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Ask Slashdot: Any Smart Phones Made Under Worker-Friendly Conditions?
New submitter unimacs writes "So Apple has been under fire recently for the conditions at the factories of their Chinese suppliers. I listened to 'This American Life's' recent retraction of the Michael Daisey piece they did a while back. Great radio for those of you who haven't heard it — rarely has dead air been used to such effect. Anyway, while his work has been discredited, Michael Daisey wasn't inaccurate in his claims that working conditions are poor in iPhone and iPad factories. Given that, are there any smart phone manufacturers whose phones are made under better conditions?"
I don't mean to be obtuse, but worker friendly means something entirely different in the US versus China. I would go as far as saying there are a enough differences between Europe and the US that settling on the terms is difficult.
Pay? Hours? Benefits? Shift?
Can we throw in the type of job and modify those parameters?
To be frank the forty hour work week is an aberration. It certainly sounds great, I haven't had one in a dozen years. For some jobs it might make sense. Yet does it have to be across five days a week or can it be done in four or seven?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Part of the issue is that consumers may want to do the right thing but have no information as to which is the least of all evils. A device/company/plant database that can be checked before buying an electronic device would help solve that particular issue.
The idea is not to tell the consumer which way to go. But instead to simply present all the facts and opinions.
Personally, I would spend a $50 premium over other phones if I knew I were rewarding fair manufacturing practices.
It may be just me, but if one part of an article is retracted due to false statements or intentional innacuracies, with apologies from the publisher on releasing the story into the wild, I'm not going to base an opinion on ANY OTHER PART of the article or any other material sourced by that author. I'll have an opinion, but I'll base it on other sources.
Listen, Apple's no angel, and neither is anyone else. I think we can all agree on that.
But Apple is the company making the biggest noticeable difference in this space. Whether that's out of the goodness of their hearts (unlikely) or the fact that the know they're under greater scrutiny because they're the big fish in this pond (considerably more likely), it does mean that the workers in the Apple foxconn factories are the ones that are likely to see the benefits of Apple's largess first.
Almost universally, however, workers at these factories feel they're better off than they would have been if they'd stayed in rural China. It IS a choice they make to work there; they line up to apply for jobs.
If that remains unconvincing to you--which is fair--write your political representatives and get them to try and convince the Chinese government to pass better worker protection laws and enforce them. Ultimately, it shouldn't be up to Apple, Samsung, Google or the consumers to protect the people of China.
AFAIK they are made in Mexico and/or Canada
As always mixture of foreign and domestic parts.
As a side note: Depending on how low level you want to go (eg: all the individual parts) you will never find a phone that is made under worker friendly conditions unless you mine the raw materials yourself and go from there. Of course this is NOT realistic!
K Man
I find it a crazy FWP that people are so fixated on workers rights in countries where the work they are getting in factories are much better than the alternative. Yet we ignore the plight of minimum wage workers in North America. In major metropolitan areas where housing is unaffordable and public transit is sadly there, why don't we fix things for our own before aiding those who haven't really ask you for your opinion?
Japanese manufacturers like Sharp are probably your best bet as they do have factories in Japan. Of course many of the components will have been made in China, but that is about the best you can hope for. Unfortunately I don't think Sharp do any phones outside of Japan.
Maybe LG or Samsung. I know they use Chinese factories for some manufacture, but they do have some assembly done in South Korea. That is about the best you can hope for.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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Not only are the physical devices made under worker-unfriendly conditions, the software for the devices is typically built by those under nearly identical poor working conditions. The storefronts, OLTP backends, charging gateways, etc, etc, etc. The entire industry is controlled by those who wish to milk every possible cent out of their customer bases, and the backends are usually a poorly written hodgepodge of technologies with few experienced workers providing oversight. It's amazing anything works at all.
Posting as AC so I don't get fired from my 120h/week job.... In the US!
A converse example is the car industry, where automation is unavoidable because the assemblies are too heavy to be easily manipulated by people. The result is that cars get made in the USA, Europe and Japan.
I suspect that whoever cited $1400 to make an iPad in the US was either manufacturing-illiterate or had a financial incentive to misrepresent the facts. I would be surprised if assembly in the US added more than $25 to the cost, and unsurprised to find it was more like $5 when everything was taken into account.
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why would it matter? All of the components are coming from the same places likely, whether 1% of the cost of the device in final assembly and packaging is done in one location or another doesn't really change that the CPU is probably made in one of a handful of foundaries in the world, same with the mobo, hard drive etc.
Exactly. Do-gooders who would shut down child labor in dirt-poor countries are applying first world solutions to third world problems. The alternative to kids in shoe factories is not kids in school; it is kids hustling the streets or kids stuck on the family farm, which probably doesn't actually belong to the family in the first place.
Shorter work weeks and days, and other improvements in living conditions, arise naturally from a better economy. If you try to force shorter working hours, all you will do is cripple the economy and keep everybody poor forever. If outsiders would just go away and leave the insiders to bring about their own improvements at their own pace, the workers would get their better conditions as a natural course of improvement.
Do-gooders make me puke, how they think they know everything about foreign societies they have never even visited, and everybody over there is too stupid to work out their own problems.
If do-gooders worked on fixing their own problems, great, but they'd rather fix problems they know nothing of, just as astrologers pretend that using reference tables and calculators and computer programs makes them scientific. Bleaagh.
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