Naked gyrating iPad vid exposes truth behind Apple's billions Foxconn has allowed a journalist to film inside an Apple iPad factory in Shenzen, revealing a fresh-faced workforce. The resulting three-minute video shows young Chinese employees at the quarter-of-a-million-strong factory filing into work at 7am, fitting motherboards into cases on clean, brightly lit assembly lines and …
U Fule,
It may be one of the best places to work in China, but by our western standards it may only be one step removed from slavery. All these thing tend to be relative.
Many years ago I worked in a heavy engineering company and a television crew were due to film part of a documentary in our company. Everyone who worked in or had reason to visit any of the workshop floor were issued with hard hats, hi-viz jackets, tradespeople were give new overalls and the whole place was cleaned and painted. Within 3 months things were “back to normal”
So do you think I have any faith in anything that comes out of “official” china?
Suspicious? Moi? Never!
Gota go, the boss is out of his/her office and is on the prowl.
I am also skeptical about any scheduled filming showing reality. One place I worked had a film crew come in as part of a documentary: The day they came in, everyone was at their desk, smartly dressed, polite, well behaved and working hard. Well, except the guy who had just come back off holiday and didn't know about the filming. He was sent off site on some spurious errand instead.
Any other day, most of the desks would have been vacant, and staff would be dressed casually, work would have been done, but not in the well behaved, focused manner portrayed for camera.
No, the upper management did not orchestrate this: They simply warned people of the filming schedule. Mostly it was the supervisors, instead.
Anon for fairly obvious reasons.
@Aaron Em
Propaganda is propaganda and should be attacked wherever it appears. Like greenwashing, astroturfing etc. Is Apple the worst? Probably not, but that does not make the mistreatment of workers by their sub-contractor OK.
"Hey, we're less oppressive than the others!" is not a sign of quality or progress.
An why AC? Meh, seemed like a good idea as I kinda figured the Apple Cops would come out of the woodwork.
Another tiresome leftist trope that started as a little lie and has become a big Lie. Of course their are suicides at Foxconn -- it's the equivalent of a small American city! The suicide RATE however is actually lower than for China in general, and comparable to most other countries.
This has been known for a long time, but truth never got in the way of a leftist meme before, so why should it now, right?
I read a while ago that the suicide rate at the factories was less than China's average.
But what was worrying at the time was the fact they were all doing it at once. Also at the time there was a high compensation paid to the victims family if they committed suicide.
At least things seem to be better now though.
A factory with 250,000 predominantly young male workers in the UK (hah, dream on) would see a significant number of suicides too. I woder how many staff they lose in RTAs.
I know when my father was a pilot for British Airways they lost more flight staff in road accidents than in plane accidents. Sadly the same wasn't true when he was an Australian NAvy pilot before that, but that's another story...
to learn, after my comments in the thread about that Java exploit that everybody but Apple fixed months ago, that I have no problem at all with Apple's contracting manufacturing work out to Foxconn, or with Foxconn's treatment of its workers.
In this it appears I agree with many of those workers themselves -- not just those featured in the video linked from the article, either; those claiming that the suicides of Foxconn workers point out some kind of problem, for example, need to explain why it is that a suicide rate, which is actually much lower at a given company than for the surrounding population, is a sign that that company has a problem -- rather than that they are treating their workers rather better than is the local standard. (Note that the suicide rate didn't decrease at Foxconn after the much-derided installation of nets around the stairwells; it was already below the local average.)
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The purpose of agitprop is to stir people up; the purpose of this is to cool people down -- and while we're on the subject of agitprop, Comrade, perhaps you've heard about NPR's recent admission that Mike Daisey's "expose" was in fact a tissue of lies?
Unfortunately, you undermine your own argument by showing that you have no idea what "communist" means. It may come as a shock, but there is no way that any part of the US administration (either federal or state) can be even vaguely referred to as "communist" (or "pseudo-communist", whatever that means).
Ensuring that all people have good health-care provision, a guaranteed safety-net from absolute poverty, and centrally-funded welfare programmes is NOT communism, despite what you have been told - it is actually the bare minimum that any country that calls itself civilised does for its inhabitants. The benefits to society far outweigh the costs.
com·mu·nism
[kom-yuh-niz-uhm]
noun
1.
a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.
2.
(often initial capital letter) a system of social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political party.
Treating private property and funds as assets to be seized and redistributed would certainly fall under the first definition, and our latest foray into picking winners and losers in the market (well, trying to anyway) would surely cover the second definition. Perhaps a better word would have been socialist, but I don't shy from communist when the actions match the word. The very actions of many from our current administration follow those definitions, so I'm going to call it as I see it. The very notion of "equal outcomes" instead of "equal opportunity" is communist in nature.
As far as all the stuff all "good" countries do, it's all well and good until handouts replace jobs and a nanny state replaces personal responsibility. That is already occurring over here, and frankly we need LESS of that sort of thing, not more of it. I'm not saying we need to yank the safety net out from under grandma! Quite the opposite: she paid in her whole life, and that obligation needs to be honored. However, that 22 year old mother of 6 who dropped out of school to have kids knowing full well that she'd be taken care of has GOT to stop, and the only way to stop it is to make people deal with the consequences of their actions. The notion that her neighbor's paycheck partly belongs to her as well is very communistic (see definition 1).
Corporations fail, businesses fail, people fail, students fail. The government needs to get out of the way and let them fail, because without the risk of failure there can be no success. We have a malaise from the top down in this country, and the current schooling is trying to establish it from the bottom up.
Thumbs down back to you, simply because denying reality in the name of political correctness is a sure-fire path to failure.
It's still a clumsy phrase presuming that the intent of the phrase was to saw that most of the workers were between 18 and 25 years old.
Rather than that someone had calculated the average and it was known to be somewhere between 18 and 25.
AC - because it's early in the morning and I'm possibly wrong
It's a clumsy phrase, but it is the way the word 'average' is used by lay-people who don't know (or care) about the mathematical definitions of the word. In context, I took this to mean that most of the workers are between 18 and 25. In other words, the modal value of the age falls in the 18-25 segment, or, for example, the 13th and 85th percentiles of the age range distribution are at 18 and 25 years of age.
When you think about it, it's not as clumsy as the more technical alternatives, is it? It doesn't really matter when the concept you are trying to communicate doesn't require a high level of precision, and the majority of the readers aren't going to care anyway.
I use to do store openings for a large retailer where I had worked. 12+h days with some days nearing nearing 20h days. That's was in the US. I have often worked long shifts here in the UK too and some of my fellow developers have done insane hours.
The difference between here and china is they get paid for all their hours and people seem to care. Here it just gets shoved under the carpet and you're expected to do it out of the kindness of your heart or something like that.
So I don't feel that bad for them. Working hard and getting rewarded for it is better than signing a contract with the expectaton that you'll work long under overtime even if it's more common for them to work long hours.
You can't take an apple hater's opinion seriously because they're no better than a spoiled child and a lot of westerners are getting lazy and expect too much for nothing. That's why they have your jobs and it's not americans or brits doing paid overtime.
Does it matter? After 12-20 hour shifts you want to SLEEP, not socialize.
The crewmen of most navies in the world live in more confined spaces than these workers, incidentally, especially submarine crews.
One more point: a climate controlled room with 8 bunks is a LOT better than a mud shanty farmhouse where you get eaten by bugs every night.
Those people go to FoxConn to work and take money home. If FoxConn built them bigger quarters, they would pay them less and the majority of those workers would rather have the money than a bigger room to themselves that sat empty 12 hours a day.
Although I'm sure there are many bad things which go on in these factories, it's important to remember it's not all bad. According to reports, Foxconn pays more than many other factories, and probably can get away with less than smaller ones.
When listening to the first radio show, one interviewee said that most of the factory workers they've spoken to, said they preferred this work to the only thing they had before, which was working in the paddy fields, effectively living in poverty.
One of the best places to work - compared to what alternatives?
People queueing up to work there - the same can be said of the sweatshops (they call them factories) that Adidas run in Indonesia, the work is intensive, exhausting and carried out over long hours, but the pay is better than anywhere else.
But of couse it's still nothing like a western worker would get (and yes I've heard ALL the b.s. excuses big business use to justify this).
I hate this sort of quasi-slavery. Not having a go at Apple or Foxconn, just the world we live in.
I am just wondering - what would actually happen if a factory popped up in China and started offering the same salaries and t&c's* as the west? The lucky few would get jobs there, everyone else would just shrug their shoulders and say that's life? I don't think so. There wouldn't be 500 people queuing for jobs, there would be riots and murders.
These countries will go through the same journey as the west, possibly a lot faster than the 200 years it took us to stop treating factory workers as expendable slave labour. Heaven help the fat and lazy UK when they get there, but they will.
*I know, but it doesn't look right without the aberrant apostrophe.
well firstly only those on an approved list (Communist Party membership most likely - in Zimbabwe it's Mugabe's thugs party ZANU PF ) would be allowed near the place; secondly only those on the approved list with relatives (or political sponsors) would be allowed to apply for a job; and if its anything like some other Asian countries (Indian Seafarers come to mind) it could cost up to 3 times annual salary to get the job. So there wouldn't be anyone queuing for the jobs; as they wouldn't be allowed to. And riots would indeed be met with murder - Tiananmen Square style
(Acronyms and abbreviations either do NOT take plurals or look like this - All MPs lie when they open their mouth)
Do would these workers be BETTER or WORSE off if Apple moved production out of China? They come to work in the factory as it pays decent wages (relative to what they were working), they actually get paid and it's a job so they can feed themselves and send money back to support their families.
People in the US / Europe cannot really appreciate it - the idea of working 'hard' for a day for what they get free in benefits or for 1-2 hours work is alien to them.
I'm sure if Apple buggered off these people would be significantly worse off / pooreras a result.
What people in the West miss is that the option here is earn a decent wage making iPads of Microsoft or [insert almost anyone else] products - earn enough money to keep yourself and be able to send some home to support your family - or to be a farmer earning very little or unemployed earning nothing.
People travel long distances and queue to try and work there - it's not what you would (in the West) call 'good' or 'easy' work but it's better pay / conditions than the alternatives. People in the US / Europe look and think 'they are working for less than $2 an hour - I would not be able to live on that' - that's right but it's probably double what they were earning if they even had a job and the cost of living in China is also much lower.
...that doesn't make it right, does it?
I'm not sure it makes it wrong either - the world isn't equal; it doesn't necessarily fit into a "Western" ideal of what's right and what's wrong. In many places the consumption of alcohol is wrong in others the consumption of marijuana, the age of consent varies across the world, in some places you can't openly criticise your beloved leader (that's a term that's actually used without irony in some places believe it or not).
I can see people having to work longer hours, for less pay, and for more years in the UK as the population continues to age - we'll look back and realise that the "baby boomers" had it easy. We'll not return to the kind of industrial age working policies current in China but then China will probably creep forward towards more "modern" (in the "Western" world) workplace practices.
It's all swings and roundabouts and as long as there are cultural, social or economic differences, someone, somewhere will profit from it.
Intractable Potshard
Yes it does. If it costs you $10 a week to buy food and $5 a week to get 'decent' accommodation for your family (decent is a sliding scale from malarial infested mud huts to Park Avenue) then $2 an hour is riches indeed.
You can not do this stupid $x per day is poverty comparison UNLESS you also add in the COST of living to a LOCALLY acceptable standard. Not everyone has/needs/wants an iPad; xbox; giant tv; rolls royce and a slack handful of bimbos (or toy boys). Some of them would just like to know they have some where the roof don't leak and they earn enough not to starve.
Don't get me wrong, i think the world would be a better place without their ethos, but Foxconn are a decent employer for Southern China, far far better than a lot of companies that size, and the plant is state of the art, and if they keep jacking up the wage rate like they have been for the last couple of years it is going to make keeping staff a nightmare for anybody in 300 miles of them. Foxconn are the 800 pound gorilla in the room for all our shiny toys, ignore them at your peril, but they are getting a poor press.
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