Labor Activist: Apple May Be Terrible, But All Others Are Worse

CheerfulMacFanboy writes "Labor Activist Li Qiang wants you to know that the iPhone 4 in his pocket is not an endorsement of Apple's policies, just an acknowledgment that the company is doing a better job of monitoring factory conditions than its peers. The founder of leading advocacy group China Labor Watch (CLW) told us that, though the Cupertino company does more-thorough inspections than competitors, it is responsible for poor working conditions at its suppliers' factories and needs to invest some of its record-breaking profits in improving them. 'Although I know that the iPhone 4 is made at sweat shop factories in China, I still think that this is the only choice, because Apple is actually one of the best. Actually before I made a decision, I compared Apple with other cell phone companies, such as Nokia,' he said through a translator. 'And the conditions in those factories are worse than the ones of Apple.'"

Comments

Interesting headline change

[bonch]

Interesting how the original headline reads "Apple Best at Auditing Factories, Still Not Doing Enough" while Slashdot's reads "Apple May Be Terrible, But All Others Are Worse". From best to terrible in the flash of a Slashdot submission.

I don't get why Apple is always the one intimately associated with Foxconn when, as the largest electronics manufacturer in the world, Foxconn builds products for Dell, HP, Sony, Motorola, Nintendo, Microsoft, and so on. That Apple is the most proactive about labor policies isn't a surprise given the company's left-wing political leanings. You can always say someone should be doing more, but one can't help but wonder at what point it becomes the responsibility of the native government to make its citizen's lives better rather than the companies in another country sending the build orders. If Apple and other companies did what Li Qiang suggests, they'd essentially be babysitting the entire world's industrial labor, and that's just an impossible slippery slope. However, the storyline of a glossy, profitable American company using "slave labor" is just too juicy a narrative for the mainstream media to pass up.

Re:Interesting headline change

[DogDude]

"Trying to police the whole world" is vastly different from making sure that you have an ethical supply chain. Hell, Americans have, in the last two decades, stopped complaining that these people, in the past, would've been direct Apple employees. Now, not only are they not employees, but they're treated like dogs. (Actually, I treat my dog better). There is no excuse for Apple and other companies to allow this kind of stuff to happen. It's not a secret, and there's plenty that they could do about it, if they wanted to.

Re:Interesting headline change

[poetmatt]

The whole point is this:

Saying "others are worse, focus on them" when apple serves as the standard for quality over there (if they're saying they do the best), means that if apple is doing this badly, they should be setting the example for doing better. Everyone, including the "worst" should be raising bar. Just because others may be worse is not in any way, an excuse for apple.

How fucking hard is this to understand?

Re:Interesting headline change

[dangitman]

More pressure should be placed on the Chinese government, since it is ultimately their responsibility to improve the lives of their citizens.

While it's true that the Chinese government needs to take its share of responsibility, don't the citizens of China also have responsibility in improving their lives?

Imagine if the same were said about America. The American government should be responsible for improving the lives of citizens? In "the land of the free," shouldn't that responsibility lie in the hands of the citizens themselves, while government should just get out of the way?

I'm pretty sure there would be an outcry about how the government shouldn't be managing people's lives.

Re:Interesting headline change

[DogDude]

Imagine if the same were said about America. The American government should be responsible for improving the lives of citizens? In "the land of the free," shouldn't that responsibility lie in the hands of the citizens themselves, while government should just get out of the way?

Yeah, land of the free, blah blah blah. The world is not a magical Ayn Randian fantasy land. People and companies CANNOT be trusted to act ethically, which is why we have basic labor laws. I know it's over used, but Somalia is a great example of the government "getting out of the way".

Re:Interesting headline change

[Caerdwyn]

I think I read it cost about $100 to manufacture one of these phones,

No, it costs a lot more than that to make an iPhone. But what does the EE Times know, right? And that's just the cost of the physical components. Good thing for your argument that R&D, shipping, marketing, software, and all that stuff that isn't something you physically hold in your hand are free, right?

Re:Interesting headline change

[Sancho]

China takes the opposite approach--criminalizing workers forming or joining a union.

But as DogDude says, absent regulation, companies and people don't tend to act ethically. Hell, nearly every regulation on the books is the result of a real problem. Look at labor in the industrial revolution. That's how companies act when there is no regulation.

Re:Interesting headline change

[Kohath]

Slashdot is becoming pretty cartoonish.

Becoming? The sad thing is that Slashdot's increasing cartoonishness seems to be a reflection of a large subset of the readers.

The idea seems to be that Apple is cheating all those workers out of the perfect utopian lives they'd have if only Apple loved them.

Re:Interesting headline change

[rjstanford]

Its also worth noting that when new Foxconn positions become available for Apple manufacturing, thousands of people appear and queue for the job opportunity. The suicide rates and overall health risks among Apple/Foxconn employees are notably better than those of local non-Apple/Foxconn employees. Apple can and should still do more, but if you treat real efforts to improve with nothing but scorn, companies will just stop making efforts to improve.

Re:Interesting headline change

[BasilBrush]

Neither the article, nor comments here are excusing Apple, nor suggesting they don't need to improve.

They are just correcting the hysterics of the media and of the slashdot haters, which have been implying Apple is the big offender. It's the very opposite of the truth.

Wow, that's what passes for best these days

[elrous0]

We've become so used to the idea that ALL consumer electronics are made in sweatshops that we're down to comparing whose sweatshop is the *least* nightmarish? That's more than a little sad, no?

Wouldn't it be nice to have just one consumer electronics manufacturer that made all their stuff in the first-world and paid their workers decent wages? It might be nice to have at least one TV, DVD player and cellphone option that I didn't have to feel guilty about. I'm getting a little sick of thinking of how many third-world people had to be exploited just so I could get a 52" LCD for $1,500 instead of $1,700. I mean saving the $200 is nice, admittedly, but not at the expense of dumping mercury into some Chinese town's river water, or working some 12-year-old for 16 hour days.

Couldn't countries at least require that imported goods be manufactured at their own minimum wage?

Re:Wow, that's what passes for best these days

[Sir_Sri]

The short answer is no to both. You couldn't actually manufacture most of the components for electronic equipment in the civilized world any more, because the whole supply chains are in china, and your price would skyrocket because the difference in labour costs is a factor of 20 or so. Sure, when you talk about foxconn assembly that's a small portion of the total cost of an iPhone, but if you talk about every component doing that, it would be a nightmare.

Second of all, the point of free trade is to drive costs up in other countries, that necessarily means they will have a competitive advantage for a while, but in the long run they will be a market. Does anyone think anyone making 50 cents an hour as a labourer in the 3rd world will ever buy a 500 dollar phone? Right, they can't. Ever. They're lucky to have clean drinking water. So if you ever want to sell them cars, computers, phones, airplanes or whatever they need to earn more money.

What will have to happen is that labourers in china will stop working for a pittance and start demanding a lot more money, that might mean mass strikes or it might mean an honest effort to pay people more money. That's a long process though. But, it's what happened in Japan, Italy, Taiwan, Korea, to a lesser extent Germany and a few 'eastern bloc' countries, and I'm only talking about since the end of WW2. The problem is that right now at least in china, if a million workers go on strike there are a million more to replace them, and no union protection for the ones on strike. Oh and because they went on strike no one else will give them jobs ever either.

You may think it's bad to work a 12 year old kid for 16 hours a day. but 30 years ago he would never have gone to school, and been working 16 hours a day on a farm from the time he was able to contribute, and he might have still starved. At least in the factory there is a chance of his lifestyle improving and he probably won't starve. That doesn't make it good, or right, but the sad reality is that progress requires people shift from the fields to factories, and it's up to them and their country to demand they get treated fairly. We can complain all we want to china, but they have us by the balls, and both parties know it. If we demand they do anything they don't like, they claw back on something we need (be it rare earths or just 'lose' export licences for things people want). And in general in china they have been working very hard at least in the last 30 years to educate their youth, and to get them prepared to be modern knowledge workers etc. They train more engineers than in the US, (about the same per capita), and most of the advanced degrees in anything useful in the 'west' are going to foreigners, probably about a third of which are chinese. There's probably a lost generation or two there, of people who are going to be exploited because they have no education, no skills and no way to get those things. But a huge portion of chinese kids growing up today will grow up into education and work very much like we have in the west, if not exactly like in the west because they're hiring western teachers to teach western curriculum's. Progress isn't perfect, and it would be nice to do better, but on the scale of things china is doing a half decent job. Which is sort of the same commentary in the article about apple. It could be better, but it could be worse too. And they're doing all of those things because we're paying them 4 dollars a day to make a tv, rather than paying them nothing as subsistence farmers, or worse, what we actually did to china, which was drugging them up on opium for most of a century.

Re:Because Apple users are high-fashion snots?

[thestudio_bob]

Apple users tend to think of themselves as the types who would never wear animal furs. Apple users are ever-so-enlightened, humanitarian, environmentally aware, and ever-so-tasteful.

I'm not sure if you've noticed or not, but there's a hell-of-a-lot of people using Apple products nowadays. My hunting, fishing, drinking, non-recycling and high school educated family members may take offense to your statement.

Re:Even Korean brands?

[Asic Eng]

Samsung manufactures in China and in Korea, too. You can get a "Made in Korea" phone from Samsung. However given the guy is a Chinese Labor activist, he probably wants conditions to become better in China, not to move production outside of China.