Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad | Hacker News Reader

Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad

nytimes.com

65 pointssteveward38 comments

Wow. I'm kind of appalled by everyone's response which amounts to "meh this has always been happening, nobody cares."

Possibly the central point of the article is not that "Apple is bad" but that most of us are quite oblivious to the working conditions which bring us cheap and fun gadgets.

We recognize that we cannot avoid benefiting from cheap labor on a daily basis. But just as (according to the article) companies could choose to enforce safety standards, we too might be swayed to demand better from Apple and other companies if we had a bit more exposure to the realities of the situation.

And the article drives home the point that we (customers) don't really care; if we did, we would stop buying [widgets] and [company] would enforce those standards.

Nothing new, sure, but it helps to put a face on the reality of the situation in terms of icons that all of us can recognize.

something to notice too is that the work and attention required to assemble Apple's products are greater than other companies thus Apple expose workers to more health damages

I do not follow that logic. Surely, "work and attention" do not cause health damages, do they?

I do not think there is any correlation either way, but one could argue that, say, putting together a 'work fast, but the end result must be spotless' item is less risky for one's health than putting together a (purely hypothetical, for the sake of the argument) 'we do not care about shards on the glass screen; blood spots on the screen are OK, too, but do it in ten seconds or we will not make a profit' product.

Take a look at teardowns of any modern mobile device and you'll see there's nothing really spectacular about the iPhone. It's kind of like saying workers at McDonalds suffer more health problems because their work requires more 'attention' than workers at Burger King.

what i meant with "work and attention" is "greater work and attention in bad working conditions". Apple products should be ,well as S.Jobs wants them, "perfect" despite the working conditions, like polishing that gorgeous ipad back cover in a non-ventilated room. While motorola's back cover doesn't require that polishing .

Apple smear campaign built around the existing problems in large-scale SE Asian(esp. chinese/vietnamese) manufacturing. Perhaps unfairly so because Apple not only actively addresses these issues, but also Apple's vendors are far above the average, and on an increasing upward trend in resolving these issues.

Despite being a hot topic - factory suicide rates are usually well below the USA/China averages.

Also many of the problems don't stem from greedy factory owners, but rather cultural issues. Such as the vast numbers of rural workers who prefer 18-hour factories simply because they can earn more in the few years that they'll be stationed (often saving a dowry or similar nest egg.) In the factories I'd engage we had to pay staff more than what they would earn in their 18 hour day to entice them to work in our "more ethical" 12 hour days. We still found numerous examples of staff using the extra time allocated to them to go and work at smaller factories which would offer short-shifts (deliberately to take advantage of our staff.)

Additionally underage labor is a problem, with workers deliberately falsifying documentation so they can work underage. Now elaborate history checks are required to ensure that the staff member isn't below the appropriate working age.

In conclusion, Apple release their summary reports on their manufacturing, I'd challenge other large companies to be this honest, because it's going to be far worse. (Especially in IT and toys.)

Unfortunately, I don't have time to read all seven pages of this article, but what I did read seems awfully sensationalist. Not only does Foxconn make products for a whole host of other tech companies (as others have pointed out), but aren't there factories with terrible working conditions all over China making things for all sorts of Western industries? And what exactly does an explosion have to do with labor conditions in what's been described as a hyper-clean, hyper-organized factory (albeit to the point of overworking their employees)? Sounds like a terrible accident to me.

My main point here, though, is that none of this is anything new. Chinese factories are continuing to abuse their workers to increase Western profit margins. Short of completely reforming the Chinese government, what's the alternative? Employing Americans instead so that even more Chinese people starve?

Again, I hate to act like I read the entire article (and I'm now realizing that I probably could have in the time it took to type this out), but I just saw a lot of extreme language.

TFA - on page 6, I realize it is difficult - says that the the explosions were caused by aluminum dust filling the air which was not properly ventilated. According to the article, these factories are not "hyper-clean or hyper-organized."

The article is singling out Apple, but it also contrasts their attitude to the attitudes of HP and other companies which manufacture electronics goods in China.

These factories can have multiple parts. Final electronics assembly - the most photogenic stage of operations - tends to be done in clean, well-lit, well-organized, air-conditioned spaces by young women (age 16-20) wearing color-coded paper hats (you don't want aluminum dust or dandruff getting on your circuit boards). But some of the earlier manufacturing stages where you mold plastic or cut metal to make an outer case shell (that is an eventual input to the later process) can be hot and dark and grimy and smelly.

This doesn't justify any sort of mistreatment the employees of Foxconn may be receiving, but why is Apple always made the focus of controversy? Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Amazon products are manufactured there as well.

Probably because they have $96 billion in cash.

Because they are the biggest company, make the most money, and are the most popular. Also, any article about Apple gets clicks.

Maybe it's a good thing the Foxconn employees will be replaced with a million of these in a few years:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1qJyAWZeV4

Work that requires you to do one thing 5000 times a day shouldn't be done by a human anyway.

Yes, I also think is intolerable that those people have to do grudge work for such low pay. Let's hope they become unemployed soon.

They're not committing suicide because of the low pay. Nobody is forcing them to take the job so I don't think being paid triple the money would do much to lower the suicide rates. It's the job itself that's making them kill themselves. They can't handle the working conditions or the work itself.

From the wired article:http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1

"Out of a million people, 17 suicides isn’t much—indeed, American college students kill themselves at four times that rate."

They should wait until the suicide ratio gets more alarming to do something about their employees conditions?

Can anyone make sense of the claim that N-hexane dries faster and therefore suppliers using it can clean more screens per unit time and thereby save money? That seems ridiculous on the face of it since it's hard to imagine a task easier to do in parallel than wait for screens to dry. Heck, imagine it took 24 hours for screens to dry after being cleaned with alcohol - you'd just make that cleaning the last step on the line, stack the product into your staging trays with the screen still damp, let them dry overnight, resume the process from there the next day. Sure, it takes longer before the first piece comes off the line, but that's in the noise - after that you're producing units at the same rate with a one-day delay as you'd be producing with a one-minute delay. No?

Can anyone put some of these figures into perspective? How many injuries per worker and per dollar are there in the iDevice supply chain vs. 1950's american manufacturing, present day american manufacturing, other electronic manufactures?

FoxConn has about half a million workers in Shenzhen, which means if you just go by the cases we've heard about, the documented injuries-per-worker rate (and the suicide rate) seems to be unusually low. Less than that for most US cities, most chinese cities, most US colleges. In order to think the overall accident rate or suicide rate among these workers is unusually bad, I think one needs to bring in additional assumptions to the effect that what we see is just "the tip of the iceberg".

The different between a movement against the Foxconn conditions and a hetz is how everyone keeps singling out Apple.

Do they want Apple to change the conditions, or do they want everyone to do it? Is it a relevant story to them because of the working conditions or because of Apple's involvement?

I imagine what revealing and and informative articles someone like Pro Publica might be able to do, because they don't have these weird proclivities and know that in order to change a problem, you have to cover it in nuance, detail and, keep running with it, until it picks up and inspires people to effect change.

This by comparison reads like a bland piece with some choice quotes peppered around it. If they had made the article with Apple as an example or example case, then it would be more interesting; the NYT are, after all, the best people in the world at making infographics, in my opinion.

I can't help get the impression that the NYT are ruining what could be a great debate and movement by this silly focus on Apple's part in something that is so much larger than them.

Why focus on Apple? Because they are so large and successful they can actually apply enough pressure to resolve issues. Simple answer.

Even more to the point, read the articles. Some entrepeneur has an oppurtinity to get sales by re-building tech manufacturing in the US because. People will buy the products because they want to re-invest in America.

I don't see how anything specified in the article is exclusive to Apple. Reads like linkbait, honestly. I was expecting rather more from NY Times.

Other factories never have any mishaps or accidents that kill humans. Nuclear reactors never melt down and hurt anyone. And so on and so forth.

Where exactly does the author of this article think the PC he typed it on is made? Or for that matter the servers that power the NY Times website.

If the NY Times doesn't like how the iPad is being made perhaps they should pull their content from Newsstand. Wait until the NY Times finds out how many loggers die each year to cut down the trees to make its paper.

"Apple typically asks suppliers to specify how much every part costs, how many workers are needed and the size of their salaries. Executives want to know every financial detail. Afterward, Apple calculates how much it will pay for a part. Most suppliers are allowed only the slimmest of profits."

"Many major technology companies have worked with factories where conditions are troubling. However, independent monitors and suppliers say some act differently. Executives at multiple suppliers, in interviews, said that Hewlett-Packard and others allowed them slightly more profits and other allowances if they were used to improve worker conditions."

The article clearly explains that Apple management does care, but that their drive for secrecy and control makes it much more difficult for them to affect change. Maybe he typed it on an HP computer instead.

  Wait until the NY Times finds out how many loggers die 
  each year to cut down the trees to make its paper.

This is brilliant. How many millions of papers has the NYT moved in its history? How many barrels of ink and logs did that use? And what's the death/injury rate in ink and paper factories per million units?

Multiply this through, and it is quite likely that 1000+ people have died in the process of feeding the Times.

I seriously wonder what made the NYT start this drip-drip campaign against Apple. How many factories produce tens of millions of units without any industrial accidents?

The New York Times is weird. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead in Iraq and elsewhere, due in large part to conditions the Times' Judith Miller and other media sources helped bring about. There is no reporting on that. All computer companies can be called to account for complicity (and yeah, unto their suppliers' supplier!), but never a newspaper for starting a war.

Human Costs Are Built Into an Xbox/Dell Laptop/Samsung/HTC/RIM/Motorola Android Smartphone/Kindle Fire/Google Chromebook/Sony TV/etc.

All right. Pretend the word Apple is replaced by "a client who wishes to remain anonymous". Is what is described in the article OK now and not newsworthy, or does the article describe disturbing things about labor practices that are intrinsically newsworthy?

Why single out the iPad?

A) page views

B) hedge funds trying to short AAPL by spreading negative news the day AFTER a record-breaking quarter.

C) A & B

D) Apple can have the biggest influence in Foxconn's work policies.

Wrong. The Chinese government does.

Ok, then Apple can have a larger impact in Foxconn's work policies than anyone else who is likely to be influenced by an article in the NY Times. I don't think the Chinese government especially cares about public opinion.

Apple, Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, Dell, HP, etc.

WHY single out Apple?

Because Apple is Foxconn's most prominent customer and probably their largest as well?

Sure I understood that from your first post.

I am interested in your opinion about the larger issue. Is what is described in the article OK now and not newsworthy, or does the article describe disturbing things about labor practices that are intrinsically newsworthy?

No its not ok. But WHY single out the iPad?

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