Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Students Say They Are Being Forced To Build Your Next iPhone
pigrabbitbear writes "Now that Apple is putting the finishing touches on the most anticipated smartphone in history, Chinese students are again being pressed into service on the factory line inside the largest single internship program in the world. This according to two separate stories in the Chinese press. A report today in the Shanghai Daily says that hundreds of students in the city of Huai'an were forced to help fulfill iPhone 5 orders starting last Thursday. Classes in town had allegedly been interrupted as a result, since the two-month long internships would fulfill the students' need to 'experience working conditions.'"
It's not about students applying to foxconn for a part time job. It's about the univeristy they work for ordering students who had no previous relations to foxconn to go work there and suspending classes as a result.
Did you read TFA? "A student [...] said 200 students from her school had been driven to the factory. [...] Several other students from at least five colleges backed up what she said, saying they were being forced to work for 12 hours a day. [...] Foxconn was badly in need of 10,000 workers but students were looking forward to returning to classrooms to continue their academic studies which had been seriously disrupted." How is this a routine event?
Almost all of us have done it. I'm certainly no fan of Apple but this appears to be making something out of a routine event.
You call a government program to meet manufacturing quotas for the purpose of moving large amounts of money from the US to China by mandating the participation of students on factory assembly lines a "routine event"? No, cpu6502, that is not at all something that "almost all" of us have done.
No independent confirmation; "someone posting under the name of Dalingzhuimengnan said" and "radio reports" and statements from Universities about internships ... all the links lead back to one Shanghai Daily article. This "journalism" needs fact checking and verification. It may be true or it may not. Time will tell. You may now resume backing Apple as if the other phones made in China wouldn't use similar tactics if they could get away with it.
Does that mean there's a labor shortage in China? If so, then things are about to get interesting.
Different countries have different labor situations. Protest with your wallet, or lack thereof.
BlameBillCosby.com
China isn't really like north america or europe in this regard. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire government in the area (district or even prefecture) is actually just an extension of foxconn (legally, officially), and if you're at their school you can be told to work at their factory, they pay for it after all. You can't take one of their products into their town, you can't set up a vegetable stall without their permission and in their town etc. This isn't some mom and pop little GM assembly plant with 6000 employees. This is a small factory with only 40 000 workers that they need to expand (http://www.tuaw.com/2012/05/21/foxconn-building-new-production-line-for-apple-products/ )
Conceptually it's much like factory towns elsewhere, with varying degrees of official backing, and institutionalizing who actually runs the show.
There is also, in china at least, some measure of communist collective effort and coercion still. This has to be done, so we all pitch in to do it, because it's for the good of the country, or else. And to some degree they're right - without a strong collective effort they wouldn't be where they are. Of course if they cared about their workers they'd be paying a lot more than 250 dollars a month, but lets not go crazy here, you need to keep costs down to stay competitive.
The government can always conscript you and and then send you to work digging trenches, fighting wars or building schools if they want. Normally rich countries don't resort to that in all but the most extreme circumstances, but for china a million iphones probably brings in 10 or 15 million dollars (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2012/01/31/how-much-of-the-iphone-is-made-in-china/). That's a lot of money, especially since, if you look at the first link I had, they're talking about only a 56 million dollar factory. There is a strategic interest in doing whatever it takes to meet that demand rather than risk letting somewhere else pick up the sales - and that's only direct wages for the phone assembly, there's all of the components manufactured in china as well - and they want to be seen as doing whatever it takes to keep it that way. China is taking 'being accommodating to business' as far as you can take it without outright allowing slavery - and that is deliberate.
What sort of university is that?!
A university in a totalitarian country? E.g., it was traditional in the countries of the Eastern Bloc for (state-owned) schools to send pupils to do "voluntary work" for the (state-owned and fairly inefficient) agriculture. Technically, nobody forced the students to do that, but you know...the universities could accommodate only so many students, they had to pick...see where the whole thing is going?
Ezekiel 23:20
19 USC 1307:
All goods, wares, articles, and merchandise mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in any foreign country by convict labor or/and forced labor or/and indentured labor under penal sanctions shall not be entitled to entry at any of the ports of the United States, and the importation thereof is hereby prohibited, and the Secretary of the Treasury is authorized and directed to prescribe such regulations as may be necessary for the enforcement of this provision. ...
'Forced labor', as herein used, shall mean all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty for its nonperformance and for which the worker does not offer himself voluntarily. For purposes of this section, the term "forced labor or/and indentured labor" includes forced or indentured child labor.
Anyone now has the right to file a complaint that could result in all iPhone 5 units incoming to the US be impounded at U.S. customs. This includes competitors.
"Forced" doesn't mean "I had to do it because I needed the money" in China. There, as elsewhere in the Communist world, there is this thing called "brigadier movement", where students (highschool and university) and sometimes older people "volunteer" to help some sector of the economy, usually for free (awful) food and no pay.
When I was a kid, we used to "help" agriculture most often, at it was the most underpopulated sector. The "help" would usually take place around the start of the school year, during the time of the harvest, but also during the summer vacation.
From the description of the article I think this is the same thing -- the authorities rounding up people to "help" the industry.
The only difference is that when I was doing it, we were doing it for the "country". Now it is for Foxconn.
Students were pulled from their classes, forced to work 12-hour shifts, and punished if they protested or tried to leave. None of this was voluntary, and all of it highly illegal even by Chinese law. The students were paid a very nominal amount, but were billed for room and board which clawed that money right back to the factory, meaning this is a "Sixteen Tons" situation where the students didn't actually get paid.
As for the "work experience," it consisted of snapping parts together and filling boxes. The students were studying Law and English. The factory work had no educational value of any kind, not are any of the students getting the references or connections customarily associated with internships.
Are you getting this yet? The students were grabbed from school, shipped to the factory and made to work 12-hour shifts. No one had agreed to any of this. Anyone who talked back or tried to leave was punished.
The nicest label you can slap on this is "impressment," which is just a fancy way of saying slavery. So let me get this straight. A national healthcare plan is "enslaving doctors," but grabbing kids out of class and forcing them to work 12-hour shifts without pay is "valuable work experience?"
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
And those that are aware of this should not purchase an iPhone.
I am proud to not own an iPhone. I am proud in knowing that the % of profits from my phone are minimal and did not come from slave labor.
Remember when people were proud to own USA items? Perhaps it is time to bring that back.
China doesn't have an adversarial and independent press (though God knows it could be argued the US doesn't have one anymore either). When things like this happen, the best you're going to get are strangled, scattered reports in fitful sporadic bursts, as happened in our own (US) revolution.
Responsible journalism would involve a reporter going out to investigate the reports and interview the people on the scene. The government won't allow it. So now you're in a similar situation where the police get a call about a wife beater. They go to the accused man's house and find there's blood on his sleeveless t-shirt, they can hear sobbing inside, but he won't let them in the door. Suddenly you have to take those few scattered reports a lot more seriously.
Various students are reporting they've been pressed into service by a dictatorial government. The dictatorial government in question isn't allowing anyone to investigate their claims. The government's behavior in and of itself tends to corroborate the students' reports, especially given the previous history of the factory in question.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
And those that are aware of this should not purchase an iPhone.
I am proud to not own an iPhone. I am proud in knowing that the % of profits from my phone are minimal and did not come from slave labor.
Remember when people were proud to own USA items? Perhaps it is time to bring that back.
Hear hear. Question: where do you find a phone that is made in the USA? AIUI, pretty much any smartphone you want to buy is made in China, in large part.
... we, university students (personal experience), but also, I've heard more seniour people in "intellectual" line of employment were forced in the Fall to go help our collectivized farmers pick up potatoes and do some other harvest-related work. (Kartoshka! ;-) )...
I do not know if, given my current line work, I would enjoy assembling high-tech stuff more than that (and would definitely learn more from it), but, overall, I, personally, did not mind at all, it was an excuse to live outside the control of our parents (for those of us who did not go to school in another city/lived in dorm which was less common than in this country), get as drunk as our farmer hosts, shmooze with girls, etc. ;-) As to actual work -- my buddies and myself self-organized to proclaim that we are going to do actual "hard" work, loading bags of potato on trucks, while the rest do "easy" part, pick and load the bags... Of course it would take much more actual time to fill a bag than to throw it into the truck, the rest we spent hanging out and baking potatoes!
Somehow I think that efficiency necessary to assemble iPhones would preclude those Chinese kids to have any good times though, but do not think that it was/is not common in "Communist" countries.
(And, no, we did not get paid, unless you could a bag of potatos which you might or might not sneak back home at the end).
Paul B.
I LOVE my American made Toyota. My neighbor's Canadian/Mexican made Chevy is a piece of crap.
Remember when people were proud to own USA items? Perhaps it is time to bring that back.
The minute "people" are willing to spend $1500 on a phone that currently costs $550, you'll see iPhones built right here in the good ol' USA. You can be the first. What's that? Not interested? Oh, sorry, never mind then, hypocrite.
Bullshit. There was a story on Slashdot several months back that included a breakdown of the costs involved in the iPhone. Manufacturing labor is only around 3%. Their workers are paid $350 a month. Paying an American worker a decent wage (say around $42k per year) would cost ten times that, for a 27% increase in the price of the phones. But making them in the US means you don't have to pay as much on shipping. I don't have numbers on hand for how much that costs, but let's ballpark it at 2% of the total phone's cost. That means that you're looking at at most a 25% price hike to build those phones in the US. Not the 200% increase that you pulled out of your ass.
Now, I'm not saying those jobs necessarily should come to the US. There's nothing that makes Americans more entitled to work than Chinese people. But whoever builds the phones should be getting a good wage. Treating people anywhere in the world as near-slave labor just so we can save $150 on our phones every two years is simply disgraceful.
It's akin to Papa John complaining that giving his workers healthcare would make the pizzas cost an extra quarter. Are we as a society really so greedy that we think that's a bad deal?
I'm sorry to tell you this but you are either lying or ignorant to the fact that Samsung does put pressure on their suppliers to clean up their act.
Also if you care to see Samsung's statements you can see them here
$350 a month in China isn't a particularly bad wage, its certainly not slave labor so maybe you could tone down the overblown rhetoric. Their cost of living is dramatically lower than the U.S. $350/month also dramatically beats what they can make trying to eek out a living as a farmer which is why large numbers of young people willingly flee rural China for those jobs.
If recent rumours out of Foxconn are true they are probably going to transfer most of the menial assembly line jobs to robots at which point there wont be any jobs at all for anyone, then what will all the Apple haters whine about.
All things considered, whining about Apple building their stuff in China is pointless and misguided. Nearly every western coporation moved their jobs and capital equipment to China. Seeking out cheap labor is what companies in a Capitalist system inherently do. It will reach its ultimate fulfillment when computers and robots are doing everything so there are no more jobs. Google's self driving cars are poised to wipe out long haul truckers, taxi drivers, auto insurance agents, highway patrolmen, and will significantly reduce the number of emergency responders, since car wrecks must be half their business.
@de_machina
...Remember when people were proud to own USA items? Perhaps it is time to bring that back.
Remember when greed wasn't the cornerstone of the American Dream? Yeah, you would need to bring that back FIRST.
(Unless you really wanted to pay $3000 for an American-made iPhone...)
Uhh..that same argument works for blood diamonds or any other thing brought here by atrocity ya know. After all its not OUR fault if those African warlords slaughter peasants, as long as we get the stones right?
Sorry but this is just one more reason we should kill the lie that is free trade. We give MFN to China while they use slaves and prisoners, yet we're shocked! Shocked I tell you! That American companies can't compete with China. Hey I hear there are lots of unemployed in the big cities, maybe we should make it legal to have slaves here again? We could compete then by God!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Oh don't get me wrong, I have NO problem with trade per se, its the lie that is called "free trade", where you give MFN to slave labor using dictatorships, that I have a problem with!
Free trade is you walking into a ring bare handed against a guy with a bat and brass knuckles, and the bat swinger has paid the ref to look the other way. Countries like China, India, and Vietnam are allowed to use slaves, dump toxins in the air and water, have unsafe worker conditions, yet we are supposed to "compete" while following the rules?
All "free trade" has done is left us an indebted nation, with business district filled with abandoned factories, huge numbers of unemployed, and future generation across the planet that will HATE the USA because the cancers and toxins they live with will be from our greedy megacorps.
So while I'm all for fair and even trading, that simply isn't what we have now, anymore than these jury rigged corporatocracy in bed with the government is a free market. The whole thing is nothing but lies, and I have a feeling when the next bubble bursts the lies about free trade will end, as nobody will buy the bullshit when the whole thing comes tumbling down.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.