Apple's rumored to profit several hundred dollars per iPhone sold, between the $1.70/hr not-employees, massive tax evasion, and dishonesty with hardware issues there's not much left to respect them for. Privacy, with the caveat that you're not the product except for Google paying $9 billion to make you their product.
Do you know the market rate for this kind of labor in the area? Is Foxconn competitive with other manufacturers? Feel free to cite any numbers if you've got em.
From what I've heard, Foxconn is a highly desirable place to work with top of market pay and benefits. A lot of people move just to work for Foxconn.
So clearly there's a dynamic going on here that'll take more nuance to understand than can be painted with a broad brush stroke from a Western perspective.
If the broad brush stroke had a social democratic Western labour perspective, the labour would be unionised and pay and benefits would be negotiated collectively.
That doesn't seem to be the case. Of course the "market rate" will always depress wages as much as possible, because that's what markets are supposed to do - and also to excuse.
But there are human externalities, and it takes a rather strange view of the value of human life to ignore them.
> If the broad brush stroke had a social democratic Western labour perspective, the labour would be unionised and pay and benefits would be negotiated collectively.
I'm amused that you're saying this about Communist China. :D
My argument isn't to excuse Foxconn. It's to point out that we're having this discussion at the wrong zoom level.
There are complex geopolitical, social, and economic factors involved. In the system that exists, Foxconn is actually one of the better if not best actors.
But of course HN wants to boil it down to Apple cutting a check to Foxconn employees because iPhone.
Yes let's severely gimp a domestic company that generates over 5% of America's GDP (and 1% of the world's) in favor of paying Chinese manufacturers much more - when China incessantly steals American IP without care and prevents foreign companies from competing in their domestic markets. Great idea.
I don't really see how this is about Foxconn. Foxconn only hires those people for Apple and Apple only have Foxconn do it because they'd have to pay more to do it themselves. How much they're paid is dictated by Apple.
I think there's some parallel with Uber's contractor-vs-employee situation but it's much more apparent when you consider these people are exclusively working on Apple devices, within Apple's supply chain, subject to Apple's rules and rulings, even some of the components and the software come from Apple employees.
Their $1.70 an hour should be compared to the US federal minimum wage or something because that's the number Apple decided to skip out on, even as they hoarded a quarter trillion dollars.
"If not to buy Apple, what’s the substitute – Samsung? Don’t you know that Samsung’s products are from its OEM factory in Tianjin? Samsung workers’ income and benefits are even worse than those at Foxconn. If not to buy iPad – (do you think) I will buy Android Pad? Have you ever been to the OEM factories for Lenovo and ASUS? Quanta, Compaq … factories of other companies are all worse than those for Apple. Not to buy iPod – (do you think) I will buy Aigo, Meizu? Do you know that Aigo’s Shenzhen factory will not pay their workers until the 19th of the second month? If you were to quit, fine, I’m sorry, your salary will be withdrawn. Foxconn never dares to do such things. First, their profit margin is higher than peers as they manufacture for Apple. Second, at least those foreign devils will regularly audit factories. Domestic brands will never care if workers live or die. I am not speaking for Foxconn. I am just speaking as an insider of this industry, and telling you some disturbing truth"
Again, I don't point this out because I think the conditions are OK. I simply point this out to provide context and relativity to the situation. Do you really think Apple is responsible for fixing China's problems? I don't think so. But they DO take responsibility and have made strides in improving conditions for workers that work on their products. And that, I can appreciate.
> From what I've heard, Foxconn is a highly desirable place to work with top of market pay and benefits.
The article states differently:
>> Foxconn is known for its high staff turnover, largely because of the low monthly salary of 2,100 yuan per month (US$313) in Zhengzhou. By comparison, the average salary in the city of Zhengzhou in 2018 was 6,929 yuan (US$1,035) per month.
Average salaries can be very deceptive especially in developing nations. The real question is what someone with minimal skills or education can make in the area.
Tim Cook is the architect of the Apple supply chain, and that's why he is the CEO instead of a product person. He is not innocent and has to have read the Foxconn job requirements of age between 16 and 40, ninth-grade diploma, no Tibetan and Uygur ethnicities. He knows what he is doing, and blaming just the board is a cop-out.
Probably does demand a response, but this doesn't seem to be an "official" Foxconn policy:
> These conditions on ethnicity do not appear on the Foxconn website, but do adorn the walls of private job agencies hiring directly for the technology giant
Wouldn't be such a big deal if the Chinese weren't literally interning and exterminating Uyghurs. Calling this stuff racism is like calling Nazi Germany Alt-Right... Stops WAAAY short of framing the problem.
Hang on. It’s not just racist hiring policies. We have companies here that are doing business in a country that is putting millions of people of a certain ethnicity in concentration camps. That really is not being talked about enough.
Yes and we are talking about Apple which has 245 billion dollars cash on hand yet is paying workers $272 / month. Where we can hardly blame workers for what China is doing, we definitely can hold Apple to account for what it's doing. This is the sort of shit Marx was referring to as ripping the workers off surplus value in the beginning of the industrial age. Socially conscious my ass.
Entirely wrong : that's not Apple doing that, and, having spent years as an engineer at Apple, it's a huge priority to be ethical and good. i'm serious.
Why not move elsewhere? The only factories able to produce the required volumes are, by virtue of great planning by China, there, and perform work on a contract basis for many companies, Apple included, Dell, and so on.
I realize it's a complicated subject, but if ethics was as high a priority as you were saying why wouldn't they simply move those jobs somewhere else with lower margins?
EDIT: Since you edited your comment instead of responding to mine, yes China is the only country that can currently support Apple's manufacturing needs. But if Apple actually felt it was unethical to work with China for whatever reason they could begin the process to have factories set up elsewhere, even in the United States or Mexico, within a few years. It would obviously impact their profit margins, but you are arguing that ethics is a "huge priority" while providing nothing substantive to back up that claim.
Not sure why, but it wouldn't let me reply to your post earlier. (?). Now it does. Apple has been building Mac Pros in a factory in Texas; i'm not aware what is produced where though for a couple years.
All right, rather than discuss Apple potentially moving manufacturing operations overseas, let me ask another question. What are some concrete examples of Apple putting a lot of value in ethics?
> The only factories able to produce the required volumes are, by virtue of great planning by China, there
I take a nuanced view of these things. I understand that in vast swathes of rural China job opportunities like this were until recently the only way to make a decent living for many people (most of my family is Asian, and I have investments there). And I also know that most companies could not in fact replicate that technology.
But Apple is rubbing everyone’s nose in their social virtue. If they really believed what they were saying they could definitely replicate a factory like Foxconn’s in Texas for, say, $100 billion. Dell couldn’t, HP probably couldn’t, but they aren’t telling me how to live my life either.
Beyond that, you could definitely migrate iPhone production to, say, Foxconn’s production facilities in Guadalajara with appropriate production guarantees from Apple and satellite investments from other entities to replicate the PRC supply chain advantages. Not tomorrow, not even in the next few years, but the opportunity to reshore high-tech manufacturing is completely attainable.
If you don't mind me pointing out the irony here: this is the epitome of "woke capital" - the issue isn't the inhumanly low wages, it's that the company policy is discriminatory towards who it will pay those wages...
While I as European fully agree with your point of view, I think that projecting our world perspective on other countries is just bs.
Fight with racism is purely white peoples concept. Racism is a term usually doesn't even exist outside of Europe/North America. So we shouldn't try to put our mentality on top of China, as we are not the sole source of truth in this world.
I mean, they can figure this out on their own but in the meanwhile we don’t have to trade with them and give them money to essentially violate our ethics at arms length distance.
Nothing. Personally, I am against trade with Saudi Arabia.
As for Israel, I am sympathetic to a small, democratic nation populated by the descendants of a western genocide, which is surrounded by hostile autocratic or theocratic neighbors.
However that’s my opinion. If Israel’s existence is somehow against your ethics, I won’t force you to trade with them. I would just criticize you more directly.
Curious how no one here is asking "WHY don't they want Uygurs or Tibetans?"
I wonder if it could be due to the bombings [1] and mass-stabbings [2] these people carry out against Han Chinese from time to time. And the fact that Foxconn workers are primarily Han Chinese.
Of course it might also be because Foxconn is run by race-haters who hate Uygurs for their Turkic features and are jealous of Tibetans for their high altitude hemoglobin adaptations. Can't rule that one out. Might have nothing to do with bombings/stabbings.
I don't think that is racism per se, that just proves what everyone already knows, that Tibet and Xinjiang are occupied territories/colonies and not really part of China.
There is a lot of pretty horrible stuff that is “normal in a lot of places.” It doesn’t excuse it. Racism is not something Apple stands for and so it has leverage to stop this practice in its suppliers.
The only surprise here is that this unflattering portrayal was published in SCMP. They are accused of becoming another mouthpiece for the CCP, but this indicates there may still be some editorial latitude.
China and Taiwan don't have a great relationship. China claims Taiwan but Taiwan claims to be independent. There is a shadow affirmation by most world powers about Taiwan's independence. (i.e. the US hasn't affirmed their state but sells them guns)
i see, so here we would basically have the communist party let that kind of reporting, uncensored, because of the grand chessboard game with Taiwan. It is an entertaining theory but I'm afraid the very existence of the factory, to begin with, discredits it entirely.
> Foxconn is known for its high staff turnover, largely because of the low monthly salary of 2,100 yuan per month (US$313) in Zhengzhou. By comparison, the average salary in the city of Zhengzhou in 2018 was 6,929 yuan (US$1,035) per month.
Sure, but then the story becomes "it's sad that poor countries exist" instead of "Apple has an exploitative supply chain".
Not to mention that the numbers are meaningless without a sense of price levels. My cousin is a lawyer in Delhi and lives a life that would be recognizable to your I as very upper-middle class, and yet his equivalent USD salary is roughly one tenth of mine.
That's what I don't get about Apple. You're selling a premium product that in some cases costs over $1K. How much labor does it take to put one together, amortized per millions of them? An hour? Would paying $35 to a US worker for that hour be out of line? I mean, this is the company that chooses to virtue signal on a ton of different first-world issues. How about not having your main, highest margin product made by 16 year old children in a sweat shop, earning starvation wages?
> made by 16 year old children in a sweat shop, earning starvation wages?
Are they in fact starvation wages? I'm the last person to defend Apple, and I'm all for emotional appeals about ethical issues, but they're useless without an understanding of the facts, and none of the complainants on this thread seem interested in understanding whether what they're saying is accurate, presumably on the off chance that they'd lose the opportunity to pay themselves on the back for their outrage.
Elsewhere in the comments someone dug up the stats: they earn one third the mean wage in that region. That's how what I'd expect given that they're making something that costs over three times their monthly salary and has a 30%+ margin.
I see the mean wage statistics, but interpreting means is very sensitive to the distribution and the income distribution in developing countries can be _very_ unintuitive. Something like a median (or lower percentile) is a much better indicator of a claim like "starvation wages".
I go by the stats I have. If you have the median, sure, bring it out. But are you going to seriously argue that $10/day is adequate pay when a single iPhone has more _margin_ baked in it than a worker makes in a month? I mean, seriously, how the fuck is this defensible at all?
This is what I mean when I say that people are forgoing critical thinking in favor of smelling the farts of their moral outrage,whether it's tied to reality or not.
Saying that Foxconn workers are being paid "starvation wages" is an infinitely different question from whether they're getting paid "adequately" (a squishy term that contains several orders of magnitude within it) relative to Apple's margins. It's very difficult for me to believe that people who are as uninterested in understanding the facts of the situation as your comment implies actually care about the situation or these people at all.
Understanding the factual landscape of the situation is separate from having an emotional response to it, but it is a prerequisite. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and economically illiterate (or willfully ignorant) emotional appeals like the one you're making have done immense damage to humanity.
I'm not even just talking about the standard examples of Communist dictatorships: there are a million less dramatic examples, like the straightforward Indian child labor law that did almost nothing but damage to the people it was supposed to protect: metrics across the board worsened for the families in question, including years of education, calories consumed, and most damningly, _hours of child labor_ (which increased).
By the way, I'm not insensitive to the notion that the balance between capital and labor's share of income could use some improvement. My point is about the damage that disinterest in understanding the distinction causes.
Speaking of government mouthpieces, how many more sumbissions from nytimes.com do I have to ignore, before HN finally fucking downweights them off the home page.
I don't come here to fucking read the fucking New York Times. I come here to get away from exactly that kind of bulk, generic, broad-audience information source.
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadFrom what I've heard, Foxconn is a highly desirable place to work with top of market pay and benefits. A lot of people move just to work for Foxconn.
So clearly there's a dynamic going on here that'll take more nuance to understand than can be painted with a broad brush stroke from a Western perspective.
That doesn't seem to be the case. Of course the "market rate" will always depress wages as much as possible, because that's what markets are supposed to do - and also to excuse.
But there are human externalities, and it takes a rather strange view of the value of human life to ignore them.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-l...
I'm amused that you're saying this about Communist China. :D
There are complex geopolitical, social, and economic factors involved. In the system that exists, Foxconn is actually one of the better if not best actors.
But of course HN wants to boil it down to Apple cutting a check to Foxconn employees because iPhone.
Yes let's severely gimp a domestic company that generates over 5% of America's GDP (and 1% of the world's) in favor of paying Chinese manufacturers much more - when China incessantly steals American IP without care and prevents foreign companies from competing in their domestic markets. Great idea.
I think there's some parallel with Uber's contractor-vs-employee situation but it's much more apparent when you consider these people are exclusively working on Apple devices, within Apple's supply chain, subject to Apple's rules and rulings, even some of the components and the software come from Apple employees.
Their $1.70 an hour should be compared to the US federal minimum wage or something because that's the number Apple decided to skip out on, even as they hoarded a quarter trillion dollars.
- Anonymous Chinese Worker
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/many-...
Again, I don't point this out because I think the conditions are OK. I simply point this out to provide context and relativity to the situation. Do you really think Apple is responsible for fixing China's problems? I don't think so. But they DO take responsibility and have made strides in improving conditions for workers that work on their products. And that, I can appreciate.
The article states differently:
>> Foxconn is known for its high staff turnover, largely because of the low monthly salary of 2,100 yuan per month (US$313) in Zhengzhou. By comparison, the average salary in the city of Zhengzhou in 2018 was 6,929 yuan (US$1,035) per month.
Many damning things in the report but this straight up racism demands a firm response from Apple.
Board: Will that make us more profitable?
Tim: We will become less profitable, but in the long term, people will see that we-
Board: No.
> These conditions on ethnicity do not appear on the Foxconn website, but do adorn the walls of private job agencies hiring directly for the technology giant
Why not move elsewhere? The only factories able to produce the required volumes are, by virtue of great planning by China, there, and perform work on a contract basis for many companies, Apple included, Dell, and so on.
EDIT: Since you edited your comment instead of responding to mine, yes China is the only country that can currently support Apple's manufacturing needs. But if Apple actually felt it was unethical to work with China for whatever reason they could begin the process to have factories set up elsewhere, even in the United States or Mexico, within a few years. It would obviously impact their profit margins, but you are arguing that ethics is a "huge priority" while providing nothing substantive to back up that claim.
I take a nuanced view of these things. I understand that in vast swathes of rural China job opportunities like this were until recently the only way to make a decent living for many people (most of my family is Asian, and I have investments there). And I also know that most companies could not in fact replicate that technology.
But Apple is rubbing everyone’s nose in their social virtue. If they really believed what they were saying they could definitely replicate a factory like Foxconn’s in Texas for, say, $100 billion. Dell couldn’t, HP probably couldn’t, but they aren’t telling me how to live my life either.
isn't it cute that FoxConn doesn't make that as a policy but subcontractors do?
Fight with racism is purely white peoples concept. Racism is a term usually doesn't even exist outside of Europe/North America. So we shouldn't try to put our mentality on top of China, as we are not the sole source of truth in this world.
But me, an European, saying to Chinese how they must live and behave - this is just neo colonialism. They should figure this out on their own.
As for Israel, I am sympathetic to a small, democratic nation populated by the descendants of a western genocide, which is surrounded by hostile autocratic or theocratic neighbors. However that’s my opinion. If Israel’s existence is somehow against your ethics, I won’t force you to trade with them. I would just criticize you more directly.
The production of intelligence in this thread :)
I wonder if it could be due to the bombings [1] and mass-stabbings [2] these people carry out against Han Chinese from time to time. And the fact that Foxconn workers are primarily Han Chinese.
Of course it might also be because Foxconn is run by race-haters who hate Uygurs for their Turkic features and are jealous of Tibetans for their high altitude hemoglobin adaptations. Can't rule that one out. Might have nothing to do with bombings/stabbings.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bomb-blast-in-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack
That's why they still hire humans. If the above statement wasn't true, they would be replaced with a robotic system.
Not to mention that the numbers are meaningless without a sense of price levels. My cousin is a lawyer in Delhi and lives a life that would be recognizable to your I as very upper-middle class, and yet his equivalent USD salary is roughly one tenth of mine.
Are they in fact starvation wages? I'm the last person to defend Apple, and I'm all for emotional appeals about ethical issues, but they're useless without an understanding of the facts, and none of the complainants on this thread seem interested in understanding whether what they're saying is accurate, presumably on the off chance that they'd lose the opportunity to pay themselves on the back for their outrage.
Saying that Foxconn workers are being paid "starvation wages" is an infinitely different question from whether they're getting paid "adequately" (a squishy term that contains several orders of magnitude within it) relative to Apple's margins. It's very difficult for me to believe that people who are as uninterested in understanding the facts of the situation as your comment implies actually care about the situation or these people at all.
Understanding the factual landscape of the situation is separate from having an emotional response to it, but it is a prerequisite. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and economically illiterate (or willfully ignorant) emotional appeals like the one you're making have done immense damage to humanity.
I'm not even just talking about the standard examples of Communist dictatorships: there are a million less dramatic examples, like the straightforward Indian child labor law that did almost nothing but damage to the people it was supposed to protect: metrics across the board worsened for the families in question, including years of education, calories consumed, and most damningly, _hours of child labor_ (which increased).
By the way, I'm not insensitive to the notion that the balance between capital and labor's share of income could use some improvement. My point is about the damage that disinterest in understanding the distinction causes.
Just curious.
I don't come here to fucking read the fucking New York Times. I come here to get away from exactly that kind of bulk, generic, broad-audience information source.