Meet The Workers Who Make Your iPad: 100 Hours Of OT, No-Suicide Pacts, Standing For 14 Hours A Day

from thinkprogress:




Meet The Workers Who Make Your iPad: 100 Hours Of Overtime, No-Suicide Pacts, Standing For 14 Hours A Day


Back in March, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) astoundingly claimed that the iPad and iPhone are “built in the United States of America.” This news must have been a great surprise to the Chinese workers who work for Taiwanese-based manufacturing giant Foxconn, which is notorious for the poor conditions at its factories and the wave of suicides at its plants.

After much of the international media covered the abuses at Foxconn’s factories, the company, along with the major American corporations it supplies — like Apple and HP — announced that it would be reforming its practices.

Yet a new report from Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based advocacy and research group, finds that many of the practices that led more than a dozen workers committ suicide continue to live on. SACOM conducted a comprehensive study of practices at several Foxconn factories over the months of March and April and found that a number of shocking policies are in place. Here are some of the highlights of their study: ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/10/workers-who-make-ipad/

how its branded. "Made in China" = slave labor.

the US a nation of slaves working for pennies on the dollar.

much more widespread than at this particular factory, and that buying anything that says "Made in China" supports the system.

why do you think it's cheap?

nt

far cheaper than what they would be if not made by near slave labor.

My Mac products work better (for my particular purposes and situations) and have much better customer support. Is our throwaway consumer culture dysfunctional and heading for a meltdown? Yes. Do corporations suck and lie and propagandize and exploit and are they a threat to democracy? Yes. Is Apple the most egregious and hypocritical about these things? Not particularly.

Most of what you wear, your shoes, your cell phone, your flat screen TV, your microwave, etc. arw all made under similar conditions, but it's so hip to single out Macs.

if anyone knows of computers manufacturers that are socially responsible they should let us know about them.

they might be more like the Santa's elves that Mac slaves assume they are.

All about Mac Users

The fashion statistic was odd.
"71% of PC users identify their style as casual trending towards jeans."
"18 and 14% of Mac users i.d. as designer/chic/upscale and unique/retro respectively."
That means 68% of Mac users probably I.D. as "casual trending towards jeans." It's not a big difference.

can't wait to have Americans working like this, too.

He types on his Macbook...

but many of the parts were produced elsewhere, except for the RAM, video card and CPU. Of course the chips on those items are made at fabs in Taiwan.

The excuse they all give is that they have to manufacture offshore to be cost competitive. Same with our clothes, etc etc etc.

but oh well.

go ahead... step over from the Dark Side. Apple good. PC bad... (unless you run Windows 7 on your Mac).

playing with toys! No wonder I love my job.

Speaking of smug, the comment "Apples are toys." is not smug?

and that's how i calibrate and analyze my Hubble images, with a toy .... :eyes:

entrance into H.S.

Her parents said they would pay for 1/2 and she'd have to earn the other 1/2.(Babysitting)

She did,and she says it was well worth it.

it died on me a few months after the 1 year warranty expired. $900 to replace the motherboard. I can get two PCs for that amount. I'm still on my first since that Mac died, and it's been 3 1/2 years on that PC.

My wife also had 3 iPods die on her within a year - and, with very limited use. Thankfully, the fourth one has been good for a few years now.

All corporations have a fiduciary duty to be ruthless. Far from being different, Apple is currently the best technology company in the world; ergo, Apple is the most ruthless.

The socially responsible investment firms rates companies on how they treat employees and environmental issues and what they do for communities and other criteria like that as well as profit. It's there eo review

A corporation does not have a fiduciary duty to be ruthless. They will however be mocked by financial pages for wasting money on things like benefits that are "too generous"

and more of the "affordable" products we encounter are made in sweatshops somewhere.

I feel naive and frustrated about the whole issue. I can't see a way out personally - I do the best I can, but it isn't possible for me to get off the grid, et cetera.

Aerows post is dead on too - people like the Koch Brothers would love nothing more to bring those kinds of conditions here.

"Everybody's doing it"

What then is the alternative vendor?

In the past, I've assembled my own PCs. The majority of the parts have been either Taiwanese, Japanese, or Korean in origin.

Any local system builder could do the same for you.

Or tech components?

just out of curiosity, and not to argue, but where are windows components made? Aren't all computer parts made and assembled out of the USA?

between "made in South Korea/Taiwan" and "made in China/Vietnam" in terms of labor conditions.

Didn't "get" that wingding. My failure.

:cheers:

Why is it always Apple singled out in these stories?

That's reason enough. It also holds itself out as a "progressive" company.

but Apple itself seems to be focused more on being seen as innovative. I'm pretty sure the laptop I'm using was built in conditions similar to - or perhaps worse, sadly - whatever Apple is putting out. My Blackberry as well, though I'm not even sure where that was made.

to their competitors.

They sure as hell don't talk about politics.

Agreed that this "progressive" stuff is partly

- projection by apple users onto Apple

and maybe more

- a projection by some people onto apple users, who may not have this belief

Show me Apple marketing to back this up.

It is true that Apple was about the first company in the valley to grant partnership rights to gay employees. It is true that Al Gore is on the board of directors. Et Cetera.

But the company does not market itself as a "progressive" company. It markets itself as a company that is better at user experience that the competition.

It is another way of saying "think outside the box."

or

Everybody says get a windows machine. Think different.

Look, you won't find ANY corporation with overt political statements in their marketing campaigns. HOWEVER, I think it's both false and a bit dishonest to argue that Apple hasn't persistently and self-consciously marketed itself as a "more enlightened" alternative to PCs. This goes back to the infamous 1984 "Big Brother" campaign.

This message typed on an Imac, Mac OS X version 10.6.7 ("Snow Leopard") btw.

has always been the message. More user friendly, better experience than the competition, easier to get work done, etc

You can see it in the iPad 2 commercials - downplay of tech bells and whistles (even though it has it in spades). The focus is on the user experience.

That's how they have always differentiated themselves.

From a G4 QuickSilver, regular Leopard. I use windows too.

in a bid to become more "mass market".

Apple was definitely the "different" choice back when their primary product was something that held 5% of the market.

If you're implying it had something to do with being pro-gay, then you're just off -- the rainbow apple has been around since the mid-70s, and was meant to show that their monitors showed colors.

I rarely purposefully "imply" things, btw; I didn't have gay rights in mind.

They list ALL of their sourcing as a part of their record. Most companies WILL NOT do that. The reason Apple gets picked on so much is that they are very OPEN about the issues they have and try to CORRECT them, publicly.

:shrug:

Because any mention of Apple causes the anti-fanboys and anti-fangirls to come swarming, which then causes the fanboys and the fangirls to come swarming too.

Who comes swarming if you mention HP, Dell, or Lenovo? :shrug:

Not sure what is going to be better about the 5. I'm also not sure this poor old Blackberry will last long enough to wait!

anywhere?

Take a look at Ikea. IIRC, they were recently found to be exploiting workers at their US plant.

It was about 3 weeks ago.

night when they think of how much money they give to their workers as a salary. I'm sure they and those like them would force Americans to work in even worse conditions...if that is possible. What we see in China is exactly what the Repukes want for our American workforce.

That's the amazing thing that we have no "made in America" movement --

completely ignored --- !!

Especially by shoppers!!!


I just tried to find some khaki pants for my husband -- could only find made in China.

There were some made in USA which were more like work pants -- not suitable.

http://www.billskhakis.com/shop/pants_chamois_cloth.html

Heck, here's an entire directory of American-made clothing:

http://www.stillmadeinusa.com/men.html

I am needing some biz casual clothes and will gladly spend a few extra bucks for US-made products.

Coming soon to a neighborhood near us, if they have their way.

be migrating here if the plutocraps (sic) get their way. And I see nothing stopping them.

But that was the Mac Plus in 1985.

When I opened the case to install a printer, I saw that the http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/391"]designers had signed the inside as well. That little Mac was great and it launched the "desktop", "gui" and "mouse" concepts originally created at HP.

All of the Apple products that I bought for years afterward were made in Cupertino, California. I don't know when they started offshoring their manufacturing.

... the mouse, GUI and desktop originated at Xerox PARC, not HP. However, the mouse originated by Doug Englebart at Stanford.


edit: spelled Stanford wrong.

Also, the current issue of The New Yorker has a really good article talking about the innovation of those things at PARC and how they basically gave away those early ideas to Apple. And how Apple took those basic ideas, continued to innovate and turn them into mass market machines. It's a good read.

if they had locked down half of what was developed at PARC.

sP

he claims to have invented it) and taken to 3Com...Novell created a driver for their servers to operate on Ethernet or Token Ring LANS back in the day...

sP

they got Ethernet_II right but Ethernet_8022 and Ethernet_8023 were screwy. 802_3 was commonly known as the Raw frame format because it was a bastardization of the 802.3 frame format standard (left off the SAP header defined in IEEE 802.3) and 802_2 was the REAL IEEE 802.3 frame structure. Ended up having to talk that one out for YEARS...

sP

I had misremembered.

:)

You shop at Wal Mart? Target? Do you own a flat-screen tv or a countertop convection oven? Do you own a Spalding basketball or a pair of tennis shoes? A bicycle? The computer you're ranting on? You're just as "guilty" as those iPad buyers! Get over your freakin' selves! Or at least, explain a way around it...tell us how to buy a phone or a television or even fucking melamine-laden BABY FORUMULA without having to buy indirectly from outsourced jobs and Chinese slave labor?

Consumers didn't choose this. Americans are stupid, to be sure. They love Wal Mart. But if Wal Mart hadn't set the mark, if the Government hadn't given corporations the go-ahead via tax incentives to move all our jobs to China, what would have happened? Oh, yeah...we'd have jobs here in the United States.

Fuck this Apple-bashing. It has nothing to do with Apple, and everything to do with our country's tax code. The only reason Microsoft doesn't make all its shit overseas is because Microsoft doesn't actually make anything...MS is just a huge office with CD/DVD duplicators. Get off your computer high-horses already. Confront the real issue...America's trade/tax policies.

.

any of the third world countries. Repugs would love to bring those conditions here.

My car is a Chevy, made by Americans in this country, not in a Mexican or Korean sweatshop.

I order my husband's work clothes from an American manufacturer. They cost a great deal more than the stuff made overseas. The quality is much better. When he lost a bunch of weight, I couldn't afford to replace them all at once so had to purchase pants at the thrift shop so that sweatshops would not profit. The money instead supports drug and alcohol rehabilitation and homeless shelters in my community.

However, I concur on items that are not made here. I buy fabric that is made in textile mills in India and Bangladesh only because the textile mills here in the US have been shut down. I do purchase Apple products only because of their excellent customer support and any PC laptops I have purchased have much shorter lifespans. However, if I want current technology, there is no alternate American made option.

Microwaves-- mine is starting to get run down. I was thinking about how it may need replacement soon. However, I cannot get out of my head the little microwave graveyard I saw at our resource recovery plant. I may possibly not replace it and donate my microwave ware and live as we did before the late 70's--- use the oven and the stovetop.

Most other appliances are made overseas and there is no American made equivalent. I hope we can turn that around.

I can afford to buy American and even better, local. But as you stated, you can't buy quality American-made fabric anymore because it's all made overseas. My current office in Connecticut, and my previous studio in Massachusetts, were both fabric/thread mills at one time. Beautiful, huge stone buildings. Giant windows, high ceilings. But empty, and cheap to rent. All the fabric mills in New England went defunct years ago. Fabric, appliances, any real "manufacturing," is being done overseas. We're reduced to feeling "patriotic" about our purchasing decisions because we buy local produce. It's all wrong, it's all bass-ackwards.

Oh, and I agree that going micro-less wouldn't really be a big deal. So I have to re-heat yesterday's coffee on the stove. Meh.

I hope we can turn this around. Indeed! :hi:

workers are non-union and exploited.

But that suggestion will not be forthcoming, and there will be no boycott or ban - we loves us some electronic gadgets.

I had the dubious pleasure of doing some contract work at a Foxconn facility in Mexico last year. While there I found an operations manual that actually spelled out the situations under which a supervisor might be justified in using physical disciplinary measures. It went into detail about how big a stick could be, where and how many times the person should be struck, and that the supervisor should avoid hitting the errant employee in the face, or on the hands, it warned (quoting from memory) that the supervisor should "...avoid causing injuries to the the employee that would inhibit their abilities to perform their assigned tasks."

Just in case that didn't sink in, I'll put it in fewer words, the proper protocol for physically abusing a worker is IN THE OPERATIONS MANUAL!

I imagine that's just the way many American managers would like their world to be.

nt

we'll probably never be able to beat somebody for below-average work outside of a prison-setting in the USA.

I worked for several tech companies, some whom were chipmakers. I remember one of the executives say that they couldn`t resist doing business with Foxconn. They were so damn cheap and they had so many capacities - fab, testing, integration....

I`d say they killed off what was left of high-tech manufacturing in North America.

Now we know how they did it.

Why should they be any more ethical than regulations tell them to be?

1 trillion $ deposit of lithium discovered in Afghanistan. Lithium batteries are needed for all those gadgets that this country of tech junkies need. Who fuckin cares if you have to invade countries to get it. I mean what would happen to all those poor users if they got left behind on facebook. I have met the enemy and it is us!:smoke:

***along with the major American corporations it supplies — like Apple and HP***

HP & other American corporations.


Sorry but Im a very unapologetic MAC user. Most of the stuff we wear buy and use comes from some type of conditions like this. To call out Apple or to try and make people who buy their products feel guilty is laughable. I bet everyone of you own something in your house that came from some bad kind of condition.


And the other thing MACs are by far and away the best computers made. Especially for home use and for graphics. If you never used one you have no idea. I work in graphics and use both PC & MAC. Anyone who ever bought a MAC after using a PC always says they will never buy another PC again. Now MAC's run all the business software and even have their own ( iwork ) just go over to apple and check out the videos on iwork. It makes Excel, Word, & powerpoint look like junk. Its just amazing that anyone buys PC's anymore. I guess people are scared of change. Or they see the price of a MAC and think they are getting the same thing when they buy a PC for less money. Its a completely different animal.

and why drive a beat up VW bug when you can drive a Porsche ?


http://www.apple.com/iwork/tutorials/#pages-hero

it automatically and instantly turns into a MAC/WINDOWS thread. No matter what the original subject matter is or was.
I do believe the OP would have had better success in lumping the MAJORITY of products we buy from China into the OP rather than just singling out one manufacturer.
It IS sickening what we have become in America. A war-faring country that believes that we have the GOD GIVEN right to cheap merchandise.
The biggest problem, however, is that cheap merchandise is the ONLY thing we can afford any longer. At least in my case.

Companies wouldnt need to raise the products that much more if they were made in USA. Its just that instead of making 60 billion in profits they might only make 40 billion in profits. Dont let these companies fool you. How much profit is enough? They say if it was made here it would cost so much more. I ask why. Why not just take less in profit?

42 million a yr. Poor babies. How could we dare ask that of them?