I hope this makes people reconsider if they really need a new laptop, iphone, etc. I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited.
A lot of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart shopping complex the next town over. Now they're upgrading that to an Amazon distribution center in the next state over.
On this board, I expect a lot of people will explain (unsympathetically but not completely unreasonably) that the benefits of these exploitative conditions outweigh the costs (this unfortunate soul's death included).
I think you can have reasonably priced quality products and worker well-being, but good luck making your case to shareholders and their apologists.
This is by design. As long as it's profitable to exploit labor, nothing will change. It is far far easier to keep people distracted and blind to all of this than it is to make them 'wake up,' or make any changes to their lives.
Do you by chance believe in "Intelligent Design" as an explanation for complex biological systems? It's not obvious to me that inefficient social systems (i.e. not optimized for worker/human happiness) require "design"? If we create an organism who's survival condition is "generate profit" won't it just do that as efficiently as we let it? When I think about exploitative systems as requiring "malice by design" I rarely seem to uncover a solution other than "wait for someone else to be less evil" or occasionally "live with it and treat the worst of the symptoms".
Intelligent Design was the functional equivalent of `s/creationism/intelligent design/g` in a creationist textbook to get around a Supreme Court ban from 1987. That revised textbook was then banned by a district court in 2005.
I'm fairly certain that Ken Miller and the many others who fought to keep that book out of classrooms in 2004-05 understood clearly that the "Intelligent Design" side was acting in bad faith. I'm also fairly certain they weren't constrained by their knowledge of the "designed malice" of the other side but instead used that fact to rally more citizens to their cause.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8498-judge-intelligen...
Company policy doesn't want you to disclose your salary. I think this is an explicit thought out design. Companies doesn't want worker union, history tells us why.
Church policy to stop people from learning how to read. Church want you to keep believing in God and doctrines and has mutual benefit with the monarch via believe in Divine right.
The people will work towards less control. Just as in computers, centralized power is simply not scalable. We will eventually move towards something like worker-owned cooperatives.
The systems of production aren't optimized for worker or human happiness, they are optimized for profit making. That is certainly a design choice, at least on a firm-by-firm level. Maybe nobody sat down and said, "how can I make my workers miserable today?" but they have certainly sat down and said, "how can I profit more today?" And typically, when there is a choice between that profit and workers' happiness, profit wins.
Once all or most firms start operating by this logic, the exploitation becomes inescapable. If the firms are smart, they will band together to use some of their profit to influence politics, shaping systems that enable them to make more profits.
"Live with it and treat the worst of the systems" would be sort of like the American Democratic party: enact reforms and put restrictions on what firms can do so that they can't exploit so much. This rarely seems to work, first because firms find a way around restrictions, second because the restrictions are often shaped or even written by the firms that are to be regulated. (If you're going to be regulated, you might as well make it happen on your terms.) As you said, it treats the symptoms but not the cause.
I don't know about "wait for someone else to be less evil", but I suppose that would be people who can see the problems with the current system but propose no solution. Also, you might have some people in this category who do think that the system could work, if only people were nicer to each other. But again, the problem isn't a lack of niceness, it's that the system is optimized for profit at all costs; given a choice between niceness or profit, profit usually wins.
An alternative would be to actually treat the cause of the problem. Have a system where firms are optimized for human needs rather than for profit.
Despite their convictions to the contrary, those are a different set of people.
It's more like "ONE half of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart", and "the OTHER half of America is using an Amazon distribution center in the next state over".
I'm not sanguine that Americans would pay fair-trade prices for household products. (And to be completely fair, there's certainly a half of America that just couldn't afford to pay the prices even if they wanted.)
To me, the major and defining difference between US vs. European management/labor relationships is found in Germany's principle of co-determination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-determination
Under these rules, the boards of directors of companies in Germany are required to include a significant portion of their voting membership to be drawn from worker population. As such, governorship of the company is at least partially beholden to the input of the persons who create all its value.
This is starkly contrasted by US capitalism, where the workers who create all the company's value have effectively no say (apart from collective bargaining and strike) in any directions the company takes. The idea of workers voting on the board is laughable in the states.
Co-determination was enshrined right after WWII, in part because the Germans looked around at the industrialized barbarism of the Third Reich and asked themselves "how can we prevent this from ever happening again"? The answer they came up with, in more ways than just co-determination, was to pointedly not hand the country's capitalists everything they wanted. They decided to place serious checks upon the power of capitalists.
It's important to never forget that once in power, the Third Reich's first act was to round up, imprison and murder labor union leadership, socialists and communists. Co-determination is one way to remember.
In the US workplaces are divided into unionized and non-unionized. Unionized firm is in competitive disadvantage against non-unionized firms. This results a situation where firms fight against unionization very aggressively and unions respond in same. It's very confrontational and aggressive.
In Europe firms with more union members are not in competitive disadvantage relative to firms with fewer union members, because negotiations happen sector level. For example restaurant workers union(s) meet restaurant business representatives and they make industry-wide agreements.
I've heard this before and seen a few specifics. If it's not too much trouble, could you summarize the differences? Thanks!
- working extra hours is paid double and this hours are limited
- you are forced to take you vacation days off, you can't chose the money and work the full year
- your work place provides you food or you get "food tickets" that you can use in stores to buy only food.
- if you have to work on national holly-day you will get paid double
- you are not forced to be a member of any union
That doesn't make sense to me, different people have dietary preferences of different levels of expense. What's the reasoning behind this?
I think this is good so the workers won't skip on food, it is also a negotiation thing, when I see offers I see that you get paid X amount + food tickets.
In the US workplaces are divided into unionized and non-unionized. Unionized firm is in competitive disadvantage against non-unionized firms. This results a situation where firms fight against unionization very aggressively and unions respond in same. It's very confrontational and aggressive.
In Europe firms with more union members are not in competitive disadvantage relative to firms with fewer union members, because negotiations happen sector level. For example restaurant workers union(s) meet restaurant business representatives and they make industry-wide agreements.
If the market could bear a higher priced product that’s ethically sourced, why wouldn’t companies simply raise the price to what the market bears, and pocket the profit instead of ethically source it?
I'd argue that if you could halve the price by literally using slaves to manufacturer them, most people wouldn't care as long as those slaves were on the other side of the planet.
But I'd say that's mainly because they don't know or don't truly understand the situation. The reason for that is that literally billions of dollars are spent on advertising that papers over human rights issues by blasting competing messages about luxury, fashion, desirability, economy, etc. A passive consumer isn't going to be able to overcome the environment of information asymmetry that's actively maintained by wealthy corporations.
Then there's also the issue of how the race to the bottom also actively destroys most ethical alternatives, which just turns understanding into despair over the lack of ethical options.
I think if you put the half-price, slave-made product and a double-priced, ethically made alternative next to each other in a store, I think consumers would chose the latter if they were both sold under signs that clearly communicated the realities of the lives of the workers that made them. That's not going to happen because the incentives are for the company that mistreats its workers is to lie and cheat, so I don't think the market can solve this issue. It's going to require sustained intervention by ethical governments to fix the incentives in favor of human rights.
Distributing responsibility for determining which companies are being ultra-shitty but not breaking the law imposes far too much time-cost on consumers to be reasonable, on top of the regular costs of participating in boycotts. They're not an effective means of enforcing society norms. Regulation is—making being ultra-shitty illegal works way better than imposing a cost of ((time it takes to keep up with and track shitty-company news)+(cost of participating in boycotts)) times (number of consumers) across your entire society. That's clearly untenable and it's not really the fault of individual consumers that boycotts don't work for enforcing social norms, since they can't really work, in the general case, once your economy scales past the local cottage industry level. It's impractical in a global, or even national economy. Then there's game-theoretical pressure to defect from a boycott, et c.
Even the highly-engaged consumer will catch and (weakly, ineffectually) punish maybe single-digit percentages of the awfulness occurring in their economic footprint, at great time and probably monetary cost, unless they check out from the economy almost entirely.
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
A better approach is to accept the reality and work from there.
The share price did not move.
In terms of worker's rights, I expect there would be more support for laws governing higher minimum conditions for workers of imported goods than there would be support for more expensive products that directly compete with cheaper products made by more exploited workers.
I think this is a good point, and is also likely why conservatives tend to prefer "minimal government" and "market forces."
As a society I think we need someone to keep us in check as individuals. Note: This doesn't mean totalitarianism, we can come to the same conclusions democratically.
This just means that socially we're more likely to vote for fair working conditions — but privately it's incredibly easy for us to be tempted into a choice that benefits us in the short-term and hurts someone else (or even ourselves) in the long-term.
I know I can buy more expensive meat from farms that treat animals ethically and supports local farms. When I look at my bank account as I'm grocery shopping on a Sunday... I'm not buying the more expensive meat. I'm capable of it, but I'm also financially risk-adverse.
A more expensive meat says nothing about how the animals were treated. Maybe it just means some business owner is making more money from it. Voting for animal welfare laws is much more impactful.
If you want the depressing version what will more likely happen is all those workers will be replaced by robots and they'll be forced back to their previous far worse conditions
More and more slave owners are being revealed every day, and people with their dollars force companies to improve policy.
If you want to see REAL human suffering, look to something like the shipbreaking yards in India and Bangladesh.
Or the e-waste recycling done in Ghana:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-...
Presumably they are not being held against their will, so this is the best job they could find.
Low-skilled factory labor is a worse job than sitting in a Silicon Valley office all day, but it’s probably better than rural poverty or unemployment.
>You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be helped with foreign aid? Maybe–although the historical record of regions like southern Italy suggests that such aid has a tendency to promote perpetual dependence. Anyway, there isn’t the slightest prospect of significant aid materializing. Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of course–but they won’t, or at least not because we tell them to. And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard... [0]
[0] https://slate.com/business/1997/03/in-praise-of-cheap-labor....
desirability = wage - working conditions?
Apple paying marginally more than another job doesn't excuse the working conditions in the factory. There isn't a formula that makes subhuman conditions acceptable.
There's no straightforward solution, but the status quo is not good enough.
This is the same attitude that led to the rise of unions in America.
The factory owners kept telling their circle of friends that the workers were better off than not working at all. It was all a big echo chamber until one day "better off" turned into "not good enough" and people died.
I'm not a big union guy, but I see a lot of history repeating itself in SV.
It's interesting that we think in terms of what extra amount we would pay.
Apple commands the highest profit margins in the industry per device manufactured which is in part due to the negotiated labor costs it pays to companies like Foxconn.
Why not instead ask Apple to pay more for labor instead?
They already go out of their way to source recycled materials and conflict free materials. Is it so hard to expect them to pay or ask their ODMs to pay living wage labor costs with favorable working conditions?
As a related note, during the worst year, Foxconn had 930k workers, and 14 deaths by suicide, so approximately 1.5/100k.
In the US, all age groups above 14 have a suicide rate over 10/100k.
Coincidentally, the same seems to be true in USA - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer...
Urbanization is a powerful force; it happens because people want to leave the rural life behind, and as it continues, it pushes the contrast ever more in favor of urban life; people move to the cities because of the opportunities, economy and culture there; and as they do so, they "carry" even more opportunities, economy and culture away from the rural areas to these cities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
Suicide rates are also very biased by how employers, friends and family, and authorities handle the death.
Across many cultures people tend to underreport suicides - but to different extents.
It's also worth noticing that some behaviors leading to death like overdose, heavy drinking and dangerous activities are not counted as suicide but sometimes they share the same psychological conditions.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/26/health/flu-deaths-2017--2018-...
Starving to death is indeed very, very rare in the United States.
80,000 people is less than 1 in 3750 Americans — I’ll take my chances with those odds over living somewhere with regular famines.
Then why do Chinese farmers line up outside the gates of factories hundreds of miles from home in the hope of getting a job? If farming gave them an equivalent or better quality of life, they would just stay at home and keep farming.
The intensity of farm work isn't even comparable. You aren't toiling in the fields doing the same exact thing for hours every day, every month, every year like you do in a factory. Most labor happens during harvest and planting seasons, maintenance labor throughout the year is focused on improving your living conditions or other local projects, something you can't do if you are working for the factory. Unfortunately, things come up that can only be fixed with immediate or continued access to capital, so you have to send one of your family members hundreds of miles away to work in a factory to fuel an emergency fund. The problem with farm work isn't the work, it's the lack of enough pay to deal with disaster.
Because they've been forced to relocate from their farms to manufactured cities by the government which then bulldozed their villages.
Then once they're in the city, their choice is to work in the greenhouses of a big government-backed company, or work in the factory of a big government-backed company.
There are many documentaries about this.
So you need crazier and crazier laptops to support the containers and IDEs and transpilation and asset pipelines and all that.
I code on a 5 year old laptop very happily. But the only reason I can do that is I code close to raw language, with a minimal build chain. I expressly design my software to need less support.
Most pros don’t have that luxury. It’s incorporate the new hotness or we won’t be able to attract the cheap devs fresh out of school.
I recently had to buy a new laptop because the cheap dev laptop I had (6GB RAM, Celeron Quad-core) couldn't run IntelliJ with a reasonable amount of performance, even when I tweaked the settings significantly for lower resource consumption. It was the CPU -- it was just way too slow.
I'm currently on an ancient HP elitebook that's my main programming machine, but I compile on a different machine with ssh and use Vim for all my text editing.
Opening pycharm on it makes it crawl, and it struggles on the web without noscript.
There were justifications, of course. "oh, they're all made in the same factory anyway". "company A probably didn't even design it in the first place, they just want you think they did. It's all marketing". "They didn't lower the price when they removed this one component that's no longer needed".
These are all people who don't need the gadget in the first place, and can easily afford to pay the higher price for it. In fact, they were going to in the first place, before the cheaper option came along. They think they're wise consumers. They think they got a bargain. They think you're a sucker if you "overpay".
Lots of caveats, sure. I have no idea who designed the product. Maybe they're both ripoffs of someone else's part. Maybe they are built in the same factory. Maybe the only difference is who is making a huge profit off the markup, and how much they're making off of it.
But the point stands. People want to pay as little as possible, they feel virtue in that, and they'll invent reasons to justify paying less, no matter what.
Back in the 80's AT&T used to use the advertising slogan, "You get what you pay for" to indicate that its phone service wasn't the cheapest, but it was the best.
Today the 20-somethings I work with balk at paying more than $10 for a logoed T-shirt. This is true for the vast majority of people in that age group, which is why stores like Ross and TJMaxx flourish, while the high-end department stores struggle, and luxury brands (coughLVcough) cope by moving production from Italy to China, or import Chinese workers into European factory camps to keep the "Made in Italy" logos on their goods.
If there was a way for me to paypal $20 to the employees myself on top of a new iPhone there could but its not something that consumers have much control over and I am skeptical that just using outdated devices addresses the situation
[1] I am currently resisting buying an iPhone XS even though I really want one, because I'm trying to work on mine.
Those in silicon valley with their Model 3 and sustainable earwax-based soaps will rave about their latest ethical laptops, while the rest of the country saves up income for years to buy the cheapest new model computer available and strives to make it work as long as possible. Most consumers are already well priced out of paying more for preference or good conscious.
Everywhere I look people are walking around with the latest iPhone (this time they literally named it "excess max"). People you wouldn't expect to have it. As for me, I'm in the top 10% of earners and I carry an iPhone 6, of which I have replaced the screen and the battery.
So we want ethically sourced tech? Maybe you're right and we wouldn't be able to keep buying the new model year after year. But we could definitely afford to have them if we saved up and then took care of what we owned.
Maybe there would be a trend toward repairability, durability, and maintainability of tech, things of practical matter, and away from inane concerns such as fashion and emojis. Maybe the Apples of the world would have to disburse some of their two hundred billion dollars to the factory employees. Maybe then some of the hands that assemble the iPhones would be able to hold the finished product.
Maybe all of that would be a good thing.
How were people able to afford the technology of the 80s and 90s that were made in developed countries? The biggest change from the shift of everything to China has been increased corporate profit.
The 80s Walkman or VCR made in Japan, the home computer made in the USA or GB were affordable. My 25 year old model M keyboard was made in Scotland. With the steady rise of automation it should be possible to do whilst paying workers a decent wage whether in China or at home.
If we have to lose the bottom of the market and the £300 laptops that are barely functional after a single software installation and a security upgrade, well everyone would benefit from losing those.
The number of households having such devices was much lower, in large part because of the cost; devices such as home computers, laptops and smartphones changed the world not when they were invented but when they became cheap enough to be really widespread; when you could buy a Japan VCR or USA computer without having Japan or USA levels of income, which the vast majority of global population don't. If we lose the bottom of the market with the cheap smartphones, well, then hundreds of millions of people worldwide would not have smartphones.
A VCR was pretty much ubiquitous. A home computer was not, in most part not because of cost but because of not being able to see the point. Smartphones are more expensive than they've ever been. If you buy cheapo you're buying something a few years old and terrible.
There was no lack of them in other countries, what has changed is the number of countries able to afford consumerism at all.
Are you comparing like with like? No. The hundreds of millions of people worldwide buying cheap are NOT buying Apple or Sony either, are they? They're buying the brands that aren't even in first world countries.
A TV was a cheap almost commodity thing when CRT based by the 80s. Only the arrival of widescreen CRT and flat screens that pushed the prices into the absurd. I imagine the 60s and 70s was the era for TV prices to be dropping.
Sure there's been a little inflation and price rises too. Overall the switch to China hasn't benefited first world consumers from price benefits from the brands. The price benefits have been in places like Primark with a £1 T shirt and the unknown brands on Amazon marketplace. A pair of Levis or an Apple device is just as "for the affluent" as they've ever been. Often more so, despite manufacture moving somewhere cheap.
And if prices double, it's plausible sales drop to one quarter what they are now, and the problem gets even worse.
If all the technology just went away and these people went back to working in the fields, because they had no other choice, would that be better? Maybe it would be less stressful but they'd also make less money. Maybe they're worse off from having the choice. Maybe they're not entirely responsible for making this choice because of deception, the trap that is earning more than your peers but still not being wealthy enough to ever quit.
How many Foxconn man-hours does it take to produce an iPhone, and what is the average hourly wage?
The solution can't come from consumer choices. It has to come from either labor militancy or the state putting forward some kind of solution - basic income, minimum wage or something else.
High-quality lies are quite cheap. You can build whole worlds out of them for nothing.
All of that was because China wanted to industrialize, and they did it. Should we avoid buying labor from countries that are pursuing rapid industrialization?
(This is a genuine question, actually, on my part. I'm still torn between "capitalism has brought tons of people out of poverty" and "real people are exploited every day.")