On the customer-facing side they are all about providing a good user experience and also going through the motions about carbon neutrality and justice and whatever else makes for good marketing these days.
On the manufacturing side it they could not care much less. They say they care about pay and justice and so on and so forth, but where the rubber hits the road --where it inconveniences them and does not add to the bottom line, they do not appear to care.
Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company.
Foxconn has a history of treating in-country employees like all the other local companies do. Multiply by a few thousand for scale, and some rate of bad things is inevitable. Apple audits Foxconn, but audits do not catch everything (and not immediately!).
Note also that Apple effectively shut down this Foxconn plant by refusing to accept manufactured product until the situation was rectified.
Extrapolating from a few cases of dramatic failures on the part of Apple's manufacturing partners is dishonest at best.
This is true, but Foxconn is the only game in town for the kind of manufacturing (precision and volume) that Apple requires.
Foxconn doesn't uniformly suck, either. They abide by local laws, and they clearly cut corners and fail more often than they should -- but it's not like Foxconn is the seventh plane of Hell and all interactions are tainted with sin.
The last time they were in the news that I recall it was because workers were killing themselves in such large numbers that they decided installing “suicide nets” was the solution.
Apple 1000% are capable of making sure that nothing like that ever happened again and yet here we are not long after.
Apple has a very sketchy history in general when it comes to China and there is no reason at this point to assume this is some innocent mistake.
>The last time they were in the news that I recall it was because workers were killing themselves in such large numbers that they decided installing “suicide nets” was the solution.
My city has installed suicide netting on bridges, presumably because residents "were killing themselves in such large numbers". Should they be getting similar flak?
I agree we can continue to pursue better, but I think it's only fair to note that crowding, sickness, and bad food is progress over suicidal tendencies .
We are blaming Apple for having a supply chain that meets no reasonable definitions of ok or appropriate.
They promised us they would fix it and they didn’t. It appears they didn’t even try because all of the conditions outlined in this article would have become very obvious if they managed to do the absolute bare minimum of analysis by say visiting these locations.
The accusation here is that Apple lied and they knew about this and that’s not ok.
> In such high numbers that you need dedicated anti suicide infrastructure?
>This very clearly isn’t some kind of regular workplace with otherwise reasonable conditions.
Or maybe "suicide + apple factory" gets clicks/comments (like this article/thread), leading apple to install preventative measures to make it look like they're doing something. I seriously would still like to see statistics before jumping to conclusions either way.
We are literally in a comment section of a set of very specific reports detailing the exact problems in the conditions. This is not some hypothetical where we need to “wait for the statistics to compare how many standard deviations about the median these workers are”.
There is very clearly a big problem here. That isn’t click bait.
It looks like the average rate is 97 per million per year in China. Foxconn employs around 350K in China (other posters are claiming 1M, but I took the most conservative figure I found).
With 350K employees, you’d expect about 34 suicides per year if their rate was at the national average. At 3 a month, yeah, I’d put up nets as well.
While I’m sure the reporting doesn’t tag every worker who happens to commit suicide as a Foxconn suicide, I don’t see evidence that the Foxconn suicide rate is higher than the national average and sibling comments and Wikipedia (sourcing ABC News and the Economist) are claiming it’s lower.
What exactly are you arguing here? I’m saying things are so bad that they KEEP making the news.
Furthermore, I’m saying that last time this happened we were promised that they didn’t know and that this would never happen again.
Yet, here we are with proof that things have not actually changed in any meaningful sense and the worlds largest company has a giant human rights problem at the core of their supply chain and there is no way they can claim ignorance this time. They are looking the other way on purpose..
People trying to commit suicide is inevitable. Suicide rates at Foxconn were lower than the national average. Workers killing themselves is obviously bad, but it's difficult to argue that Foxconn drove them to it when suicide rates outside were higher.
If these violations were happening stateside, I bet we’d hear a lot more about it in the news and Twitter. I’m sure all the people on Twitter who dump on Amazon would be dumping in them… but likewise the Twitterverse only cares about what will get them internet brownie points.
>Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company
Please back this statement up. I'm honestly curious.
It's a company, they optimize for their interest. They will invest according to that image/reputation value.
But as any company, profits...
But this reply just sounds like blind PR.
> It's a company, they optimize for their interest. They will invest according to that image/reputation value.
Given this article exists, which specifically targets damages against apple’s image/reputation value, then it seems clear to me there exists at least some incentive for apple to do as GP describes
There might be an incentive != they are doing things about it. ParanoidShroom righly asked for proof from GP, you offered "they are incentivized" that's not proof.
> Foxconn has a history of treating in-country employees like all the other local companies do. Multiply by a few thousand for scale, and some rate of bad things is inevitable. Apple audits Foxconn, but audits do not catch everything (and not immediately!).
They have a LONG and storied history of treating in-country employees like this. This isn't some new revelation. Apple has had more than enough time to start moving their manufacturing to a country that doesn't allow this sort of thing. They won't do that, though, because their pricing is already exorbitant for that they offer and it just doesn't work if you have to pay western wages and respect western labor laws.
> Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company.
Citation definitely needed.
Apple has a global revenue of about $360B, but the automotive industry is an order of magnitude larger at $3.6T. You're suggesting that the automotive industry expends about 1000x less per dollar of revenue on supply chain working conditions than Apple does?
I never understood why Apple catches so much flack for this. They don’t own Foxconn, it’s a contact. There’s only so much they can audit, and is there any other company they could choose instead who has iPhone-level manufacturing scale? I suspect they’ve got no choice but Foxxcon and Pegatron. Pick your poison.
Apple is making money hand over fist, and they've got nearly $200B cash on hand. They aren't directly responsible for the working conditions, but they set the terms of the contract. They could pay more, and demand humane treatment and living wages in their contract. With that warchest, they could afford their own manufacturing facilities -- Foxxcon vs Petragon is a false dichotomy. But they don't. This is their responsibility, but they prefer to keep it at arms-length and pretend that they don't know what conditions will result from paying a certain price per unit.
The factory in question doesn't make just iphones. It also makes Amazon firesticks "among other things"
Apple specifically getting called out here is odd to say the least. Besides, Apple is the only company that has put the said plant under probation. If anything, the other companies should be getting some flak for not even caring.
I agree, other companies should be getting flak for this. Apple does not deserve less attention. Apple has the power and financial standing to make a difference here. With great power comes great responsibility and all that.
Just because others are using this facility isn't an excuse by any means. Like I said, Apple could build another factory. They choose not to, because they profit from the human rights abuses.
If you are knowledgeable about precision manufacturing and supply lines, you'll know that it is not that simple.
Apple shut the plant down. They are making a difference. Do you know what it was like before Apple arrived with enormous manufacturing requirements, and had the power to influence things? Not better!
Apple does not profit from human rights abuses. Apple writes contracts to prevent them. Those contracts are not always followed, and Apple's audits sometimes fail to turn up problems in time. This can be tragic, but it's blatantly incorrect to assert that Apple doesn't take this extremely seriously.
Indeed, I cannot understand how "you have $200B, there are more than two options here" could be interpreted to imply that a third option is necessarily simple.
>Apple specifically getting called out here is odd to say the least.
"a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic"
Saying "$COMPANY treats its workers poorly" provides a concrete entity to be mad at and might lead to some protests/social media posts, whereas saying "most electronics makers treat their workers poorly probably leads to a resounding "that sucks but what can you do?".
Ah yes, the "but Something has to be done" fallacy.
Placing blame arbitrarily, directing anger at the wrong people, and protesting because the mob said to on social media all leads to solutions for the wrong problems.
I don't have standing for any legal act in India. I can boycott and criticize the company that's doing business in my country. And that's why we focus on Apple -- the company whose reputation is so important to its market value.
I would mostly agree, the thing I try to understand is the motivations for working with these ODMs.
There's sort of the line of business. Just assuming from a black box, Apple wants to build devices in these low-cost countries. Is it a competitive advantage to do this themselves? Do they have the skillset and wherewithal to do it well? They design chips, but they have TSMC make them, because among other things, there's much more to being a fab that bluntly, I think apple is not equipped for.
Similarly, I think, design the products, figure out processes, then get them from the companies that spend all their time coordinating and building the stuff at a global scale.
Not to exculpate Foxconn, this is not the first time there's been stories like this of Indian facilities of Taiwan ODMs. And usually the first thing that gets pointed out, is that the ODM is itself using local contractors. So the reality is, where does the buck actually stop? The big question I have, is how would apple do this themselves? Is it that Foxconn has not quite figured out how to operate in India effectively, or is there some implicit outsourcing of misery to the next sub-contractor?
I assume apple also works with everyone else who has the scale to build iPhones like Wistron and Flex, but apple already similarly put one of Wistron's Indian factories on probation after a riot due to unpaid wages(?). I want to say they were mainly doing macbooks and ipads?
My understanding was one of the things is that the ODM books all the components and sort of capital for building things, so there's some capital structure things that I probably don't fully appreciate. No guarantee that's correct though...
I think it's as simple that for every "Apple can do no wrong" out of touch fanboy, there's about a half dozen "Apple can do nothing good" commenters online that are angered by Apple simply continuing to exist. No amount of oversight, auditing or spending will appease them even if it's tenfold as much as the next best tech company.
Apple publicly promised everyone that the first time they were exposed as having terrible working conditions and major human rights issues in their supply chain that it would never happen again.
They are the largest company in the world they are entirely capable of delivering on that promise.
Asking for some accountability on that isn’t some hysterical opinion.
Sorry dude but your comments on this thread are the standard Apple-hater stereotype, so forgive me for not believing you care. Where's the outrage about Playstations, XBoxes, Dells and Pixels made by Foxconn? Nowhere, because nobody cares when it isn't Apple.
There's never a demand that we change trade agreements at a political level. There's never a news story that Microsoft is sourcing from Foxconn. That makes the motives for the concern suspect.
By all means, we should hold Apple accountable to their word. But this seems like the absolute least effective way to enact the change being requested.
Of course people can be mad at Apple specifically for the reasons already outlined:
1. This is a long term pattern of behaviour from them.
2. They promised they would fix it. While everyone seems to agree that as the largest company in the world they are entirely capable of doing that the fact is they didn’t.
3. There is zero chance that any of this is happening without their knowledge. That excuse worked the first time but not now.
Anyone who fits that pattern is of course fair game but don’t pull that kind of nonsense where unless you criticise everything that is wrong in tech supply chains than you are secretly “just a hater”.
If you claim that we should hold Apple to account for their word how exactly do you suggest we go about change?
I think you have an oversimplified view of very complicated problems.
1. The long-term pattern of behavior from Apple is to work with manufacturers in developing countries. And to write in very specific requirements for worker treatment into contracts. And to audit facilities, and shut them down when not compliant. And to have Apple staff on-site at those facilities.
They do not see everything, and they do not prevent everything. But they do make more, and a more visible effort than anyone else.
2. Apple cannot "fix" the woes of the developing world, certainly not alone, and certainly not immediately. Even with the cooperation of foreign corporations, with Amazon and Microsoft and Dell who all work with the same partners. Even with the cooperation of foreign governments (local, regional, national), who are of course never ever corrupt, and never look the other way when a sub-sub-sub-contractor does a crappy job. Perfection is not happening.
The proper questions are: Is Apple leading the way for improving things for workers? And are they doing enough to improve things such that additional doings would have only marginal effects? Clearly the answers are YES and maybe. My opinion of the latter "maybe" is more like "probably" because I'm biased to believe that the people who run Apple recognize the moral and economic value in doing so. Obviously you disagree on that, but you are no more objectively correct than I.
3. You honestly believe that someone in Apple was aware of tainted food being served to workers, and decided "eh, who cares?"?? Honestly?
I think that would say more about you than it would about Apple.
Likewise, if we want to solve an industry-wide or global labor ethics problems we need industry wide or global solutions. Tariffs, taxes, regulation, trade agreements and embargoes solve these scale of problems and we do it all the time. Make it an even playing field across the industry and make it more expensive to do the wrong things and force externalized costs to be part of the price.
Apple fucks up, but it seems entirely unrealistic to expect a company to voluntarily put themselves at a competitive disadvantage, to give up profit, and to make everything harder and more expensive for themselves just because they're a big player in the market. That gets the exact results we see, instead of the solution we want. Let's try to solve the problem and let's line up Apple to be first in line for inspection, but it can't be a line of just one company if we expect actual results otherwise we're just going to shift around the problem instead of solving it. It's not like Google and Microsoft are small scrappy startups looking for a moonshot, they're chomping at the bit to take marketshare away from Apple and they're both already in bed with Foxconn too.
A good read on the subject is "Dying for an iPhone" by Chan. The book documents the last 20 years or so of Apple's labor interactions with Foxconn and makes a fairly compelling argument that Apple, like most other companies, says one thing and then does enough to be seen "doing something about the problem" while not actually doing anything of substance (the problem with the suicides was that they were getting ripped apart in the press for it, so the solution was to make it harder to commit spectacular suicide).
It also documents the "creative abuses" that local governments and Foxconn seem to have with schools and such - "internships" that are not optional, are claimed to be CprE/EE/etc, and are really just bonus labor for the busy season. "Your degree is nice, now turn this screw."
It's hard to say where Apple's responsibility ends and Foxconn's begins - the two are woven so tightly anymore that the boundaries are blurred. Major chunks of Foxconn's operation are purely Apple assembly plants, and Apple, of course, literally wouldn't exist today without Foxconn.
I've decided that I'm done with Apple for now and have been seeking alternatives (Kobo Elipsa for PDF references, PineBook Pro for laptop, and a little flip phone for cell connectivity at the moment) - it was their labor practices, on top of their eagerness to do on-device content scanning, and a few other things that just pushed me over the edge.
Unfortunately, there's not really a good space in modern tech that remotely qualifies as "ethical to use," anymore. I've been trying to go down some weird roads of low power ARM systems, but a lot of those are still made in China. At least some of the Rpi boards are made in the UK, and Purism has the USA-made Librem 5 at some significant cost.
Unfortunately, the only sane answer I keep coming to is that the best solution is to abandon consumer tech entirely. It's the field in which I've made my living, and there's certainly some good to come out of it, but if you trace where the hardware comes from, and then look at how the software is designed (to capture all the behavioral surplus it can for the surveillance capitalism processing pipeline, Zuboff's book goes into great detail here)... it's slavery for the hardware and human-toxic psychological exploitation for the software.
The less I use the stuff, the less desire I have to use it.
Apple have plenty of money and resources to have a full time independent team tasked with investigating all their contractors working conditions, and preventing these things from happening, before the media shines a light on it. And yet they don't. Or worse, perhaps they do know, and yet still do nothing until the media reports it.
That could be applied to every corporation that outsources manufacturing, which is almost all of them. The same could also be said of the "greenwashing" effect of outsourcing. We move polluting industries overseas so we don't see it and companies can make two-faced claims about being "carbon neutral" by not counting overseas manufacturing.
Do you think your non-Apple smartphone or non-Apple laptop is somehow "righteous" and assembled at some other special plant with more dignified treatment of their workers? Think again.
Are you suggesting we accept human misery and injustice as necessary evils? Or are you advocating for change as these problems are endemic to modern manufacturing?
Neither. I'm just surprised at the ignorance of people who think that any other brand isn't partaking in similar sweatshops, or the very same one - Foxconn is the world's largest assembly contractor (and more), serving all the major brands. They're not just "the Apple factory".
Basically it’s outsourced slavery. But who cares in the West? It’s like the deepest levels of cruise ships filled with Asian workers that nobody sees. One sees shiny stores and shiny ships and it’s ok.
On the other hand Apple does audit the suppliers and I believe, that internally they know very well what’s happening in the factories.
By this logic, just about every job in early-development countries (e.g. and relevantly: large parts of China and India), is slavery.
If we accept the colloquial gross misuse of "slavery" to mean "crappy jobs that the workers depend on for survival", then I'm inclined to agree on principle, but I feel similarly about food service workers in the US and subsistence farmers everywhere.
There's a difference between making federal minimum wage and the indentured servitude these workers find themselves in. McDonalds workers are free to go home at the end of their shift and eat whatever they want. These workers sleep 8 to a room with no temperature control, no privacy, shared bathrooms and rations that we literally would not feed to prisoners.
We aren't talking about 100 or 200 people. We are talking about 1 million as of 2011. Foxconn's solution to suicide jumpers was.. netting. There's shitty working conditions and then there's.. this.
Those living conditions are pretty awful, but not unique. Regionally, it's just on the bad side of ordinary.
Obviously tainted food is always serious, and it sounds like the oversight there was abysmal. Remember that Apple shut the plant down until it's fixed.
1 million employees, not 1 million exploited suicidal wastrels.
San Francisco's solution to jumpers from the Golden Gate bridge was ... counseling services, cameras, and nets. Just like Foxconn! What would you suggest instead?
They weren't physically unable to leave. They were not given permission to leave the work day early. Nothing stopped them from terminating employment to leave.
Why can’t be these extreme expensive devices be a positive example? Adding 2$ for manufacturing cost would be less than 0,2% of retail price, but give somebody meal without worms. Ok, poor shareholders earning less is an argument.
My friend is Burger King worker in Germany. He has some vacation days, low but stable wage and can go home after his shift and cook his special body building meals. Not much slavery.
Most of these jobs you consider outsourced slavery pay better than anything local. If you were getting paid 25% more than any other job back home you would consider it good pay.
Can we stop comparing low wage workers with slavery? Slavery is much worse, at least how it was practiced in North America. It was more than low wages and and economically exploitative relationship, it was a different set of laws & rights for an ethnic group.
Slaves had severe legal restrictions on movement, education, religion, marriage, and participating in commerce. Slaves also had very limited legal protections against bodily harm caused by their masters. This is an inherently different type of relationship than someone working in a Foxconn factory.
People believe money is the solution to this problem. Apple has a lot of money. Therefore, Apple should be able to fix this. Since they don't fix it, they aren't spending enough money to fix it.
More money makes solving a lot of problems easier. Can Apple actually put in enough money to fix it? If they can, they aren't. If they can't... this isn't a problem solvable by money.
Which is it? I don't know. The question comes down to, what does trying hard enough look like? shrug
Sounds like my student accommodation 25 years ago. We had human shit flowing down the hall on numerous occasions, the rooms were so small you could only lie down in one axis and the refectory food put people in hospital and wasn't even recognisable as described. It actually turned me vegetarian. All for £120 a week.
This is always what happens when you subcontract responsibility out. The middle-man works out how to keep the margin as large as possible and that means the bottom rung gets squashed and everyone up the chain is getting lied to. This has been universally true through my entire life from (real) estate agents, IT contracting agencies, education and service contracts.
The food for the workers was also seemingly college canteen food because the whole accomodation setup was a converted college + student dorm (which had been closed since COVID)
Edit: Found a video of someone complaining about the food when it was still a college hostel.
Now imagine what students, who do not have the same organizing abilities as workers, had to go through.
> This is always what happens when you subcontract responsibility out. The middle-man works out how to keep the margin as large as possible and that means the bottom rung gets squashed and everyone up the chain is getting lied to.
Not always. You can have reliable middlemen who verify claims and investigate and blacklist fishy suppliers, but the buyers have to want it. Consider how we as purchasers of expensive electronics tend to buy from established retailers (middlemen) who invest in processes to ensure the legitimacy of the name-brand products they stock, instead of buying from an unknown company that was created last week and is selling the same products at a much cheaper price. We consider the risk that the unknown company with no history may have sourced counterfeits, intentionally or unintentionally, and we buy from a retailer we trust instead.
It sounds like Foxconn's approach to acquiring accommodations for their workers is like buying an Hermes handbag under a bridge for $20.
And £120 a week sounds like a rip-off. I remember paying just under £40 a week in Greater London at around the same time. The accommodation was pretty basic (a room in a hall of residence with shared loos/showers/kitchens) but pretty well looked after.
Compared to student residences (общежития) in the former USSR the accommodation seemed almost luxurious.
Oh it was a complete rip off. It was apparently the luxury end of things but they put us in the “overflow” block. Catering was included in that price.
It was renewed every 3 months so we moved into a 4 bed house which we rented for £400pcm and got 5 of us in it by using the living room as a bedroom. We got three weeks money back from the housing management after complaining loudly.
The Indian government wanted iPhones to be made in India under Indian standards. I mean, the factory is literally in their country. If they want something to be done about it they can do it themselves.
On a side note, I don't know why but it feels so satisfying to watch them destroy the iPhone factory. I wish we had that bravery here in the US. You even think about causing any damage and the cops will come and put a bullet in your head or throw in you prison for 10,000 years.
I agree. I guess that good feeling comes from a lack of good recourse typically happening in worker disputes so when the little guys "gets a point" then it feels good.
Could you imagine; pig iron casework, 360p resistive touch screen, Siri unironically calls you sir, broken English UI, live chat features where they copy paste you canned responses. Sublime.
I would be willing to pay extra for Apple devices made here in America.
All American engineering and design, all American manufacturing. I think it's a real possibility; Apple has deep pockets and the ability to plan ahead and is the perfect company to bring manufacturing to the 21st century thanks to innovation and automation.
"Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China"
I laughed the first time I saw that because of how proudly it was featured for such a mundane statement. In 2014 I bought the Moto X in part because it was assembled in the US. Remember, it costs $14/hr to pay a US worker compared to $4/hr in China, which makes up some fraction of the cost of a $400 phone but I'm not sure how much. I was also never really clear on how much of the assembly was done in the US. At some point companies were saying things like, "Built in USA" "Final Assembly in USA" or whatever other term they thought could be used to imply "Made in USA"/"Assembled in USA" without alerting the FTC.
In general it's not terribly difficult to find products made in the US. It's a hunt, it takes time, it often costs more, and sometimes the material are from overseas. But clothes, toys, furnishings, food, it's still made here by the people and their businesses which care to make it here.
So why isn't "Made in USA" etched on the back of iPhones today? I think it's not a priority of the company. Maybe that's cynical given that two years ago there was all this news about Mac Pro towers being assembled in Texas [1]. But Apple is the most profitable company in the world, and chooses to etch "Designed by Apple in California" on the back of every phone despite the means to say more, so I don't know why I should expect Apple manufacturing to move to the US unless there is financial incentive.
To be clear: I assume Apple estimates how many people feel the way you and I do (will pay for Made in USA) and concludes now is not the time.
As an aside, I once saw a sale for Tommy Hilfiger USA "All American II" towels. Made in India.
Supply chains are more relevant now than labor of assembly costs. It is cheaper to produce many of the components in China for a lot of other reasons (much of them not pretty, like reduced enforcement of environmental standards).
Are you sure its $14/hr? I was watching the documentary about the Chinese Car Windshield company opening a plant in Ohio and they were paying workers there something like ~30ish an hour. I recall some lady was sad because the old GM plant was playing closer to 40 but still happy to have the job. Isn't this the same kind of work? Wouldn't it be closer to the 30$ figure?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadOn the customer-facing side they are all about providing a good user experience and also going through the motions about carbon neutrality and justice and whatever else makes for good marketing these days.
On the manufacturing side it they could not care much less. They say they care about pay and justice and so on and so forth, but where the rubber hits the road --where it inconveniences them and does not add to the bottom line, they do not appear to care.
Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company.
Foxconn has a history of treating in-country employees like all the other local companies do. Multiply by a few thousand for scale, and some rate of bad things is inevitable. Apple audits Foxconn, but audits do not catch everything (and not immediately!).
Note also that Apple effectively shut down this Foxconn plant by refusing to accept manufactured product until the situation was rectified.
Extrapolating from a few cases of dramatic failures on the part of Apple's manufacturing partners is dishonest at best.
Foxconn doesn't uniformly suck, either. They abide by local laws, and they clearly cut corners and fail more often than they should -- but it's not like Foxconn is the seventh plane of Hell and all interactions are tainted with sin.
Apple 1000% are capable of making sure that nothing like that ever happened again and yet here we are not long after.
Apple has a very sketchy history in general when it comes to China and there is no reason at this point to assume this is some innocent mistake.
My city has installed suicide netting on bridges, presumably because residents "were killing themselves in such large numbers". Should they be getting similar flak?
Just because people were killing themselves on that city, it doesn't mean it's the city fault. But that logic does not apply to corporation dorms.
Dressing that up as progress hardly feels right. They could have solved all of this the first time around.
This very clearly isn’t some kind of regular workplace with otherwise reasonable conditions.
What has been repeated described there over many years and many accounts is by every reasonable definition a human rights and moral nightmare.
Just waving this away as the “normal” course of business seems gross
The nightmares you describe might very well be a big improvement over normal life in that country.
Blaming Apple for a statistically average rate of suicide is madness; they make phones, they aren’t all-powerful
They promised us they would fix it and they didn’t. It appears they didn’t even try because all of the conditions outlined in this article would have become very obvious if they managed to do the absolute bare minimum of analysis by say visiting these locations.
The accusation here is that Apple lied and they knew about this and that’s not ok.
>This very clearly isn’t some kind of regular workplace with otherwise reasonable conditions.
Or maybe "suicide + apple factory" gets clicks/comments (like this article/thread), leading apple to install preventative measures to make it look like they're doing something. I seriously would still like to see statistics before jumping to conclusions either way.
There is very clearly a big problem here. That isn’t click bait.
I see what you did there :)
Let’s be honest here, it’s a bit of net. “Dedicated anti suicide infrastructure” Jesus Christ pull the other one.
I’m curious how many people would have to commit suicide before you’d splash out on some nets? I think one would do it for me…
With 350K employees, you’d expect about 34 suicides per year if their rate was at the national average. At 3 a month, yeah, I’d put up nets as well.
While I’m sure the reporting doesn’t tag every worker who happens to commit suicide as a Foxconn suicide, I don’t see evidence that the Foxconn suicide rate is higher than the national average and sibling comments and Wikipedia (sourcing ABC News and the Economist) are claiming it’s lower.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_China#Statistics
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides#Analysis
It's the bad situations that make the news. If things are basically ok this week at the factory, it's not going to make headlines.
Furthermore, I’m saying that last time this happened we were promised that they didn’t know and that this would never happen again.
Yet, here we are with proof that things have not actually changed in any meaningful sense and the worlds largest company has a giant human rights problem at the core of their supply chain and there is no way they can claim ignorance this time. They are looking the other way on purpose..
Please back this statement up. I'm honestly curious.
It's a company, they optimize for their interest. They will invest according to that image/reputation value. But as any company, profits... But this reply just sounds like blind PR.
Given this article exists, which specifically targets damages against apple’s image/reputation value, then it seems clear to me there exists at least some incentive for apple to do as GP describes
https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Comb...
https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/
They have a LONG and storied history of treating in-country employees like this. This isn't some new revelation. Apple has had more than enough time to start moving their manufacturing to a country that doesn't allow this sort of thing. They won't do that, though, because their pricing is already exorbitant for that they offer and it just doesn't work if you have to pay western wages and respect western labor laws.
Citation definitely needed.
Apple has a global revenue of about $360B, but the automotive industry is an order of magnitude larger at $3.6T. You're suggesting that the automotive industry expends about 1000x less per dollar of revenue on supply chain working conditions than Apple does?
Apple specifically getting called out here is odd to say the least. Besides, Apple is the only company that has put the said plant under probation. If anything, the other companies should be getting some flak for not even caring.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/rumour-lea...
Just because others are using this facility isn't an excuse by any means. Like I said, Apple could build another factory. They choose not to, because they profit from the human rights abuses.
If you are knowledgeable about precision manufacturing and supply lines, you'll know that it is not that simple.
Apple shut the plant down. They are making a difference. Do you know what it was like before Apple arrived with enormous manufacturing requirements, and had the power to influence things? Not better!
Apple does not profit from human rights abuses. Apple writes contracts to prevent them. Those contracts are not always followed, and Apple's audits sometimes fail to turn up problems in time. This can be tragic, but it's blatantly incorrect to assert that Apple doesn't take this extremely seriously.
They have 200 BILLION dollars CASH on hand. It might not be "simple" but it's certainly not impossible when you're richer than Croesus.
"a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic"
Saying "$COMPANY treats its workers poorly" provides a concrete entity to be mad at and might lead to some protests/social media posts, whereas saying "most electronics makers treat their workers poorly probably leads to a resounding "that sucks but what can you do?".
Placing blame arbitrarily, directing anger at the wrong people, and protesting because the mob said to on social media all leads to solutions for the wrong problems.
"We never said they had to pee in bottles and run red lights to make the delivery schedules, that's on them! We just said deliver these packages..."
If my quick google is correct they could buy foxconn for ~$3B USD out of the 36B cash on hand. Or start building a competitor...
There's sort of the line of business. Just assuming from a black box, Apple wants to build devices in these low-cost countries. Is it a competitive advantage to do this themselves? Do they have the skillset and wherewithal to do it well? They design chips, but they have TSMC make them, because among other things, there's much more to being a fab that bluntly, I think apple is not equipped for. Similarly, I think, design the products, figure out processes, then get them from the companies that spend all their time coordinating and building the stuff at a global scale.
Not to exculpate Foxconn, this is not the first time there's been stories like this of Indian facilities of Taiwan ODMs. And usually the first thing that gets pointed out, is that the ODM is itself using local contractors. So the reality is, where does the buck actually stop? The big question I have, is how would apple do this themselves? Is it that Foxconn has not quite figured out how to operate in India effectively, or is there some implicit outsourcing of misery to the next sub-contractor?
I assume apple also works with everyone else who has the scale to build iPhones like Wistron and Flex, but apple already similarly put one of Wistron's Indian factories on probation after a riot due to unpaid wages(?). I want to say they were mainly doing macbooks and ipads?
My understanding was one of the things is that the ODM books all the components and sort of capital for building things, so there's some capital structure things that I probably don't fully appreciate. No guarantee that's correct though...
They are the largest company in the world they are entirely capable of delivering on that promise.
Asking for some accountability on that isn’t some hysterical opinion.
There's never a demand that we change trade agreements at a political level. There's never a news story that Microsoft is sourcing from Foxconn. That makes the motives for the concern suspect.
By all means, we should hold Apple accountable to their word. But this seems like the absolute least effective way to enact the change being requested.
Of course people can be mad at Apple specifically for the reasons already outlined:
1. This is a long term pattern of behaviour from them.
2. They promised they would fix it. While everyone seems to agree that as the largest company in the world they are entirely capable of doing that the fact is they didn’t.
3. There is zero chance that any of this is happening without their knowledge. That excuse worked the first time but not now.
Anyone who fits that pattern is of course fair game but don’t pull that kind of nonsense where unless you criticise everything that is wrong in tech supply chains than you are secretly “just a hater”.
If you claim that we should hold Apple to account for their word how exactly do you suggest we go about change?
1. The long-term pattern of behavior from Apple is to work with manufacturers in developing countries. And to write in very specific requirements for worker treatment into contracts. And to audit facilities, and shut them down when not compliant. And to have Apple staff on-site at those facilities.
They do not see everything, and they do not prevent everything. But they do make more, and a more visible effort than anyone else.
2. Apple cannot "fix" the woes of the developing world, certainly not alone, and certainly not immediately. Even with the cooperation of foreign corporations, with Amazon and Microsoft and Dell who all work with the same partners. Even with the cooperation of foreign governments (local, regional, national), who are of course never ever corrupt, and never look the other way when a sub-sub-sub-contractor does a crappy job. Perfection is not happening.
The proper questions are: Is Apple leading the way for improving things for workers? And are they doing enough to improve things such that additional doings would have only marginal effects? Clearly the answers are YES and maybe. My opinion of the latter "maybe" is more like "probably" because I'm biased to believe that the people who run Apple recognize the moral and economic value in doing so. Obviously you disagree on that, but you are no more objectively correct than I.
3. You honestly believe that someone in Apple was aware of tainted food being served to workers, and decided "eh, who cares?"?? Honestly?
I think that would say more about you than it would about Apple.
Apple fucks up, but it seems entirely unrealistic to expect a company to voluntarily put themselves at a competitive disadvantage, to give up profit, and to make everything harder and more expensive for themselves just because they're a big player in the market. That gets the exact results we see, instead of the solution we want. Let's try to solve the problem and let's line up Apple to be first in line for inspection, but it can't be a line of just one company if we expect actual results otherwise we're just going to shift around the problem instead of solving it. It's not like Google and Microsoft are small scrappy startups looking for a moonshot, they're chomping at the bit to take marketshare away from Apple and they're both already in bed with Foxconn too.
It also documents the "creative abuses" that local governments and Foxconn seem to have with schools and such - "internships" that are not optional, are claimed to be CprE/EE/etc, and are really just bonus labor for the busy season. "Your degree is nice, now turn this screw."
It's hard to say where Apple's responsibility ends and Foxconn's begins - the two are woven so tightly anymore that the boundaries are blurred. Major chunks of Foxconn's operation are purely Apple assembly plants, and Apple, of course, literally wouldn't exist today without Foxconn.
I've decided that I'm done with Apple for now and have been seeking alternatives (Kobo Elipsa for PDF references, PineBook Pro for laptop, and a little flip phone for cell connectivity at the moment) - it was their labor practices, on top of their eagerness to do on-device content scanning, and a few other things that just pushed me over the edge.
Unfortunately, there's not really a good space in modern tech that remotely qualifies as "ethical to use," anymore. I've been trying to go down some weird roads of low power ARM systems, but a lot of those are still made in China. At least some of the Rpi boards are made in the UK, and Purism has the USA-made Librem 5 at some significant cost.
Unfortunately, the only sane answer I keep coming to is that the best solution is to abandon consumer tech entirely. It's the field in which I've made my living, and there's certainly some good to come out of it, but if you trace where the hardware comes from, and then look at how the software is designed (to capture all the behavioral surplus it can for the surveillance capitalism processing pipeline, Zuboff's book goes into great detail here)... it's slavery for the hardware and human-toxic psychological exploitation for the software.
The less I use the stuff, the less desire I have to use it.
> It's hard to say where Apple's responsibility ends and Foxconn's begins
I don't think it's hard at all. Apple, as with any other business, bears full responsibility together with its suppliers.
Really appalled by the people in this thread saying that "the others do worse!". Crazy stuff.
On the other hand Apple does audit the suppliers and I believe, that internally they know very well what’s happening in the factories.
If we accept the colloquial gross misuse of "slavery" to mean "crappy jobs that the workers depend on for survival", then I'm inclined to agree on principle, but I feel similarly about food service workers in the US and subsistence farmers everywhere.
We aren't talking about 100 or 200 people. We are talking about 1 million as of 2011. Foxconn's solution to suicide jumpers was.. netting. There's shitty working conditions and then there's.. this.
https://www.wired.com/2011/02/ff-joelinchina/
Those living conditions are pretty awful, but not unique. Regionally, it's just on the bad side of ordinary.
Obviously tainted food is always serious, and it sounds like the oversight there was abysmal. Remember that Apple shut the plant down until it's fixed.
1 million employees, not 1 million exploited suicidal wastrels.
San Francisco's solution to jumpers from the Golden Gate bridge was ... counseling services, cameras, and nets. Just like Foxconn! What would you suggest instead?
My friend is Burger King worker in Germany. He has some vacation days, low but stable wage and can go home after his shift and cook his special body building meals. Not much slavery.
Slaves had severe legal restrictions on movement, education, religion, marriage, and participating in commerce. Slaves also had very limited legal protections against bodily harm caused by their masters. This is an inherently different type of relationship than someone working in a Foxconn factory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_codes
More money makes solving a lot of problems easier. Can Apple actually put in enough money to fix it? If they can, they aren't. If they can't... this isn't a problem solvable by money.
Which is it? I don't know. The question comes down to, what does trying hard enough look like? shrug
That was their claim to make.
I think we are free to hold them accountable to that.
This is always what happens when you subcontract responsibility out. The middle-man works out how to keep the margin as large as possible and that means the bottom rung gets squashed and everyone up the chain is getting lied to. This has been universally true through my entire life from (real) estate agents, IT contracting agencies, education and service contracts.
Edit: Found a video of someone complaining about the food when it was still a college hostel. Now imagine what students, who do not have the same organizing abilities as workers, had to go through.
https://youtu.be/RH336--NQVg
Not always. You can have reliable middlemen who verify claims and investigate and blacklist fishy suppliers, but the buyers have to want it. Consider how we as purchasers of expensive electronics tend to buy from established retailers (middlemen) who invest in processes to ensure the legitimacy of the name-brand products they stock, instead of buying from an unknown company that was created last week and is selling the same products at a much cheaper price. We consider the risk that the unknown company with no history may have sourced counterfeits, intentionally or unintentionally, and we buy from a retailer we trust instead.
It sounds like Foxconn's approach to acquiring accommodations for their workers is like buying an Hermes handbag under a bridge for $20.
And £120 a week sounds like a rip-off. I remember paying just under £40 a week in Greater London at around the same time. The accommodation was pretty basic (a room in a hall of residence with shared loos/showers/kitchens) but pretty well looked after.
Compared to student residences (общежития) in the former USSR the accommodation seemed almost luxurious.
It was renewed every 3 months so we moved into a 4 bed house which we rented for £400pcm and got 5 of us in it by using the living room as a bedroom. We got three weeks money back from the housing management after complaining loudly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-VzxTDs5eA
On a side note, I don't know why but it feels so satisfying to watch them destroy the iPhone factory. I wish we had that bravery here in the US. You even think about causing any damage and the cops will come and put a bullet in your head or throw in you prison for 10,000 years.
So it’s on the gov to force the company to ensure these employees are paid.
All American engineering and design, all American manufacturing. I think it's a real possibility; Apple has deep pockets and the ability to plan ahead and is the perfect company to bring manufacturing to the 21st century thanks to innovation and automation.
They chose not to do any of that.
I laughed the first time I saw that because of how proudly it was featured for such a mundane statement. In 2014 I bought the Moto X in part because it was assembled in the US. Remember, it costs $14/hr to pay a US worker compared to $4/hr in China, which makes up some fraction of the cost of a $400 phone but I'm not sure how much. I was also never really clear on how much of the assembly was done in the US. At some point companies were saying things like, "Built in USA" "Final Assembly in USA" or whatever other term they thought could be used to imply "Made in USA"/"Assembled in USA" without alerting the FTC.
In general it's not terribly difficult to find products made in the US. It's a hunt, it takes time, it often costs more, and sometimes the material are from overseas. But clothes, toys, furnishings, food, it's still made here by the people and their businesses which care to make it here.
So why isn't "Made in USA" etched on the back of iPhones today? I think it's not a priority of the company. Maybe that's cynical given that two years ago there was all this news about Mac Pro towers being assembled in Texas [1]. But Apple is the most profitable company in the world, and chooses to etch "Designed by Apple in California" on the back of every phone despite the means to say more, so I don't know why I should expect Apple manufacturing to move to the US unless there is financial incentive.
To be clear: I assume Apple estimates how many people feel the way you and I do (will pay for Made in USA) and concludes now is not the time.
As an aside, I once saw a sale for Tommy Hilfiger USA "All American II" towels. Made in India.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EsN2LCcXUAErEkr?format=jpg&name=...