Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
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Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#2After the mess that was the last Apple Foxconn story, and with all the economic pressure that affects newspapers & news media, it becomes increasingly difficult for me to believe stories like these.
It's not that I don't suppose that there're bad working conditions at Foxconn - there probably are. No, it's that even if the journalist in this story managed to sneak in, and work there, he probably added tons of hyperbole and wrong encounters into his story, just to make it all the more dramatic. Otherwise, nobody would be interested in it, nobody would read it, and there'd be no money.
I really think it's hard to believe journalists these days, especially if the stories are unheard of and outrageous. The decline of advertising money and newspaper subscriptions has lead to a decline of journalistic integrity and objectivism, I think.
Addendum, I studied journalism & communication, most of my friends are journalists, and I'd say they try hard, but the economic pressure sounds untenable sometimes. Some of them earn so little money, that I wonder how they even manage to pay rent.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#3Gee, I wonder why this was released today.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#4After the mess that was the last Apple Foxconn story, and with all the economic pressure that affects newspapers & news media, it becomes increasingly difficult for me to believe stories like these. It's not that I don't suppose that there're bad working conditions at Foxconn - there probably are. No, it's that even if the journalist in this story managed to sneak in, and work there, he probably added tons of hyperbo…
It is hard to know who to believe. The journalist who has something to gain by exaggerating the suffering of the workers, or the company which has much more to gain by hiding the suffering. The truth is somewhere in between. Based on the Foxconn on-the-job-site suicide rate being significantly higher than other on-the-job-site suicide rates (important to compare apples-with-apples, no pun intended), the truth probably lies closer to the journalist version.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#5> The work is clearly very stressful and the pay is terrible. The example the journalist gave was two hours of overtime earning him just $4.
Can anyone give any context of how bad this actually is? Obviously it's not as terrible as if somebody got paid $4 for two hours of overtime here in the UK, in terms of average wage and typical cost of living, but no idea how much less bad it is..
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#6After the mess that was the last Apple Foxconn story, and with all the economic pressure that affects newspapers & news media, it becomes increasingly difficult for me to believe stories like these. It's not that I don't suppose that there're bad working conditions at Foxconn - there probably are. No, it's that even if the journalist in this story managed to sneak in, and work there, he probably added tons of hyperbo…
It is hard to know who to believe. The journalist who has something to gain by exaggerating the suffering of the workers, or the company which has much more to gain by hiding the suffering. The truth is somewhere in between. Based on the Foxconn on-the-job-site suicide rate being significantly higher than other on-the-job-site suicide rates (important to compare apples-with-apples, no pun intended), the truth probabl…
If you are comparing apples-to-apples, then surely you should weight your statement on who to believe by how easy it is for each person to exaggerate/hide.
It's super easy for a journalist to exaggerate something like this, with relatively little risk for a massive gain. On the other hand, a "Company" hiding things involves many, many more people involved in the conspiracy, and the penalty for failure isn't really that much (how many decades of big-companies-with-bad-working-conditions stories have we had?).
It also doesn't give any sense of context - how reliable the newspaper is, what the average working conditions are for that class of facility, etc etc.
Also, again it doesn't seem (or at least the writeup doesn't) to include the information about foxconn being more than just apple, that seems to get forgotten every time there is a Foxconn story.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#7After the mess that was the last Apple Foxconn story, and with all the economic pressure that affects newspapers & news media, it becomes increasingly difficult for me to believe stories like these. It's not that I don't suppose that there're bad working conditions at Foxconn - there probably are. No, it's that even if the journalist in this story managed to sneak in, and work there, he probably added tons of hyperbo…
tl;dr You don't anything about this (I don't either) but you doubt it because there is "economic pressure". Right. The same comment can apply to every single item posted to this website, yoohoo.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#8> The work is clearly very stressful and the pay is terrible. The example the journalist gave was two hours of overtime earning him just $4. Can anyone give any context of how bad this actually is? Obviously it's not as terrible as if somebody got paid $4 for two hours of overtime here in the UK, in terms of average wage and typical cost of living, but no idea how much less bad it is..
Depending on where the factory is it's either good, bad or totally average. China seems to have multiple minimum wages for different areas.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#9> The work is clearly very stressful and the pay is terrible. The example the journalist gave was two hours of overtime earning him just $4. Can anyone give any context of how bad this actually is? Obviously it's not as terrible as if somebody got paid $4 for two hours of overtime here in the UK, in terms of average wage and typical cost of living, but no idea how much less bad it is..
In May, Foxconn’s base salary was $350 per month [1]
So, $350 / 22 working days (per month aprox, assuming 2 days of weekend, I don't know if they have 1 or 2) => $15.9 per day. / 10 hours per day => $1.59 per hour
Earning $2 for every extra hour... is like earning 1/3 extra per hour. Just to compare, here in Argentina, every extra hour is paid double by law. But I don't know if this is regulated in China...
Anyway, given the kind of job, I wouldn't try to stimulate working extra hours, as attention would decrease too much for this kind of monotonous and precision work. So, it makes sense that they pay little for overtime work.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/china/iphone-manufacturer-foxconn-...
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#10The Apple Supplier Responsibility 2012 Progress Report [1] is worth a read.
[1] http://images.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_...