Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
thisamericanlife.org
thisamericanlife.org
I'm back in China now, after a two year break to the U.S. Ten years in Shanghai was too much for me. I needed some perspective from home. Now I'm back, in Chengdu. My rules are simple. In all aspects of my life, where I can, I incrementally raise the labor bar and try to provide more than just a job. The IT projects I do, I tell my clients I only do high-end work and pay my talent well. And I do pay them well; generally 50% to 200% over their prior jobs. I also get to cherry pick the best talent and have very satisfied clients. This approach has its limitations and I'll adjust my approach when I reach their limits.
For you, there are two things you can do:
1 - Choose wisely who you give your money to. If you feel you can't easily raise the bar in the electronics you buy because all suppliers are playing the same game, do so in other aspects of your life. For many, there is choice in food and other local things you buy.
2 - Get involved more closely in who your elected representative are. These guys set the global and local trade rules. Let them know at the ballot box what you think.
The situation China, in many ways, better than it was in the Western world when we were going through our Industrial Revolution.
It made me think back to a TED talk from Hans Rosling on Population Growth, and the relation to economic status: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_g...
Although it seems bad to us now, globilization is, over all, a net positive.
This is often brought up, but strangely "the alternative" is defined as "the way things were before" instead of "better working conditions." The fact is that there is no one "alternative" to these kinds of business situations; there are many different alternatives, some of them better and some of them worse. Conditions can be improved, if people want it. Otherwise, there would still be 12-year-olds working 80 hour weeks in factories in the US and Europe.
That was the argument made against divestiture in South Africa during apartheid.
History has shown that it was wrong, at the time.
At the time, moral reasoning showed that it was wrong, as well.
If you list all the companies or pick another one that’s not Apple they will just say noncommittal nice things and try to shift responsibility away from them. “But we have to do this to stay competitive, everyone else does!” “We have even stricter guidelines for our suppliers than our competitors!” “Have you tried looking at this other company?”
Apple is extremely successful, extremely rich and always in the Spotlight. They are the most likely company to actually do something to improve conditions.
And it got hit by the recession really hard. They reduced the workforce by over 300.000 people. That's a lot of pink slips.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers
Review: http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/theater/reviews/the-ag...
Here's an article from Gizmodo about an undercover journalist: http://gizmodo.com/5542527/undercover-report-from-foxconns-h...
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/metro/2010-06/02/content_992207...
and a direct link to the mp3: http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/454.mp3
The minor undercurrent of criticism since his passing has been Apple's manufacturing vendors in Asia. Forgotten is the drag on NeXT by its decision to build a factory in Fremont, CA. It was way overbuilt, and sucked up a lot of the money fronted by Canon and Ross Perot to keep NeXT alive while it was largely unable to sell much of anything.
http://allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/places/fremont/place/light...
in the good ole days even before Standard Oil, fierce competition and W-2 (and IRS/SS in that matter), the reason behind owning any business was not to get rich or satisfy the board with higher dividend, but to give people job and ability to keep their families respected.
to me its a simple math: Apple produce stuff in China saving 40% of production costs, then sells its goods in America putting 40% profit margin on it. I smell greed, regardless if people accept to be ripped of or not.
I don't know of any such time. Which good ole days are you talking about? I think you're dreaming of a romantic past that never existed.
Don't blindly buy in to the cult of human selfishness.
So, you expect Apple to manufacture in the States, and then sell it to you without a margin (over production costs)... And how exactly are those poor Apple engineers and Apple Store Employees are supposed to make money?
If some day Apple manufactures iDevices in America, then an iPad would cost $799, or Apple would go out of business.
This is not to say I'd like Apple's partner (Foxconn) to enslave chinese workers so I could buy an iPad cheaper... I'd be happy if my iPad would be $549 (instead of $499) AND those workers were receiving more money for their hard work.
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/12/16/samsungs-new-texas-facto...
On a more cynical note, Apple's shareholders would not be happy if they could be making more profit by making it in China and selling it for $549. Another downsides to having shareholders run your company.
I have thought that for years.
Apple has over $80 billion in cash. That's all left over after their employees have been paid. They could afford to manufacture their goods in a first-world country, sell their products at the same price, and still pay their employees the same rate.
Entrepreneurs were always in it for the money. Even if you want to help humanity, you still have to be in it for the money, because otherwise you go broke and can't help humanity anymore, either.
I don't know the details but this is supposedly one of the issues he spoke about to Obama.
http://www.onedigitallife.com/2006/03/21/flickr-find-mac-fac...
As I recall, the US stupidly made that uncompetitive by enforcing anti-"dumping" duties on DRAM chips. We required that RAM sold to the US should be really expensive, to protect our (then largely hypothetical) local suppliers. So clone PCs built abroad could include cheap DRAM chips while Apple could not legally do the same.
Eventual solution? Move Mac assembly offshore to places like Cork, Ireland.
US memory makers had exited the arena long before. Now it was multinationals fighting other multinational corporations for an edge and they knew they could use the US court as their proxy.
PC manufacturing left the US because the labor was expensive not because of the price of any of the components. No matter what you heard the US still manufacturers a lot of things but: a) it's mostly automated, b) really highend specialty c) unlike the car factory, these manufacturing jobs really do require a degree.
Here's an example a few years later (in 1991/92) of Apple trying to get its own memory boards excluded from such actions: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_n1935_v38/ai_...
Quote:
> 'The papers also disclosed that Apple Computer had filed a last-minute request that "a product imported by Apple containing Korean DRAMs not be considered within the scope" of the dumping ruling. Micron Technology, which initiated the dumping complaint, opposed the Apple petition'
The earthquake you're talking about happened in 1999, right?
FWIW, the Fremont Mac plant was extremely automated, well ahead of its time in that regard. The anti-dumping duties applied to memory imported alone or in circuit boards but did not apply to memory chips in finished products - that last possibly for the practical reason that nobody wants customs inspectors tearing apart VCRs to see if they can find untaxed memory chips.
FWIW, no matter how you cut it California is still an expensive place to do business. All the automation in the world couldn't save that factory. Not for what they were making. Now it's about specialization, automation (in the short term) is still more expensive than millions of chinese factory workers.
It depends on a library called CocoaSequenceGrabber. I'm sure you can find it somewhere, but the first Google link seems to be dead. I also have no idea whether it works on recent versions of OS X.
A fan was making a lot of noise. (Not just the usual noise fans make when they spin up; it sounded broken, like it was grinding against something.) They couldn't hear it, and didn't fix it. (Later, I brought it back and asked them to please just replace the fan, regardless of whether they could hear it. They did.)
He's performing in NYC on January 31st.
Problem for me being that Apple is a corporation and doesn't have one mind. Does anyone at Apple know? I'm sure people who visit the factories do. Does the information get passed around throughout the organization so that everyone knows? I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Do most people who work at Apple want to be intentionally ignorant? Probably, but I don't think there's some huge conspiracy going on. Most Apple employees are no different than consumers. They have no knowledge of this from Apple internals and don't think about it much.
How many US products are made by prison labour? Who has worse conditions: a Foxconn employee paid a low wage and living in a dorm or a US prisoner deprived of liberty, exposed to violence and paid practically nothing? Who will live better and longer, the grandchildren of Foxconn employees or those of US prisoners?
The US has an astonishingly high incarceration rate compared to other countries thanks to government policy. The US economy clearly benefits from the misery caused by this system. Why would any foreigner want to support it?
I'm still trying.
This story tells you everything you already know, but makes you really realize it. Like you should play it once a month to remind yourself of what we all conveniently forget.
edit It's more likely the cafeterias seat only 4,000. I guess that's better.
If you read Apple's status reports, one of the problems they seem to be battling is that these jobs are so good that workers are willing to pay huge bribes to middlemen in order to get the jobs. The workers are routinely willing to give up at least a month's salary to get these jobs, often more.
(Apple can't ban this practice outright because it's too widespread (and probably serves a useful market purpose), so they try to put a cap on it and make sure workers pay only a month's salary to get the job, no more than that.)
edit: As to "huge bribes to middlemen", I live close to a Foxconn factory making Apple products in Chengdu. I've seen recruiters in a suburban (poor) farmer's market with a table setup recruiting people for Apple jobs. Yes, they were clear the jobs were for Foxconn making Apple products. I had my wife talk to one of them. Perhaps other factories at some times have been competitive to the point where employees paid fees to recruiters, but it doesn't appear to be happening where I live as of a few weeks ago.
Quote from Apple's Supplier Responsibility report (page 7)
http://images.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_...
Limiting Recruitment Fees
Some of our suppliers work with third-party labor agencies to hire contract workers from countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. These agencies, in turn, may work through multiple subagencies in the hiring country, the workers’ home country, and, in some cases, all the way back to the workers’ home village. By the time the worker has paid all fees across these agencies, the total cost can equal many months’ wages, forcing workers into debt to gain employment.
Apple views recruitment fee overcharges as debt-bonded labor, or involuntary labor, which is strictly prohibited by our Code. We limit recruitment fees to the equivalent of one month’s net wages and require suppliers to reimburse overpaid fees for all foreign contract workers in their facilities, including workers not assigned to Apple projects. To the best of our knowledge, Apple is the only company in the electronics industry that mandates reimbursement of excessive recruitment fees.
Apple forced companies to reimburse more than $3.4 million that year to foreign contract workers, fees of as much as "thousands of dollars per worker".