Apple’s longtime supplier accused of using forced labor in China

Post by diegoholiveira » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

_pp0b wrote: post #41

daenz wrote: post #9

"forced labor" It's slavery...modern day slavery. Why are we mincing words? We stand on our soap boxes and preach about historical injustices and how we need to repair them. Well here is your chance to prevent a future historical injustice, and all it takes is for you to take a stand, instead of quietly consuming the products and leaving it for future generations to atone for methods by which those products were prod…

Equating slavery with forced labour belittles the gravity and awfulness of what actual slavery is (or was). Forced labour takes different forms, which includes forced paid work and by some definitions penal work. Slavery is when a person is treated as a property of another person. Being a slave may or may not involve forced labour. In addition, calling Uyghur work “slavery” in fact undermines the cause, allowing CCP…

Post by philliphaydon » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

MaxHoppersGhost wrote: post #61

hdjtkrnrn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an influencer to do? Switch to Android, like poor people? Nobody who matters is going to boycott Apple. Apple will counter with a plausible narrative, "we didn't know, we cancelled contracts, ..." and everything will be fine again. Oh, and a new woke diversity ad to show how much they care about muslims. And everybody will share and clap and feel good.

Exactly. No one is ditching their iPhone. It’s all about the blue text bubbles. If Americans would just switch to WhatsApp or something else like the rest of the world we could get past the Android stigma.

Post by vinay427 » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

tcbawo wrote: post #15

wwwwwwwww wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the US voters have decided that they like forced prision labor in the US.

With choices of two major political parties, US voters have do not have granularity to approve or disapprove long term/chronic/fringe issues or issues that disproportionately affect a small minority of the population.

Post by hertzrat » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

delecti wrote: post #45

christophilus wrote: post #34

I’ve decided to leave the Apple ecosystem in 2021. But the problem is not isolated to Apple. In fact, I’d be surprised if other, cheaper products aren’t quite a bit worse. Is there an electronics company that does a better job? (That’s not a rhetorical question.)

Fairphone is your best bet with smartphones, but I'm not sure if there's similarly ethically produced hardware of other types.

Post by simonh » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

WillPostForFood wrote: post #102

daenz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now post the next 3 paragraphs after those quotes. Apple is actively doing business in a location where slavery is frequently occurring, while pretending that their audits are thorough and comprehensive so that their hands appear clean. But the fact that they are playing whack-a-mole with constant slavery reports should be evidence enough that they know exactly what they're doing: they're trying to turn a profit whil…

It would be easier to just not do any business with any company in Xinjiang, but is that actually punishing the Uighur community who aren’t part of the forced labor? It might be better to focus the pressure on China as a whole, and at the international level. Or it might be more effective to punish companies in Beijing because they have the ear of the government.