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

washingtonpost.com

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

#371

Post by emteycz »

izacus wrote: post #281
Talyen42 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's supply chain is more than 1,000 companies. Do you really think Apple has the expertise and personnel to replicate what 1,000 companies have spent decades mastering? Not likely. No company on earth has ever been able to make a smartphone entirely themselves, and no company ever will, although i'd like to be proven wrong.

> Apple's supply chain is more than 1,000 companies. Do you really think Apple has the expertise and personnel to replicate what 1,000 companies have spent decades mastering? Not likely. As one of the richest corporations on the planet which always smugly tells everyone how nice they are and how much they respect people? Yes, fuck yes. They're not a mom and pop shop. They're a corporation that finds millions to lobby…

Why should a business be doing the job of a government and multinational governmental organisations such as the UN?

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

#372

Post by cghendrix »

xbmcuser wrote: post #356
Talyen42 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's supply chain is more than 1,000 companies. Do you really think Apple has the expertise and personnel to replicate what 1,000 companies have spent decades mastering? Not likely. No company on earth has ever been able to make a smartphone entirely themselves, and no company ever will, although i'd like to be proven wrong.

Apple annual income is more than the annual budgets of many countries they don't need to make everything themselves but they can have few thousand trained inspectors which monitor all the places where it products are being produced. If they are able to keep new phone designs months into production secret they are also capable of monitoring and finding about worker abuse.

But think about the abuse of the shareholders! The horror

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

#373

Post by Pfhreak »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #291
matthewdgreen wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The previous poster made a very obvious point that work is not voluntary when the alternative is punishment, which your post very helpfully illustrates as “sitting in [a] tiny little cell.” This doesn’t seem like a point that should require so much explanation for thinking people.

You and the previous poster seem to ignore that the punishment is just (to the extent that the criminal justice system is capable of justice). It's not like they're forced to work; and if they take the option, they're still under punishment doled by the justice system. So it's not immoral forced labor as long as neither the work or the jail cell constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment".

> the punishment is just

I think it's reasonable to hold the belief that the punishment, especially in today's prison system, is not just.

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

#374

Post by lumost »

Talyen42 wrote: post #273
barnacled wrote: post #229

And yet Tim Cook has the cheek to get 'woke'. Apple could easily afford to build everything in a country that isn't an awful dictatorship running concentration camps and still earn obscene profits. And yet they still somehow maintain this aura of being the 'good guys'...

Apple's supply chain is more than 1,000 companies. Do you really think Apple has the expertise and personnel to replicate what 1,000 companies have spent decades mastering? Not likely. No company on earth has ever been able to make a smartphone entirely themselves, and no company ever will, although i'd like to be proven wrong.

Most companies can and do prioritize vendors who meet non-monetary criteria. Apple can easily ask vendors to complete external ethics audits, these audits usually request information on each vendors suppliers, suppliers of suppliers, etc.

Apple absolutely has control over who they buy from in this regard. Failing their willingness to act the US federal government has the authority to enforce labor law parity with trading partners through trade negotiations, tariffs, and bans.

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

#375

Post by DenisM »

bigbubba wrote: post #325
DenisM wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't do that here. From the guidelines: > Don't be snarky. > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Run tell dang. Maybe he'll wake up and do something about the blatant CCP shills (I doubt it) after giving me a scolding for telling him (and you) to fuck off.

> CCP shills

And that is also against the rules:

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

If you despise the rules so much why do you even keep coming here?

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

#376

Post by dpifke »

YawningAngel wrote: post #295
amscanne wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are kept in camps, monitored constantly, have no privacy, are searched constantly and on top of that, they are forced to work or go to detention This also seems to describe prison labor that occurs in the US, which, putting problems and criticisms aside, is definitely different from slavery. I don't think the imprecision in language is helpful, it hurts the cause in the same way people constantly referring to…

It isn't clear to me that prison labour in the US is meaningfully distinct from slavery

It isn't, which is why the 13th amendment (which bans other forms of slavery) explicitly permits it.

Some members from both houses of Congress have recently proposed a constitutional amendment to change this:

https://www.merkley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/The%20Abolition...

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

#377

Post by Siira »

_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…

I don’t see how forced labor is not a typical example of slavery. This is not “precision,” it’s apologism.

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

#378

Post by unethical_ban »

ogre_codes wrote: post #306
echelon wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy an iPhone, you're complicit in human slavery. Period. Don't even try to explain yourself out of it.

Then by extension if you buy any computer, consumer electronics, smartphone, manufactured toy, etc, you are complicit in human slavery. There are almost no computer or smartphone companies which do not participate in these markets. Samsung, Dell, HP, Lenovo (which is a Chinese company yet oddly gets ignored every time these discussions come up), Microsoft, LG, etc etc etc. All of them participate in these same indust…

And u/echelon was never seen in this thread again.

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

#379

Post by daenz »

mvanbaak wrote: post #302
saladgnu054 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you moving the goalposts? What does the history matter, the list of countries currently with millions of people in concentration camps is quite short.

As far as I can see they are not moving the goalpost. They simply asked to what mobile phone brand they can go to make things better. Yes, the answer is: not one.

The goal post moving was the phrasing "with any history of human rights issues" (emphasis mine). The goal was: let's not do business with places who are currently abusing human rights like this. The goal post was then moved to: let's not do business with places with any history of human rights issues.

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

#380

Post by insulanus »

insulanus wrote: post #357
zm262 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this kind of news paints the wrong picture, or more likely to believe in this kind of thing. The more likely case is that, there are a bunch of people who are unemployable having no skills or lack motivations to work or happen to be in miserable conditions (like the homeless in US) were forced (yes) to enter this kind of "de-radicalization camps", monitored (yes) and _given_ an opportunity to get employment (…

I translated your comment. > The more likely case is that, there are a bunch of people who are unemployable having no skills or lack motivations to work or happen to be in miserable conditions (like the homeless in US) were forced (yes) to enter this kind of "de-radicalization camps", monitored (yes) and _given_ an opportunity to get employment (like an internship for students) and get _paid_ the market salary. Yes t…

zm262, I improvedthe grammar in your comment.

> The more likely case is that, there are a bunch of people who are unemployable having no skills or lack motivations to work or happen to be in miserable conditions (like the homeless in US) were forced (yes) to enter this kind of "de-radicalization camps", monitored (yes) and _given_ an opportunity to get employment (like an internship for students) and get _paid_ the market salary. Yes they were forced to have a job that they can potentially do (the work conditions are like other "normal" apple factory workers). If they decline, well they need to go back to the "school"..

Unfortunately, the free flow of uncensored news has made you aware of something I don't want you to know.

These people are no help to themselves, and do not want to do what the government tells them to do, even though it would be greatly beneficial. They are monitored, of course, as all radicals should be. The US has no right to complain. After all, they also have useless, dirty homeless people, which are pretty much the same thing.. Furthermore, these prisoners are even paid for their work! What more do they want!?

If they decline, they should be sent back to their interment camps.

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