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Ask Slashdot: Tech Manufacturers With Better Labor Practices?

Posted by samzenpus on from the best-of-the-worst dept.

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?"

15 of 375 comments (clear)

  1. Really? by Mashiki · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...
    1. Re:Really? by Mashiki · · Score: 5, Informative

      Quite true. In fact, most people don't know that Europe started to mass-export their industry to North America in early 1800's, and literally built their society on the backs of children here. And they did so right up until the 1930's give or take a little bit. Though if you look further back, companies were exporting their industry as soon as people started landing here and started setting up shop. Hell, England was buying wagon wheels made in Canada, made by children, paid by levy in 1750.

      Though let's not forget, it was this flagrant abuse that forced us. To say enough was enough, and ensure there were working standards, end child slaveshops and all the rest too. Though it went on for a long time before anything changed.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
    2. Re:Really? by actionbastard · · Score: 5, Informative

      It goes a lot deeper than just the components. It goes down to the minerals and metals that make up those components:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan#Ethics_of_Coltan_mining_in_the_Democratic_Republic_of_Congo

      http://sitemaker.umich.edu/section002group3/coltan_mining_in_democratic_republic_of_the_congo

      Apple gets the spotlight thrown on it because of its popular following. But every company that makes anything electronic or that contains electronic components is just as culpable.

      --
      Sig this!
    3. Re:Really? by Sir_Sri · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So wait, you'd rather people in china go back to being subsistence farmers with a 44 year life expectancy (that was by the way, 1960), with no education, so you can feel good about giving extra money to your neighbour who's going to go out and spend more on lunch than someone in china would have made in a week? That's the argument against what is happening in china today.

      China is in transition. There is a huge swath of people, basically 3 or 4 lost generations of people, and another 1 or 2 in the pipeline who are the transition from destitute subsistence farmers who literally never had anything, to a society of people who have little things like antibiotics, and electricity. Unfortunately, they're lost. They're not savable by any laws rules, treaties or procedures. Nothing. And there are hundreds of millions of them, which makes them worth next to nothing. A million workers at foxconn go on strike? No problem, shut down the facility and move somewhere else, and hire a million others, or let foxconn go out of business and someone else will emerge. Because they have generations of people who have nothing else they can do but repetitive manual labour. Chinas literacy rate in 1950 was 20% (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/news/12iht-rchina.t.html?pagewanted=all) Today it's still only about 88%.

      Believe it or not, all these exploited workers in china are living the great dream. That their children and childrens children won't have to go through this. But they are condemned to lives of either being peasant farmers who could never read, write or get any actual health care, or being underpaid overworked factory workers. The only thing we can do for them is give them jobs, and we can only give them money based on the fact that they're basically doing the work of robots.

      Remember, there are still 2.7 billion people living on less than 2 dollars a day, and 1.1 billion on less than a dollar (worldwide). http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/00282/over_world.htm . That's slightly out of date, but it conveys the point. Foxconn's wages are about 300 dollars a month, or about 10 dollars a day (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/business/global/08wages.html). Comparatively, people working at foxconn at 10 dollars a day, are doing *extremely* well compared to the lives they would have had 40 years earlier.

      In the west we don't really think about the cost of basic things. Workers at foxconn have access to a diverse diet, which, by the way, is actually pretty tough to get on 2 dollars a day. They have generally clean water, again, not something they would have had as starving peasants. Oh, and they aren't starving. They, and their children will be able to read and write. They have electricity, which again, is a pretty radical concept.

      The only way billions of *people* in the world are going to get out of illiterate starving and dying to preventable diseases, is if we give them jobs, preferably for honest work. That might be making your shoes, and that might be snapping together an iPod. But you can't just go and pay someone in china 10 dollars and hour for a job someone else will do for 2, it's has devastating cascading effect through society, and frankly, for 10 dollars an hour, it would be cheaper to pay a robot than a foxconn worker. They're better to get the 2 dollars an hour or 1.25 or whatever it is, than to get nothing. Because without money they can't build anything to improve their society with, which is why they (along with a lot of other places) are so far behind, and that china has realized this is why they're growing at a break neck rate and fixing it.

      As a grad student, I make about 20k a year (I'm sort of half game developer half grad student, but one is part of the other). I am, by canadian measures barely above the poverty line once you take out my tuition. That's still more money in 1 year that about half the people in the world will make in their lifetimes.

      Yes, china has unfair currency practices which (significantly) undervalue their currency, and

    4. Re:Really? by geogob · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Is it really that misguided? I wanted to mod you down, but on second thought your comment really is insightful... I just don't agree with it.

      If it really bothers the poster that much, simply go without the toy.

      What kind of logic is that? That goes in the same bucket as "If you don't like how it is, make it yourself"... It's also like saying if you are bothered by how animals are handled by *some* producers, why don't you become vegetarian.
      With food, just like with electronics devices, there are ways to consume while reducing your negative footprint. With food, it gets always easier to do so - no so much with electronics.

      ...simply go without the toy.

      Toys, really? I don't know how you live or what you do for a living, but there is no way I could work or live in 2012 without consuming electronic products.

      But it the end, I think what will happen here is the same thing as with what happens when people try to consume animals products only coming from animals treated in the best conditions... most are not ready to pay the price.

    5. Re:Really? by Rockoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No matter how many times you call it exploitation, that doesn't make it so. These people want a better life, which is why they work in factories. Just like Americans did. Just like the English did. Just like the Germans did. Just like the French did. Just like the Japanese did. Just like the Taiwanese did. Just like the Australians did. Just like the Canadians did.

      You are filthy rich in comparison to the rest of the world, but you are so spoiled that you don't even know it. The Chinese people cannot have your life until their country is comparatively rich. Their country cannot become comparatively rich until the majority of the population is involved in wealth creation. Thats a straight up fact and no matter how many times you claim bullshit like "exploitation", you cannot change the facts.

      Yes, we all understand that you feel so strongly for the plight of others that you feel the need to say something, *anything*, as some sort of make-you-feel-good-inside moral protest. Your problem is that your thinking is so shallow that all you are doing is appealing to emotion. There is no logic in your protest. There are no facts in your protest. Its just a protest for protests sake, and for that you should be ashamed of yourself. How shallow, petty, and spoiled you are.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
  2. me! by retchdog · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  3. No such thing as ethical corporations by jehan60188 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:No such thing as ethical corporations by zedrdave · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Valid assumption, wrong conclusion.

      Corporations are in the business of making money... and they have long realised one way of doing that was betting on upper-middle-class consumer guilt to pay a premium in exchange for some sort of vaguely-enforced "ethical business" seal-of-approval. It's a niche market, but a market nonetheless.

      Just look at Whole Foods' CEO: not exactly the hippy-dippy type, just a guy who realised there was a market to tap, and tap he did. Call it cynical (it definitely is), but some corporations will behave ethically, just as long as they can make a profit out of it.

  4. Seriously? by Compaqt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  5. General Chinese labor conditions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:It's all about the money. by Stormthirst · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ...?

  7. No slaves please. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:DIY/Relativity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:It's all about the money. by AdamWill · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.