Labor advocate challenges accuracy of NYT report on Apple, Foxconn - Page 3

Actually, the only fourth-rate views here are the naive ones such as yours -- no doubt, motivated by the goodness of your heart for your fellow-men (as long as, I am guessing, they look like you, and live in the same country) -- whose sole rationale is to keep the poorer countries and their people poor for as long as you can.

What is really irksome is Molly Wood's call "for others to join me" in calling for Apple to make changes. She was usurping the situation claim leadership and call attention to herself. Barf!

Having seen the BMW plant in South Carolina, I think the future is here. Almost all the difficult complex tasks are done by robots. The human labor part, did not appear all that technical. In fact, I think the reason they have the as many number of people at the plant had to do with BMW needing to have a quota of workers to get the tax break they got.

They do need inspectors, technicians, and engineers, as well as the cleaning people and the people who drive the car off the plant. As I recall I think they said that they only need about 500 robots, reducing the actually man hours significantly and dramatically improving quality. But you are probably right that end to end robotic production is many years away.

BSR hasnt provided any proof.

At this point, its anyone's game.

I'm just doing my part to help AI increase its clicks.

You need people like myself to keep this discussion board occupied and busy.

"The human labor part, did not appear all that technical ..."

"They do need inspectors, technicians, and engineers ..."

Make up your mind.

But seriously, the BMW plant is not the most advanced exemplar of the best of robotic automation. No automative plant currently is.

Furthermore, the question here is about whether anyone can make that many robots in 2 years. The number of robots in all automative plants does not approach what Foxconn ostensibly wants. There is further no logical analysis justifying such a need in the first place.

This issue is dead. Sorry, you can't win this argument.

Fixed that for you.

Apple is the only company willing to be transparent about its suppliers. The only company willing to take a hit to bring abuses to light. Why should they be kicked in the teeth for abuses they have helped bring to light?

You are right, you are guessing.

And you guessed wrong. The world is a connected place. My job is in a global organization, and I am fully cognizant of the fact that working conditions in one place will ultimately affect those elsewhere.

So if in China the philosophy is that workers are animals, everybody who needs to work for a living should be concerned, regardless of where they live, or what they look like.

Huh!?

Methinks you should not drink before you post.

OMG! Here in the US and much of the world, firefighters are roused from their sleep in the middle of the night and forced to go inside of burning buildings.

I wonder who owns Foxconn, Foxconn or Apple.

Apple can advise and it is up to Foxconn as to whether they want to install more hot lines.

So it is Apple's fault.

For every one or two articles defending Apple, there are literally dozens more supporting the NYT article. Who are we to believe? This doesn't look good for Apple right now. C/NET, ZDNET, BetaNews, CBS, The Guardian. Yes a call to boycott Apple has been printed by The Guardian. Here are a few points from The Guardian piece. Besides dwindling sales, now this bad Publicity accelerates Apple-iOS downwards trend. Not good at all.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...-worker-abuses

"The company's public image took a dive after revelations about working conditions in the factories of some of its network of Chinese suppliers. The allegations, reported at length in the New York Times, build on previous concerns about abuses at firms that Apple uses to make its bestselling computers and phones. Now the dreaded word "boycott" has started to appear in media coverage of its activities.

"Should consumers boycott Apple?" asked a column in the Los Angeles Times as it recounted details of the bad PR fallout.

The influential Daily Beast and Newsweek technology writer Dan Lyons wrote a scathing piece. "It's barbaric," he said, before saying to his readership: "Ultimately the blame lies not with Apple and other electronics companies but with us, the consumers. And ultimately we are the ones who must demand change."

Forbes magazine columnist Peter Cohan also got in on the act. "If you add up all the workers who have died to build your iPhone or iPad, the number is shockingly high," he began an article that also toyed with the idea of a boycott in its headline."

When we start work at 9am, for the Indian call centre staff we call it's 4am, maybe we should tell our customers to go away and come back in the afternoon.

For the US and Europe the time zones are even further out of whack, maybe Americans should set their alarms and call in the middle of the night so the staff in Indian call centres can sleep in.

That'd go down well.

You want 24/7 customer care without paying higher costs?

It comes from India.

You add up the workers who died so you can drive across the Brooklyn Bridge and the number is "shockingly higher" than the number that have died working for Foxconn.

Will people boycott the Brooklyn Bridge?

I think the call for boycott is hypocritical, and a slippery slope. But the Brooklyn Bridge analogy is ... misplaced.

It's easy to call for a boycott, and perhaps not completely unjustifiable to some. But I have questions:

1. This issue is not new. Where were the sanctimonious calls for boycott before the NYT article?

2. Will the reporters calling for a boycott do their homework first and make a list of all companies connected to labor abuse so that we know exactly what the alternatives are?

People died while building the Brooklyn Bridge, due to working conditions deemed acceptable for the time and place, is the analogy misplaced because the workers were brought to the work rather than the work being sent to the workers?

I cant believe how many people on here live in fantasy land with a gum drop house on lolly pop lane.
people can sit on their high horses & talk about the world, with little actual understanding on how the world works, its pretty pathetic reading people random views, read a news paper & understand how the world works, not a chance.
I think people should worry about their own backyards, getting ones own house in order, like getting an education system, maybe go somewhere overseas, get some perspective & world experience, Idiots....

Perhaps Samsung would be a better candidate.

One hundred and fifty workers with cancer, fifty already dead and they refuse to pay compensation.

http://stopsamsung.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/380/

Android's golden darling is not so golden, after all.

That's absolute B.S. Let's say there are no unions and all a company has to pay is federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and offer absolutely no benefits. Let's say the employees have a mandatory one-hour lunch which they don't get paid for, 10 holidays which they don't get paid for and 2-weeks off which they don't get pair for.

That still works out to $12,180 per year (which no one can live on in the U.S. anyway. In most places, housing costs alone would eat all of it.)

Chinese manufacturing workers are reputed to work up to 60 hours a week for $130 per month ($1560 per year.) Let's say within a few years, Chinese workers DOUBLE their pay to $3120 per year and only work 35 hours per week. That's still only 26% of a U.S. worker's minimum wage with no benefits.

That's why manufacturing has left the U.S. Not because of unions. Unions do suck in many ways, but they also helped to create the middle-class in the U.S. And now, there's fewer than 15 million American workers covered by unions, mostly public workers.

Leave it to slap-happy to use one of the most ridiculous arguments possible.

So you determine the truth of something based on how many people say it?

Let's vote on evolution. That means that evolution occurred in Massachusetts, but did not occur in Oklahoma. After all, more people deny it in OK than in MA.

The story is either true or it's fabricated. The number of people who copy it doesn't tell you a thing - other than the fact that people like to knock a front-runner off it's perch.

What the heck, let's vote on gravity......

Even that's an oversimplification. Manufacturing has left the US for MANY reasons - and labor costs are only a part of it.

If you're making t-shirts, labor is a major component. If you're building iPhones, labor is a much smaller factor. The bigger factors which drive the decision as to where to manufacture are:
- Corporate income tax rates
- Currency exchange rates (manipulated by foreign governments in some cases)
- Availability of workers and other resources
- Proximity to world markets (less than half of Apple's sales were U.S.)
- Health, safety, and environmental regulations
- Liability laws and risks (few, if any, countries love to sue as much as the U.S.)
- Worker flexibility
- Local government rules
- And many, many other factors.

Most of those factors are entirely beyond the control of manufacturers and most are unrelated to direct labor rates. Even if labor were free in the U.S., there are many products that would STILL not make sense to manufacture here.

Informative...thank you.


But his reply was more so to counteract GregInPrague's asinine post.

I believe most of these companies provide room and board for the employees, so add that into the compensation. I don't know if they cover food or clothing in any way. Also not sure what kind of health care is provided. So there may be/is quite a bit of compensation beyond wages.

For many working in these factories, the choices are pretty grim. Work 60+ hours in these factory towns, or live out in a village subsistence farming. There are millions of people in China living in mud huts with dirt floors scratching a meager life out of the ground. Living & working in the modern conditions of the factory towns is a big step up from where they could be.

Now, that does not justify treating the workers as cattle/slaves. But working & living standards is something the culture and society needs to work out for itself. And when working conditions and costs go up enough, manufacturing will move to some other country with an abundance of near-starvation population willing to work 60+ hours for the promise of a warm bed and full belly.

- Jasen.

Dear Tim Cook,

How about you put your goddamn money where your mouth is! The best way to solve this issue to take a piece of Apple's War Chest (you know, the one with more money than the US government) and create a production facility in the United States. That way you have better control of your supply chain, and create American jobs.

Clearly from your email, you're only interested in words and not actions. Profits, but not solutions.

Sincerely,

The World

Well, asking to vote for gravity is a bit more ridiculous than a justified boycott of Apple products.

No, "the world" is not saying this. People who have no idea what they're talking about are, however.

If there were a justified boycott of Apple products, you might be right. But there isn't.

Furthermore, asking people to vote on gravity is not much different than your assertion that just because more media outlets say something that it must be true.

I hereby resign from your World.

By now you should have figured out that mobile electronics "production facilities" as you call them (manufacturing or assembly or what?) are part of an ecosystem that only exists in Japan, Taiwan, China, Korea, Thailand, etc.

That's where the parts come from, the expertise in manufacturing is there -- generations of making stuff like video cameras that never were made in America -- so are you asking Tim Cook to buy Asia and import it to Texas?

Why is this so hard to grasp? I believe people in this miserable media-flogged country can only think in memes, slogans and sound bites.

Try to think in terms of systems -- you'll be happier. Or just try to think.

Foxconn did it in Brazil? Ok, get Foxconn to build an ASSEMBLY PLANT in the third-world country of Texas. That I could believe logistically, but not the economics of it.

For another view - from someone who has direct experience:
http://techpinions.com/made-in-china...-be-wrong/5140

From our friends at 9 to 5 Mac.

No, because if that was my thinking, it would be nitpicking

This is my rationale: The Brooklyn Bridge construction is over. Boycotting it won't bring back the dead and won't prevent any more construction-related deaths on it. Boycotting Apple products might force the company to do more, and might actually prevent some deaths.

But, as mentioned elsewhere, I believe targeting Apple is hypocritical, unless we look at all our purchases and target every single company linked to labor abuse.

Some believe Apple is taking steps to domesticate manufacturing: http://www.appleoutsider.com/2012/01/04/components/. Not saying I believe it, but it's an interesting theory. Furthermore, if it happens, it will only happen to specific components and specific steps in the manufacturing process.

Banning an app from the App Store has nothing to do with censoring the news. You are confused about the definition of "censor".

China's economy will eventually expand and grow to serve a majority of internal customers (i.e. Chinese citizens) as they continue to grow beyond manufacturing, as long as they are able to avoid internal political collapse... and there's no proof they will be able to avoid collapse yet. If their country's economic progress slows too drastically, it will cause mass unrest. They already know this. You cannot bring their people into the modern era and expect them to simply roll over if there is economic trouble. They will explode in revolution. The recent crisis of mass self-immolations in Tibet is a harbinger of possible bad times ahead.

Don't be ridiculous.

No doubt Apple is going to do something really new and interesting with their 100B, and I have a feeling that they'd like the goodwill that would come with doing it in the neighborhood. They've already founded a couple of new industries here lately: mobile apps, and book publishing. Previously they founded desktop publishing and desktop movie editing.

What's next? Wearable computers and displays may offer an opportunity for some U.S. input. The one technology that is still being done here in a more or less current form is chip design and fabrication. Shrinking the portable phone/computer/camera down to wrist size, and displays down to eyeglasses size, may be the kind of adventurous micro designing that Apple and Silicon Valley are historically good at. The manufacturing might have to be part of the technology from the beginning, like it was with large scale ICs in the early days, before Samsung.

Oh, and I think Matt Drance is being overly dramatic about the Apple-Samsung legal "battle." Both sides probably privately concede that this has nothing to do with the processor side of their business, and everything to do with establishing design boundaries. Apple is making it expensive to copy is all.

How about you get bent. If you're going to have the nerve to disagree with me, be less lazy next time and back up your disagreement with something besides insults.

I think about this stuff all the time. Small minds produce even smaller results.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/t...w/11130977.cms

Look, change has to begin somewhere. Manufacturing must return to the US for our long term health. The A5 chip is built in Texas. That's a start. Over time, we'll build up our expertise, and more parts can be built here. But someone has to lead the charge.

Why any of you would support overseas factories is beyond me. It's bad for jobs and our economy as a whole. Apple already makes an obscene profit margin on it's products. Moving manufacturing to the US would reduce those profits, which I'm sure you greedy stockholders can't stomach.

In other words, typical republican thinking. Worry about yourself and screw everyone else.

Have the nerve? Really?