard with the whole scheme. Party makes no difference.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
HTC actually makes their phones in Taiwan. Since the manufacturing is in Taiwan, they pay the workers a decent level of wages and sweatshop like conditions are not legal.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The high demand for Apple's shares has absolutely nothing to do with their staggering profitability. Not at all. Totally unrelated. People would be willing to pay just as much for Apple shares if they were losing $13bn a quarter rather than making $13bn.
Exactly. Apple stock is high because people know Apple. Apple hasn't paid a dividend in over a decade. There's no reason to buy Apple stock unless you think that other people will continue to want to buy Apple stock. (aka: Ponzi Scheme) People buy and sell billions of dollars of stock of worthless companies every single day.
I don't respond to AC's.
Yep, no different from McD's using non-humane cattle farms, and risky meat. People are concerned, but when it comes to their chicken nuggets or McRib (which is NOT real RIBS), they look the other way.
To solve a problem from this is gotta come "from within", McD's did it with veggie oil and soy products, and getting there with the humane part. And it was from the leaders of that company to finally do something about it. Apple needs to do the same, they are similar companies business-wise. The customers will not, nor the investors.
There's rather a lot of Americans which aren't citizens of the USA.
Name one. Seriously, name one.
people from the Dominion of Canada are called Canadians,
people from the United States of Mexico are called Mexicans
people from the United States of America are called Americans
get over it. "America" is the short version name of the US of A
(just as Mexico and Canada are respectively).
There is no other country named America (or with America in it's name)
It's hard to get people excited over people on the other side of the world suffering for their living style, but good thing Apple users care about fine details and getting them right, not letting a corporation do it for them as if it knows what's best. OH WAIT.
And this isn't meant as flamebait. Seriously, go to an Occupy protest sometime and just look at the sheer number of Mac's, iPhones, and iPads you'll see. It's fucking creepy. They've been for shit at organizing on any other point, but they've apparently almost all agreed on at least *one* thing.
Really? Fucking retarded moderators, looks like any old rhetoric is taken as gospel these days with not one cited reference. Why should it be creepy that Apple products are used anyway, as opposed to any other foxconn branded gear?
BTW, here is an example of how to cite a reference, it would be nice if you earned your mod points: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=occupy+wall+street+laptops&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=xA4nT53LGYbG8QO4r53uBg&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CEcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1224&bih=612
Then, they're all cowards for willfully choosing to deal with conditions such as that. You're diverting the blame. Stop doing that, it's insulting to the people of the free world.
I imagined people protesting outside apple stores, all while tweeting and taking pictures and videos with their iPhones LOL
They're singled out because they're the most visible. That's the price you pay for being at the head of the pack. If they don't like it - maybe they should do something about the factory conditions.
Agreed, and we'll watch their next move closely.
"Everybody else is doing it" wasn't a valid defense when you were 7, and it's not a valid defense when you're running a giant corporation.
"Nobody else is doing it" isn't a valid viewpoint to push when you are writing click bait news stories, and it's not a valid viewpoint to imply when you are commenting on a respected, intelligent website such as slashdot.
1. Wal-mart has a profit margin of 3.3%. Again, Apple could raise their prices marginally to cover this difference. 2. Apple pays it's Apple store employees only marginally better than Best Buy pays the Geek Squad. They pay the same rates for engineers as everyone else, as far as I can tell from Glass Door. 3. That was in 2005, right? iMacs are still way overpriced, and they still sell. All-in-one touch screens from competitors sell for 60% of Apple prices.
Except it's really China's manufacturing practices. Foxconn makes parts and subsystems (as well as finished goods) for thousands of companies. Calls to boycotting Apple, in that context, are absurd, and in some ways suggest and even less informed (by way of thinking you know something now, but only knowing part of the story) position.
It's not absurd at all. Apple is, by far, the most visible customer of Foxconn and therefore the best place to start pressuring them. Boycotting Foxconn directly is impractical because no one knows which products have Foxconn parts and/or assemblies and Foxconn isn't a household word. Apple on the other hand, is a household word and everyone would understand what is involved in an Apple boycott.
So as a representative of those who believe unilaterally boycotting Apple is a good idea, please tell me what the ground rules for this boycott are. For example I usually like to upgrade my iPhone once a year, so are you suggesting that I hold onto my phone say for another year? But if we all did this then all corporations are punished equally.
Or maybe the way to go is to change my vendor - let's say to Samsung. But no one knows which products have Foxconn parts (your words) so would I still be showing my support for Foxconn, or do Samsung's suppliers have a worse record of employee exploitation and abuse?
So why is Foxconn moving to Brazil?
It's all about wages. Don't be fooled.
I might care more about Apple's practices because that's where my dollars tend to go -- not Dell, not HP.
In the bicycle industry there is certainly Chinese competition, and it is a similar issue there, though it does not receive as much press because the dollars involved are so much smaller.
It's pretty fucking obvious that this story is a "Let's pick on Apple because they're big, even though the entire fucking industry does the same shit."
It doesn't make it okay for Apple to do it.
The thing that irks me most about Apple fanbois in that they all act "anti-corporation" and won't eat and Starbuck's and McDonalds - but "sellout" to a multinational because it's trendy. And even though their iPad breaks in 13 months and their MacBook is constantly crashing, they'll still claim that their 5 year old iPod works and then say "see Apple makes good products".
I actually know people who do this.
I think you're misreading my comment. I argued that it's too late for tariffs. You seem to agree with me that tariffs are a bad idea.
I simply said, in response to the previous poster, that tariffs by China on our goods wouldn't matter because we export to them quite a bit less than they export to us. What does matter is just our own action of putting tariffs on products imported from China because Americans consumers would have no choice but to pay it.
It may have more to do with shareholders that customers; Rivendell is privately owned, and if its owners care to promote their own hobby horses (everything from Smile Train, to being picky about product sources, to offering low-cost replacements for carbon fiber forks), they can.
The question then becomes, how do you reach the shareholders? (Credible) threats of boycott and the possibility of legislation or lawsuits are two of those.
The best thing to do, do not buy a new phone unless the old is broken. And if possible, replace the battery if you can instead of throwing the thing away.
The good thing about that occupy movement (as far as I can see it from over here), they might be open to arguments.
So we stop pumping money into Foxconn products then? The law of unintended consequences immediately springs to mind, when those Foxconn workers start to lose their jobs. Ok their working conditions are shitty by western standards, but could it be that the alternative is much, much worse? Others may know the answer to this.
As one who has been to China, and spoken with many low paid (by Western standards) line workers, I can tell you this. Each and every one of them is there voluntarily and are happy to have any sort of factory work they can get. Most of these people hailed from the rural areas and were dirt poor and starving to death before the likes of Apple Computer et al came along.
God bless all of them in their continued endeavors, that is if we can get these airheaded, spoiled, tofu eating Western Liberals to mind their own business for a change.
Tim Cook met the allegations head-on:
'Any suggestion that we don't care is patently false and offensive to us ... accusations like these are contrary to our values.'
There you have it, "we care because we say we care, and therefore those workers are obviously cared for." Wow, Tim, way to keep the reality distortion field alive!
Hear, hear. And I'm sure Tim graciously speaks on behalf of all gadget manufacturers with this message. Including the one who made the Android/Windows/Blackberry Foxconn phone in your pocket.
by union labor.
Why was Nike singled out and boycotted?
Because those people were fucking stupid, too.
It may be true that all products from China are produced under similar conditions so the people building samsungs and acers have it just as bad as those building iStuff. However, some of Apple's success is attributed to the massive quantities they purchase and how they hold great power over manufacturers to drive their cost down. I'd say this also makes apple the most effective target for a boycott. Their control as the single buyer of vast numbers of parts puts them in the unique position to be able to improve working conditions. Instead of saying "we'll buy 50,000,000 LCD screens if you reduce the cost by 3% or sell to us exclusively" they could say "we'll buy 50,000,000 screens if you stop making workers live in pens and let them have friends/unionize". Of course, the only reason they would do such a crazy thing would be because of a massive boycott. It would seem that if you care about how your stuff is made, your best bet is to go after the biggest fish.
It's no good boycotting Apple if all you do is start buying Samsung (for example) because you are still perpetuating the exploitation of workers at the bottom of the supply chain. And the trouble with this "big fish" argument is that your average person would do exactly this, because they are getting the message: "Apple bad, everyone else good".
Right back at you.
There's some research suggesting corporate CEOs are, in fact, much more likely to be psychopaths than the average. I find it amusing that one of the best discussions of that subject I've read is in Cracked magazine discussing the Global Economy.
Yes, you're a sophist that's distorting the actual point of the movement that, first and foremost, is in response to political/corporate corruption here in the U.S.
But, that's what conservatives and neo-liberals do: try to take advantage of white liberal guilt in order to fracture and de-focus protest movements.
The other day I pulled the cover off my venerable HP 5MP laser printer -- which still works nicely after 15 years, thank you -- to install some additional memory. The PCB hosting the memory modules was labeled "Made in USA." Whoa! That'll take you back. Surprisingly, there are quite a number of these quality heavy-duty machines around. So many that that there is a cottage industry in providing consumable parts like paper rollers and fusers for these dinosaurs. Granted my American-made machine cost a thousand dollars, but then it has returned a lot of value in over a decade and a half of reliable service. And I hope it will stay out of a landfill for at least another five years.
We're in a throw away world now, however. Throw-away products made by throw away people. It seems tragic that our government allowed our corporations to do an end run around our American workers' hard-won wage, benefit and working condition prerogatives by letting U.S. companies export manufacturing to places that put no value on human rights whatsoever. Did U.S. unions sometimes abuse their advantages in days gone by? Sure. But there is a reason that unions evolved in the first place. Ask the workers at Foxconn. (Independent unions are illegal in the workers' paradise.)
Sadly, we could have used our economic might as a carrot to teach the world, China included, something valuable. We could have done this by tying globalization to humanization. Instead we traded our good jobs for cheap goods that don't last. Not that they have to last, however. We can just buy new ones. Everything, including human life, is cheap. Now we have a "service economy". But somehow I doubt we can go far by selling each other coffee and massages. I am for free trade. But I am for free trade between free peoples. And the poor Chinese are anything but free. Maybe it is time to use our buying power to buy them some freedom, while buying back some of our lost jobs.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
I think you're missing the point.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
And in the soon to be most advanced fab in the world.
http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011/02/18/intel-to-invest-more-than-5-billion-to-build-new-factory-in-arizona
You are welcome Chandler, AZ.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
My problem is that Apple and Silicon Valley came up with this "HR Technology" on their own. These people who, to hear them tell it, spend every waking hour innovating. The Wizards reinvented Slavery in Asia and Indentured Servitude in North America (that lawsuit about "poaching"). Is this how Wizards act ?
They chose willful ignorance.
I have no issue with that, just doing anything would be a step in the right direction and I will happily support any cordanated boycott (or other logical plan) with these goals. As an additional point for going after apple, they did just post record profits again. So everyone knows that they could easily do more to improve the lives of the workers.
That and the fact that Apple still has done nothing to correct the issue regardless of their current statements. That is what I get out of it. Also, NYT is far more read than wired or any of the other trade rags. Getting this into the "mainstream" is what Apple fears because once NYT has it, it gets echoed all around the world and Joe Blow may, just may, start thinking about how that gizmo in their hand was made.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
You can say that all you want, but it won't be long before "they" no longer need the first world. "They" will be quite content to sell in Asia, which by then will be the largest market in the world by a wide margin, and leave you to rot in your self-imposed 3rd world kleptocracy.
What exactly is the goal of these regulations?
You do realize that that temp worker program is providing you with a job, where you would otherwise have none, right? If they got rid of the regulation stating that you must be provided with all the benefits of a permanent worker, you could stay on, and not be classed out of raises and promotions. But instead, the government has stepped in and created an underclass. And now you want someone who wants to create jobs to LEAVE?
The USA is going down in flames, yet no-one can see the cause. Sad.
Care to elaborate on that? I spent a year trying to open a small winery and was done in by the insane level of regulation at the Federal level. I wasn't even allowed to start production until I had a label, and the label required four revisions, with them taking a MONTH for each one. I ran out of seed money before I could start my first batch. Note that the state regulatory agency had much more common sense requirements, and MORE OF THEM, and I had them handled within three months.
But hey, don't let that stop you from railing against individualism and common sense at the altar of the almighty state.
Right, because they let them do all that in Germany and Japan.
Americans use the same excuses over and over as they watch their industrial base rust away to nothing. Blame the foreigners. Don't look inward, for fuck's sake.
That's nice. You can continue ignoring reality now.
Are you saying that billions in profit won't pay for better salary and waste disposal? 10k workers at 50k$ is 0.5bil$ per year.
Foxconn employs a million people, not 10k, and their profit is around $1000/worker/year.
Here is the main problem with these rants against using Chinese labor:
China's GDP/Capita after adjustment for inflation and purchasing power is still just a bit lower than America in 1890. Thats America 120 years ago. This idea that such a country can provide the same level of things that we in the rich part of the world enjoy is laughable. Every single rant against China always uses a scare number without any context. 17 suicides at Foxconn in 2010 for example. Thats a scare number with no context. Put it in context and its 1 suicide for every ~59000 employees per year, and adding more context we see that America has a suicide rate of 1 suicide for every ~9000 people per year.
The ranters cried about those 17 suicides, but failed to see the big picture. China is doing quite well for itself given its GDP/Capita. Their Human Development Index is on par with far richer countries. The ranters now cry because some of the employers there provide room and board on top of better than average pay? Really?
"His name was James Damore."
. . . that fat guy in the one man Broadway show about Foxconn, appear to be the same person.
Just sayin' . . .
The key organization quoted in the article has gone on record as saying the article is false and misleading.
BSR Open Letter to NYT
"The narrative you present is an inaccurate picture of the work we have done with Apple, of the role Apple played in the worker hotline project, and of BSR’s views of Apple."
Move along. Nothing to be seen here. Just another news hack selling papers.
iPhones are not only sold in the USA. And besides, China will assemble electronics much cheaper than an American company. So if Apple was making its stuff in the USA, China would produce much cheaper goods, and sell those to you in the US again, and you would abandon your own brands to buy the cheaper and equal or better quality Chinese products. Don't believe me, look at what happened to your auto industry, and your consumer electronics industry.
Besides, this all sounds like protectionist bullshit. Americans want jobs, and they want them at the expense of Chinese workers, and on much higher salaries too. So they complain about how the Chinese are being treated, because lets face it, if Apple (or Del, or Microsoft or Walmart) was forced to pay comparable labour costs for Chinese labour, they would have no reason to produce in China, so China would remain poor.
Wages in China are already rising, and soon this won't be an issue, like it ceased to be an issue in Japan, and South Korea and Taiwan. It sounds mean to say it, but there is a generation of Chinese people who are never going to see prosperity, and not by their own fault. They were unlucky to be born before China became wealthy. They are barely educated, and can only do the most menial of work, for wages a fraction of what their counterparts in the West get. The next generation though will be much wealthier, will demand more and get more, and will compete on a more even footing with their Western counterparts. Then I guess it will be Africa's turn to become the world's factory, until the cycle completes, and maybe, just maybe, machines finally take over the boring rote work that we still need humans to do.
The way it goes right now, yes, it won't be long. Which is precisely why we've got to change course before that happens, and ensure that we still have the manufacturing capacity for ourselves, and the people who earn enough money to buy the goods that are produced by it, before it's all shipped off to China wholesale.
Oh, and if you think the West is a "kleptocracy", I don't even know what the appropriate label for China would then be.
It is hypocritical. You are choosing one company to punish and assuage your 'conscience' whilst going to buy a product off another company that makes its product in the very same place, using the very same labour with the very same problems. Sounds more like picking on Apple. If I was being cynical, I would say Apple hasn't paid its dues enough to the media, maybe doesn't spend enough advertising dollars, or maybe isn't paying campaign contributions.
But how is it just Apple that's being singled out here?
Probably something to do with their size and profits.
Why this obsession about worker dormitories?
Could it have anything to do with squeezing 15 beds into a 12' x 12' room (as mentioned in TFA)? The beds are stacked and so close together that you have to slide into them. If that's not worker abuse, I don't know what is.
The difference between doctors/residents and factory workers is the doctors/residents aren't working in a hazardous environment.
ORLY?
"His name was James Damore."
Yes, lets stop buying Apple products, that'll teach 'em. (Apple has 40,000 employees, and uses contract manufacturers). If Apple's sales and all mobile phone sales collapsed significantly, the only people in trouble would be Chinese workers, who would find themselves without jobs. Apple would still be profitable (Their costs are not fixed - they reduce the fewer gadgets they make). That would also swing the pendulum away from workers. Chinese companies are beginning to have to compete for workers. But if they suddenly found a nice surplus of workers, then could and would pay less again, because, well, there is someone prepared to take your job for less.
That's economics for you.
is a Foxconn plant. How does that distance them from Foxconn?
But, you don't BUILD a freaking economy around something that amounts to nothing more than a support industry.
Why not? We built an economy based on building more and more stuff, and just look where it got us. http://www.gradientmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/edward-burtynsky-manufactured-landscape-photography-01.jpg
Fuck off. Part of the problem are people bitching about regulatory compliance, and creating the illusion that costs are high. They aren't, especially if you're actually doing the shit you should be doing in the first place.
If you have to retool things to not fuck over the environment and create a safe working environment, then things might be expensive. But you should have though of that when you were designing your factory in the first place.
Dormitories aren't just usual, in China they're necessary. In China there is the Hukou system which makes it illegal for migrant workers to buy (and I believe even rent) property outside of their registered area. This system greatly contributes to the inequality between Chinese citizens and allows workers to be exploited.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system
Table a new law: Any company doing business in a foreign nation is required to meet the environmental, labour, pay scales, and health/safety regulations of it's home country when doing business overseas.
Force companies like Apple to bring the standards of employment in China UP instead of letting them offshore slavery.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Tell that to Micron and Intel. They seem to have no issues keeping plants in the US.
I see, so waiting for months to get permits is not a problem, then? You can do EVERYTHING right, and a city council can shut down your operation at the drop of a hat. You think that is conducive to business?
You sure are aggressive. Makes me think you don't believe a word you are saying.
I wonder how many people realize that Apple lately has been trading places back and forth with Exxon as the largest corporation on the planet.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Give people a choice.
Make some devices in the US give them a distinguishing feature like a star spangled apple.
Sell them for a higher price with maybe even better margins.
Shame people into buying the higher priced US made devices.
And this isn't meant as flamebait. Seriously, go to an Occupy protest sometime and just look at the sheer number of Mac's, iPhones, and iPads you'll see. It's fucking creepy. They've been for shit at organizing on any other point, but they've apparently almost all agreed on at least *one* thing.
Same thing when you go to a hacker congress. Or a gathering of scientists. Or authors. Or musicians.
Fandroids hate facts.
And on that note. umm only apple? Like these places only make Apple stuff? I dont' think so. Is it only slavery when its an apple product not a dell amazon hp ....... product?
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
are you aware that after Tian ah Mien that lots changed in China? (still lots to go but they have to do it themselves) People protest pretty regularly in China and with much bigger balls then US protesters. Have you ever threatened to have a mass suicide of 20,000 people if you don't get better working conditions? (you will have to google/bing/yahoo that to get the actual number.)
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
There are a couple of hole in your nice, pat theory. First, those western countries reformed their work environments from within, because at the time manufacturing was mainly a local or region endeavor. In the US, in the 30's, labor finally organized to begin to reform working environments *with the support of the government*. In essence, it was a free and fairly democratic society that provided the means for the worker to stand up and demand rights.
Yup, and the children of China's current factory workers will undoubtedly demand better conditions and more pay than their parents did.
Manufacturers are not chasing cheap labor, they are in search of cheap governments that don't have pesky environmental regulations or troublesome labor laws. They get into these countries and they stick, perhaps even helping to prop up the government so the labor force has no ability to force change. The Chinese laborer, whether it be farmer or factory, is merely chattel for the government to use. A "middle-class" is presented to show progress, but it tightly controlled and can be struck down if they get to strong to support the status quo.
Except that this doesn't actually happen. There isn't a single country in the world that used to have sweat shops as its major manufacturing base 25 years ago and still does because of government oppression. This is a complete fiction.
Certainly there is a relative aspect to life around the globe. I would not expect a worker in a developing country to have the same living environment, the say pay, or the same life style as I. What I would expect is that the worker has rights to a regulated workplace, one the respects a human life through decent hours, balanced wages, and a respect of work/life. I would expect that the worker has the right to assemble, to form an organization that gives them some power against abuse in the workplace. I would expect that humans be treated humanely.
And they will, when they're ready for it. And that's not as a result of an external judgement from an unconnected western point of view meddling in their lives. The workers (or more likely their children) themselves will improve their working conditions when they value their quality of life more than the jobs, because the factories will move on to the next country when they start demanding quality of life, and the next impoverished rural economy will get the factory jobs.
Now the notion of a boycott is foolish in part for reasons stated throughout this thread. It is not just Apple eating from the poison fruit, it is many companies and we all share in that guilt. The only effective way to change is to demand that our "civilized" governments enforce humane work environments for goods that come into the country or monetary penalties will be assested for each violation of human rights. Apple wants to use slave labor to build iPads, fine, but it will cost more to get them back into this country. Don't just boycott, write to representatives and demand that we stand up for human rights be making it costly to abuse humans in the manufacturing of goods.
Your mad scheme will hurt the very people you're trying to help. The factory owners won't improve conditions, because they can't. The factories only get the work because they charge so little, and as soon as they start charging more the economics don't work and the jobs disappear. The peasants go back to their farms that they chose to leave to get these jobs as the AC above pointed out, back to their subsistence farming with worse conditions than they ever faced in the factories. And their children get raised ignorant and destined to short, unpleasant lives. You've locked the entire developing country into a poverty trap that they can't get out of until your insane legislation is rescinded and once again they can willingly head to the factories to work in inhuman conditions like our ancestors did.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Boycotting apple is a good idea, yes everyone is using the same factories but it is unrealistic to boycott everyone at the same time. So why not pick the bully in the group and lay him out?
Because Apple is the only one actually doing anything to improve human rights among their suppliers. Other companies are bigger or just as big and have just as much visibility (e.g. Sony, Nintendo, MS) and those companies don't perform audits or if they do they don't publish them. They don't have an independent third party perform audits. They don't fire any companies over violations. They don't require changes. So pick on Apple because they were open and trying to make a difference, oh yeah that's a great way to motivate change, just not in the direction you seem to think. That is, unless you think the problem is hearing about human rights problems instead of the violations themelves.
We weren't talking about how much foxconn makes in profit though (which is far lower than Apple). Foxconn also makes a ton of other products.. those 1mil workers are not all working to make apple products.
I really don't think there are many ranters about "those 17 suicides". I mean, Foxconn is a huge efficient machine. 17 people make up a very small percentage. But you can admit it doesn't look good that they keep getting this kind of negative news cover. The US military also has a rather high suicide rate, people in general don't rant over it.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
You are using dialectics and innuendos to try to prove the OP wrong. But you just repeated his points who were clear enough.
Mitt, Is that you? It has to be to advocate sweat shops and oppressive work conditions as a way to "grow" a society into success. You may want to go back in time and talk to a few oppressed societies that had to revolt to bring about actual reform to their lives. You'd make a good dictator, Pharaoh, or republican.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Can you be a little more specific? I looked carefully throughout all seven pages of the NYT article but I couldn't find the part where it says that "other tech companies often pay these manufacturers more money to be spent on improving work conditions". (And no, I was not expecting to find that exact wording, but the same basic concept.)
Do people realize that everyone else uses Foxconn too? Microsoft XBOX's, Amazon Kindles, Sony Playstations, Samsung TVs, Nokia phones, and much more are all made by Foxconn too using the same practices. Apple has been the sole target of this outrage and yet they're the only ones that have publicly stated their policy over the working conditions.
You were apparently replying to my post where I asked "If anyone is seriously proposing a boycott, what is the "ethical" alternative?" Bicycles are not really an alternative to an iPad, for most purposes. Though they may be healthier, I agree.
its pretty simple.99.9% of people that chirp about boycotting and selling their stuff wether it be apple or dell or toyota or bananas from some poor nation that treat their people like crap ,,WIIL NOT DO IT!,,i can remember people wanting to boycott apple because of the colour change of the iTunes logo in mac osx..too friggin funny..i can remember posts about selling all their apple "stuff" and switching to windows (now thats punishment).. people are all talk and no action.. especially when it comes to cars and computers and iPads and iPhones and and all the technojunk that they rely on..i double dog dare all of you soap box standing freaks to sell off all your non american made "stuff" and try to live without it.....NOT GONNA HAPPEN!!!! :) LMAO .. go protest foxconn or something but for christ sake,,,don't be hypocritical!!
So if you are a small company, you can jump on that band wagon and make some good money.
I seriously doubt that. The markets are different in many ways, not just the physical products. There is a lot more service and customisation involved in bikes than most consumer electronics. You can keep a bike running for decades with regular maintenance and replacing parts like tyres, chain, cables, bearings, etc. With most phones, laptops, you buy them and use them for a year or two, then upgrade and dispose of the old one. There is no ongoing relationship with a guy who gives you advice on what is the best brake pad for your climate and style of riding. But buying a laptop or phone, most will just ask one question: Where can I get it cheapest?
Even in the niche for "ethically produced electronics" exists, it would be tiny and do nothing to help the majority of workers in dormitories paid the minimum possible and not allowed to unionise, etc.
Redistribution of wealth? In China? What are you? Some kind of *commie*? ;-)
And Samsung? They have terrible working conditions at their own factories, and nobody cares about that.
Fandroids hate facts.
So you bash Apple because the others are incompetent at making money? Every company selling more PCs than Apple works with Lenovo - and so do almost all selling less.
Fandroids hate facts.
On the software side, I would say OSX Lion .... it is only $30 for the FULL VERSION.
On the hardware side, ignoring add-on products, probably the iPod Shuffle. $49
I actually know people who do this.
I actually know that the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
"Many major technology companies have worked with factories where conditions are troubling. However, independent monitors and suppliers say some act differently. Executives at multiple suppliers, in interviews, said that Hewlett-Packard and others allowed them slightly more profits and other allowances if they were used to improve worker conditions."
If you want your manufacturing jobs to come back to America, you need to get over your whole "slavery" thing.
“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”
Getting rid of your benefits, your freedom to live as you choose, mandatory compensation for overtime, and your dreams of a better life are way more realistic and attainable in today's America than that "accountability" thing. It's you that needs to change, not them.
Why was Nike singled out and boycotted?
Because those people were fucking stupid, too.
It is ok to diagree and propose better actions to take, but why are they stupid when they are affecting change for the better? They haven't turned low cost countries into a paradise, but the actions against Nike clearly made Nike work on improving the conditions of their supply chain, and, importantly, made competitors take notice and preventive actions. This definitely got attention and produced changes in the industry. Baby steps, but better than no steps. I work in a tech company that are actively looking into our supply chain conditions right now because of the focus on Apple (wish we had regardless, but take what I can get). This is how putting high profile targets on the spot for their actions (even if their actions are not unique, especially if their actions are not unique) produce results.
There still is a lot to critize, but all improvements are worth it - it is easy to "forget" about , but there are human sufferings behind us getting our brand icons a few dollars cheaper. All focus on this, and on improving this is worth it, in my view. But I'd be happy to hear about better alternative specific actions you and me can take to contribute.
Tariffs would do this too and are a large part of our US history. Tariffs are sanctioned by the WTO if your trade imbalance is >10%. So why don't we do it?
Free trade's always great until someone is more successful at it than you are.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Leave your pointless partisan politics at the door and think for yourself. I'm not even American, so your futile choices between two aspects of the same corporate-funded gravy train really don't interest or affect me.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Why this obsession about worker dormitories?
Because it is too easy for companies to exert pressure on the workers living in them. Being stuck in dormitories away from your family and much outside contact with the world is pretty much what happens in the military, and the reason it is done is basically for brainwashing, control and peer pressure to conform.. While I am happy for people to volunteer for the army and subject themselves to this, it does not seem reasonable just to get a job building consumer electronic gadgets.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No, Apple are the largest and most prominent electronics company at the moment, so it makes sense to boycott them rather than your little local shop. It's about PR.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Why do you think that paying FoxConn better would automatically mean the workers get better pay? I for one haven't heard of any business contracts where a buyer gets to decide what the money they pay the seller i used for.
You can always stick in a clause about having access to details of workers' pay and conditions if you want to. But if you contract for the government, you will often be asked to prove that you are conforming to health, safety, discrimination or whatever conditions for your staff.
It's just that most commercial compnaies don't care.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If that's so, my next phone might be a HTC.
When I have to buy a new phone, then I can make a choice. I can either buy an Apple product or I can buy (hopefully) a product which is more sustainable manufactured. And when I choose the latter, it will effect Apples decisions to start to produce more sustainable as well. And BTW producing products with cheap labor has negative economical effects. However, you do nat have to pay for them now and so it looks cheap. Have a look at externalizing cost. Externalized cost has always to be payed. And normally it is payed by the public.
And what caused NYT and everyone else to start caring? Mike Daisey's monologue performances, in particular, his episode on This American Life.
You are correct and I'll do something not normally done on /., I apologise for the stupid comment. I still disagree with your position, but certainly could have been less childish about making my point.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
And what you're missing is that it would invoke a protectionist response from China, who already doesn't play by the WTO rules anyway.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Then, you can put pressure on the worst offender.
That way, you can raise the manufacturing conditions by the bottom, which makes sense. But I somehow doubt Apple is one of the worst offender. I may be wrong.
No, the way to raise manufacturing conditions is to put pressure on the most VISIBLE company. That puts pressure on everyone. Apple is the most visible, so start with them and when they reform, the others will have to follow in order to compete.
Sorry but that argument is so stupid, it has to come from someone who gets payed by the worst offender.
Fandroids hate facts.
An American working in "manufacturing" is not going to be working for minimum wage. I posited a rather conservative $20-$30 an hour, depending on where you live. I guess it could be as low as $15 an hour, but that's still orders of magnitude higher than $17 ... A DAY.
Done. I am convinced. Now let Apple do their part.
Please stop wielding this "think of the shareholders - they won't allow it" nonsense all the time. Just because I hold a few Apple/GM/McDOnald/whatever shares doesn't mean I'm stupid, blind and unethical. I'm looking for decent investments, but that doesn't mean that I feel the need to squeeze out even the last cent from it. And I bet a lot of other "shareholders" (=people like you and me who hold small stocks) will agree with me on this.
"Teh ebil shareholders" is as much a cheap excuse as "teh ebil pirates" for the content mafia.
I really don't think there are many ranters about "those 17 suicides".
Really?
i guess that this site hasn't had a bunch of ranters then.
The US military also has a rather high suicide rate, people in general don't rant over it.
Now there you go.. You do not seem to comprehend that the Foxconn suicide rate is amazingly low. Instead, its "rather high" like the U.S. military.
This is exactly the problem. You do not understand the scare number, and have led yourself to believe that its "rather high." No, it's not. Its "rather outstanding."
"His name was James Damore."
Thanks, jholyhead.
If Americans would be willing to have no health benefits, vacation leave, work for 10 dollars a day, work 12 hour days, 7 days a week, live in onsite company dormitories away from their family, Outsourcing problem would be completely solved...damn lazy Americans.
"They're singled out because they're the most visible."
actually No they were singled out as you put it because they make most of Apple's gigantic fortune (market cap and cash) was built nearly-exclusively on the success and huge profit margins of the iPod and iPhone both manufactured by the modern slaves of China, , With the iPhones, ALL THE MONEY GOES OUT of China, all the money goes into the pockets of Apple fanboy Nasdaq shareholders and lucky few royalty board members based in Cupertino, unlike all the other vendors you mention
and less you forget the fact that Foxconn built a purpose made iphone factory for exclusive use for apple assembly based on the apple profits they were going to make for them.
that means apple exec's held ALL the cards, and could stipulate any worker conditions they pleased that benefited they and their profitability.
the fact the apple executives stated
"Appleâ(TM)s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that âoeMade in the U.S.A.â is no longer a viable option for most Apple products."
plus OC the US worker will not assemble for $10 on a 12hours shift etc...
$10 for Chinese workers assembling each iPhone.
$140 for the components (all sent to the Chinese factory that just puts them together)
$500 is Apple's pure profit per iPhone
(each iPhone is sold at an average of $650 mostly through carriers)
"We shouldnâ(TM)t be criticized for using Chinese workers,â a current Apple executive said. âoeThe U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.â
"Apple is legendary for demanding extraordinary levels of control. On several occasions, Steve Jobs either changed announcement plans at the last moment, canceled deals, or refused to deal with press publications that disrupted his carefully laid plans for a product demonstration or unveiling. The company requires absolute transparency from companies like Foxconn, carefully scrutinizing their manufacturing and employee costs â" then dictates to the company what margin theyâ(TM)ll be allowed to maintain.
âoeThe only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper,â an executive at one company that helped bring the iPad to market told the New York Times. âoeAnd then theyâ(TM)ll come back the next year, and force a 10 percent price cut.â" ...
etc etc
Another reason is that Americans are too cheap to pay for things built in the USA. Look at Walmart... I don' think you will see anything made in thee USA there. It would probably add 50 to 100 dollars to build a computer here and we will never pay that much moreeven to save our own economy.
"Excpet Foxconn's employees are already some of the best paid in China."
your assumptions are wrong according this official report
http://sacom.hk/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/2011-05-06_foxconn-and-apple-fail-to-fulfill-promises.pdf
"Basic salary is far from a living wage
SACOM suggested that the living wage in Shenzhen was about CNY 2300 referencing to the
Engel Law formula in last year. Owing to skyrocketed inflation in the cities, the living wage in 2011 should be CNY 2728.
8
And the monthly living wage in Chongqing should be CNY 2192.
SACOM estimates the living wage in Chengdu should be CNY 2600.
9
This echoes the aspiration of the workers that a monthly income should be around CNY 2500 in Chengdu and Chongqing,
and CNY 3000 in Shenzhen. In other words, the basic salary at Foxconn in the three cities lags
behind the basic needs of workers.
Eventually, workers have to earn a living from overtime work.
âoeI work very hard everyday and I deserve CNY 3000-4000 per month.,â Xiao Yang, a
student intern from vocational school who is working at the repairing department in the
southern campus of Chengdu commented..
âoeThe salary at Foxconn is not really high. After deducting expenditure for food, dormitory
and social insurance, I donâ(TM)t have much left every month,â
It's truly a sad state of affairs that we would actually toss the dream of the last 50 years in the trash in favor of using human beings paid subsistence wages as robots.
All pretty pointless iProducts are not the top iSpoiled iBrat gear. Selfishness and ego are the drivers in that market, pose factor driven by marketing are the drivers and everything else including hardware inferiority, unchanged software, lock in and the highest profit margins in the industry mean nothing to them,
That the workers are treated like crap, won't turn them off at all, in fact it'll turn them on.
The flip slide of the spoilt brat market is they tend to be late comers, everyone else treats their choice and them as wildly uncool regardless of peer pressure tactics. Of course once the product loses it's ego fad status they disappear like a herd of sheep scattered by a wolf.
Rather than boycott just point out how they have been sucked in to paying Apple's inflated margins by Apples marketing treated them like idiot sheep, the hardware lack of competitiveness, the dated software and of course mindless lock in.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You are absolutely right.
When something bad is being done, we must not chastize anyone for doing it until, across the board, we punish all.
For example, with Tax Cheats, going after the largest tax cheat would be wrong. We can only prosecute if we punish ALL cheats at the same time....
or, it's like knowing A girl was picked on by a group of boys, including Jimmy. But refusing to do anything to Jimmy until we're 100% sure that all the boys have been identified...
Only 23% higher to have USA made & get environmental benefits and fair wages.
Sad but true.
Sure we could compete by repealing all of our labor and environmental laws- what is your suggestion?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Well done :) My hopes for the planet increase :) And the courtesy is appreciated.
I only came to my point of view after talking to a Korean studying abroad. His attitude was very interesting; his parents saw working in sweat shops as a way of improving their lives and their children's lives. They didn't resent it, but they didn't want their children working in sweat shops. So he was studying IT abroad on the money they'd earned and was going to go back and get an office job and look after his parents in their old age.
It's such a different attitude to what we have in the West. I have no obligation to my parents, my country, my family. I stand on my own two feet and don't ask anyone else for anything. The thought of spending my life in a job I hated and that was bad for my health so that someone else could benefit and do better, or even that my country would be a better place, is completely foreign to me (and most Western cultures). It's a much more common point of view in developing countries though.
In the end, I think it's about choice, as the previous poster said. No-one is forcing people to work in factories. They're choosing to do this, for reasons that seem good to them. Taking away that choice is bad, even if it's done from a paternalistic sense of 'we know what's best for you and we're trying to help you'.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Hi
While Apple and others are at fault here, the major fault lies with China. China does not care for its workers or its people.Apple can only outsource work and lay conditions but ultimately its the on ground supervisor or the supplier who makes the call.
Problem is not Apple or other companies its China and regimes like China which have scant respect for their own people.I am not condoning Apple but they are here to make money and hasn't exploitation of workers been happening for centuries by capitalists(and imperialists).
International community worries about North Korea and Iran but wont take a stand against China who has a far worse track record. Guess might is right!
The story makes a valid point and is reflective of other countries with democratic societies that went through a period of adjustment. Look at the US with early immigration. Irish, Poles, Germans (et al) came to this country and worked in horrible conditions with the idea that they can do better for their children. To some extent that attitude continues today though I find it sad that we have companies that maintain bad work practices. What stops the exploitation of the worker? Not that they are separate, but one is a government that works top support and protect its people, the other is an agitated and pissed off labor.
So what upsets me about places like China or North Korea or any place that has power placed explicitly in the hand of a few (or one) is that the people then become chattel to Business. It becomes easier to abuse and harder to change. These people may believe their children may have a better life, but there is no foundation for that belief. The future is controlled by the state.
Anyway, interesting thoughts, I gained a new viewpoint and that is what is worthy of good discourse.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Why do you care now? Why do any of you care now? Is it because it's Apple? Take a nice shot at a pompous company? Nothing about Samsung or Motorola bother you? How about HP or HTC? Let's leave this sector and go elsewhere to Hasbro or Mattel. How about Disney? Better yet, forget the toys and the electronics, how about clothing? Any of you buy from Aeropostale, Abercrombie & Fitch, or any of those other trendy stores? Okay, fine, none of you dress like teenage girls. How about food. You all eat, right? So, let's talk about Dole, Del Monte, or Nestle? No? Any pet owners out there want to talk about Tyson or Purina?
You guys can make it all about Apple, but you're all a bunch of useful idiots for it. You'll bitch and moan and feel good about the fact that you don't own any Apple products, but when you'll go back to eating your processed snacks, collecting your expensive action figures, buying your video games, and using one of your favorite Google services on your smartphone, and guess what -- you'll still be perpetuating a pretty bad situation. Give a free pass to Apple? No. Absolutely not. But in your righteous indignation, you damn well had better say something about the myriad of other companies that use Chinese labor.
Heath and safety is expensive.
In china, someone dies, you have a funeral.
In the USA, someone dies, you have a court case, a huge investigation going on for months, and the media turns and bites you.
Reality:
In China, someone dies, the family gets $50,000
In the US, someone dies, the company gets a million. Even if the person doesn't work there anymore. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate-owned_life_insurance
Fandroids hate facts.
not true. Many electronics are made in democratic countries, though, most in asia. For instance, my smartphone (samsung) is made in korea. My computer is made in Taiwan. I try to avoid chinese made goods when possible.
Samsung? The Samsung that poisons it own workers?
Fandroids hate facts.
Foxconn makes tech for MANY companies, including Apple. And it's not like the chinese government forces them to show up at Foxconns door! I'm not saying things couldn't change for the better, but throwing money at it, or taking money from it isn't the answer. What it comes down to is just expecting great transparency from ALL the companies who contract with Foxconn, not ONLY Apple. So we all stop buying mobile electronics, then what??? Foxconn just sends all their worker back to a dried up rice paddy, so they can starve to death? Also, it's not like people didn't die building the many Hydroelectric dams for the United Saviours of America. Or all the sky scrapers, or all of out railroads. What do you call all the cole mine "accidents" and other industrial accidents that happen in the USA. Why do you think executives, and middle managers in the USA commit suicide too. It's not ONLY China, it's all over, including here!
Yes, our "leaders" think only short term. Of course the voters that elect them, and the corporations that pay for their elections also think only short term because few people seem capable of thinking beyond when they retire, or the next election etc.
This is why I am thoroughly convinced that we will NOT ever deal with climate change even if we get everyone on earth to agree that its happening and we are the cause. No one will want to make the sacrifices necessary, they will all want someone else to make those sacrifices.
This is only made worse by the fact that most of our policy decisions are being made by corporations (through their lobbyists), and as I said above there are no morals in an effective corporation.
The desire for the all-holy Profit will eventually kill most of us unless something changes rather dramatically.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
This over hyped company and its over rated products are an insignificant laughingstock to the other 90% of the world's computer users. Apple is to the majority what the Occupy thugs are to math: a ban of neo-communist cranks being led by the 2%.
The fact that the Butchers of Tiananmen want Apple devices to replace PC technology isn't a testament to the company. It's a glaring example of a totalitarian government like China wanting Apple's dumbed-down and highly restrictive devices to further control all flow of media and information its people are allowed to have.
Any conflict between Apple and China = Godzilla versus Rodan. Let them both push each other off the cliff and be out of our misery. Also include in this purge: all of Apple's creepy, fanatical iCultists worshipping at the altar of Steve Jobs, and the loudmouth Progressive (Marxist) goons who hate America and who sympathize with tyrannical regimes.