iLabor: Spotlight on Working Conditions in Chinese Electronics Factories
SACOM protest in front of Foxconn shareholder meeting in Hong Kong in 2010.
Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM
I read a report a few days ago stating that if Apple products were made here in America that the price for an iPhone would go up an average of $60. Steve also had said he would not move the factories back here to the States, because in China they can do the things we can not do. Like wake up workers in their dorms, feed them a muffin and cup of tea and make them work a 12 hour shift, just to crank out whatever changes were made to the device.
How sad. These are conditions we fought against as American workers long ago and we allow this to happen in China so that we can have the next greatest gadget for a mear $60 less!? But I guess it is ok to do this in China after all there are 2 billion people there and they are thousands of miles away, so what does it matter to Americans!? As long as we get the next best gadget that speaks to us, maybe bends, glass that doesn't break... it's just at the expense of human life and billions in profit for a greedy company that has truly changed the way we lead our daily lives around the world.
Read the article NEW YORK TIMES/
In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad
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It is unreasonable to single out Apple, as opposed to any other company which manufacturers products in countries without adequate labor protection laws.
In fact, Apple is the only tech company to sign on with the Fair Labor Association, that seeks to establish and monitor international labor standards.
That being said, however, it is vitally important that international standards and protections be adopted in labor standards as well as environmental standards, and that consumers and investors apply pressure to all businesses in whatever industry to ensure that workers, as well as those who live in the relevant communities are treated humanely, and with appropriate concern for human safety and environmental protection.
I feel like that Apple is being identified because there is the sense that Apple, as well as its customers, are more likely to be concerned about these issues, and because Apple is in a position to get something done. Let's hope it works.
Pressure must be applied to all manufacturers, however, and not merely one.
Read the article NEW YORK TIMES/
In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad
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I was going to comment, but really, what's the use. Over the last generation, Western ideals have been dismantled along with the factories where our fathers worked. Cheap labor is only a small part of the equation - the bosses of the world want control, absolute and total. Labor laws, environmental regulations, even basic ethics and codes of behavior are offensive to people like Steve Jobs and his cohorts at Apple not so much because they potentially reduce profit, but because the little people, the workers, dare to interfere. If he snaps his fingers and wants thousands to march to work in the middle of the night, his will be done.
Such irony. In my younger days I became enamored of Apple after seeing the Mac commercial where a defiant rebel throws a hammer and smashes an Orwellian image. The coolness is gone, replaced by a bitter distrust of a secretive and abusive corporation whose greed and control is another part of the shift from Enlightenment to serfdom. Yes, Apple is simply following in the model set by Wal-Mart, Nike and hundreds of other international corporations; it is simply doing it in a sleeker, cleaner and more efficient manner. These guys own us.
Read the article NEW YORK TIMES/
In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad
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Foxconn says...
“All assembly line employees are given regular breaks, including one-hour lunch breaks,” the company wrote, and only 5 percent of assembly line workers are required to stand to carry out their tasks. Work stations have been designed to ergonomic standards, and employees have opportunities for job rotation and promotion, the statement said.
I've been at the Foxconn city-factory in Shenzhen about 2 dozen times in the last 3 years; from what I have observed, the only truth in the above statement is that workers do get regular breaks. On the lines that assemble my company's products, there is absolutely no one seated. The work stations have horrible ergonomic standards. "Job rotation and promotion" probably means that you get to learn how to attached a different piece to the product every few weeks. And then you get to do that job several hundred times a day until your next "promotion".
Small wonder that following payday, some 5 to 10% of the youngsters fail to return to their job (at all). At least Shenzhen has only mildly cool temperatures in the winter; in Shanghai, where winter's are more like Chicago's, the factories are unheated and workers wear their winter coats all day long.
A worker's paradise, indeed.
Read the article NEW YORK TIMES/
In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad
Consumer electronics is now almost exclusively an Asian industry. The entire supply chain is over there. All the little rubber gaskets and screws are made in the same factory city where the main assembly hall is located. Most of the workers are housed in company-owned dormitories on campus. Chinese technical schools crank out thousands of industrial engineers trained specifically to deploy and oversee production lines.
It takes months to get a factory up and running in the United States. In China they can scale up, adapt to late design changes, and hire thousands of new workers within days. The greatest advantage of Chinese manufacturing is response time. For consumer electronics products like the iPhone on a 12-month development cycle, China is the only option. It's not that American labor is too expensive, it's that American industry can't react and retool on the necessary timescale.
We can still manufacture certain parts in the United States. For example, the Apple A5 chip at the heart of the iPhone and iPad is fabricated by Samsung in Austin, and the Gorilla Glass display cover was originally only produced by Corning in Kentucky. But when the Kentucky plant was pushed to capacity, Corning turned to Japan to scale up production. It takes too long to ship the glass to the assembly plants in China by sea, and it costs too much to ship by air. And besides, it costs way too much in both money and time to get a new plant up and running in the USA.
We don't have a semi-skilled technical workforce in the United States. We have some highly-skilled engineers (not enough) and we have some unskilled labor (mainly adapted to service industries and construction), but we don't have a technical factory workforce. For example, it would be difficult to staff a high-volume production line with workers experienced in soldering electronics.
The challenge for tech companies looking to bring consumer electronics manufacturing back to the United States, as President Obama implored them to consider in his SOTU address, is not really about the cost of labor. We don't have gigantic factory cities optimized for rapid scaling and retooling of production on demand. We don't have a semi-skilled technical workforce or nearly enough experienced industrial production engineers. We don't have the supply chain.
America invented mass production, and China reinvented it in a way that has become indispensable to the consumer electronics industry. We have no capital or human infrastructure to support the kind of on-demand dynamic supply chain provisioning that China has mastered.
Read the article HUFFINGTON POST/Apple's iPad And The Human Costs For Workers In China
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I work in the footwear industry and I stopped working for companies that do business in China. Although, in this industry, conditions have improved 10 fold, a great amount of abuse and oppression still exist.
I do most of my production here or in Mexico and Korea. In Mexico they leave at 5 and could care less about you after that. They cherish a descent quality of life. In China, they do as well but it's hard to achieve it.
Many of the factories are Taiwanese owned. The workers have a healthy amount of prejudice toward Taiwanese people as a result.
One more point, this is what unchecked capitalism looks like. I don't think I ever saw the sky in Southern China. And, other designers on this site who continue to work there know what I mean.
I LOVE China, miss it, in fact but I'll only do production there when better conditions arise. It's getting better, I hear.
Don't defend Apple because you love them. The footwear industry got better because people spoke out. The large manufacturers don't do business with factories who don't meet certain standards. Force Apple to do the same.
Keep in mind; I'm a hypocrite, as I type this on my Apple (you'll hear this counter argument, guaranteed). That doesn't mean we can't force them to give us untainted product. It can be done.
Read the article HUFFINGTON POST/Apple's iPad And The Human Costs For Workers In China
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From the article: "Foxconn Technology, China’s largest exporter and one of the nation’s biggest employers, with 1.2 million workers. The company has plants throughout China, and assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, including for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung"
Why was this article aimed squarely at Apple? It took until page 3 to find out that Apple has been auditing suppliers since 2005. Where are the highly publicized audits from these other six huge consumer electronics manufacturers?
Apple has succeeded by applying flawless creative execution to standard manufacturing processes that every company listed above uses. If they shunned these manufacturing companies, not only would they have no place for these devices to get manufactured, they would no longer have a device that people could afford.
It's truly reprehensible that laborers are being treated the way they are, but in business, the rules of the game always fall to the lowest common denominator with regards to manufacturing. Those that do not master the techniques as well as their competitors fall behind. It's Ayn Rand vs. Upton Sinclair, and these companies are absolutely clamoring for the business. On top of that, the employees are clamoring for jobs at those companies. What gives here??
Regulations are the only thing that can level the playing field for all manufacturers, and those regulations *will* add to the price of every device. Quit pointing at these manufacturers and ask why regulators are sitting on their hands!
Read the article HUFFINGTON POST/Apple's iPad And The Human Costs For Workers In China
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It isn't just Apple corporate culture... It's pretty much corporate culture throughout the corporations that operate out of the U.S.. The biggest problem is that we have become so finance minded and greedy, as a people, that so many value money and possessions over other people. Our whole sense of values has taken a turn for the worst. the whole culture of "buy, buy, buy" has turned us into possession junkies, that care more about being able to live a rich lifestyle, than about whether the children in other parts of the country are able to eat every day. We've reached a sad state of affairs when your stock portfolio is more important to you than the lives and well being of other human beings...
Newspapers: Clay Shirky on the Future of the Paywall
Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users/Clay Shirky [Newcastle town wall at Orchard Street/Wikipedia]
Is there no hope of an ad-based model for web papers? It strikes me that while something is lost the unraveling of content, much that was previously impossible is now relatively trivial. Specifically, I’m thinking of our ability to monitor exactly which parts of “the paper” appeals to specific readers, where the reader consumes information, and by what means. This knowledge comes with vast opportunities. It not only gives us significant insight into a reader’s demonstrated preferences, but we can also make good guesses at other content that will be appealing. This same line of insight also applies, perhaps more compellingly (in terms of financial viability), to advertising. The new world is rife with microtargeting opportunities, one where more data (i.e., greater openness) is preferable. Interestingly, IBM and others seem to be betting heavily on these new opportunities.
This same insight into who is reading what has obvious implications for real journalism too. All of a sudden, you know exactly what your customer reads and also what they don’t. It may lead to painful decisions in the short-term, but informed decisions are typically more sustainable. As physical newsrooms transition to logical ones, competition for individual journalists balloons, but niche opportunities open up too. Outside of huge markets, a journalist with a passion for Chinese documentary film making would be well advised to cultivate more mainstream passions, but could be entirely possible (albeit still, presumably, limited) in the not-too-distant future. As content becomes more individualized, local journalists become essential. Clearly, many other new opportunities have opened and are already being explored (e.g., how news is collected, etc.).
Even for editors and management, there seems to be plausible future opportunities. As the amount of content explodes, quality assurance, individualized content, sensible aggregation, signal, marketing and so on become increasingly important.
The more I consider the future of content, the less prone I am to worrying about the long term. It strike me that the radical changes we’re currently seeing are less of a collapse and more of a reboot.
Read the article CLAY SHIRKY/Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users
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Those who are curious about the precise economics of “a paywall doesn’t actually cause most readers to pay,” can take a look at the visual paywall revenue calculator I put together for NiemanLab. That ran almost exactly two years ago, but the fundamental balance of audience breakdown, article threshold, conversion rate, and ad revenue remains the same.
While the calculator can be used to gauge the result of any particular set of assumptions — and questions like “what fraction of users who hit the paywall will pay?” can only be answered with speculation — I think what we can learn from playing carefully with this model of news revenue is the sensitivity of the outcome on those assumptions. Unfortunately, even in the face of dismal and declining online display ad rates, it’s a real gamble whether or not switching to a paywall will result in a net increase in revenue.
And yet, “freemium” seems to be the dominant web business model these days, because it’s so good at exploiting the virality of the internet for marketing and scale-out to sizes where network effects (in the sense of lock-in) become significant. So I don’t want to dismiss the fundamental idea that most people get the product for free but some people pay. The question is, what would people pay for? If I understand you correctly, you are saying that “news” as in “public interest journalism” is not something people will pay for. And from the evidence so far, it looks like you are right.
That’s why this looks like a product design problem to me.
Read the article CLAY SHIRKY/Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users
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"The most dramatic change, though, is that the paying users are almost certain to be more political, and more partisan, than the median reader. …"
Shirky has this fundamentally wrong. Partisanship rises in lock-step with the more open a technology is. Radio spawned the televangelists and conservative talk radio. The cheapest newspapers like the New York Post are the most mindlessly conservative. Free weeklies like every single Independent are reflexively liberal. Free websites have not brought us balanced debate- The Drudge Report, Hufpo, Redstate, Big Government. Free news is often good, but its business model has historically been to cater to humanity's cheapest intellectual drive- to reinforce the prejudices of its readers.
When people are paying a good sum to actually be informed, and this is what true news-loving people really want: to be informed about the facts, the interpretation and then the other side's view. In this, newspapers must be ecumenical. We will see the exact opposite of what Shirky says.
Read the article POYNTER/Shirky: Paywalls will change what users want from news sites
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