40 Foxconn staff hospitalised after CAMPUS RIOT A dispute at a dormitory near a Foxconn plant in northern China last night led to a riot involving 2,000 employees lasting well into the early hours of this morning when police took control, with scores sent to hospital for treatement. The giant Taiwanese ODM employs 79,000 at the plant which is believed to be manufacturing …
@Sir Runcible Spoon
Money is just a tool
Yes, but...... Money is not just a tool to facilitate trade, i.e. a means to an end, money is also an object of desire and an end in itself, Aristotle said that money serves two purposes, the first to be the acquisition of goods which he considered the first to be necessary and natural, and the second, the goal of getting rich which Aristotle considered the opposite of the first and was unnatural and devoid of any boundaries.
In the modern dystopian society governments have ceded power and moral authority to corporations whose only goal is the maximisation of profit at any cost, they do not see courts as something to dispense justice, courts are only tools to be used to try and screw their competitors by any means.
Once you step over the line and start worshipping the gods of profit, anything is fair game, hyping your product, employing sock puppets to talk up your product, bogus court claims to delay the competitions product, law doesn't suit you, bribe make political donations to politicians and get the law changed, offshore everything to countries with dubious work practices, and then deny everything when it goes tits-up and start a witch hunt for a sacrificial lamb. It's total war for profit, and the first causality of war is truth.
Master those skills and you can have a job on Wall street.
As the Buddhists would have us believe, desire is the root of unhappiness.
Why do you want money? To get stuff.
Why do you need stuff? To get power, women, fame or all three.
Why do you need any of those things? To feel your life has some kind of meaning.
Greed for green, is the root of all evil! Money is just a place filler for whatever the going rate is of exchange for commodities, an exchange token if you will.
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I hope all the twat's that stood inline for their Jesus Phone 5 or iPad relies that the product is manufactured using slave labour.
I'm now ashamed to say I own Apple products and would much prefer to own goods manufactured in countries where trades unions are recognised and the workers paid a living salary.
Here's hoping for more of the same at Foxconn and other slave owning manufacturing - that should be assembly plants - in Asia and South America.
Funny, how until Cook was employed that a great deal of Apple kit was manufactured in Ireland, Singapore and the USA!!!
While I agree with the sentiment; it's not the "twats" fault for wanting their shiney new iPhone, it's Foxxcons fault for having such crappy working conditions (in China!? surely not...) and Apple's fault for continuing to employ Foxxcon when they KNOW this is still going on.
Yeah. Like you really care about workers rights eh. When your real agenda is to paint Apple as the sole cause of worker misery.
Because if you really did care you would call out other manufactures with truly abusive track records instead of protecting them with walls of silence.
But then that would bring Android and Windows kit makers into the spotlight and we absolutely can't have that. Can we?
Use Apple as the scapegoat and people will forget about the others. Its a good plan and seems to be working well so far.
This facility has nothing to do with Apple - I can say this with absolute certainty as if Apple were involved then you can bet your house on the fact The Reg would've plastered the headline and article mentioning this.
it's interesting to note though that there's no mention of who this facility does manufacture for - is it just Apple that gets a kicking these days?
btw, yes, i have a iphone but I don't regard myself a fanboi or sheep etc etc - not that matters as no doubt you've already made your mind up that I'm an Apple shill, right? ;-)
Nice little diatribe! You do realise they make other manufacturers stuff?
So if you care so much about foreign workers conditions, where do you buy your clothes? Do you support charities like War on Want, who fight for worker's rights and ethical treatment worldwide? What about all those little odds and sods, like connectors, plugs, cables, adapters that join all your lovely shiny gadgets together, do you think the fairies made them and put them in little packets to be sold for 50p on eBay? Of course not, some 14 year old wage slave in a far east sweatshop knocks them out by the thousands while slowly losing the will to live on a 12 hour shift pattern!
You are a sanctimonious fucking tool my friend!
While I agree partly with your sentiment, there is one huge problem. Even if you try to avoid anything made by Apple, Samsung or any other manufacturer that uses Foxconn to make their whole products, you can't avoid products with Foxconn components.
My laptot is made by Fujitsu, which still makes most of its products in Japan, an arguably modern nation with some respect for worker's rights. When I opened it up, it contained some Foxconn components. My phone is an HTC Droid Incredible, made in Taiwan, a nation on whose commitment to worker's rights I am a bit fuzzy, but is likely leaps and bounds ahead of China. I have yet to do anything with its hardware, but it undoubtedly contains Chinese, maybe even Foxconn components.
Any device you own is certainly tainted by some kind of worker or environmental abuse whether it is Chinese labourers or conflict minerals funding the Congolese army mined by children. Apple is probably the most guilty however, not for what it is actually doing, but for the image it presents. Some of my technologically illiterate friends don't want to believe what goes into making their Jesus Phones because Apple "is such a progressive company", though many of them believe the worst about every other company.
...have a look at
http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/china-in-revolt/
This article is definitely written from a hard left position, you can tell by the vocabulary, but it appears that Foxcon has begun moving factories away from the coast and into the interior.
As the article explains, this may have unanticipated side effects because the people who work in the factories may not be transients without local residence rights, but actual local people.
Time for Apple to buy some robots and start making shiny shiny things within the USA?
Apple should do that, they are guiltier that the rest of the companies because they make a lot of money out of each product.
If a phone costs $200 to make in China and $300 in US, the companies that are selling phones for $250 won't be able to make them in US, but Apple could afford that.
"This article is definitely written from a hard left position"? If you characterise the tone of this article as in any way "hard left I am obliged either to assume that you have never talked politics with anyone from the outside left or to ask you just how right-wing you are if you actually believe what you have just written.
Lots of companies use Foxconn components in their products. Foxconn replaced AMP in the motherboard connector business about 15 years ago and up scaled from there. Motherboard production is a low margin business so any reduction on cost is sought to remain competitive. You want cheap consumer products then the biggest factor in most manufacture is labour. If you want to purchase products that have been made by companies that treat their workforce well then be prepared to pay a premium for it. There are many reasons for not buying Apple but in this case if you were to veto every purchase of electronic equipped based on Foxconn components then you would find yourself with few choices.
In China workers are having to fight for rights that have been won in the Europe and the US. Expect this to continue for some time. These rights are under threat everywhere in the global economy . Once these rights get established in China expect companies to set up elsewhere where labour is cheap and they can operate as they please.
There was a report on NPR (http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/161670004/foxconn-temporarily-closes-iphone-plant-after-riot) indicating that the security personnel were asking for someone with whom to negotiate.
Here's a link to some YouTube footage of the riot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9xGssvTEIw
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