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Foxconn Hires Top Spinners To Defend Its Image
An anonymous reader writes "Foxconn is insisting that it has done no wrong. But it has hired Burson-Marsteller to deal with the press failout from recent child labour allegations. Burson-Masteller is a PR heavy hitter called in when outfits have big image problems. It handled Tylenol poisonings, and, according to Corporate Watch, the Bhopal disaster, and Three Mile Island. It represented the private military group Blackwater after Baghdad allegations. Its clients have included the Argentinian military junta led by General Jorge Videla and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and Saudi Arabia after it was pointed out that most of the September 11 attackers were from that country."
Foxconn has done plenty of wrong - consulting with this(or any) PR agency only affirms it. There's only one option that should be on the table - confess the truth no matter how bad it is, correct the wrongdoings of slave labor and mistreatment of their workers, and then make sure it never happens again.
It's kind of hard to justify your actions when people catch you doing not-so-good-stuff (to say it lightly) and then catch your lies as well. That, and it's even harder to do it when people keep on catching you do it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
And does this PR agency charge 35 cents per hour and work 12 hour shifts 6 days a week?
Doonesbury ran a series of storylines on a firm like that a year or so ago.
Blaming the Saudis directly for 911 is stretching things slightly: Saudi Arabia is run by religous conservatives mired in the middle ages, the people who carried out the 911 attacks considered the Saudi rulers to be hypocritical liberals. They were incandescent with rage at the Saudi rulers allowing armed infidels onto their sacred soil during the first Gulf War and its aftermath.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Anyway, Foxconn is telling us that it has strict recruitment regulations to ensure full compliance with worker age regulations and laws.
That presumes that the records are accurate and that nobody falsifies them - including the Chinese government.
"We have sufficient access to workers who are of legal age and there is no incentive for us to break our own strict policies and Chinese law on the matter. Let us be very clear, Foxconn does not employ, in any capacity, any underage workers," the spokesperson said.
When you have to make a lot of product in a short amount of time, there is huge incentive to break your policies. Never mind that Chinese law only gets enforced if you're from the wrong family or alignment of families.
"It is a clear sign that SACOM is not interested in seeing actions that bring real benefit to workers in China. As such, they do a disservice to those companies who do provide competitive wages and benefits," Foxconn said.
SACOM is interested in bringing benefit to workers in China, just that they would rather see workers have some freedom - especially if it means openly speaking out against the multinationals and government officials that only want a pliant workforce.
In a sideways swipe to SACOM, Foxconn is working with "credible outside organisations such as the Fair Labor Association" to "ensure that our over a million employees in China have a safe and positive working environment and compensation and benefits that are competitive to everyone else."
Foxconn's definition of credible is "as long as they say things we like".
Foxconn top brass Terry Gou has been quoted as saying: "Hungry people have especially clear minds".
If his definition means willing to comply just for the meager rations given, even if one sees unspeakable acts.
Terry Gou also allegedly said, speaking at a zoo in Taipei: "I have a headache how to manage one million animals."
He sure has a very low opinion of the people that work for Foxconn if that's so good of a place.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There can't be many PR companies which have had clients like the Argentinian military junta led by General Jorge Videla who helped 35,000 people to disappear. Burson-Marsteller looked after the image of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and Saudi Arabia after it was pointed out that most of the September 11 attackers were from that country.
With clients like these, Burson Marsteller might as well be a propaganda firm given how many despotic countries outside the US are on the list.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
What if they built them because of westerners whining about exploited people who have suicide as the only way out, not because there was a problem per se?
Does anybody know what was the reason people commited suicide there? There are hundreds of thousands of people working there in factories, were the suicides all work related or maybe some/most were a result of broken heart or bullying in their out-of-work social circles or any other thing people commit suicides because of?
Besides, can't people simply walk away instead of killing themselves?
Saudi Arabia is run by religous conservatives
No, Saudi Arabia is run by clever, worldly people whose preferred tool for oppression is religious conservatism. If you believe that the Saudi Arabia is ruled by the religious, the USA by bastions of freedom and USSR was controlled selfless communists then the PR has worked on you too.
Religion is a symptom, not a cause.
If you screwed your employees or raped the environment or society and walked away with millions or billions in profits, in what way have you failed?
Remember, corporations have no morals. They cannot have morals by definition. Their only goal and measure of success is profit. If did some bad things and hired a PR company afterwards and still profits are up, you haven't failed.
--Coder
The problem is that Foxconn had to bring in a PR firm known for whitewashing despots.
Their regular PR agency, known as the PRC's propaganda arm, just wasn't cutting it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The situation is a bit more complex than that. Saudi Arabia is run by the House of Saud, a monarchistic dictatorship, who have backed the dictators in the Arab Spring including the sending of troops and tanks to Bahrain to brutally suppress protests there. They are also accused of assassinating the leaders of their own protests. And some of the upper parts of the monarchy, and parts of Saudi Intelligence, are accused of backing terrorism, see The Kingdom and the Towers:
In support of his claim that Saudi Arabia supported terrorism, Khilewi spoke of an episode relevant to the first, 1993, attempt to bring down the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. “A Saudi citizen carrying a Saudi diplomatic passport,” he said, “gave money to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the World Trade Center bombing,” when the al-Qaeda terrorist was in the Philippines. The Saudi relationship with Yousef, the defector claimed, “is secret and goes through Saudi intelligence.”
When Khalifa returned to Saudi Arabia, in 1995—following detention in the United States and subsequent acquittal on terrorism charges in Jordan—he was, according to C.I.A. bin Laden chief Michael Scheuer, met by a limousine and a welcome home from “a high-ranking official.” A Philippine newspaper would suggest that the official had been Prince Sultan, then a deputy prime minister and minister of defense and aviation, today the heir to the Saudi throne.
In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 Prince Turki, chief of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department (G.I.D.), sealed a deal under which bin Laden agreed not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban, not demand bin Laden’s extradition, and not bring pressure to close down al-Qaeda training camps. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden.
Quitting presumes that alternatives exist and that the government wouldn't find some charge to hold them up on if they quit at the wrong time.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Because then they wouldn't have control over the workers.
Why do you need an expensive PR firm when you already have David Pogue working for you?
It's not about them.
mistreatment of workers is the entire purpose of outsourcing manufacturing to China in the first place. if you make Foxconn stop abusing people, you essentially put it out of business, because now the playing field is leveled so that other countries that are not brutal dictatorships will have a chance to enter manufacturing again.
the destruction of unions and the lowering of wages and the destruction of environmmental regulations was the very purposes of existence of companies like Foxconn, and their American enablers. you seem to think these people are just going to say 'oh woops sorry' and somehow reverse the last 30 years of history, including the huge profits they made for private equity firms, investment banks like Goldman Sachs, and hedge funds.
I'll get modded flamebait for this but it's true. Everyone I know does not give a single f-ck about upgrading for the sake of having the newest, latest, greatest whatever gadget is coming out. Apples 'record sales' are largely symptomatic of a several much bigger problems. Greed, envy, waste, and more. 37 million iphones? with sales up 128% from last year. 15.4 million ipads - also doubled from last year. Apple isnt the only offender but they are tge biggest.
* http://allthingsd.com/20120124/apples-record-iphone-and-ipad-sales-beat-expectations/
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Money and petty power struggles mired in deeply seeded inertia-laden cultural institutions that have a surprising influence on the first two and can at best only be manipulated and guided rather than completely deconstructed.
How is this an eyebrow raising story? Is Tylenol somehow like Bohpol? Tylenol was a corporation which was a victim of an attack on its brand and business practice, and hired a PR firm and made changes to bottle caps which are taught as the textbook business response to a press emergency. Having been to Foxconn / Han Hai and worked with people from there, and having read the hysterical descriptions of their operations in the USA press, I think they deserve credit for A) having already identified a scaleability problem (plan to put in robot labor), B) having raised the salaries significantly within weeks of the bad press, and now C) hiring a professional western PR firm to help them in a dilemma in western PR.
I'm not excusing everything that has happened in the course of Han Hoi Precision's growth curve, but they seem to be handling the industrial revolution reform at a pace in years rather than decades. Sure some of it is reaction to criticism, but rapid response is not the same as "cover up"! Some commenters seem to have no default setting between fanboy/troll, and any story with Foxconn in a headline becomes 5-Mod v. 0-Mod debate, more like American politics than indication that anyone is in any way concerned about China's development, pollution, or unemployment balance.
Gently reply
Their regular PR agency, known as the PRC's propaganda arm, just wasn't cutting it.
Let's face it, the PRC is shitty at propaganda. Nobody believes anything they say. They're pretty good at strong-arming, which is why people believe anything they want them to believe, but it's not on the strength of their words, but on the strength of their strength.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What I find most irritating is the sancitmonious attitude of some Apple users who think their choice of table/phone is superior in more than technology.
What I find most irritating is the attitude of Apple users who think their hardware is superior in anything other than number printed on the price tag.
If you hire a guy like this one, then you have more than a little bit of shit up your sleeves.
Quote from the Foxconn CEO: “Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”
So - my first thought was, "it couldn't have been that bad, I'm sure there was some confusion in the translations".
And then he LITERALLY invited the director to the Taipei Zoo to "share his experience with the audience on how to manage different animals according to their individual temperaments."
So yes, Foxconn may really be as bad as they seem.
inertia-laden cultural institutions
Why do you insist on using a euphemism (which barely euphemises, btw) instead of just saying "religion?"
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Suicide rate at Foxconn: 1.8 per million workers, suicide rate in the United States (IIRC) 3+ per million workers, maybe Americans should try and get Foxconn jobs instead... :)