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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?"
No.
No, .... well yes. It all depends on how deep you want to follow the supply chain and how much you want to remain ignorant of. And enough of that second part will also lead to a NO.
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.
Nokia fired 4000 smart phone assemblers in Finland, Hungary and Mexico last month, moving to Asia. Theres a press release from around feb 8th.
This /. article is probably a response, however indirect, to that.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
What I would like to know is why all the outrage over Apple? Most Chinese factories have poor working conditions, so this would cover what, 95% of consumer goods.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If it's not made by machines, the odds are it's made by underpaid and overworked humans in some overseas sweatshop conditions.
North Americans and Europeans aren't willing to pay for the true cost of the labour.
I seem to recall an article estimating what it would cost to manufacture an iPad in North America with the unions, health and safety regulations, and so on respected. They came up with a number in the neighbourhood of $1400.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
That said, I suspect that globalisation is heading into a lot of flak at the moment. There has always been a conflict between the perceived strategic needs of the US and what American corporations will do. In WW2 they were the begin with supplying both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union with arms and technology although it was not in the interests of the USA to do so. You can see the transfer of manufacturing to China as hastening the downfall of the USA, but corporate executives will simply buy citizenship of whatever country offers the most benefits to them; they have no loyalty whatsoever to any particular country.
So no, you will never get any piece of electronics nowadays that can be called "ethically sourced", but it is just about possible to decide which is most in your interest to buy, assuming that you have, or want, to live in one country.
For an inhabitant of CA, that is probably Apple. For anybody else, YMMV.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
My smartphone is made from low-fat granola pieces glued together from wheat reaped by freedom-loving highly-paid yet-still-spiritualistic gay Tibetan monks who are all married to one another and turn all their after-tax profits over to Greenpeace.
Of course it doesn't work, but I feel really good about owning it and it's a great conversation-starter with the cute angry Goth chicks who hang out in my local hipster food co-op in Brooklyn.
If Foxconn employees aren't happy with the wages and the working conditions I'm sure they know where the door is.
Actually Canada right now is the greatest country in the free world. They actually care about people instead of being a bunch of ravenous assholes that lose their mind over paying for healthcare for people.
America right now is being over-run by uneducated scumbag assholes, (For perfect examples, please see the current top 3 GOP presidential candidates) I'd avoid it like the plague unless you are a filthy, filthy, rich person.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
HTC is headquartered in Taiwan, not mainland China. Does anyone know if they manufacture their phones in Taiwan or in China?
HTC manufactures in various countries, including mainland China. Foxconn is also headquartered in Taiwan, so there's really no correlation between where their CEO sits and where manufacturing happens.
I find it interesting that those most upset about Foxconn factory conditions have never been there, and those that have been there lied about what they saw.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
If you are worried about the social and environmental impact of your smartphone, you aren't going to be satisfied by any of the options on the market. A consolation prize, if you will, would be to purchase a used phone. You can get even the latest phones on the used market, and in so doing you prevent it from ending up in a landfill or "recycler" in the third world. Plus, the social and environmental impact of that phone has already been made. I won't say your conscience gets off scot free, but you could argue (to yourself and others) that those impacts are borne more by the original purchaser than you, the second purchaser. You can't fix the harm that originally went into making the phone, but you can prevent additional harm by not purchasing a new one.
This calculus works for lots of things besides smartphones. The one I particularly like is to consider buying a used honda civic that gets 35+ mpg as a replacement for a gas guzzler, rather than purchasing a new prius.
", while his work has been discredited, Michael Daisey wasn't inaccurate in his claims that working conditions are poor in iPhone and iPad factories."
That statement is nonsense.
Michael Daisey was discredited because working conditions were fine for iPhone or iPad factories; none of the horrible things he had reported on were true upon his visit. I've listened to original piece (when it aired) as well as the full retraction. He had to create lies based what he'd heard of previous (outlawed) practices of various Chinese manufactures as well fabricate people, events, and conversations in order to invoke an emotional response. Then he repeatedly, unapologetically used the theater as a scapegoat as to why he could tell people that he was telling a factual account, but in reality, was more lie than occurrence.
That said, the OP does have a good question about sweatshop free phones. I wish there was a list for all goods and services; seems internet searches pull up a lot of hits for clothing and apparel, but not so much for electronics.
Japan: 25 per 100,000
Foxconn: 2.5 per 100,000
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The fact that workers are better off in these factories doesn't mean much, given that China is a brutal, repressive dictatorship. If the Chinese authorities leave conditions in the country so bad that near slavery in towns is better, despite their need for farming, then the desire of workers to escape the countryside is unsurprising. "Encouraging" the population to move to the towns to replicate the Industrial Revolution makes sense for the Chinese global strategy, but giving people a choice between agrarian near-slavery and urban better paid near-slavery isn't exactly validated by their preferring the frying pan to the fire.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
There is no ethical smartphone.
According to this article, "Apple fully traced its supply chains for the four conflict minerals—tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold—which is further than other companies have gone."
http://www.raisehopeforcongo.org/blog/post/new-report-apple-strong-supply-chain-tracing-weak-certification
From 2009 to 2011 you could buy a Garmin-Asus phone in the US. The nuvifone G60 was designed mostly by Garmin in Kansas, and hardware and low level software engineering and manufacturing was done by Asus in Taiwan. Asus is known for good working conditions, fair labor policies, and a refusal to work with suppliers with who do not share their ethics. While the software left a bit to be desired, the quality of the device was superb, and had an extremely low failure rate. However, because the device had software written by American engineers and was manufactured by an ethical Taiwanese company, it was expensive. The same could be said for the G60's successor in the US, the A50/Garminfone.
And you know what? People didn't want to pay for these. They wanted iPhones. So excuse me for laughing when I see everyone here saying "oh I would've paid extra for a phone that wasn't made by unethical companies". The proof is undeniable. People didn't buy these phones because they were expensive. Today, neither Garmin nor Asus sell phones in the US anymore. You had your chance to support companies that produced equipment made ethically, but in the end you proved you just wanted something shiny.
Posting AC since I was one of the engineers who worked on both of these phones.
The fact is, the way we have society set up and corporations set up, there aren't any good options. We're all allowing this current paradigm to continue...basically corporate rule. With the goal of business being maximum profit at all costs, externalities be damned, there aren't any good options until you start to think outside the current economic paradigm. What I'm saying is that the way corporations/businesses are set up, we can't help but do evil as a society. So the answer to the original quesiton of this post "Any smart phones made under worker friendly conditions"....of course the answer is no. In fact, everything we do is basically evil. When you show up to work at the fascist corporation that elslaves you and collect a paycheck, you're part of the evil. No good can or will come from a society that is based on the current goals of the entities that rule it...profit at any cost. Just pick up a newspaper....every awful thing that's happening is rooted in that one goal and it's not going to change until people act to change it. Greed isn't good. Greed doesn't work. You'll never find an ethical smart phone, or anything else for that matter, until things drastically change. And for those of you who are going to say that some companies are ethical...yeah maybe .5% and the rest that seem less evil just have a great PR machine. Oh and the only reason people are keying in on the Smartphone or Apple is because America's PR machine has accidentally caught a snag and has caused the bewildered herd to think. You probably spend a heck of a lot more $ every year on non-smartphone items that are made under similar or worse conditions, but since the media/American PR has allowed you to think of smartphones, you're thinking of them. Don't think you're thinking outside the control of PR. It really is amazing and must take amazing discipline to be so blind. Just smartphones? Really?
At this point the question should be is there anything that you're buying in stores like Walmart, Best Buy, or the Dollar Stores which are starting to supplant them, that doesn't involve a sweatshop in it's production. I suspect that the question is something that not many people are going to want to search the answer to. It's pretty hypocritical to suddenly launch on Apple for Foxcomm, when we've been tolerating far worse conditions to get our Nikes.
If you're concerned about the way something is manufactured, don't buy it new. Yes, by buying a used item you're increasing the resale value of it, which makes a tiny difference in how much the company can charge for it new. But otherwise you're not supporting the manufacturer.
This is helpful in all sorts of areas, not just with tech manufacturing. If I find an authors to be loathsome in his politics -- I'm looking at you, Mr. Card -- I'll buy his books used. That way I get to read what I want, but don't have to give money to someone whose ideas I find repulsive. Sure, I have to hunt around to find a copy, and maybe deal with dog-eared pages and someone else's underlining, but if you feel strongly about something you should be willing to live with minor inconveniences.