Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ask Slashdot: Any Smart Phones Made Under Worker-Friendly Conditions?

Posted by timothy on from the ethics-vs-aesthetics dept.

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?"

11 of 371 comments (clear)

  1. Short answer... by MonkeyBot · · Score: 5, Informative

    No.

    1. Re:Short answer... by cbope · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Not exactly true. Business-class Nokia smartphones (E-series) were made in Finland until very recently. Unfortunately, when Nokia signed a pact to switch to Windows Phone, production moved East for the new Lumia models. You can still pick up Nokias that were manufactured here, until current supply chain inventories run out. The E7 I got a couple weeks ago was Made in Finland and my previous E72 was also made here.

    2. Re:Short answer... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

      You labor activists, always with your whining.

      Seriously, is child slavery in my tantalum pits really so different from the 'spring break' that first-worlders voluntarily pay to experience?

      It looks pretty similar from my air conditioned compound: Baking sun, strenuous physical activity, mud, wet t-shirts, very limited sleep, lots and lots of children your age, no 'parents' there to look over your shoulder, an exotically corrupt law enforcement environment, questionably consensual debauchery...

    3. Re:Short answer... by burisch_research · · Score: 5, Funny

      I believe both Zunes made last year were manufactured in Sweden.

      --
      char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
  2. Define worker friendly. by Shivetya · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Define worker friendly. by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I have to agree with this post - my experience isn't quite China, but I think it does carry over.

      At the end of January, start of February this year, I spent nearly three weeks in Uganda - and this wasn't all nice hotels and B&Bs in cushy areas of towns and cities, this was staying with some native Ugandan friends in their normal settings.

      On a social level, these friends were our (myself and my wife) equals - in Ugandan social levels they earned the equivalent of what we did, they held a roughly equal level of job and such. And their "standard" of living, be it *very* good for their setting, is basically the equivalent of one step up from complete poverty in the UK.

      Their kitchen was a basic stone (cast concrete) sink, and a single electrical hotplate on the floor. And thats a step up from what the neighbours used - the outdoor cooking facilities (basically, a fire pit), but only because my friends saved up and bought this for themselves.

      Their bathroom was indoors, but extremely basic. Because they paid a lot more in rent. Others on the same site had to make do with outdoor facilities.

      So we got settled into this - and then we visited our hosts father in his village. Thats a huge huge step down from the comparative luxury our hosts lived in.

      Our hosts father is a vicar in a traditional Ugandan hilltop village, thirty miles from running water, a hundred miles from electricity, and a hundred and fifty miles from an actual paved road. Still lives in a mud hut, the roof covered with well used corrogated tin sheets and (funnily enough, Sainsburies) plastic grocery bags. He eats meat once a month, but still managed to serve his "honoured guests" two types of meat - that would have cost him two months wages, all gone in a single meal for us. His wash facilities is an old plastic jerry can, his toilet a long drop hole in the floor. He and his wife have to travel 9 miles each day to get fresh water, and then gather the wood to make the fire.

      This man sold off 90% of his ancestral lands in order to put his first child through nursing school - and that child had to pay for the next two. He actually really struggled to sell the land as well, because it was seen as "the wrong thing to do" by his fellow villagers.

      And the final place we stayed was with a Bishop of the Church of Uganda. No better really than our hosts - nothing to shout about at all.

      And believe me, these people were seriously well off in the scheme of things. Meeting children who are never going to have a prospect of going to school, who are wearing sack cloth for clothes (I saw that dozens of times just in one 3 hour road trip, and then more turned up at the vicars house), or wearing "GAP" sweaters that have obviously been through at least two generations already. A 4 year old carrying a 2 pint plastic milk carton of water behind his older sibling, on a road where we hadn't seen a house for two miles before, and didn't see one for another two miles.

      I never really thought poverty actually existed, or at least thats what I now think I thought - it just doesn't sink in until you see these things in the real world for yourself.

      One of the huge things that struck me was the fact that you could never trust meat sold anywhere - if you wanted to make sure the meat you are eating hasn't been sitting on the butchers stall for a week then you have to kill the animal yourself, and store the parts you aren't going to eat immediately. The chicken and goat we ate at the vicars was killed shortly after we arrived, basically right in front of us.

      You can't really judge the sort of step up that people in these situations get from jobs like Foxconn, its literally stepping from one world into another. You can shout all you can about how the standards don't match up with western ones, but when seeing the sort of standards these people are coming from you can see why there are thousands lining up whenever there is a mere hint of a job available. It really is the difference to them between "su

  3. Nokia fired 4000 last month by vlm · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  4. A retracted story should mean something by syntap · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Buy Apple by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Minimum wage in North America by derfla8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  7. You're Wrong! by RobotRunAmok · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.