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Nintendo Investigating Underage Workers At Foxconn
itwbennett writes "Earlier this week, Foxconn revealed that an internal investigation had turned up workers as young as 14 toiling at its factory in Yantai, China. Now Nintendo, whose products are manufactured at that factory, is also investigating Foxconn's labor sourcing."
Welcomed our whip snapping overlords xin li 14f, Yantai. -Sent from my iPhone 5
Why is it such a big deal that there are 14 year olds at Foxconn?
"His name was James Damore."
WiiU... For 14 year olds, by 14 years olds...
Why is it such a big deal that there are 14 year olds at Foxconn?
You my lad will probably never grasp the idea that a brain needs to develop and needs to be fed with challenging ideas in order for it to reach a higher level of independence in later life. Allowing kids to work earlier brings them money but on the whole working at early age deprives them from development. At a younger age kids are easily influenced and will apparently consent to doing stuff they later regret. Civilised societies protect kids from taking risks they cannot oversee, like working too early in life. Sure, such regulations will not suit for an extremely small part of the population. Absence of such laws will however compromise a significant amount of kids and that will reflect onto society later on.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
[close-up shot of Steve Jobs lounging in a high-tech office, Apple logo]
SJ: "Oppan Foxconn Style!"
[camera zooms out, background is actually a Foxconn assembly line]
14-year-old female worker: "Ooh, sexy lady"
Yeah, but you're comparing workers from a first world country to China. In Canada, you can have unions, people have rights that are respected and upheld by the governement.
.... there's gambling going on in the casino!!!!
I was in my boss's office in the late 80's (probably 1988) while he was having a conversation with an old friend who owned another company. Both were computer companies with all their manufacturing here in the US and both were facing a new wave of cheap imported computer products flooding in from Taiwan. The friend told my boss that he had gone to China with some other business men and had seen that US companies there were using labor delivered to their factories every day by the People's army and returned to their barracks by that same army... the army made sure they had the right number of workers every day, made sure they never stole anything, and there were simply no labor laws as long as the US firms kept the Army happy (which was easy back then). He then said that he saw no future in manufacturing consumer goods in the US and was going to shift his production to China. My boss, refused to join that tidal wave and as the years went by and the US generally (and California in particular) added regulation after regulation while taxing him heavily and not protecting him from the modern equivalent of slave labor he eventually closed his doors and all his US workers lost their jobs.
Companies like Apple are the most evil entities in the US:
1. They talk a good line about civil rights and the environment and they back more laws along these lines (in the US where those laws will impact any new upstart who tries to get going in a garage somewhere) while shifting their own production to places like China where none of the laws they embrace will apply to them; they hope their super-gullible customers will fixate on the next shiny bauble and not notice.
2. They demand that the US government and courts protect their intellectual property rights from any infringement by the very same hard working taxpayers of the US who fund that government... while depriving them of jobs in the US and pushing down their wages (by using cheap Chinese labor both in competition with and as a replacement for US workers)
3. They demand all the benefits of capitalism and free enterprise within the US, but then when supply and demand rules within that arena might drive-up their costs for things like engineering and manufacturing they escape from the US to a police-state with a demand-economy (which any small upstart cannot do)
Correct, China isn't "civilised", in the Latin sense of the word. It's a cluster of medieval agrarian villages, with some industry springing up around major waterways. It's going through exactly the same industrial revolution that "civilised" nations went through in the past, with the same winners and losers.
You can educate the peasants all the like, but then they'll be educated and toiling in the rice paddies, or educated and toiling in the factories. Either way, they're not post industrial and don't have the same leisure to flout their education from the comfort of their keyboards that you and I enjoy, and judging them on that basis is neither fair nor reasonable.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.