Slavery induced profits for Apple Electronics!!

Hmmm.... thought this forum seems the appropriate one to post this in... the link below will highlight the slavery which goes on today with people who work for Foxconn in Southern China, they are Apples biggest suppliers!

Just think the next Ipad or Ipod you buy contributes to the slavery of these guys and girls slugging it out in the warehouses for just under £3 a day.... it's kinda disgusting that this type of slavery still exists but to see it's one of the biggest Electronic Suppliers in the World which is in-directly responsible is beyond belief... just check out the link!!

www.mailonsunday.co.uk...

I'll include some of the article here but there really is quite a lot and worth reading:

As the iPad is launched in Britain, a special investigation now reveals the full shocking toll of suicides at its Chinese factory
A once pretty 17-year-old lies crippled in a hospital bed two miles from the factory where she worked long, tedious hours checking the screens of Apple iPads for tiny flaws. Her parents brood silently at her bedside.

At 8am one morning in March - just 40 days after she began her first job at Apple's main supplier, Foxconn, in southern China - Tian Yu took the decision to leap from her fourth-floor dormitory rather than take her place on the production line.

Tian survived but must wonder if she would not have been better off dead.

After two weeks in a coma, she woke to find herself paralysed from the waist down, unable to sit up by herself and suffering from fractures and liver and spleen damage.


Read more: www.mailonsunday.co.uk...


The Orwellian control that Foxconn's army of security guards, backed by local police, exercise over the lives of the young people living in the factory plants in Shenzhen's Longhua and Guanlan districts adds to the sense of intrigue surrounding the deaths.

Both of the heavily guarded plants comprise several bunker-like, six-storey factory blocks that are protected by several layers of electronic security, through which workers flow continually night and day.

In the towns outside the factory complexes that contain the dormitory blocks, teams of Foxconn security guards patrol on motorbikes and on foot, armed with 3ft-long batons. A restaurant owner in Guanlan, who asks not to be named, describes the operation that swung into operation within minutes of an 18-year-old female worker jumping from a dormitory block beside his restaurant on April 7.



Read more: www.mailonsunday.co.uk...

With security guards constantly watching them, workers - most of whom earn a basic salary equivalent to £2.90 a day - would talk to us only when they were able to meet us at discreet locations away from the Guanlan and Longhua plants.

Those who did spoke of a harsh factory regime, characterised by monotony, intimidation and stress, and beginning with a period of military-style training known in Mandarin as 'jun-xun' for new recruits.

One 20-year-old male worker recalls: 'I was made to stand to attention like a soldier without moving for ten minutes, 20 minutes and 30 minutes at a time. We lived in dormitories inside the factory blocks when we were undergoing training.

'There were 45 people in my dorm and we slept in three rows of triple-layer bunk beds. The dormitories stink and they're full of ants and cockroaches.'



Read more: www.mailonsunday.co.uk...


^^ These are just snippets from the story but makes the point.... go check it for yourself...

It's like that everywhere, sorry to pop your bubble. But Apple is one of the most respectuous company towards it's workers, trust me.

But, it's always sad to hear thoses stories, but it's our fault if it's happening, because WE are always asking more and more, so companies needed a better way of producing (faster and for less) so they all moved to China and other places like this to produce.. but the effects of this mass productions that WE wanted to satisfy our completely WRONG NEEDS are very very sad.


:\

I hope I made my sentences clear enough, sorry I'm not english

aahh..true capitalism at its finest...and you don't think that's what is slowly being done in the western world?? first you have to get rid of the unions...only 7% of american workers are unionized, and the europeans are right now in the middle of breaking up the unions over there. the wealthy think that wages and benefits are too high in the western world, and would love to see the chinese model of employment, imported around the world.

and what stands between us and the corporations??? representative government that's what. so, you might want to think twice about doing away with representative government, the alternative could be china.

I'm not sure if this story is being presented as a 'surprise'. Apple are not the only company to be using 'slave' labour in off shore manufacturing centres. The point is, these centres have grown up precisely because the standard of living is low in comparison to the West and so labour wages can be kept incredibly low.

The same goes for off-shoring IT to India etc. The pff-shoring doesn't take place because they are the 'best' at what they do, it takes place because it is cheaper and provides an 'adequate' service.

It is simple math...

Why bring slaves thousands of miles across the oceans to work in your own country when they can do it in their own country and you just transport the products? No social outfall...

The world manufacturing markets have expanded based on this principle of low cost labour, the major problem comes when the labour markets reach a point of economic development such that they are no longer 'competitive'. Problem is that there will then be no alternatives and the economy will truly be major trouble, maybe in 50 years or so.

Under developed parts of Africa will likely be come the next major source of low costs manufacturing labour and we'll start to see large amounts of corporate cash being ploughed into puppet governments that can create a stable enough social environment such that finance can be pumped in for manufacturing development with low cost labour.

reply to post by jolois


I did understand your post (just about )....

This Foxconn sounds more like how a Prison should be not Freedom...

reply to post by SugarCube


Yeh, but you have to look at the billions made by Apple and then look at the whole picture... who is doing the work? where it's coming from? how is it being done? etc etc...

And i think i agree with you about other parts of the World incorporating this type of behaviour seen in Asia...

I always remember these words 'It's the way of the World'

and

'Money makes the World go round' < This one is just totally wrong because it's the Suns magnetic pull which makes the World go round!!

We got the World Cup coming up in Africa.... i wonder how much the labourers got paid for that...

[edit on 30-5-2010 by TruthxIsxInxThexMist]

This thread is very misleading, starting with the title of the thread referring to Apple.

The thread is about an independent company called Foxconn. You can buy their motherboards directly in which case Apple is not involved at all, though I expect they sell to a number of other customers, of which Apple is one along with other companies like HP, Dell, etc.

Secondly, I've been to numerous factories in China to assess the employee living conditions as a condition of doing business with a US company, though not this particular one. The good companies there are all pretty similar though and this appears to be a good company. The dormitories in the similar companies remind me of the dormitory I went to college in, somewhat cramped and a lot of people share the same bathroom but they really weren't much different than my college dorm. Certainly not luxurious in any way but hardly bad place to live compared to some of the accommodations I saw in the Chinese countryside which were far worse, that they were probably trying to get away from.

Thirdly, the suicide rate reported at Foxconn is about the same as the suicide rate in the USA which is lower than the average for China. This thread is somewhat of a duplicate and I posted the stats in another thread:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
reply to post by rickjames

 

Suicide rates for China are 13.9 per 100,000 people per year. So 14x3 would be 42 suicides per year at the standard Chinese suicide rate, right? So isn't 13 suicides low? If you project 13 suicides so far, for the full year you get about 31 suicides. So 31 is below 42, it's actually lower than average.

The US suicide rate is 11.1 per 100,000 people per year, so even at that rate we would expect 33.3 suicides per year for 300,000 people. So 13 projects out to 31 which is not only well below the average for China, but it's even slightly below the suicide rate for the USA, but about the same.

en.wikipedia.org...

So yes any employer with 300,000 employees is going to have suicides. But let's put that in perspective with the suicide statistics for the US and for China, shall we?

The part about the wages is accurate but for some of these folks, the alternative to this low income is no income at all. Try starting your own factory using US labor and see how far you get. Your version of the products will cost much more to make because of the labor costs, and nobody will buy it because the price will be too high. So yes there is wage inequality from country to country, there's no easy answer for that. But China has minimum wage laws like the US does and it's not fun to live off of minimum wage in either country.

Apple evaluates the living conditions of the factory employees before awarding those factories any contracts for business and looks at them annually. And they are investigating the suicides:

Apple, Dell, and HP: Shocked, Shocked at Foxconn Suicides

Look at the following that AP reported:

“We are saddened and upset by the recent suicides at Foxconn,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said. “Apple is deeply committed to ensuring that conditions throughout our supply chain are safe and workers are treated with respect and dignity.”"A team from Apple is independently evaluating the steps they are taking to address these tragic events, and we will continue our ongoing inspections of the facilities where our products are made,” he said.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
This thread is very misleading, starting with the title of the thread referring to Apple.

The thread is about an independent company called Foxconn. You can buy their motherboards directly in which case Apple is not involved at all, though I expect they sell to a number of other customers, of which Apple is one along with other companies like HP, Dell, etc.

Secondly, I've been to numerous factories in China to assess the employee living conditions as a condition of doing business with a US company, though not this particular one. The good companies there are all pretty similar though and this appears to be a good company. The dormitories in the similar companies remind me of the dormitory I went to college in, somewhat cramped and a lot of people share the same bathroom but they really weren't much different than my college dorm. Certainly not luxurious in any way but hardly bad place to live compared to some of the accommodations I saw in the Chinese countryside which were far worse, that they were probably trying to get away from.

Thirdly, the suicide rate reported at Foxconn is about the same as the suicide rate in the USA which is lower than the average for China. This thread is somewhat of a duplicate and I posted the stats in another thread:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
reply to post by rickjames

 

Suicide rates for China are 13.9 per 100,000 people per year. So 14x3 would be 42 suicides per year at the standard Chinese suicide rate, right? So isn't 13 suicides low? If you project 13 suicides so far, for the full year you get about 31 suicides. So 31 is below 42, it's actually lower than average.

The US suicide rate is 11.1 per 100,000 people per year, so even at that rate we would expect 33.3 suicides per year for 300,000 people. So 13 projects out to 31 which is not only well below the average for China, but it's even slightly below the suicide rate for the USA, but about the same.

en.wikipedia.org...

So yes any employer with 300,000 employees is going to have suicides. But let's put that in perspective with the suicide statistics for the US and for China, shall we?

The part about the wages is accurate but for some of these folks, the alternative to this low income is no income at all. Try starting your own factory using US labor and see how far you get. Your version of the products will cost much more to make because of the labor costs, and nobody will buy it because the price will be too high. So yes there is wage inequality from country to country, there's no easy answer for that. But China has minimum wage laws like the US does and it's not fun to live off of minimum wage in either country.

Apple evaluates the living conditions of the factory employees before awarding those factories any contracts for business and looks at them annually. And they are investigating the suicides:

Apple, Dell, and HP: Shocked, Shocked at Foxconn Suicides

Look at the following that AP reported:

“We are saddened and upset by the recent suicides at Foxconn,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said. “Apple is deeply committed to ensuring that conditions throughout our supply chain are safe and workers are treated with respect and dignity.”"A team from Apple is independently evaluating the steps they are taking to address these tragic events, and we will continue our ongoing inspections of the facilities where our products are made,” he said.

Great post, very informative and I think you summed it up pretty well..
Thanks

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Just letting you know that i have read your post and maybe i should have done a little more research before posting my thread but it doesnt discount from the fact that there are people working their butts off for the men at the top only to recieve paltry pay and conditions... look at how much billions top companies make per year and then look at the people who make the billionaires...

Anyway thanks for your post, it was a good one and i have starred it.

reply to post by jolois

Thanks, glad you like my post (that's what stars are for BTW)

I hope I didn't sound too defensive of Apple because I don't really like them because of the way their quicktime product doesn't give me the option of starting it when I want to. It automatically starts when my PC starts and I hate that! I hardly ever use quicktime so I need the resources for other applications.

Most other respectable applications will give you the option of having it start when your PC starts, but Apple are bullies in that regard because they don't give you any option, so I have my issues with them. But not over their labor sourcing practices...If you read more in that link I posted, their supplier evaluations are quite detailed.