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[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot...
Gee, I wonder why this was released today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
If that is true, why don't they have robots already? I know they are planning[1], however that kind of work seems to be very easily replaced by a robot (who will have a far higher accuracy and less failure rate than humans especially for the task the journalist describes). [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot...
If that is true, why don't they have robots already? I know they are planning[1], however that kind of work seems to be very easily replaced by a robot (who will have a far higher accuracy and less failure rate than humans especially for the task the journalist describes). [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot...
Simple; it's cheaper in the near-term. Keep production flowing while you figure out the automation side.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
The story is about making an iPhone 5, which is expected to boost the GDP of the US. http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-apple-iphone-...
As we're constantly reminded by the Apple blogs and on here, Apple takes 75% of the profits in the phone industry and have huge margins which their competitors can't come close to, so isn't it logical that Apple gets more of the bad press for bad working conditions since they are in the best position to improve the workers' pathetic work and living environment?
> 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..
The journalist also notes that "there aren’t enough workers to fill the positions at the factory as they keep resigning". This doesn't neccessarily mean its a bad place to work. I hardly have any friends that haven't quit at least one job in the last year or two. Modern Chinese culture -- particularly among young people -- accepts quitting your job, messing around for a few months ("playing" in Chinese) and then finding another as quite normal.
Setting up automation will become quicker and cheaper, forcing the labour alternative to become even cheaper and more demanding to compete with that. This is what is happening.
As this progresses, fewer people will be willing to work for that pay or under those conditions. Then these jobs will go away.
This is a good thing, but bad if you are used to slower technological progress where you can always make ends meet by taking up some low paid low skill jobs.