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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

#381

Post by imglorp »

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.

> Do you really think Apple has the expertise and personnel to replicate what 1,000 companies have spent decades mastering?

Yes absolutely. They do supply chain all day, every day: in order to keep high quality, they need to be in tight control. They're very, very good at outsourced manufacture or they wouldn't be a US$1T company.

Foxconn was only the first to reach our awareness but it seems there's many other vendors with dubious HR.

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

#382

Post by Siira »

MaxHoppersGhost wrote: post #29

I hate how American (and European) companies will virtue signal with commercials and campaigns (Apple and Nike come to mind) toting their ESG credentials but then will be doing stuff like this. People fall for it and it really pisses me off. Welcome to marketing. It’s also crazy to me that China isn’t facing more severe backlash for the treatment of the Uyghurs. It’s reprehensible and disgusting.

Rather than people falling for it, they have pretty much the same incentives as the corporations. They like virtue signaling, when its costs are negligible and the externalities fall on others, but they don’t sacrifice cheap goods for some pretty lies.

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

#383

Post by slumpt_ »

_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…

And so we tread on, repeating history, justified by subtle semantic arguments on the internet.

Humans are disappointing, though I am encouraged by the abundance of others calling this out the same.

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

#384

Post by slovette »

danudey wrote: post #327
izacus wrote: post #281

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. 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…

One of the reasons Jobs cited as being an important factor for locating in China is the availability of skilled labor. It would have taken them years to hire enough industrial engineers to handle the scope and scale and volume that the iPhone required in the US, if they could even manage it at all, but only weeks to do so in China. The supply chain is also important. One person who worked in Shenzhen commented that,…

You’re going to get cherry picked apart for this, but as someone who has ran supply chains, been apart of product dev that involved early hardware design & dev and the necessary chain dev to build that design, you hit the nail on the head.

Everyone wants a bad guy here, and apples logo with the billions behind it enable people to easily assign blame to that logo (not that they shouldn’t). But what’s forgotten is the massively complex “stack”, if you will, that brings everything together. Just saying “oh this billion dollar company is terrible!” Is being lazy and doesn’t contribute to a solution, all it does it make people feel entitled and validated because it doesn’t take much real thought.

The real problem at root is human/consumer behavior. Turning a logo into a fitting evil character borrowed from childhood cartoon narratives is not real.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up.

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

#385

Post by throw12344112 »

animal_spirits wrote: post #231
beisner wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there probably is an element of that, hard evidence that might paint the Chinese government negatively in general is much more difficult to obtain because of information and communications controls.

Agreed, I am just wary of journalist referencing other journalists as "evidence". But I have since found some very damning evidence here: https://shahit.biz/eng/ This is very sad to read and understand. I hope this site gets more attention than these articles

Not sure why you find that piece of "evidence" particularly damning. Do you know anything about the author? Do you know his methodology? His sources? What makes him credible?

From the database author himself [0]:

> "we have over 10000+ documented people" was the initial comment. Neither boasting nor saying 100% are credible.

I honestly find it both hilarious and disappointing that HN users are skeptical and contrarian about absolutely everything, except when it comes to what the US government and its proxies have to say about China.

[0] https://twitter.com/shahitbiz/status/1306554296088096769?s=2...

[1] https://twitter.com/DanielDumbrill/status/130801041951298764...

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

#386

Post by throwaway201103 »

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

Except for the due process trial, conviction, and sentencing.

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

#387

Post by __m »

kortilla wrote: post #333
__m wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t trivialize nazi concentration camps by comparing them to some re-education camps. I highly doubt the number of deaths that occurred in these camps is anywhere close to the deaths that Apple‘s home country caused in its own war on terror, including torture and war crimes. With police brutality and the highest incarceration rate in the world, how can a company that values human lives do business in the US?

Wow the desperation it takes to try to misdirect the conversation camps to the “war on terror”. Right out of a whataboutism propaganda playbook. A citizen of any regime, from the best to the most brutal, can criticize China and it does not detract from the argument at all. It’s not hypocritical because citizens are not the government; and, even if it was directly from the government and was hypocritical, the substanc…

Misdirect? The camps are China‘s war on terror, a comparison is appropriate.

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

#388

Post by jedberg »

MaxHoppersGhost wrote: post #29

I hate how American (and European) companies will virtue signal with commercials and campaigns (Apple and Nike come to mind) toting their ESG credentials but then will be doing stuff like this. People fall for it and it really pisses me off. Welcome to marketing. It’s also crazy to me that China isn’t facing more severe backlash for the treatment of the Uyghurs. It’s reprehensible and disgusting.

What exactly did Apple do? The hired a contractor, and they just found out that contractor is using slave labor, so now they are investigating. The last time they found out a contractor was using slave labor, they severed the relationship.

I'm not sure what else you'd expect them to do exactly.

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

#389

Post by insulanus »

dirtyid wrote: post #264
throw_m239339 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm amazed the world isn't taking more action on China. Its quite sad really, 20 years ago, any one of the headlines from this year would have prompted sanctions and denunciations... I don't think so. Nothing happened with Tibet, or after the Tiananmen Square event AFAIK. 20 years ago, the people that signed all the trade deals with countries such as China claimed it would lead to improving democracy and human righ…

> obviously, it didn't Of course it did, in Kishore Mahbuani's words: >The greatest explosion of personal freedoms that the Chinese people have experienced in the past 4,000 years has taken place in the last 40 years There's some slide back in some categories from Hu Jintao era, but overall things are progressing. The west fixates on the 1% of extra bad when it's been mostly great. >what human cost? 800m uplifted fro…

It is an excellent point that the well managed Chinese economy and PR apparatus has helped the average Chinese citizen.

You would be singing a different tune if you were to come under Chinese rule.

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

#390

Post by bobthepanda »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #192
strogonoff wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forced labour in prisons is legal in the US right now. Equating forced labour as a whole with slavery, which is frequently used to refer to chattel slavery that existed in the US (HN audience is to large degree US-based) before 1865, may seem inconsiderate to those whose ancestors had to endure the latter. What is reported to be happening to Muslims now in Xinjang, with reeducation camps and all, is not the same as t…

> Equating forced labour as a whole with slavery, which is frequently used to refer to what existed in the US (HN audience is to large degree US-based) before 1865, may seem inconsiderate to those whose ancestors had to endure the latter. I don't see this as a reason to cut off the discussion. Trying to distance forced labor from slavery may seem incosiderate to those who had to endure the former. There's no escaping…

Also, at least in the US,

- slavery is allowed explicitly for prison labor,

- there was a concerted effort after the end of slavery to put former slaves and their descendants into things that were almost like slavery, including mass incarceration

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