iPhone factory workers riot over unpaid wages in India Workers at one of Apple’s three iPhone assembly plant rioted on Saturday evening over unpaid wages. Local media reported that around 2,000 staff protested at not having been properly paid for months, and that iPhones may have been looted and the factory damaged. The factory only opened in August 2020 and is thought to …
There is no rational reason to pay your workers if you get supported by MP when not doing it.
There is even less reason to do it if you got paid to create a new factory where you don't pay the workers.
The joy to assemble the iThings they can't afford should be enough!
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Interesting deconstructing the responsibility chain here.
1. Wistron are an Apple contract supplier so presumably there are SLAs in place governing acceptable supplier conduct.
2. Wistron themselves are claiming this was as a result of incorrect expectations setting by a 3rd party hiring/recruitment vendor.
3. 3rd party recruiter is claiming Wistron weren't clear when setting salary frameworks for new positions (per Indiatimes)
Wistron are growing exponentially at the moment, and reading some of the articles in Indiatimes and others it sounds like the 3rd party recruiter made offers to new staff ($285/month) which turned out to be a 'signing bonus' rather than repeating salary; actual salary was anywhere between $163 and $217 per month. New personnel clearly weren't happy with this.
Yes, it is very small because the phones are too expensive for 99% of the population to be able to afford. But they are certainly not unpopular - having an iPhone is a huge status symbol, and there are many old second-hand iPhones to be seen.
Bugatti has a very small share of the car market in the UK ...
99% eh ? That one percent would be 13 million people. Now let’s look at reality:
The iPhone 11 and SE sold 8 million units just in Q3 - right in the middle of the pandemic. It outsold the popular Samsung Galaxy A51, which sold just 11 million units in the past year. The Xiaomi models sell another 50 million or so a year. Given the massive increase in Q4 consumer goods sales due to a strong Hindu festival season for sales, they’ll probably ship >10m units for his quarter.
There are 500 MILLION smartphones in use in India. 2019 saw 150 million smartphones sold. There are about 830 million unique cellphone users, which is almost exactly the same number as the total electorate of the 2019 General Election. This means almost every adult has a cellphone. There are 1.5 billion cellphone numbers due to many having multiple phones or dual sim phones.
There’s no godly reason for any cellphone to cost over $750-800 at the absolute most. The iPhone 11 bucked the trend of progressively absurd selling prices and therefore was a big hit in India, where it accounts for >70% of the ultra premium segment. Android phones in the $400-750 range constitute the overwhelming majority of the Indian premium market.
Why would you want to spend >$1000 on a phone and then blame Indians - tens of millions of whom are easily in a position to buy an iPhone but won’t - of being poor ? A major market being a price deflator is a good thing for the world - it compels Apple to either sit out or choose to make compelling phones in the sub $750 range to win over that market.
For a long time Apple chose to sit out of India while it’s minimum selling price rose to an absurd $999 for the X . It’s now reversed course and has better options in the 500-750 range. It opened its first Apple Store in India in. September. This is a good thing for everyone - including stockholders.
I stuggle to find your point, as you are fully contradicting yourself. firstly you need to compare apples and apples, thew a51 probably competes with the SE, but you have to look at the S Series to compare to the iPhone.
OS to OS, iOS counts for 2.69% of mobiles in india, Android 96.28%
Vendor wise Xiaomi have 27.32%, Samsung 20.1% Vivo 13.62% Oppo 11% Realme 8.62% and Apple a lowly 2.69%
(latest from statcounter)
but with the smartphone market penetration at a lowly 36.7% there are a lot of indians who have multiple mobiles and a lot more that dont have any
iPhones are inedible and provide lousy shelter.
When I worked in China the idiot tourist rate for a small but clean hotel room was under £1/day. Good food public transport also cost a pittance. That $200/month may well be enough for a local to live, eat and attend evening classes to get a qualification for a better job (the hours may well be so horrendous that you would have to save up and stop work to get some education).
Someone deserves some consequences for deliberately or accidently failing to accurately communicate the salary but for people who live thousands of miles away it is not clear whether the contract manufacturer rips off its employees more than Apple overcharges it customers.
"...whether the contract manufacturer rips off its employees more than Apple overcharges it customers."
Let's be honest; ripping off employees != charging a high (but entirely voluntary) price for an absolute luxury.
Apple doesn't 'over'charge its customers - it charges them exactly what they are prepared to pay. When you buy an iDevice you make an informed choice; every single thing Apple makes is a luxury, exactly none of them are what you could consider to be 'essentials'. So those who choose to buy their products are doing so after considering the product value proposition relative to the price.
Ripping off employees who may well have no other option of employment, or who are ill-equipped to fight an injustice, is not the same thing.
Huawei isn't in the contract manufacturing business. You seem pretty confused about the difference in skillsets involved.
Go read a little https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China#Freedom_of_association
Or talk to someone from a (ex)-communist country. Like say someone from China.
"That's because you can't buy much with that. Playing stupid on purpose, are we?"
Nope. You are conflating absolute and relative poverty. And also China's definition of poverty is more or less starvation-level income. Even at PPP this is very low. You can reaad about it here for example. You need a login but the first two paragraphs should be enough to convince you that all is not tickety-boo.
While in Western countries we get to read this:
https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/about-homelessness/
"This Christmas, more than 200,000 families and individuals in England alone will be experiencing the worst forms of homelessness. Many people already living with financial pressures made worse by the coronavirus pandemic have been pushed over the brink into homelessness and are finding themselves sleeping on the streets, hunkered down in sheds and garages, stuck in unsuitable accommodation or sofa surfing."
which is appalling, life in China has improved over the last decades:
https://theconversation.com/lessons-from-china-ensuring-no-one-goes-hungry-during-coronavirus-lockdowns-135781
"Lessons from China: Ensuring no one goes hungry during coronavirus lockdowns"
https://www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2018/06/The-Social-Assistance-Reform-in-China.pdf
"The Social Assistance Reform in China:Towards a Fair and Inclusive Social Safety Net"
https://news.gallup.com/poll/153464/poorest-chinese-better-access-food-shelter.aspx
"Poorest Chinese See Better Access to Food, Shelter
Improvement coincides with economic recovery, poverty reduction programs"
In other words: We are going down. They are moving up. Do you catch my drift?
>>In other words: We are going down. They are moving up.
But they are moving up in another quadrant of the scale.
>> Do you catch my drift?
Not really.
This started with employment rights. I mean with their forced labour policies for the poor, "education" camps, and state determined costs for goods, why are there any poor? I thought communism meant no one went hungry anyway. Just that everyone would eat gruel if it came to that.
I suppose you need to be the right "class" of communist citizen in China?
All run by percentage merchants extracting their slice whilst adding little real value themselves, and paying less and less down the chain, combined with the new normal of state subsidies financed by other workers' taxes to "incentivise investment" and paid for politicians enacting policies to erode workers rights, leads to this happy hell. And all the while, the biggest slice of profits flows upwards to the mega corp at the top, which gets to look like it keeps its hands clean from all the exploitation at the bottom because it's completely out of their control of course and they had no idea that this could ever possibly happen.
If the workers at your sub-sub-sub contractors are rioting, then only reacting to the situation when it gets to this shows that your corporate governance is severely lacking and needs much more attention and investment. "We had no idea" should not be an acceptable excuse.
"The brand owner pretending to know nothing about how their subcontractors behave is just part of the plan. Naomi Klein wrote about this in No Logo."
Surely it predates her. I mean, there are a number of 1980s action movies with this as a plot device, and I'm sure they weren't exactly the first.
well, I saw this in mid-1990s, when some outdoor equipment manufacturers, (TNF lead the way, if I remember correctly, although, Nike was probably there first) saw a great way to bigger, much bigger profits. So, they stopped being "manufacturers" and became "brands", i.e. fired all their workforce in the US and shut down production, and outsourced it to China (Mexico and South America too, if they could find those prepared to be paid so little to compete with the Chinese). And from the very beginning they knew very well about conditions and wages in those Chinese factories. 25 years later, brands playing stupid still works brilliantly. But hey, it works brilliantly because WE, the "consumers" play stupid.
"Others suggest that Wistron and Apple simply picked the wrong location to run the plant."
So they're suggesting that in other locations the workforce would put up with not being paid for months?
As usual Apple seem to be trying to distance themselves from sharp practice (to put it mildly) in their supply chain. I've heard too many stories of the workforce being maltreated in Apple's supply chain to ever buy one of their overpriced products. If course the Apple faithful will just stick their airpods in and play LA LA LA LA LA LA at full volume and claim they never heard anything bad about the treatment of people working in Apple's sweatshops.
What you need to bear in mind if course is that Apple is a fashion brand and this sort of shit has long been standard practice in the fashion industry.
While I appreciate that you're enthusiastic about bending the available facts so you can blame Apple, in this case there isn't enough evidence to justify that conclusion.
The article lists an outsourcing/subcontracting chain. You could blame Apple for not checking everything in their supply chain but I suspect Apple had little idea of the multiple hops in this chain, with each hop taking its fair share and then leaving nothing for the people doing the actual work.
If you're really so keen on buying a product without "sharp practices", I wish you luck finding another company that is at least trying to bring some openness. Or will you "play LA LA LA LA LA LA at full volume" if your choice of company merely doesn't disclose its practices the way Apple presently does?
They're not innocent lambs, but your bias is IMHO showing.
I understand your point, that this is multiple hops along the subcontracting chain, and that Apple are a long way away from these workers. But the title of the article is "iPhone factory workers riot..." These people are working in a factory which assembles iPhones. Not just components for them, or assemblies, but iPhones. The next link down the supply chain is the Apple Store.
A few years ago in the UK we had the "Tesco Horsemeat Scandal". Ready-meals sold by Tesco contained horsemeat, rather than beef. The investigation revealed a long string of contractors, subcontractors and suppliers, most of whom had acted in good faith and trusted their upstream supplier to act faithfully in accordance with their contracts. Tesco were the ones at the end of the chain who sold the contaminated meals (with their brand-name on). Therefore Tesco were the ones with the reputation to lose.
Apple are in a similar situation here. People who are unhappy with the way that these workers are being treated complain to (and about) the final link in the chain, who are the ones with their name on the product - Apple. Apple therefore have an interest (and, I assume, legal means via the contracts) to ensure that these workers are treated fairly.
Many people want the products they buy to have been produced "ethically". When the only way a customer has to do this is to lobby the company whose name is on the box, then that is what happens.
Summary: The workers are building iPhones, therefore people are saying Apple should sort it out.
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