Where Your iPad and iPod Are Made

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I saw this posted on Twitter and wasn't at all surprised by what I read.

I've never really liked Apple, but this article certainly proved my point about the techno giant.

Apple's iPad and the Human Costs for Workers in China

Core Values from George Takei

Apple Should Reinvent Gadget Manufacturing - Thanks SpacePPoliceman

Apple Can Do Better for China - Thanks Parallax Abstraction

Amazing this American Life Story on Chinese Manufacturing Conditions - Thanks Parallax Abstraction

iPod City - Thanks Edwin

The Apple Boycott - Thanks jdzappa

China's Precious Metals - KrazyTaco[FO]

I would post the FT article, but it won't let me read it because I'm not a member.

I made a couple of posts on my blog about a recent This American Life episode that chronicled the poor treatment of many Foxconn workers at Apple plants and Apple's lackluster response to that. I'm a well known non-fan (I'm not a hater, just not a huge fan) of Apple products but the thing is, this isn't a trend they began and they're only the worst offender because they're selling so much stuff right now. We use HP ProBook laptops at work and I did a little digging into where they're made and it's quite possible they come from an abusive manufacturer as well. Sadly, I don't get to pick what brand of laptop we use.

Exploiting lacking labour and environmental regulations in China has been a problem of big business as a whole for a long time now and it's only going to get worse as people continue to demand to pay $500 for an iPad or $300 for a basic laptop that by all rights should cost twice that much at least. Where I think Apple can be faulted is not fighting for change as hard as they could be, something I address in my second blog post. When they have profit margins that are freakishly large relative to the median in the high-tech industry and are posting financial results such as they are, they have a very large pulpit from which to fight for change, both vocally and financially. Apple (or really any number of large companies) could lead the charge for better working conditions and environmental compliance. Their manufacturing partners can afford these things, they're just choosing not do because no one's forcing them. But if people are willing to keep buying so much of their stuff and they have such a vocal fanbase that will defend them no matter what they do, what's their incentive to change? Part of the reason they're one of the world's most valuable companies is because of how cheap they can build their stuff. If they agreed to make $12.6B instead of $13.6B in the last quarter to do right by the Chinese workers, a part of that reason goes away.

I know Nintendo uses Foxconn products too since I work for them in a Reman/Refurb warehouse here in the states. But the entire reason we're open to do what we do for Nintendo is because we build cheaper than China. And while yes, the US has stricter laws for worker safety, etc, I think it's ridiculous that one of the largest companies - Apple - doesn't start a trend to either bring jobs back to the States, or push for stricter demands from their supplier chain in China.

But I'm with you, I'm not a hater, I'm just not a huge fan of Apple as a company and their practices.

From what I've been reading in the article you linked, it appears Apple operates with their partners much like Wal-Mart does. You get a contract and a year later they come back and say "We're paying you 10% less for the same product this year." There's no negotiating, you either do so or you lose their business and that's where a lot of the poor conditions come from. I wonder if that's really different from the way say a Dell, HP, Lenovo or Asus would work though.

I actually used to work for Foxconn in Taiwan and find this sort of thing entirely unsurprising. Folks at the design plant in Tucheng (Taiwan) used to joke about the uneducated labor in China as if they were farm animals.

Dominic Knight wrote:

I think it's ridiculous that one of the largest companies - Apple - doesn't start a trend to either bring jobs back to the States, or push for stricter demands from their supplier chain in China.

Consumers generally don't want to pay the higher prices that come with American wages or stricter supply chain regulations though. Suppose the apple store sold

A) North American made ipad with fairly paid employees, labour regulations, and strict safety regulations.

B) Current ipad except with the environmental and human costs made known to the purchaser rather than hidden, $200-300 less than ipad A.

I suspect people would still buy ipad B, certainly not all people but probably enough for the bottom line folks at Apple to 'justify' the continued production of ipad B.

Yep, that's the problem. Sadly, most consumers don't care about things like working conditions when it requires them to spend more money. They don't know the people making their products half a world away and if they don't have to see what they go through, it's out of sight, out of mind. I don't think people should have to pay more for a "fair trade" iPad when Apple can afford to have them all built in a humane way, just at a slightly lower profit margin. I've been debating buying an iPad 3 when they announce them (mostly for iOS games and to use on the treadmill) and this enters into it but when I think of how much Chinese made electronics I have and have to continue to buy as part of my job and my hobbies, I'm sure I'm contributing to this problem significantly whether I get one or not.

I've never really liked Apple, but this article certainly proved my point about the techno giant.

What is your point? That Apple, like every other electronics company in the world, is complicit in creating the horrendous work environment in China? I can agree with that, to a point. Of course I'd say the Chinese government has more responsibility here.

Nobody seems to mention the end of that TAL episode in which they investigate Daisy's claims and find that Apple has gone a distance to do exactly what everyone is railing against them for not doing. At the end of the episode, it's boiled down to "Sure, they're trying but they're not trying hard enough and aren't transparent enough about it." That's a far distance from the blunt, inaccurate "APPLE IS EVIL!" message that people are enjoying making out of this.

I know the Wii is significantly cheaper than an iPad. But it's possible to make items cheaper here than in other countries where regulations basically don't exist. Yes, at my warehouse we make remanufactured/refurbished products. But we sell them at the same price you would purchase them everywhere else. We also produce items to make up for the high defect rate that the China warehouse has. And we do it cheaper than they do, and we're all paid above minimum wage and work a minimum of 40 hours a week. It's obviously not that hard to do if Nintendo uses many of the same supply chains that Apple does.

Certainly people would go to the cheaper option because for them, it makes sense and they're getting what they pay for. A crappy product that is made in modern day sweatshops.

lostlobster wrote:
I've never really liked Apple, but this article certainly proved my point about the techno giant.

What is your point? That Apple, like every other electronics company in the world, is complicit in creating the horrendous work environment in China? I can agree with that, to a point. Of course I'd say the Chinese government has more responsibility here.

Nobody seems to mention the end of that TAL episode in which they investigate Daisy's claims and find that Apple has gone a distance to do exactly what everyone is railing against them for not doing. At the end of the episode, it's boiled down to "Sure, they're trying but they're not trying hard enough and aren't transparent enough about it." That's a far distance from the blunt, inaccurate "APPLE IS EVIL!" message that people are enjoying making out of this.

Apple isn't "evil", I just firmly disagree with many of their practices as a company overall. So I personally don't support them by purchasing their products, but that's me.

If they're so "great" of a company, they should also do the right thing and come down a lot harder on their factories. That's all I'm saying.

I think the issue is Apple hasn't tried to sell you just some junk in a box. It's selling a whole ethos. It's selling to you based on this image that Apple is special, that it's more than just another consumer product. Exploiting third-world workers doesn't fit in very well with that image.

The issue for the consumer is if you should question all those warm-and-fuzzy feelings you get when buying Apple products given how Apple operates. The culture that contributes to Apple being cool--and thus being able to charge that Apple premium/get such high sales--is a culture that seemed to be firmly against the exploitation of workers. The culture Apple says you're buying into when you buy their products and the behavior of Apple in creating those products don't fit together well.

lostlobster wrote:
I've never really liked Apple, but this article certainly proved my point about the techno giant.

What is your point? That Apple, like every other electronics company in the world, is complicit in creating the horrendous work environment in China? I can agree with that, to a point. Of course I'd say the Chinese government has more responsibility here.

Nobody seems to mention the end of that TAL episode in which they investigate Daisy's claims and find that Apple has gone a distance to do exactly what everyone is railing against them for not doing. At the end of the episode, it's boiled down to "Sure, they're trying but they're not trying hard enough and aren't transparent enough about it." That's a far distance from the blunt, inaccurate "APPLE IS EVIL!" message that people are enjoying making out of this.

No post I've read in this thread is doing what you're saying, aside from the one cherry picked sentence you're quoting. I made a specific point of saying that Apple's not the first company to do this. But since when has "everyone else is doing it" been an excuse? Apple cultivates their image of being cool, friendly and hip and that they're better than this. Also, you should read my second blog post I linked to in which Apple did respond to the TAL episode (well they say they weren't responding to it and that the timing was a coincidence) with what they said was their commitment to stricter action, except it really wasn't at all. I'm not going to repost the whole thing here but I broke down what their response said. They have the means to do something significant about this issue and all they've done thus far is put up a smoke screen to make it look like they are, not like any number of other large companies do all the time.

I don't know how big a fan of Apple you are but whether you like the company or not, what they and many others partake in is both deplorable and most disturbingly, avoidable. I really wish people would stop taking anything negative said about this company (even when backed up by facts and real journalism) and just chalk it up to Apple haters. Apple (or any other high-tech company) is a business, they don't care about you or me, only the money we give them. What they should care about is the health and welfare of the people without whom they would have nothing to sell. And most of them don't. And I say this as someone who bought his girlfriend a 32GB iPod Touch for Christmas and is still debating buying an iPad 3.

CheezePavilion wrote:

I think the issue is Apple hasn't tried to sell you just some junk in a box. It's selling a whole ethos. It's selling to you based on this image that Apple is special, that it's more than just another consumer product. Exploiting third-world workers doesn't fit in very well with that image.

The issue for the consumer is if you should question all those warm-and-fuzzy feelings you get when buying Apple products given how Apple operates. The culture that contributes to Apple being cool--and thus being able to charge that Apple premium/get such high sales--is a culture that seemed to be firmly against the exploitation of workers. The culture Apple says you're buying into when you buy their products and the behavior of Apple in creating those products don't fit together well.

I can definitely see this. I remember during Occupy Wall Street when a bunch of partisan twits were condemning the protesters for saying how they can't find a job and make good money but were all seen with iPhones in their hands. I understood how ultimately that was irrelevant to the principals they were fighting for but given those principals, I wonder how many of them would attempt to rationalise their continued support of the company (or for that matter, find a cell phone manufacturer that had a record of good labour relations) after reading the NYT article. There is also the argument many have made that the workers in these factories are people that might otherwise be unemployed, destitute and starving had the option not been there for them. Much of China's recent economic boom has been due to the flourishing manufacturing industry there and many forget that what seems like a slavishly low daily wage to us can be a decent living in China in some cases. I think this whole issue is very complicated and I think the whole picture is only just now starting to be uncovered.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

From what I've been reading in the article you linked, it appears Apple operates with their partners much like Wal-Mart does. You get a contract and a year later they come back and say "We're paying you 10% less for the same product this year." There's no negotiating, you either do so or you lose their business and that's where a lot of the poor conditions come from. I wonder if that's really different from the way say a Dell, HP, Lenovo or Asus would work though.

According to the article, other companies are much more willing to work with their suppliers than Apple is (or at least has been historically).

“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety.”
...
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.

“Our suppliers are very open with us,” said Zoe McMahon, an executive in Hewlett-Packard’s supply chain social and environmental responsibility program. “They let us know when they are struggling to meet our expectations, and that influences our decisions.”

Yeah, I read that as well and given what a dedicated HP shop my employer is, it's nice to see them singled out as one of the better examples. When I did some digging on the potential places our most common model of laptop is made, I came up with a couple of companies who don't have a great history with workers (one of them being Foxconn but it's hard to buy anything computer related that they haven't been involved with the manufacturing of at some point) but from what I've read, a lot of these companies don't have a problem having scruples as long as they can afford it. That's what makes trying to avoid the less reputable places so difficult. You can see the names of companies that are known to have poor practices but sometimes that's only in certain factories that deal with certain partners. And in other cases (also touched on in the article), you can buy a product that was assembled at a reputable factory but which uses components that were made by less reputable places. If you're someone who really wants to only purchase "fairly made" electronics, it seems an almost impossible task unless you just want to largely get out of using modern technology. As an IT person who is also a tech nerd, that's really depressing to me.

What they don't mention is that the manufacturing can't come back to the US because the rest of the supply chain is *also* overseas. The Corning factory that makes the glass for Apple products is very close to FoxConn; the company that makes the metal for the cases is just blocks away. If you move part of it, say final assembly and testing, to the US, you add 10-30 days transport time to the manufacturing cycle.

The US just does not have the trained low and mid-level tech employees and resource suppliers to set up entire affordable supply chains anymore, and that's the reason for the manufacturing being done overseas.

Well, that, and the crazy games we're playing with money, where all the manufacturing can move offshore, and send goods and services to the US, and all we send back are green paper promises. No matter how much money goes overseas, we'll make more!

If you're someone who really wants to only purchase "fairly made" electronics, it seems an almost impossible task unless you just want to largely get out of using modern technology. As an IT person who is also a tech nerd, that's really depressing to me.

+1

If anyone knows how and where to buy 'fair trade' IT products, I would be eternally grateful. I heard even the Xbox is made at Foxconn, and simply knowing that Sony makes its Playstations in normal working conditions would be enough for me to make the switch for the next console generation.

dejanzie wrote:
If you're someone who really wants to only purchase "fairly made" electronics, it seems an almost impossible task unless you just want to largely get out of using modern technology. As an IT person who is also a tech nerd, that's really depressing to me.

+1

If anyone knows how and where to buy 'fair trade' IT products, I would be eternally grateful. I heard even the Xbox is made at Foxconn, and simply knowing that Sony makes its Playstations in normal working conditions would be enough for me to make the switch for the next console generation.

Believe it or not, Foxconn is not anywhere near the worst offender. They just happen to be one of the bigger companies out there making it easier to identify them as an offender when things like this are discovered. This sort of thing is pretty much the state of the industry and is unlikely to get a whole lot better without the aid of regulation. Any market response to this such as boycotts resulting from bad press are likely to be temporary in nature if they result in anything at all.

If you really want to make a difference, it won't be in your purchasing choices. It will be in your willingness to petition your own government to enter into international agreements guaranteeing worker conditions, funding the enforcement of them, and accepting the market consequences. Otherwise, the Chinese are way too savvy and certainly way too numerous to give a rat's rectum about anyone's individual purchasing decisions.

So in other words I pretty much can't avoid having blood on my hands each time I buy something nerdy? As if this grey winter Monday wasn't depressing enough as it is

dejanzie wrote:

So in other words I pretty much can't avoid having blood on my hands each time I buy something nerdy? As if this grey winter Monday wasn't depressing enough as it is

That's pretty much the case.

Having spent 4 years in Taiwan doing trade development and witnessing exactly how the sausage is made, I can say with some authority that any conscience driven market response is likely to be about as effective as pissing in the ocean to change its salinity.

The only course of action that seems to have any effect at all is regulation (like the ban on CFC's). And in this case, it needs to be a global agreement.

Paleocon wrote:
dejanzie wrote:

So in other words I pretty much can't avoid having blood on my hands each time I buy something nerdy? As if this grey winter Monday wasn't depressing enough as it is

That's pretty much the case.

Having spent 4 years in Taiwan doing trade development and witnessing exactly how the sausage is made, I can say with some authority that any conscience driven market response is likely to be about as effective as pissing in the ocean to change its salinity.

The only course of action that seems to have any effect at all is regulation (like the ban on CFC's). And in this case, it needs to be a global agreement.

That's more and more the conclusion I'm reaching as well and it's sad because the high-tech industry is so big, so wealthy, so powerful and so dependant on this cheap, largely unregulated labour that they will ensure such agreements either never come to fruition or are largely toothless when they do. I think it's going to have to be up to the companies themselves to demand higher standards and provide enough transparency to ensure they're being met. But right now, there's simply no large scale demand for them to do so. People want their stuff cheap and that takes priority. Ugh, sometimes I hate being a gadget geek.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:
Paleocon wrote:
dejanzie wrote:

So in other words I pretty much can't avoid having blood on my hands each time I buy something nerdy? As if this grey winter Monday wasn't depressing enough as it is

That's pretty much the case.

Having spent 4 years in Taiwan doing trade development and witnessing exactly how the sausage is made, I can say with some authority that any conscience driven market response is likely to be about as effective as pissing in the ocean to change its salinity.

The only course of action that seems to have any effect at all is regulation (like the ban on CFC's). And in this case, it needs to be a global agreement.

That's more and more the conclusion I'm reaching as well and it's sad because the high-tech industry is so big, so wealthy, so powerful and so dependant on this cheap, largely unregulated labour that they will ensure such agreements either never come to fruition or are largely toothless when they do. I think it's going to have to be up to the companies themselves to demand higher standards and provide enough transparency to ensure they're being met. But right now, there's simply no large scale demand for them to do so. People want their stuff cheap and that takes priority. Ugh, sometimes I hate being a gadget geek. :(

This is precisely the sort of behavior that an unregulated market demands. It demands the driving down of prices/costs by any means necessary. The aptly named departments of "human resources" in most corporations exist primarily for finding ways to better mine those "human resources" for productivity. If that means exporting jobs to places where political prison labor is acceptable, working conditions are horrific, and political dissent is punishable by being disappeared, that's what it means. This is the inevitable conclusion of an unregulated market and no amount of consumer conscience can make any lasting difference whatsoever.

This is what scares me most about all this deregulation talk and all this libertarian "unplug the government" crap. We know what the endpoint of deregulation or toothless enforcement looks like. It looks like Indian beggar colonies, Chinese sweatshops, and rivers on fire with toxic pollutants. It is a market that hops from scandal to scandal as folks get poisoned with baby milk laced with melamine or moon cakes made of expired dog food. It momentarily punishes the worst offenders, but without lasting regulation the public attention span simply ignores the offenses of the next couple thousand offenders until someone else goes too far.

I lived there for four years and was horrified by what I saw. And there is nothing like a brief glimpse into that abyss to make you recognize how great we have it and how bad it can be.

Not to try to belittle this subject but doesn't anyway else remember reading the same kinds of articles about migrant farm workers? Working in meat packing plants, working in the fields, etc. is often just as bad as described in the article about working in the Foxconn plant. How many of us really work to only buy fruits and vegetables we know were produced by workers paid minimum wage?

It seems when you dig a bit into our society that quite frankly the 1st world is built on the backs of the rest of the world. Like I said I am not trying to say Foxconn (and Apple) are not wrong but I think it is bigger than just them. And I don't think the solution is easy or obvious.

Claiming that tech products like iPods, iPhones, etc aren't made in the US because it's cheaper to make them in Asia isn't really the whole picture. Yes, it is cheaper to produce such products in Asia, but it's also virtually impossible to produce those same products in the USA at any price. The NYT recently had a very good article on why the iPhone in particular was produced in China and not in the US. I highly recommend you take a few minutes to read it all the way through.

A couple choice quotes:

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”
Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Now that's not to say that working conditions are ideal and that some scrutiny isn't appropriate, but it really bugs me when people say that those jobs should be in America when that's simply not a realistic option.

I did read that article when it came out but I think it left a chicken and egg situation that was never addressed. Was manufacturing in the US so inefficient and the lack of skilled labour so total that the manufacturers had to move everything overseas or is it because the manufacturers moved everything overseas because it was cheaper that the US manufacturing sector become unable to compete? I'm not sure what the answer to that question is but from reading books like The Wal-Mart Effect, my opinion is that it's most likely the latter. I have no real academic evidence to back that up though, it's just my gut feeling. Regardless of what came first, the end result is that North America doesn't have a lot of the type of labour needed to bring electronics manufacturing back over here because there's been no demand for it for so long. We can't easily go back from where we are now.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

And no plant anywhere should be expected to ever do that. The [tech] world moves too fast for the [human] world's own good. Apple screwed something up and demanded an 11th hour change they should never have gotten.

Why shouldn't any plant anywhere be expected to do that?

If a company is capable of providing a service like that, don't they have the right to provide it if they wish to? If a company provides that service and another company wants to make use of it, don't they have the right to choose the company that can provide the service they want?

It's possible to argue that the "getting workers up and making them work a 12-hour shift" is inhumane (Although there's a lot of context missing from the scenario—when did the workers last work a shift? Were they resting because it was their normal time to rest, or because the line was down while people were coming up with a solution? When would these workers normally have been expected to work and for how long?) and it's reasonable to argue that if such flexibility requires the inhumane actions it shouldn't be provided.

But let us imagine that it can be provided without inhuman treatment of workers. Would it then be unreasonable to expect a plant to do that?

Foxconn workers do 15 hour shifts for 13 days and then get a day off. This isn't a new controversy either as Ars Technica wrote about this 5 years ago. Microsoft is having similar issues with human right violations at the Xbox factory.

Hypatian wrote:

Why shouldn't any plant anywhere be expected to do that?

If a company is capable of providing a service like that, don't they have the right to provide it if they wish to? If a company provides that service and another company wants to make use of it, don't they have the right to choose the company that can provide the service they want?

It's possible to argue that the "getting workers up and making them work a 12-hour shift" is inhumane (Although there's a lot of context missing from the scenario—when did the workers last work a shift? Were they resting because it was their normal time to rest, or because the line was down while people were coming up with a solution? When would these workers normally have been expected to work and for how long?) and it's reasonable to argue that if such flexibility requires the inhumane actions it shouldn't be provided.

But let us imagine that it can be provided without inhuman treatment of workers. Would it then be unreasonable to expect a plant to do that?

Plenty of companies in America will wake up their workers and put them to a 12 hour shift due to an 11th hour change. I was never woken up there because no one else was working before 7 AM either but the rest was common and if we were a 24 hour business then I could see the early morning phone calls coming too. We were also treated well and paid well in general plus paid overtime for those shifts. I see no problem with that.

Edit: Now that I think about it, working for the 2010 US Census I saw the whole thing happen including the wake up calls. Unfortunately we didn't get any biscuits or tea.

gregrampage wrote:

Edit: Now that I think about it, working for the 2010 US Census I saw the whole thing happen including the wake up calls. Unfortunately we didn't get any biscuits or tea.

No tea? Those bastards.

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