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Comment by quesera | Hacker News Reader

That's an oversimplified and cynical take.

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.

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>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.

https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2...

https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Comb...

https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/

The thing is, it's always the same with Foxconn. Apple should know better... (and the same goes for other Foxconn customers)

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.

And in this case, it's a sub contractor of Foxconn that's responsible for accomodation and that's behind the horribly substandard food.

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?

That actually might be a good idea.

If a city can't exist without people committing suicide, maybe it shouldn't exist.

Somebody does deserve.

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.

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 .

It was the absolute bare minimum change that they thought (correctly it seems) that they could get away with.

Dressing that up as progress hardly feels right. They could have solved all of this the first time around.

If you employ a million people, there will be a certain number of suicides per year

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.

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

My city has dedicated anti suicide infrastructure and it’s one of the happiest places on Earth. It means nothing.

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

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.

> I seriously would still like to see statistics before jumping to conclusions either way.

I see what you did there :)

> In such high numbers that you need dedicated anti suicide infrastructure?

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…

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_China#Statistics

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides#Analysis

> The last time they were in the news

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.

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.

Were they lower than the national average for people in the same demographic group?

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.

> 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?

The entire automotive industry isn't one company.

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