Where Your iPad and iPod Are Made

My respect for TAL has gone way up from this, not down. They got suckered, but the instant they knew it, they owned the problem and told everyone about it.

My trust level for them is much higher than it was. I now know that if they really blow it, they'll tell me.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

I think while it's fair to point out that Apple is not the only one having products made in China, it is most certainly the only one worth about as much as the rest of the US retail sector combined. When you are that big, you shouldn't be surprised when you're the one getting picked on, nor do I think it's unreasonable to expect a greater level of leadership from you.

Analyzing the work environment in China is complex and requires context, but at this point Apple is worth more than the GDP of all but 18 countries in the world, so one might say it's time [warning bad pun ahead] to move from safety nets on the sides of buildings to safety nets that provide healthcare, better work hours, salaries, overtime, etc.

It's also extremely profitable. To the point where management is sitting on giant piles of cash it literally doesn't know what to do with. Sharing a bit of the profits with its workforce wouldn't kill it. Or require price increases.

I thought that Daisey's story was interesting but I actually found him really annoying to listen to on TAL - I thought it was a bad call for them to just air a big chunk of his one-man show straight up. The segment afterwards where they actually investigated the issue in their traditional style was much better. As a donator, I hope that this experience teaches them that when they present something as journalism, to do it themselves.

Malor wrote:

My respect for TAL has gone way up from this, not down. They got suckered, but the instant they knew it, they owned the problem and told everyone about it.

My trust level for them is much higher than it was. I now know that if they really blow it, they'll tell me.

This. There was no doubling down, no fauxpology, no ignoring it and hoping it'd go away. The minute they knew, they owned it and retracted it. It's a f*ckup, yes, but how you conduct yourself after making a mistake says a lot, and this is the way I wish everyone would conduct themselves.

Trust in TAL goes up. Trust in humanity goes down. Net shift towards entropy.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:
TheWanderer wrote:

In the end, 9 minutes of airtime were devoted to the actual, factual and corroborated instances of disasters and poor working conditions independently observed in Apple plants. Still damning to Apple, but all rather dated. We need to lower the temperature on the tar and get real here folks. TAL done f*cked up and things are murkey at this point.

I completely agree they f*cked up (though they at least did the right thing about it by owning it) but it should be noted that there's been a number of other reports since his story including one by the New York Times that have not been called into question. Daisey stretched the truth, he should be ashamed of himself (though he amazingly doesn't seem to be) but this is no sign that there isn't a major problem over there, which Apple is one contributor to. The worst thing that could happen from this debacle is for people to treat it as a reason to assume the problems never exited in the first place because that is simply not true.

The last 9 minutes that TheWanderer speaks of, in which they're looking at the actual facts that are known, they were talking to Charles Duhigg (who is one of the named authors of that story you link).

His take on it is, essentially, that there are two categories of things going on.

One is "harsh work conditions"--things that American (and in general, first world) workers would never stand for. Living in dorm rooms with 10+ people per room. Working double shifts. There's a lot of gray here. On the one hand, workers come to these factories and want to do overtime in order to make money--they actively want to get around Apple's proscriptions (maximum 60 hours of work per week). On the other hand, that gives the people who manage them a lot of leverage. You want overtime? Then you're going to do this overtime right now or we're not going to give you any overtime at all any more.

The other is "dangerous and deadly conditions"--things that lead to injury and loss of life. The given example for this is the dust explosions that occurred at two plants, killing four and injuring 77.

The harsh work conditions are there pretty much all the time--much like they were in the US and Europe in the early part of the 20th century. The dangerous and deadly conditions are a lot more rare--but they capture headlines in a way that the overall conditions don't.

Duhigg's final thought, provoked by Glass, with regard to whether we should feel responsible for these things: If consumers of these products chose what they bought differently, things could be different. We can choose to make things better. As a society, we rejected these kinds of harsh and unsafe conditions for our own workers a century ago. Now they're occurring somewhere else--and it's arguable that they are occurring there because we exported them. If we wanted to do so, we could make Apple change their priorities. If Apple's priorities were stronger, they could make their suppliers change their behavior. He's very ambivalent about this, though--he's obviously happier sticking to the facts of the case.

My own feeling is ambivalent. On the safety side of things, these factories are much much safer than the factories of the early industrial age. Yes, I would like things to be safer. However, looking at the size of the enterprise and the number of people who get hurt, it doesn't seem completely out of scale. Clearly, any explosion should be investigated, any hazard like that should be fixed. But the number and size of the events that we know about isn't particularly large compared to the number of people involved. (In short: Of course Apple should push their suppliers to be safer. However, the events do not provide strong evidence that Apple has been particularly sloppy about this.) So I think Apple should be forced to keep looking into this stuff and improving, but I'm ambivalent about censuring a company that actually appears to be doing a pretty good job.

On the harsh working conditions side of things, I don't think anybody should work these kinds of hours or in these conditions. But at the same time, I'm ambivalent about forcing the workers into that. The hell of this sort of thing is that it's maintained from both sides. The workers couldn't be deprived of extra hours if they didn't want the extra hours. The people trying to regulate things could do it much more easily if not for the collusion of the workers. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't stop. It's just a question of whether that's something that should (or even [em]can[/em]) be imposed from outside or something that should grow from inside.

--

I think that overall, my stance on things remains pretty much unchanged. Apple should continue to be vigilant about safety, and consumers and others should continue to hold Apple accountable for safety. I think the pressure that we bring to bear based on [em]actual things that happen[/em] is sufficient. Any time there's a major incident, Apple is going to get the hairy eyeball. And simply because of the scale of things, that's going to be more often than it is for most companies. I think that's sufficient pressure to keep Apple honest.

On the harsh conditions front, Apple should push harder. I don't think this kind of thing can be changed over-night, no matter what--there are too many people on every side of the question invested in it. But by keeping the pressure on and trying to do better year after year, things can be improved. I don't know if consumer pressure can ever really make that big a difference here, though. I think that only the opinion of the Chinese public can effectively bring about real change.

TheWanderer wrote:

Ira even left the door open, allowed him to return to his studio and continue his act of contrition. Instead Daisey stood proud and tall and espoused, and I quote, "I wouldn't say, in a theatrical context, that this [story] wasn't true." That doesn't even make any sense!

Every time he repeated that I wanted to reach through my headphones and punch him in the mouth. True in a theatrical context? Really? Maybe if he'd prefaced his performance with something like "this is a dramatization of events, but it describes real issues" he could claim that it was "theatrically true", but he didn't. He stated over and over that these were all things that he witnessed first-hand, and that's not true in any f*cking context.

Marketplace did a bit this morning about it, too, including a snippet from what Daisey said before his monologue over the weekend.

Warning: Desire to punch may rise when reading the following:

Mike Daisey wrote:

I wanted to let you know that This American Life is airing an episode this weekend that calls into question the veracity of the personal experiences in this monologue. I want you to understand that’s what’s being called into question are the personal experiences. The facts of what the situation is in China in manufacturing are undisputed. And they are reinforced by the New York Times, CNN, NPR…

Thing is with that, he's totally right, many of the things are occurring there (as was confirmed in the Retraction episode and by the New York Times) but he's once again trying to frame himself as some kind of victim here and basically saying "Well I guess I kind of sort of maybe in a way did lie but I really didn't when you think about it." I really wish he would shut up and go away because the more he talks, the more he hurts the cause to sort out the real issues that are still abundant in China.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

Thing is with that, he's totally right, many of the things are occurring there (as was confirmed in the Retraction episode and by the New York Times) but he's once again trying to frame himself as some kind of victim here and basically saying "Well I guess I kind of sort of maybe in a way did lie but I really didn't when you think about it." I really wish he would shut up and go away because the more he talks, the more he hurts the cause to sort out the real issues that are still abundant in China.

Indeed. When I saw the corrections I was kind of non-plussed. Workers didn't die from chemicals in this city, but they did die in this other city. They died either way. It's still an important story. So cover it as news and go away, Mike Daisy, before you do more harm.

There was a post on Bloomberg's tech blog on March 20 titled "Now Can We Start Talking About the Real Foxconn?". A pretty reasonable read.

So I've started seeing something pop up in a couple of places that has got me thinking and it's sending a disturbing message to me about Western consumer culture. There's a tech journalist in Canada named Peter Nowak who I got to know about during our whole Usage Based Billing brouhaha last year. He's a good guy and a great writer and we've had some discussions and spirited debated on Twitter and on his blog. He's also a huge Apple fan, though they only tends to come through in his personal writing, his professional stuff is pretty on the level.

Recently, he put up this post and today he tweeted this story from an Australian newspaper. Essentially, the argument they both make (aside from saying that because Mike Daisey lied, all the problems he mentioned just don't exist which has already been proven false) is that while there can be problems at many Chinese factories, people still line up to work there because in China, being a rural farmer or unemployed entirely is far worse. They argue that we as The West shouldn't feel guilty about buying products made in China because we're providing manufacturing jobs to people who would otherwise be living in abject poverty.

I can see certain elements in that but I'm finding this disturbingly indicative of The West's societal ability to rationalise any bad thing away when the alternative means sacrificing something that we don't even need but merely want. Rather than agree that some of the stuff we buy is made in poor conditions and demanding that the very profitable companies involved step up, make a tiny bit less money and fix the issues, we say "Well compared to many rural Chinese farmers, this is great so really I'm helping them." Rather than sacrifice what are ostensibly expensive toys, we somehow think this stuff is OK when framed under the lame rationalisation of "Well it could be worse." I think that's just not right.

In the case of high-tech, this is a problem involving one of the most profitable industries in the world. Everyone involved can work to solve them and still make buckets of money, they just choose not to. Just because something can be worse doesn't absolve anyone of any responsibility to make it better, especially when it's easily within reach. If people don't want to feel guilty about this stuff, it's their choice. But now there are people who almost promote the reverse and say if you don't buy products made in China, you're making things worse. That gives me a very disturbing feeling about where our consumer culture is evolving.

Not only that, but we would like to see things change in China - we feel they should have good working conditions, limits on work hours, more safety, better pay, better housing, better air to breathe... All the stuff that we're trying to deregulate and just trust that employers will continue to provide here, we want the Chinese to have... Forgetting that we didn't actually get that stuff out of the goodness of capitalism, but rather through struggle against it's excesses.

Tim Cook just made a big China trip, including a stop at one of Foxconn's factories to meet workers. It's a bit of a PR stunt (the photos look like straight up propaganda reminiscent of the good ol days), but Apple and Foxconn have agreed to make improvements, including reducing work hours to 49 a week including overtime, without reducing compensation. In short, Apple's agreeing to increase the cost of producing its devices. May not solve everything, but I think it's showing that the public pressure Apple--and China--has received does matter. It's important to note that China's support for said changes has nothing to do with assuaging Westerners' sense of injustice. It's all about ensuring social stability.

Well, Foxconn has agreed to increase their cost to produce Apple devices or just find somewhere else to save that money. Whether Apple has agreed to give them anything resembling a humane profit margin that gets further squeezed with each passing year is another question. It is a positive step though and if Apple's and the FLA's reports start improving, that's a good thing. Apple has the chance to fix this issue and since the press is eager to write stories about everything they do, they have the means to set a strong example that other companies will want to emulate because everyone's desperate to be like Apple.

Personally I have no problem with the hours worked a week. Massive problem if the conditions are so poor that they actually grind these people to mush.

Theres definitely a huge culture difference when you start talking about work. A section in Outliers Gladwell talks about the actual hours a rice farmer puts in vs other type of farming. To me going to Foxconn and working like a robot might not actually be much different then what some people are doing in first world economies. I doubt it would be hard to find some first generation immigrants in Canada or the U.S who are finding ways around 40 hour work weeks to put in 50+ 60+ weeks to get ahead.

Annecdotally while travelling in India talking to a a well off local friend about the difference between China and India he simply put there was no way India could produce certain things cheaper because the people did not have the will/want to live like that. Same goes personally. I took my first day off in 39 days this week and my Mom's response was "Why? because your so rich?".

Conditions at Foxconn plants are still a nightmare according to Sacom, contradicting most of Apple's recent claims. To be fair, it's not just Apple cited in this report and no company has an excuse for condoning this. Given how Apple's been making a big deal about the improvements they're spearheading though, it's frustrating to see such a big problem still exists.

And Kindles, too. Great. Not that Bezos has ever shied away from dodgily-sourced labor, but it's sad we're a party to this.

What's the way out? Hemp-woven Fair Trade semiconductors from widows in Bolivia?

H.P. Lovesauce wrote:

What's the way out? Hemp-woven Fair Trade semiconductors from widows in Bolivia?

It's my depressingly honest opinion that any workable way out is about as likely to actually happen. Until there's not a demand for cheap consumer devices, there isn't a way out. And yes, I say this with my smartphone on the desk next to me

Seems to me the fault lies with Foxconn, not Amazon and Apple.

Apple and Amazon could have chosen American companies to make their products, or they could have monitored Foxconn more closely. But they wanted their stuff built cheap.

It's absolutely their fault. It can't be anyone else's.

I would say it's not their fault, but it is certainly their responsibility.

dejanzie wrote:

I would say it's not their fault, but it is certainly their responsibility.

This. The fault lies with Foxxconn but Apple et al. are the ones who pay them and they're the ones with the power to say "Shape up or we're taking our business across the street." It's not like there aren't other electronics manufacturers in China. They either take this seriously or they don't. They don't get to claim they do while the status quo is maintained.

And Foxconn could say we can't build it that cheap and not treat their workers like crap.

Malor wrote:

Apple and Amazon could have chosen American companies to make their products, or they could have monitored Foxconn more closely. But they wanted their stuff built cheap.

It's absolutely their fault. It can't be anyone else's.

Apple, Amazon, HP, etc are buying a product. How that product is made is not their fault. If you follow this logic then it is YOUR fault since you are buying the products that these companies sell, which in turn they buy from a contractor, which in turn treats their workers like crap.

LeapingGnome wrote:

And Foxconn could say we can't build it that cheap and not treat their workers like crap.

Malor wrote:

Apple and Amazon could have chosen American companies to make their products, or they could have monitored Foxconn more closely. But they wanted their stuff built cheap.

It's absolutely their fault. It can't be anyone else's.

Apple, Amazon, HP, etc are buying a product. How that product is made is not their fault. If you follow this logic then it is YOUR fault since you are buying the products that these companies sell, which in turn they buy from a contractor, which in turn treats their workers like crap.

Right, I can't see how you can blame Apple and Amazon and not blame the end consumer as well.

LeapingGnome wrote:

If you follow this logic then it is YOUR fault since you are buying the products that these companies sell,

It would be everyone's fault in the chain, which is why end users often boycott products that use child or slave labor. The same boycotts are often targeted at improving conditions for workers. End users, however, have no control over contractors used or the amount of profit the company takes. Apple does. Apple also profits from using Foxconn workers. End users don't.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

It's not like there aren't other electronics manufacturers in China.

I agree with this to a point, but you don't know that other factories are not actually worse than Foxconn. Also Foxconn is the worldest 10th largest employer, the largest electronics maker in the world and the largest exporter from China. It is not like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc can just hop to Bob's factory next door to get their stuff made. For all we know a move away from Foxconn might already be in the works and Apple is just working out the supply chain, waiting for existing contracts to expire, get bids, etc...

Funkenpants wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:

If you follow this logic then it is YOUR fault since you are buying the products that these companies sell,

It would be everyone's fault in the chain, which is why end users often boycott products that use child or slave labor. The same boycotts are often targeted at improving conditions for workers.

Yes but I don't see that happening Funken. I bet every poster in this thread condemning Apple or Amazon for Foxconn factory conditions bought at least one product made by Foxconn.

Foxconn manufactures products for many companies including:

(country of headquarters in parentheses)

Acer Inc. (Taiwan)[37]
Amazon.com (United States)[7]
Apple Inc. (United States)[38]
Cisco (United States)[39]
Dell (United States)[40]
Hewlett-Packard (United States)[41]
Intel (United States)[42]
Microsoft (United States)[9]
Motorola Mobility (United States)[40]
Nintendo (Japan)[43]
Nokia (Finland)[38]
Samsung Electronics (South Korea)[44]
Sony (Japan)[8]
Toshiba (Japan) [45]
Vizio (United States)[46]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn...

LeapingGnome wrote:
Funkenpants wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:

If you follow this logic then it is YOUR fault since you are buying the products that these companies sell,

It would be everyone's fault in the chain, which is why end users often boycott products that use child or slave labor. The same boycotts are often targeted at improving conditions for workers.

Yes but I don't see that happening Funken. I bet every poster in this thread condemning Apple or Amazon for Foxconn factory conditions bought at least one product made by Foxconn.

Probably, but that doesn't make it right or Apple, Amazon and other companies not part of the problem.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Yes but I don't see that happening Funken. I bet every poster in this thread condemning Apple or Amazon for Foxconn factory conditions bought at least one product made by Foxconn.

It is very difficult to make a boycott work, but even without a boycott it's appropriate to try to get Apple to change their policies by contrasting Apple's self-image with reality. The tech industry's image has tended to be forward-thinking and progressive. What Foxconn shows is that they're just another soulless corporation, only with cuter branding. So if you make Apple be concerned over maintaining that image, what's the problem?