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Ask Slashdot: Tech Manufacturers With Better Labor Practices?
First time accepted submitter srs5694 writes "In light of the recent flood of stories about abysmal labor practices at Foxconn and other Chinese factories that produce most of the tech products we consume, the question arises: Who makes motherboards, plug-in cards, cell phones, and other devices WITHOUT relying on labor practices that are just one rung above slave labor? If I want to buy a new tech gadget, from whom can I buy it without ethical qualms?"
Probably no one these days. Either components, or parts are made in china in some form or another. Even down to the base layer PCB. Though it's getting even worse than that, China is getting too "expensive" to operate in. And they're moving out to other 3rd world countries.
Om, nomnomnom...
we offer a full line of consumer and professional electronics, athletic apparel, and soy products, all officially certified by the retchdog institute for unicorns and sunshine to be completely free of whatever it is you find objectionable. our modest markup of 1200% is necessary to ensure that only the finest managers, assistant managers, and assistants to assistant managers are hired from a competitive field of my friends and extended family.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
There's no such thing. Corporations aren't in the business of creating products in an ethical manner. They're in the business of making money by using the cheapest parts and labor possible.. If they could employ slaves, and get away with it, they would.
From open-source hardware communities?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
This is about as useful as asking who doesn't rely on semi-slave labor practices during the industrialization phase of the UK or US (no vacations, Pinkerton detective agency, strikebreaking, pittance wages, etc.).
Look, this phase is messy, but necessary.
They can't just start out with a "services" economy all styling each others' hair.
They have to go through this phase, and it's certainly a step up from the near-starvation they had in the countryside. Then wages go up, slowly, but surely. Before you know it, Chinese will be asking about organic certification before they deign to go to work for a company.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I work in China. It is worth noting that some of the conditions at Foxconn, while terrible by Western standards, are normal here.
A Chinese friend worked as a waitress. She thought $400 a month (in a culture where there are no tips) was excellent money. Most meals and a bunk in a shared apartment provided. No heat, at a latitude where frost is moderately common.
In at 9 am to do cleaning, work until after lunch, sleep in the afternoon, start again at 4:30 and work until closing which was usually about 11 but if customers wanted to stay later, some waitresses would have to stay until 2 or 3. No extra money for that. She got two days a month off, and thought that was generous, but a "day off" meant coming in at 4:30 instead of in the morning.
This is a topic that goes around on ./ every now and then.
When all the manufacturing etc is done by robots - surely the entire capitalist system will crash. The inherent nature of capitalism is to have a triangle - the wide base with people doing low paid jobs, the people who go to university and get a good education to get well paid jobs in the middle, and the 1%ers at the top.
If you start messing with that triangle, won't the whole thing collapse?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting there's anything inherently wrong with this system (buggy whip manufacturers etc) - but ...?
That doesn't excuse it. If slavery is required to make cell phones at a reasonable price then we'll have to do without.
"I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process." -- Benjamin Harrison 23rd President
Sorry, corporate overlord here. Slaves require room, board, clothes, etc. provided for them. It doesn't come free. It's much much better now underpaying non-slaves, as people line up to replace them.
Keep complaining though, but make sure not to change your lifestyle at all. Because that works.
I have this hookup in Napa Valley which supplies me with free-range electronics. It comes from a commune where they manufacture phones and laptops using sustainable, cruelty-free paleo techniques. Their R&D division is an ayuhuasca hut.
Except that alternative is worse for the workers, who already have the option of not working at those factories and, funnily enough, they don't actually prefer it.
Your solution helps your moral guilty at their expense. For shame.
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html
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"Fair labor practices are not something that takes care of itself via an Invisible Hand, be it that of Capitalism or of God."
Yes, actually, they do improve as a result of market conditions (the so-called invisible hand), when employers have to compete for workers in the marketplace. When there is a glut of labor applying for a few factory jobs, then yes, wages will be low and conditions will be poor. But then more manufacturers will build factories to take advantage of that cheap labor and the supply/demand situation will shift in favor of the workers.
That is exactly what the "invisible hand" is about.
there are ways to produce goods without any of these things. the most productive nation on earth in the 20th century was the united states
And it got that way by being the United States in the 19th century. Crack a history book.
You don't need unlimited time or money, you need to be well organized, know your needs precisely and be willing to learn and work hard.
I run a small artisan bakery, and I not only build the shop from scratch, but I have also made all the equipment I need myself - including mixers, a rather hi-tech production line including a kneeder, dough laminator, rather complex dough proofer, shaper with corresponding loaders. I myself manage to produce about 500-600 items for about half a day, most of it long-rise bread. My ovens even report stuff on Twitter for my customers.
Not only is everything DIY (including the cast aluminium boxes for the electronics), it is also cheaper than any alternative with similar capabilities and capacity I've been able to source. And it was all made in my backyard, with hand tools from recycled materials over a year, including the learning. I had never touched a shovel, a saw, a router, a milling machine or a soldering iron before that.
If you want, you can do it, the problem is everyone wants to be a manager, and nobody wants to do the hard work.
There's no such thing. Corporations aren't in the business of creating products in an ethical manner. They're in the business of making money by using the cheapest parts and labor possible.
Emphasize "possible". "Possible" includes behavior acceptable to consumers.
Sweat shops and outsourcing are driven by consumer preferences. Namely the consumer's preference for the absolute lowest price regardless of all other considerations. It is a classic tragedy of the commons situation.
Corporate greed does *not* inevitably lead to sweat shops and outsourcing. Of primary importance to corporations are sales, and sales are determined by consumers. Outsourcing and sweat shops are only possible if there is consumer indifference, if employing such methods will offend customers and result in lost sales then the "greed" motivation says do not employ such methods.
Corporate greed actually inevitably leads to satisfying consume demands at the lowest possible cost *and* consistent with consumer expectations. Consumers are actually in control of the methods employed by corporations.
I've replied to it before on slashdot, but no, that's a fallacy.
There isn't some magic limited quality of labor that needs to be done, and once we replace all of that with robots, there'll be no work left for people to do any more. That fallacy has existed for hundreds of years. It never quite seems to happen, yet people persist with the belief.
Couple hundred years ago, it was cotton weaving - see, hundreds of thousands of people used to work weaving cotton, then machines got invented that could perform the job much more efficiently. Surely this would result in there not being enough work for all those people! oh no!
Well, in a very short timeframe that can happen, but over the long run it just doesn't work out that way. Why? We just keep inventing more work to do. There's no objective definition of 'work'. It's whatever you can get paid to do. Back in the age of manual cotton weaving, for instance, almost no-one made a living in the 'creative industries', which barely existed. Nowadays, tens of thousands of people make a good wage producing utterly unnecessary and frivolous TV shows. The key point is _there's a direct link between the two things_. Automate things that at present take hundreds of thousands of humans to do, and those hundreds of thousands of humans won't - over the long run - starve to death. We'll invent new stuff for them to do. That 'stuff' is frequently frivolous and entirely unnecessary - like television, or advertising, or professional sports, or pet grooming, or personal shopping...the reason all those ridiculous 'jobs' exist is _precisely_ because we've got so good at making the really essential tasks - farming, construction, health care, clothes manufacture, resource extraction, power generation etc - happen very efficiently that, once all of the above tasks are done for everyone in a reasonably developed country, there's still a *massive* potential labor surplus. Via the magic of the free market economy, instead of rationing all the essential labor and the results of that labor out equally so everyone works 5 hours a week and we all live a comfortable life by the standards of 1850, we instead invented a bewildering array of utterly unnecessary 'work' so most people can continue to 'work' 40 hours a week, and be rewarded with the opportunity to buy a crystal-encrufted cellphone, buy a shirt for their dog, and watch 2.5 Men on an HDTV. Ain't humanity great?
This process can continue more or less indefinitely if we want it to. I see no particular limit to human ingenuity in inventing ridiculous new spheres of activity.
apparently it's not so much the minimal labor wages that make China attractive to manufacturing, but the supply of trained engineers to manage the operation. Apple alone needs hundreds of engineers to supervise the thousands of workers.
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/22/why-apples-products-are-designed-in-california-but-assembled/
Can confirm that. A Nokia factory closed this month in Hungary. They're moving it to Asia too.
NSFW for language
http://www.oglaf.com/relief/