4,000 Foxconn workers on strike over iPhone 5 quality control measures | Hacker News Reader

4,000 Foxconn workers on strike over iPhone 5 quality control measures

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61 pointssandipc34 comments

Here's a crazy idea.

A hedge fund puts a couple billion dollar short on Apple, and then pays 20,000 Foxconn workers $5,000 each to take the month off from tomorrow and go somewhere else. That's a $100m outlay for a vastly higher profit.

It's not a serious suggestion but it's feasible. It's an interesting situation - an extremely highly valued company underpinned by extremely cheap labour.

Hedge funds (and anyone) can make money regardless of the direction the market moves, or even if the market doesn't move. So why would they do something risky, illegal, and difficult that has the potential for unbounded losses?

It's easier for a third part with only money to cause damage to apple (which will happen in a known time period) than to cause a buff.

(an industry player could cause positive effects, like a huge purchase of Apple into a new industry like enterprise/government, or vendor neutrality for public sector purchases, or Microsoft committing to OSX as a tier-1 OS, etc., but a hedge fund can't do that)

That's what they do:

Risk is their bread and butter. Difficulty - if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Illegal - arguable but they're probably just good at not getting caught (and managing the risk of it). See eg. recent libor scandal.

Theoretically, the only way to make money on an efficient market is to have information others don't have. Manufacturing it would one (very desperate) way.

I agree that this would be too difficult to pull off (one worker spilling the beans would be enough).

But "can make money on the market" mean "might make money" not "will make money". Worth keeping in mind that hedge don't just get stream of money from the market just for being hedge funds. You need to get good information somehow.

Hypothetically a bigger hedge fund could bid up Apple stock causing the smaller hedge fund to lose its shirt... and its quite plausible given that the world's biggest hedge fund is Apple!

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-09-30/presenting-worlds-b...

First of all, this is obviously not happened in this situation, so we should not trivialize the existing labor problems at Foxconn with such imagined hypotheticals.

Second, it is very unlikely an external party can organize such action among a foreign insular and sequestered workforce without Foxconn finding out. They certainly have spies among the workers.

Your idea requires 20,000 people to keep their mouths shut. I'm skeptical.

You can just start a compan near, target foxconn workers and hire them. Semi openly but fast.

Foxconn denied the report this morning. This article is referencing a release from yesterday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/business/foxconn-denies-re...

Who is China Labor Watch and who are they funded by?

A quick Google search yields: http://chinalaborwatch.org/upfile/20110706Annual.pdf (list of large donors)

http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/OurPeople.html

Seems like a fairly new, pretty standard 501(c)(3)

Note: Anonymous donors are also allowed and aren't included on that list. Not saying anything is odd about it all. ;)

I don't mean to justify Apple's policies with regards to Foxconn, but Apple delivers its products on time, on a massive scale. Contrast this with Lenovo, who released a Macbook Air copycat in August, the X1 Carbon. I ordered it as soon as it came out, and it still has not shipped.

I had a Lenovo and hated it. It felt like a cheap computer made entirely of plastic. With normal use, the enclosure started to crack. Later pieces of the enclosure actually started falling off. I'll never buy one again.

You mean like virtually every single MacBook ever? A fault Apple only fixed by discontinuing the line? https://www.google.com/search?q=macbook+wrist+rest+cracks...

Discontinuing the line and replacing all broken cases for free. I changed mine twice at no charge.

I am sure lenovo has produced inferior laptops before, but the X1 Carbon was supposedly stress tested by machines that open and close the lid for days on end to test the hinge, and also machines that press the keys repeatedly, to ensure that the function of these components do not deteriote substantially over time.

That's hardly unusual. Not doing that would be more unusual.

Foxconn has multiple plants with more than 200k workers. 4k workers on strike must be a small enough thing for them.

2% of your entire workforce being on strike is not insignificant - imagine if 2% of the US population suddenly took to the streets!

This, followed by the riots at other Foxconn factories, labor action, and becoming the whipping boy of the Chinese government, local labor, and international rights groups.

No, I think this whole labor business is a big friggin' deal for Foxconn right now.

In Belgium where I live, 10% of prison wardens and 50% of the public transportation sector go on strike at least thrice every year. Here at least it's not a big deal. Sad country, I know.

I agree it's probably more significant in China, where they are not used to this kind of behaviour.

That is very bad. I was always curious how life is in Europe (being the first world) but didn't think that's how the state of affairs would be.

Is it because of unions?

It's also because of unions that far few people are losing their life at the workplace. Seems like a reasonable trade-off to me.

It's not "Europe", it's parts of it. France is particularly bad I hear, supposedly paralysed by unions. In the UK things are much better because unions lost a lot of their power in the 80s under Thatcher.

Unions are not universally bad. As with all things it's a matter of dosage. Germany has pretty strong unions, too...

FWIW, France has a lower proportion of unionized workforce than the US, and a lot lower than the UK in the public sector. It's more about cultural differences than any single thing like unions.

Oh, I didn't know that. I've just heard bad things about it.

Although I might be confusing this with the government business laws in France, which are also a bit messy. There's a reason lots of French companies have exactly 49 employees.

I found it amusing that, when in college, the only people who objected to the on-campus bar's pool table usage scheme - "winner stays, loser pays" - in the whole four years I was there, were French :)

Consider that this is an assembly line. So 4k workers going on strike will prevent others in the assembly line from getting the parts they need to continue working. 4k on strike can easily trigger a large work stoppage.

Up to a rumored 450K workers per factory zone... 1.2M employees in total at last count... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17429786

“It was reported that factory management and Apple, despite design defects, raised strict quality demands on workers, including indentations standards of 0.02mm and demands related to scratches on frames and back covers"

It seems like a few cracks are showing the ole' Apple's armor.

I am not sure how you make that deduction.

good marketing for Apple :)

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