Crowded dorms,no flush toilets and food crawling with worms at iPhone plant
independent.ie
independent.ie
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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…
>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 :)
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.
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..
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 $3.6T. You're suggesting that the automotive industry expends about 1000x less per dollar of revenue on supply chain working conditions than Apple does?
Apple specifically getting called out here is odd to say the least. Besides, Apple is the only company that has put the said plant under probation. If anything, the other companies should be getting some flak for not even caring.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/rumour-lea...
"a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic"
Saying "$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.
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.
"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...
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.
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...
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.
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=...
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.
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.
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.
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.