It has more dimensions than is presented by Mike Daisey. I really is heart breaking, similar to the stores of child labour in Nike factories.
But on the flip side, you pull the industry out, and those 'poor workers' become just 'poor people with no income'. So the industry needs to be moved to more ethical standards. Apple do "seem" to be trying, with their releases of working conditions. But it's hard to tell how much of that is truth vs propaganda.
I guess raising awareness, will slowly put pressure on companies like Apple/HTC/etc to change these things.
Someone needs to think of a system that couples a profit motive to a 'people motive'...
My heart sunk on reading that. Overall, the whole initiative is positive. But given the working conditions lightly touched in the article, this is amounting to pure exploitation
>In June 2011, Zhang and his teenage classmates were taken out of their family homes and dispatched to a factory making electronic gadgets. The pupils were away for a six-month internship at a giant Foxconn plant in the southern city of Shenzhen, a 20-hour train ride from their home in central China. He had no say in the matter, he told researchers. "Unless we could present a medical report certified by the city hospital that we were very ill, we had to go immediately."
>The report details the push to find workers to produce the iPhone 5’s 8-megapixel camera, and the means by which companies like Flextronics International, one of Apple’s largest suppliers, recruit for positions on factory assembly lines. According to Bloomberg, companies recruit across the poor cities and villages of Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Nepal to staff up the army of workers needed to create components. To accomplish that task, recruiters hire brokers, who charge families high fees — often a year's worth of wages, with interest — for the opportunity to work on the supply side.
>Factory workers were reportedly also obliged to surrender their passports to brokers to ensure they paid off their debts. This practice amounts to the very same kind of bonded labor that Apple has tried to combat in its recent supply-chain audits. According to Bloomberg, Flextronics has commissioned an outside group to conduct an investigation into the fees being foisted on recruits. Apple spokesperson Chris Gaither told Bloomberg that the company will ensure that "the right payments have been made."
Neither of those is the story I had in mind FWIW. I can find you more such reports from mainstream media if you like.
People get charged for a job, shipped out to a location; kept in a virtual confinement (eg passports taken, not allowed off campus), then sometimes the work disappears and they're left high-and-dry with a debt and still no job.
Yes I imagine many do make more in factories but that's not at all the whole story, not by a long shot.
The horrifying working conditions are more of a reference to the children and political prisoners of China who are forced to work in factories for Apple suppliers.
Consider what those “exploited” workers would be doing if enough fewer people bought iPhones for their labor not to be needed. Would they be better off than they are now?
Presumably they are not being held against their will, so this is the best job they could find.
Low-skilled factory labor is a worse job than sitting in a Silicon Valley office all day, but it’s probably better than rural poverty or unemployment.
Completely agree. So often when I read articles similar to this one I can't help but think of that SNL skit with the iPhone reviewers complaining about rather esoteric issues, then being confronted by the Chinese factory workers who have to labor in much worse conditions: https://youtu.be/AJJ353epH3o
This story make me sad for the human species, it sounds criminal.
On the upside, with tech of course:
Is there any existing app for labor conditions reporting?
If potential employees had a slight opportunity to easily research conditions, they might choose another company with a better record. This would have the potential to drive disreputable shops out of business and promote those that care a bit more about basic human rights. It would be a daunting education and development task, but one that would be meaningful.
It's not so much the midnight wakeup and the rush to accomplish some necessary goal. In the right circumstances, that's actually kind of neat.
But we do have to understand, these employees live their lives in company dormitories, and for this above and beyond effort, are not paid in overtime, but with a biscuit.
Apple (and others) are arbitraging the more humane and worthwhile labor arrangements our parents (and their parents) literally fought for, and died for, to make our working lives much better.
It actually is, pretty despicable, not that foreign workers are given a chance to better their lives, but that the Apple's (and others) decisions work not to raise everyone up, but to bring us all down to a minimal level.
I think all of us are eager to see living and wage conditions rise all around the world. It is the race to the bottom that is disturbing.
They’re violating rules and it’s not without any consequences though [ex 0]
It also looks to me the same as child labor in developing countries for instance. It might be par for the course but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be against it, or turn a blind eye on the big players participating in it, or ignore reports.
Basically I don’t see how it’a misleading when it’s a reality thy is shared across an industry. Just as Apple gets press when factory workers suicide after bruning out, Amazon getting press for their warehouse is nothing unnatural.
It baffles me that "poor people being mistreated by large corporations" is such a non-story for American media, while "poor people being mistreated by large corporations that make EVs or iPhones" is such a recurring theme, to the extent that it seems it's the iPhones or the EVs that are the issue, rather than the mistreatment.
The optimistic take is that the author is trying to motivate the people who already care about "saving the planet" to also care about exploited workers, though I would have hoped for more constructive suggestions on how to help if that was the case.
The pessimistic take is that this is just a long form essay version of a YouTube thumbnail with a shocked face on it, randomly pressing emotional buttons to attract attention and using any random psychological lever that seems to work.
If this article interested you, I'd recommend the 2011 documentary, Empire of Dust about Chinese engineers working to build roads in the Congo for their mines in this area. Fascinating look at the human side of this from both the Chinese and Congolese perspective:
> Lao Yang and Eddy both work for a company called CREC (Chinese Railway Engineering Company). They have just set up camp near the remote mining town of Kolwezi in the Katanga province of the RDC. The goal of the company i..
We talked about exactly this in my Ethics in Technology class and came to the same conclusion you've stated. Yes, this is terrible from our perspective because we outlawed those kind of working conditions years ago. But if there were better options, then there wouldn't be so many people working for Fox Con. And if it's bad to us but manageable to them, then there is worse out there that they are trying to get away from.
Thinking and talking about the situation in terms of our lives sensationalizes more than it informs.
Consider what those “exploited” workers would be doing if enough fewer people bought iPhones for their labor not to be needed. Would they be better off than they are now?
This is the same attitude that led to the rise of unions in America.
The factory owners kept telling their circle of friends that the workers were better off than not working at all. It was all a big echo chamber until one day "better off" turned into "not good enough" and people died.
I'm not a big union guy, but I see a lot of history repeating itself in SV.
While this is technically true, I disagree with the undertone. I think the industry is fundamentally different and in its most extreme realizations has been shown to cause severe emotional harm to exploited workers.
the need to improve working conditions in third world factories is real. Mr.Daisy in his 'passion' to be broadcast and the rare sloppy work by TAL will cast a shadow on future investigative reports of this kind.
Apple did release the list of its suppliers after the TAL story. i hope they keep up their drive to be more transparent irrespective of this blotch by TAL.
It shouldn’t just be taken at face value, that’s a really shallow commentary. It should be put in context of the working conditions that led to this kind thing.
>>Workers are continuing to die and sustain injuries in horrific accidents as they are forced to work from morning to night for slave wages in sweatshop conditions.
But on the flip side, you pull the industry out, and those 'poor workers' become just 'poor people with no income'. So the industry needs to be moved to more ethical standards. Apple do "seem" to be trying, with their releases of working conditions. But it's hard to tell how much of that is truth vs propaganda.
I guess raising awareness, will slowly put pressure on companies like Apple/HTC/etc to change these things.
Someone needs to think of a system that couples a profit motive to a 'people motive'...
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