Hyundai investigating child labor in its U.S. supply chain
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hyundai-kia-auto-parts-supp...
(This links to more info.)
Wow.
I think the thing that shocks me the most is that the punishment from the Department of Labor is a very mild slap-on-the-wrist. A small fine and a promise not to do it any more. This should basically be the end of that company entirely. Instead they just have to point the finger at some low-level managers, fire them, and keep on rolling. I would think criminal charges are warranted for importing 12 and 13 year-olds for labor. The children can't consent. That's essentially child slave labor.
If Hyundai/Kia drops them, that would at least be a much bigger penalty than the DOL imposed.
Minors can totally consent to labor; it's pretty common too (see: child actors). The issue with children working in factories is a (1) safety and (2) exploitation issue, not a consent issue—in fact even adult parents (who can presumably consent) aren't allowed to get exemptions for their children in some high-risk situations either. There are lots of exemptions for child labor though, especially in areas where safety and exploitation risks are deemed to be lower. Worth reading: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/youthlabor/exemptionsflsa
Edit to clarify (since some people seem to be reading this different): this isn't my opinion, support, or opposition on what I believe children can or should consent to; I'm just discussing labor laws here.
(n.b. 2017)
https://texaslodging.com/child-labor-laws-2017/
> Now minors [in New Jersey] will no longer need parental consent or anything from the school district to secure a work permit. Instead, the state Labor Department will create a centralized database for teens to register for work permits, which will be accessible to employers when interviewing potential employees.
https://newjerseymonitor.com/2022/07/06/teens-in-n-j-can-wor...
Instead of posting more links I will just summarize what I am finding... Instead of parental consent most states require a work permit which is more formal documentation than just a parent saying ok. Obtaining a work permit includes a review process, and require the submission of various materials which sometimes includes written permission from a parent, for some age groups.
Very unluikely in the US, but it also varies by Industry; when I cooked and interviewed for dishwashers/prep/line cooks I often had more than one 18 year old kid from the rural US say they had 4+ years of experience.
I'd ask them to describe how that was possible and they'd cite having exemption that allowed them to begin working from 13 onward. They often had extreme poverty circumstances and were from states like Montana, Kentucky, Wyoming, Ohio or Missouri whose parent's had been disabled or injured (addiction was a big one) or something along those lines, so rather than just put them and their siblings into foster care this was the best possible solution were parent's kept custody and a child could work on school days before the age of 16 under a basic work permit.
In farming it's even younger than that, the youngest I've seen being pre-K, and yes this is in the EU and in even in Switzerland. They admittedly couldn't' do much but perhaps like feed the animals or attach the the suction to the utters of a cow or sheep (both of which could easily maim their small bodies) or put seeds in a starer plant or water the plants, wrap electrical posts, harvesting fruit/veg etc...
I still laugh thinking about being in a convoy of tractors heading into the the citys city center in Bern that had cows in-tow headed to the Swiss Alps and was behind a few 12 year old kids with a coupe of seasons under their belts.
I come from a family of restaurateurs in CA, where it was typical to see the kids help out in the kitchen peeling/cutting vegetables, carrying products, manning a register or simply washing dishes or bussing tables at very young ages (think 10 onward) but this was high contentious and likely illegal, practice.
But every time I went to my grantparents home their were hardly any pictures of my grandparents, aunts or uncles and cousins where they, even as children, weren't doing the aforementioned in at least half of their pictures.
Also, it's worth noting that all of these pearl-clutching FAANG workers like to pretend their aren't minors working at Foxxcon making the iphones, or sweatshops in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka etc... making name brand clothing items that they wear.
The sad truth is child labour laws are only applicable to those who can't afford the legal team to make it anything more than just a fine.
This isn't whataboutism, but it goes to show that their is a heterodoxy when it comes to exploiting the poor and young alike in both the East and West. Sadly, I fear this will remain the norm and will likely increase in my lifetime before it gets better since things like labour laws and unions mean less as Megacorps consolidate and acquire more small businesses and increase market share.
what in the world does this have to do with faang employees? are they particularly notorious for patronizing sweatshops? did I miss something?
Hypocrisy, gross negligence? I guess from all but Netflix they have all close affiliation to these practices and business models, than not.
Again, what I'm underscoring is that this is wide-spread and isn't limited to just an isolated few, but rather a systemic issue, one in which a certain sector sits atop of the wealth distribution model which makes them complicit of this very issue.
the Department of Labor has an exemption for children working in their parents business because that's the only way they could get the prohibitions passed, since children cannot speak for themselves on the matter after recognizing that children can't legally consent to anything which is why there are prohibitions on the matter.
what you are writing is a wild distortion of the concept of consent, that many people consider dangerous to harbor.
there is legal consent restrictions (ie. even if someone says okay, its not valid), as well as societal consent recognitions such as when power dynamics are not in someone's favor and some extremes of that we don't allow to happen.
even for things they are allowed to do autonomously, there are age restrictions on that.
You are just supporting OP's point unwitting.
Yes they can, for some jobs. Not every job. I don't have a full list of which ones allow it and which ones don't, but it's not difficult to infer this if you look up the relevant laws and regulations, since they sometimes explicitly mention things like "minors working until 11 p.m. on nights before a school day are required to have written parental permission" [1], for instance.
You can go “just discussing labor laws” somewhere else.
In short, I'm less surprised but it is appalling.
For this reason, ensuring the freedom of whistleblowers, Wikileaks and others is so important. Without that, it becomes much easier for the authorities - which we trust our rights to - to do nothing and get away with it
It sounds like JK USA will rightfully be destroyed by this. If it really was just a handful of kids employed by a sub sub contractor I don't see why everyone in the whole factory should lose their livelihoods. The parents need some counseling and a stern scaring too but I wouldn't push too hard on a family desperate enough to send their kids to a factory.
The kids were reported missing to police, which is why they were found.
I started mowing lawns at 12. Pretty heavy machinery; massive spinning blade, could lose an arm! Luckily I had that opportunity, I was able to make money and pay for clothes. Learn responsibility, self-respect, etc.
I do think child labor laws are there to protect children. However, we don’t know the circumstances and I think in most cases child labor laws do more harm than good. Here are some important details:
> In a separate statement on Tuesday, Alabama’s state DOL said it had levied around $35,000 in total in civil penalties on SL Alabama and JK USA, a temporary labor recruiting firm. JK USA employed five minors between the ages of 13 and 16 at the plant, the state DOL said.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hyundai-kia-auto-parts-supp...
To me, it could be as simple as a few guys brought their kids who wanted to make an extra buck. They could have just been picking up metal scraps. We don’t know. What I can say is in high school I knew multiple people whos family worked in metal works and the kids would help out and get paid. Some kids were as young as 10, but everyone was safe and it appeared to be in everyone’s interest
--------------------------------------
(a) No individual under 16 years of age shall be employed, except in agricultural service, and except as otherwise provided in this chapter. Any individual 14 or 15 years of age may be employed outside school hours and during school vacation periods, so long as the individual is not employed in, about, or in connection with, any manufacturing or mechanical establishment, cannery, mill, workshop, warehouse, or machine shop or in any occupation or place of employment otherwise prohibited by law. The presence of any individual under 18 years of age in any restricted business establishment or restricted occupation shall be prima facie evidence of his or her employment in the business establishment or occupation.
(b)(1) This section does not apply to an individual 14 years of age or 15 years of age when both of the following are true:
a. The individual is enrolled in either a youth pre-apprenticeship program, youth industry-registry apprenticeship program, or similar program in which employment and work-based learning are an integral part of the course of study.
b. The program the individual is enrolled in is registered by the Alabama Office of Apprenticeship.
(2) This section does not apply to employment procured by an individual 14 years of age or 15 years of age when the employment is supervised through the Alabama Department of Education and approved by the Alabama Department of Labor.
--------------------------------------------
Doesn't sound like those rules were followed. And I assume that the restrictions is mostly because heavy equipment like metal presses lack fail safes like a lawn mower does.
There is a pretty major difference between that and doing work for an auto supplier while being staffed by a temp agency.
I personally worked like 20-30 hrs a week and went to school as well lol
> The girl, who turns 14 this month, and her two brothers, aged 12 and 15, all worked at the plant earlier this year and weren't going to school, according to people familiar with their employment. Their father, Pedro Tzi, confirmed these people's account in an interview with Reuters.
[...]
> Pedro Tzi's children, who have now enrolled for the upcoming school term, were among a larger cohort of underage workers who found jobs at the Hyundai-owned supplier over the past few years, according to interviews with a dozen former and current plant employees and labor recruiters.
> Several of these minors, they said, have foregone schooling in order to work long shifts at the plant,
> The story of the children came to light following the February 3 disappearance of a 14-year-old Guatemalan migrant child in Alabama, the news service stated.
> According to Reuters, the child and her two brothers, aged 12 and 15, all worked for the plant. After the publicity generated by the February disappearance case, SMART reportedly dismissed several underage workers, according to former employees.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-hyundai-subsidiar...
> The girl, who turns 14 this month, and her two brothers, aged 12 and 15, all worked at the plant earlier this year and weren't going to school, according to people familiar with their employment. Their father, Pedro Tzi, confirmed these people's account in an interview with Reuters.
> Police in the Tzi family's adopted hometown of Enterprise also told Reuters that the girl and her siblings had worked at SMART. The police, who helped locate the missing girl, at the time of their search identified her by name in a public alert.
----
Trafficked isn't the right word to use for the work (her disappearance may have been a case of attempted child trafficking - I haven't found anything yet on the specifics of the disappearance and it is likely more difficult because she is a minor). There are, however, issues with undocumented and poorly documented workers and their children not getting the proper public and social services (school for children being part of the public services).
[1]see the text of the 13th amendment and how private prisons operate if you are one of the 10000 today whose just learning this
Also see prison labour.
There is plenty of room to be upset about bad sentencing guidelines and a system that wrongly convicts alongside the privatization of prisons. But slave labor is not I think an accurate summation.
>Section 2 Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The above is the exact text of the 13th amendment outlawing slavery. It allows for a single exception to this, allowing slave labor when it is a punishment for a convicted criminal. Calling it anything other than slave labor seems to the inaccurate description to me. I find most Americans are squeamish to call it what it is because we've developed this national narrative that slavery is one of the worst things a society can allow(which I agree with) and that we fought a war to abolish it entirely(which I do not agree with).
>...the inmates are paying off a debt to the society that they wronged.
The imprisonment is paying off a debt to society. If they were entirely focused on infrastructure work, I could consider it paying off a debt to society. Producing all these consumer and luxury items for sale at profit does not fit under "paying a debt to society".[1]
[1]https://theweek.com/articles/463364/11-products-might-not-re....
That's been happening forever, not just the current year. Child labor sweatshops were a major source of industrial productivity for centuries the world over until relatively recently.
Charles Dickens' novels turned it into an adjective in English bearing his name that described (among other things) the indifference of those in power to child labor.
Expenses for things like conversion of documentation to pictures instead of text (the workers are functionally illiterate) are one time, but you can pay someone $13/hr instead of $25/hr in a less regressive place.
Split across racial lines, AL has lower literacy than CA among each of Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks.
But because the literacy rate among whites is higher than Hispanics and Blacks, and Alabama is much more White than CA, AL's overall literacy rate is higher.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
OFF2: I wish for a functionality that could make my own post gray/collapsed, if it is offtopic. I must risk points, and being actually banned (or just don't be offtopic) this way.
edit: I am just asking for some explanation about how things work, e.g. why GP said "you are shadowbanned", and what's happening, really.
This is a really bigoted comment that generalizes a whole state. If it would be racist for any random country, eg. 'Mexico' or 'Nigeria', why is it ok for an American state?
(no, I'm not from Alabama).
Clearly, no one would ever want to live there. Right, muffy?
(This comment is in response to this whole train wreck of a thread.)
Even though I agree with the thrust of your argument, I'd just like to point out that this is provably inaccurate, depending on which quantifiable axis you're referring to as "better" (i.e., test scores, IQ, lead in the water, whatever.) But, if you're just saying "better" == "humanity", then, sure, I agree with that too.
No, you misunderstand. That demographic segment has bad outcomes everywhere. Nothing about Alabama is worse once you condition on demographics. The state just looks bad because of demos.
I don't see where any children were "imported". Instead it seems like some 13-16 year olds got jobs. (Note, none of the children were 12). You brought up consent (which later responses delve into 'parental consent') and I have no clue what the parents thought.
Still, they did violate child labor laws and should be punished. I agree with that principle.
The consequences didn't seem that mild. They paid a fine of $7,000 per minor. They agreed to destroy any products the children were involved in producing. They implemented new methods to prevent this in the future. They fired the third party staffing agency that found the children (and which I would agree should have other consequences). And, far from "firing low-level managers", the president of the factory was fired.
Is there anything to suggest that they were actually trafficking humans? I think it is far more likely that they were illegal immigrants already in the States.
The point is that allowing kids to work is clearly not as egregious as forcing them to attend prison-style schools, and yet we punish the former and support the latter.
> forcing them to attend prison-style schools
That is not true for most kids. If your parents pay for one of those camps for troubled teenagers, then it is prison like. If you commit crime then yes, your school will be prison. If you have enough behavioral issues to end up in one of those special schools, it gets closer to prison.
But no, schools are not prison like for overwhelming majority of kids. Going further, majority of kids has neutral or positive attitude toward schools. Some hate it, but they are minority.
The 18th birthday is not a magical doorway.
Now who's blending "legal consent and practical capacity for decisions"?
To argue otherwise would be odd. Perhaps you have misparsed my comment.
We chose an age that made sense to us, because the law needs an objective anchor point, not a philosophical one. However, just because the age makes sense to us legally and socially, doesn't mean it's enshrined in natural law, and we shouldn't necessarily view it as such.
Edit: Below I am replying to the reply to this comment here because apparently 5 posts in an hour and a half is enough to trigger rate limiting for me.
Yes, that is too young to make that decision. You can throw any hypothetical, emotional situation at this and the answer will be the same.
Do I think some 15 year olds are perfectly capable of deciding to work? yes. However, I think it's prudent for us to ignore those few and assume not, simply because there is no universal test for competence, and the vast majority are not.
I assume similar laws exist in other countries, and hence societies recognize the capacity of minors to consent to some things.
No. That bit is obviously not in the brain.
In Alabama, for example, anyone over the age too 14 can consent to medical treatment.
It's all well and good to make parents send their kids to school. But at a certain point the punishments can exacerbate child poverty.
What is not protected is working in an industrial factory all day. Hell I had a job at target when I was 17 and I was allowed to do anything other than operate the trash compactor as that was heavy machinery. A sweep of factories and other heavy industry for child labor is not going to exacerbate child poverty
Fun fact, tax breaks encourage this as long as you report the income, then some of the parents' income can be offset by the income that the child "earns" as that is tax deductible. Of course this is not financial advice and consult your own tax professional.
> What is not protected is working in an industrial factory all day. Hell I had a job at target when I was 17 and I was allowed to do anything other than operate the trash compactor as that was heavy machinery. A sweep of factories and other heavy industry for child labor is not going to exacerbate child poverty
Much of the labor lately in grocery and fast food has been underage or young workers.
Well, color me amazed, TIL there's child labor happening in the US.
Of course businesses do this. If nothing else the kids in poverty are literally going to ask for a part time job and a few people will say yes because they won’t see the harm because there actually isn’t any.
The only abusive sounding part of this story to me is the kids were pulled out of school and seemingly working at the factory all the time. What is surprising here is that it went beyond “child helps contractor/small business on the weekend and gets money under the table” and instead “large corporation had full time child labourer at factory” which is rather extreme by American standards. But child labour is plenty common, if you’ve eaten chocolate recently there’s a good chance it was made with tiny child hands, rich people literally just can’t comprehend such things.
You've only shown that my question is not answerable by simply legalizing child labor, not that my question is unanswerable full stop.
> Can you formulate the question in a way that would invite a sincere discussion?
Sadly, I don't know how to phrase questions in a way that invites discussion; I only know how to ask questions that I want to know the answer to. But here's my question, restated, in case it helps:
@lupire said that support systems in "the entire civilized world" are successful at making it so that no family needs to have their kids work. By what measure do we know that these support systems are successful at this job?
In general, I can think of three different policies that all work to reduce child labor:
- a general ban on child labor, which obviously is a stick mechanism to prevent child labor
- compulsory education, which is another stick mechanism to make sure children do not work all day
- child benefit payments, which is a carrot mechanism to make sure parents have the means to feed and clothe their children
Then there's indirect policies like unemployment benefits, health insurance, and child abuse laws that also help parents to stay afloat and keep children out of labor. But the only measures we have are child labor incidence rate and school attendance rate. Neither of those measurements specifically measure the need for children to supplement the family income, nor do they measure the effects of the carrot policies alone.
So that's why I said your question is unanswerable: you're asking for the effects of specific policies on the decisions of parents, while the statistics will only give you the effects of the complete policy on the outcome of those parental decisions.
(edit: see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/incidence-of-child-labour... for example. If you can find a way to compare the child labor policies of e.g. Argentina, Mexico, Serbia, Peru, and Nigeria and correlate them with this graph, maybe you'll be able to get closer to an answer to your question)
That is an oxymoron given how "education" is currently defined in the US. The only way this could be achieved is if the whole system is torn down to absolute zero and rebuilt as something entirely different. That is, of course, not possible.
It is extremely unusual for this kind of labor abuse to be carried out by American companies. As the articles note, these are Korean-owned and Korean-operated companies.
FTA: "Korean-operated SL Alabama, finding children as young as age 13."
There are hundreds of foreign owned and operated factories in America that are run like independent kingdoms, staffed with people from other countries with their own restaurants and dorms so the workers are never exposed to the outside world, so that the company can put the all important "Made in USA" label on the product. There's at least one all-Chinese factory outside of Las Vegas. There was a Chinese-run industrial marijuana farming operation shut down in Arizona last year.
And this is not unique to the United States. There are similar operations in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. There are multiple Chinese factories in Italy churning out "Made in Italy" leather good for the luxury market.
Lots of newspaper articles about it over the last ten years or so.
A friend who worked for a union that organized poultry plant workers said some of these plants– all large, American companies with names you see in every grocery store— essentially ignored labor laws entirely. One actually had a jail cell in the factory used as a disciplinary measure for misbehaving employees.
This seems like a fairly easy thing for the media (or the union) to expose - so is there any evidence this is true? Seems more likely to be union FUD if the union doesn't expose the evidence
https://revealnews.org/article/they-thought-they-were-going-...
https://revealnews.org/blog/response-to-labor-camp-investiga...
He said the union absolutely used it to pressure management into a more favorable stance towards Unionization, and the plant is now unionized.
That doesn't make it ok, does it? What you're describing sounds a lot like the conditions that migrant workers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia are working in.
The US shouldn't tolerate such conditions for workers in factories on its soil, no matter who operates them and where the workers are from.
In fact, no country caring about human rights should. I'm from Germany and in the early Covid phase in 2020 it became clear that there are a lot of east European workers in our slaughterhouses, with them living in very tightly packed quarters (for which they had to pay exaggerated prices to their employers) leading to a massive spread of the disease. At the time, many politicians cried that something will have to change, but of course nothing happened and the whole thing was forgotten as quickly as it had come to light.
Nor for any company the USA law has reach over. Y'all stop copyright all around the World, but that protects executive wages so it's pretty clear where the morals lie here.
If there's anyone involved in a company, and that person can reasonable be expected to know human trafficking, or forced child labour are happening under the auspices of that company, any where in the World, if those people are in reach of Western countries extradition agreements then they should be prosecuted. The companies should be fined a minimum of a years [recent average] profit, and all execs fined a minimum of a years wage.
At what point did I say it was OK? You're railing against a comment that agrees with your position.
The one's in Milan are terrifying, and often have some mafia (often southern) and triad affiliations, an Italian movie about the Camorra briefly goes into he detail of just how dark that part of the fashion industry is. I lived in Italy during the later end of the financial crisis and it was pretty common to see hordes of Han-Chinese come to Emilia Romanaga who had fled Milan and look for work on farms and restaurants.
Seeing tons of refugees living in parks and waiting all day in the piazzas made it feel like I was living in the 21st century version of Salo, which is a fucked up sordid tale from the 20th Century.
Criminals are going to bribe, sure, undestandable.. but people, government employees, who should be working for 'us', the taxpayers, are taking bribes... the punishment for them should be a vastly higher than for someone just offering a bribe... and somehow, (usually) nothing ever happens to them... maybe someone loses their job, but that's it.
That factory should have a managers at least. They should be in jail.
Or, in some cases, they use illegal labor. I doubt that the federal government gave a work visa to the 13-year-old in the article.
I find this incredibly interesting and somewhat surprising, can you substantiate the scale of this problem a little bit more, or link 3-5 map locations?
If there's enough "other stuff" that can bring a company who's existence causes death and disease as its main impact on society to 79/100, I don't really care about the scoring system.
Not all of it is illegal. There is an exception for tobacco farming, which employs children as young as 10.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/child-lab...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/12/09/teens-tobacco-fields/c...
It varies from state to state and industry to industry.
And if they’re unpaid then you have much more leeway!
ESG is not needed to not have child labor.
As Reuters reported, migrant children from Guatemala found working at SMART Alabama, LLC and SL Alabama had been hired by recruiting or staffing firms in the region. In a statement to Reuters this week, Hyundai said it had already stopped relying on at least one labor recruiting firm that had been hiring for SMART
I think there should be a huge divergence of punishment options based on the actual details.
I remember having a paper route when I was 10 years old. Yeah, not the same thing as a factory line job, but I wanted the job for extra money.
If these kids were forced to work, that's horrible, fine the company, punish them hard.
But if these were kids working a few 4 hour shifts a week because their parents worked there, then that's entirely different. Not legal, but not the same as exploiting some youngster against their will.
> In a statement on Wednesday, SL Alabama said it had taken "aggressive steps to remedy the situation" as soon it learned a subcontractor had provided underage workers.
It's hard to believe no one noticed 12 year olds working in manufacturing. It would be one thing if they were 17 and this were some legal technicality.
Willful violation of the law and a "oops weird" cover up. The fine will likely be a fraction of the money they saved.
"Reuters first reported on July 22 that allegations surfaced about SMART’s labor practices after a Guatemalan girl reportedly working at the Hyundai-owned auto supplier went missing from her family’s Alabama home."
https://www.fox6now.com/news/hyundai-subsidiary-allegedly-us...
Who wants to bet those aggressive steps will be.
When our contract with the child labor ends we will put out a search for a replacement contract company. This time when we say "CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP Labor on the bid we will specify we don't mean "Child labor cheap" just regular old undocumented slave labor cheap.
Nonetheless it should by far, exceedingly, not be the norm.
I myself had a job in my school at ~15 myself, it was nbd and I was happy for some spending money that my mom couldn't provide.
The article only mentions Korean owned suppliers operating in the US, some directly controlled by Hyundai, which were investigated by Alabama's state Department of Labor, in coordination with federal agencies.
No comparing, no who is better, just the blunt reality of child labor in the US
You are missing the part where the foreign owned company is caught by the police and investigated by the authorities, and then the crime is reported by the media.
This is exactly what you'd expect in a country where child labor is not accepted.
It's not honest to omit this part. Indeed it's a deliberate deception.
Not so long ago, the unthinkable thing wouldn't have been child labor in the supply chain of a big company, but we all would have expected it to be an American company with Asian manufacturing. Actually relatively recently, I had an executive from an American company express to me earnestly that child sweatshop labor helps grow local economies, and therefore it was misguided to condemn the practice. But it seemed implicit, in a condescending way, that that was justifiable for other people in other places.
I think a lot of people here had soft lives as kids and extrapolate from that experience that kids are too fragile to handle working or something.
There need to be a minimum 5+ zeroes on top of the fine + jail time, or nothing will change.
there's all kinds of abuse going on, even without the child labour, in labour intensive jobs.
man this sucked to read
Of course, because they were the ones wrongfully letting this happen without knowing.
I want shareholders so petrified of their stock suddenly being worth nothing that they keep the board in check who makes heads roll when this kind of bullshit is tried.
Everything less is a tacit acceptance that child labour is fine as long as you factor the cost into doing business.
This is not the American dream, it's the American nightmare. Kids need to be kids. Learning and developing is a very difficult full time job.
Child labor is perfectly legal in other US industries, like tobacco production.
Surely people remember those girls manufacturing Amazon and Apple products at Foxconn, about 14 years old, who tried to kill themselves by jumping off the roof, but Foxconn just installed nets to catch them and bounce them back onto the production line.
EDIT: I found the entity investigaing the matter [1]. And also another story indicating that it may have been an internal whsitleblower who began the trail.
[1] https://borgenproject.org/labor-exploitation-at-foxconn-chin...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/undercover-reporter-...
We very much are not.
Both the USA and especially the EU have stringent laws against importing goods produced using child labour. Companies put some serious efforts auditing their suppliers to ensure no child labour is used and every time they fail it becomes a major scandal (see Nike as an exemple).
Actually the reason you know Foxconn employed 14 years old is because it was a major violation of child labour law and was widely reported as such. The Chinese state wasn’t happy about that at all. I can assure they didn’t go back to the production lines.
IIRC it was an undercover documentary I watched. Not sure who the team who made it were, and cannot find it on YouTube etc now. But I do not recall it being a labour audit team from Apple or Amazon. Both of whom I remember initially denied the claims, and then distanced themselves from Foxconn (while the story blew-over) before eventually admitting it much later [1]
Of course we all know how such inconveniences are spun: it was an "isolated" incident. A few bad apples. Mistakes were made. The (scapegoat) managers have been fired. Lessons learned... etc.
> I can assure they didn’t go back to the production lines.
On what basis do you make such "assurances"? Because I'm pretty sure you are wrong. For me, a most stomach churning aspect of that whole story was the "soft torture" of the poor kids who were not even able to end their ordeal by suicide. The anti-suicide nets were the company's response instead of changing the awful working conditions.
Quite beyond belief.
They were designed to catch the workers, who could then be given "counselling" (presumably advice on what would happen to their families if they tried that again) and then returned to work as soon as possible.
[1] https://www.industryweek.com/talent/labor-employment-policy/...
Your original statement was that we, the collective west, are confortable buying the product of child labour as long as it happens abroad. This is clearly false. Not only are we uncomfortable doing so, we find the idea so abhorrent that we have made it illegal.
> On what basis do you make such "assurances"?
The CCP doesn’t take people flaunting Chinese laws kindly.
Also while the issue with underage interns was discovered during the probe on the suicides, they are unrelated events. The workers who killed themselves due to overworking and poor working conditions were all of legal age.
Under age workers were provided as month long interns from vocational schools. Foxconn wasn’t checking if they were of legal ages which made quite a splash.
I don't think it is "clearly false". And you've offered me no contrary evidence - although I cannot imagine what that would realistically be or that we can resolve this difference of opinion by appealing to the stated opinions of other groups.
But "we" in this case is undefined.
There is the "we" of PR executives, corporate lawyers and politicians, all of whom paint a party line on how "we are uncomfortable"
And then there are the tens of millions of people who, knowing the reality of overseas child labour (through, as you say yourself, the widely reported news), still go out and buy an iPhone or Amazon Alexa.
As far as I know neither Apple nor Amazon's sales were significantly hit by these revelations.
There is a vast difference between the world as we wish it to be, and the world as it really is. I think you speak more to the former.
Obviously I have. First I have pointed to you that it is illegal. Secondly I have mentioned Nike to you. After the 1996 Life magazine report and the subsequent protest, they lost millions of dollars of sales and had to work on the issue significantly in the following years to save their image.
You keep torpedoing your own argument yourself anyway by bringing up all the articles covering the issue which should show you people care.
This conversation is over as far as I’m concerned. I’m impressed by the length you are ready to go to refuse to simply admit you are wrong.
Well thank goodness for that. You've offered nothing of any value except reiterating your own disagreement and sidestepped everything I've offered you with wilful ignorance. I get it, you don't like what I'm saying, but your arguments are pitiable. A most disappointing exchange.
> Following the Reuters report, Alabama's state Department of Labor, in coordination with federal agencies, began investigating SMART Alabama. Authorities subsequently launched a child labor probe at another of Hyundai's regional supplier plants, Korean-operated SL Alabama, finding children as young as age 13.
I can't tell if you're being serious, but you have two comments both casting doubt on this article so maybe you are. The article is reporting on investigations conducted by US authorities, so I suppose you imagine that the US is acting in the interest of China to weaken its own charges against China?