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Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

Apple can do math. Apple can look at what they're getting and what they're paying for it and run the figures and see what that comes to in terms of pay for hours worked. At a certain point, asking for X and putting down rules that make X impossible or highly improbable isn't getting conned, it's trying to get to plausible deniability.

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The complaints here don't seem to be that the workers were underpaid for hours worked. It's hard to imagine what kind of math could let Apple look at "what they're getting and what they're paying for it" and deduce the amount of overtime or percentage of temps.

There's no question, they're definitely accountable for violations like this. I think they know that, which is why they have the monitoring and interview processes in place.

The question for me is, what's the mechanism for enforcing accountability down the chain.

Foxconn operates the plants, so what is the mechanism for incentivising them to comply? What penalties or sanctions do they face for violations? That's really the only way to get to the root of this, but it can't be financial penalties to Apple. That would create perverse incentives and moral hazard.

It isn't clear to me that they're "definitely accountable". The monitoring could be in place for reputation reasons. Apple probably doesn't want negative headlines across the western press about how their phones are made with slave labour, or what ever.

> The monitoring could be in place for reputation reasons

Which again, comes down to accountability.

What accountability are we talking about? As written it seems like we were talking about legal accountability.

There's lots of discussion on the accountability question from the last Bloomberg expose of Apple's subcontracting practices-

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19133586

> That's really the only way to get to the root of this, but it can't be financial penalties to Apple. That would create perverse incentives and moral hazard.

I don't follow. What perverse incentives and moral hazard?

Apple would financially benefit from the abuse of Chinese workers.

> Foxconn operates the plants, so what is the mechanism for incentivising them to comply?

Presumably the rule of law, and penalties under Chinese law. The issue here is that the rule of law and punishment are both fairly lax in China.

People are eager to work overtime when they're not making enough money working for their regular hours.

That'll just have Foxconn now begin to "overcharge" Apple and keep the difference to themselves. None will reach to the employees.

This is exactly why Steve Jobs hired Tim Cook.

His whole job was to lean on suppliers and get them to do the most work for the least amount of pay. He basically trimmed all the fat from their Chinese suppliers, streamlined their production and essentially blackmailed suppliers to meet their insane production quotas and deadlines.

I'm never surprised when I hear this stuff now considering it was Cook who started all of this and now he's the guy running the company.

Wouldn't it be the opposite? They overpaid because these people were working all of this overtime?

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