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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

https://www.wired.com/2011/02/ff-joelinchina/

Foxconn workers are free to go home also.

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?

The US has forced labor where they are literally not allowed to leave? See some weeks back where workers were killed due to bad weather.

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.

in many countries, people count themselves lucky if they have a job making $10/day. It very much is slavery, just with extra steps.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_codes

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.

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