People who are in disgust in Foxconn incident should also look into the factories where cloths they were wearing are made http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/may-18-20.... It is standard rule in capitalization. Businesses have to get goods/materials from the cheapest source available. No questions asked about how the supplier achieves it as long as it doesn't get worse. And yes, this article is pure propaganda stunt.
Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
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Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Foxxcoon pays about 400 USD a month - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/technology/foxconn-to-rais... and if that's for 7 days a week 10 hours a day as the reporter said, that's 300 hours.. so 1.33 dollars per hour. BTW, the typical salary range for a junior Ruby dev in a second or third tier city in China is about 800 - 1600 USD per month. Just to put things in perspectives
What's the typical wage for unskilled labor? That seems like a more relevant data point.
Elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510271 It's not bad.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#53This "journalist" puts 1 single Chinese company under a microscope and incites people of first world nations to pick up their pitch forks and torches in protest. Sure the conditions at Foxconn are terrible in comparison to my world view, but I'm not Chinese and my world view is irrelevant here. You know how I know this article is trash? This statement right here: "It also appears that windows have had bars put over them in an attempt to cut down on suicides." The suicide thing was covered pretty well recently and my recollection was that the workers of Foxconn were threatening suicide in a round about way of collective bargaining. Foxconn handled the situation very poorly and it's been a huge fiasco ever since. My understanding from the follow-up articles I read is that there is nothing abnormal about actual suicide rates at Foxconn when compared to any other company.
Let's be real here. What matters is how Foxconn compares to other Chinese factories. For all I know, Foxconn could be providing better pay, better living conditions, and better benefits than every other Chinese company. However, since there's nothing in this article to give me a better perspective, I have no way of knowing. There's no reason to expect Foxconn to act any differently than any other Chinese company. The issue here is the Chinese government and their lack of concern for fair and equal treatment of workers. Don't blame Foxconn simply because they make Apple products when they are doing the same thing as every other Chinese company.
Also, what's with this fixation on Foxconn and Apple? Foxconn does a whole hell of a lot more than just assembling ipads and iphones. I'm sure Apple accounts for but a small fraction of their total revenue.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#54it is a underpaid sweat shop worker in a developing country or a robotic manufacturing in a developed nation, one thing for sure manufacturing jobs are not coming back to America.
there is empirical evidence to suggest very successful companies get more bad press, Apple(for foxconn working conditions), Amazon(for temp warehouse jobs) being leading example.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#55Anyone who has significant issues with this needs to stop buying anything marked made in China. There are some interesting bits in there from the perspective of understanding the manufacturing process, but in terms of the worker conditions and so on, it's nothing new and anyone for whom this is news has presumably been hiding under a rock for the last couple of years and making a concious effort not to think about ho…
So your philosophy is to ignore the things you don't like? That may help you sleep better at night, but the world doesn't stop turning when you close your eyes. IMHO a better philosophy is accept the hypocrisy of willful indifference or try to make a difference. I don't find willful indifference to be 'action'.
Big words. The Internet is full of windbags asserting we need to make a difference. Notice how none of these people ever seem to attempt to do so? They usually limit themselves to vacuous back-of-a-cornflake-packet, trendy posturing like this.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#56Anyone who has significant issues with this needs to stop buying anything marked made in China. There are some interesting bits in there from the perspective of understanding the manufacturing process, but in terms of the worker conditions and so on, it's nothing new and anyone for whom this is news has presumably been hiding under a rock for the last couple of years and making a concious effort not to think about ho…
..stop buying anything marked made in China.
Good luck with that.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#57This "journalist" puts 1 single Chinese company under a microscope and incites people of first world nations to pick up their pitch forks and torches in protest. Sure the conditions at Foxconn are terrible in comparison to my world view, but I'm not Chinese and my world view is irrelevant here. You know how I know this article is trash? This statement right here: "It also appears that windows have had bars put over t…
Apple is the market leader. Therefore they're a lightning rod for this sort of criticism. Stated without proof but I'd be surprised if conditions building any other device over there anywhere else are any better...
As others have said, if you truly don't approve of these practices, then stop buying the end products of them...
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#58After 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…
he probably added tons of hyperbole and wrong encounters into his story, just to make it all the more dramatic. Are you basing this accusation on something or just pulling it out of thin air? You probably cheat on tests, steal other people's ideas, and slack off at work so everyone else has to work harder to accommodate you. Baseless accusations don't feel good, do they?
No, I based it on a general feeling based on several other stories like the 'This American Life' Foxconn report. I'm also not saying that he is lying, just that he is distorting reality.
Finally, I wasn't trying to write about this author in particular, but more about general journalism.
I may well be wrong there, but I tried to express an opinion based on a theory (explained in the post) that economic pressure can lead to a lower quality of journalistic output. My examples of hyperbole & more were, then, just examples of typical traits of said process. It's well known, that journalistic outlets of less quality (Sun in the UK, Fox News in the US, BILD in Germany, etc) do just what I explained above: They add unnecessary hyperbole, shift facts & more - as long as the story sells. I was just expressing that less money may lead to less quality.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#59Anyone who has significant issues with this needs to stop buying anything marked made in China. There are some interesting bits in there from the perspective of understanding the manufacturing process, but in terms of the worker conditions and so on, it's nothing new and anyone for whom this is news has presumably been hiding under a rock for the last couple of years and making a concious effort not to think about ho…
..stop buying anything marked made in China. Good luck with that.
I'm not expecting it to happen, I'm just saying if people are that bothered then it needs to run to more than Apple and Foxconn.
Re: Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
#60After 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…
> "I really think it's hard to believe journalists these days, especially if the stories are unheard of and outrageous." You really think piss-poor working conditions in Second-World factories are "unheard of and outrageous"? It's been going on for centuries. Sure, this story was impeccably timed, and I'm sure there are liberties taken here and there, but that's because running a magazine/newspaper is a business. Tha…
I also think that it's dangerous to not trust media anymore. I was expressing my fear that that might happen. I don't think the working conditions are outrageous, I also don't think that they're piss-poor though. Relative to the environment (china) they may be not so bad. I was saying that media is trying to market it as outrageous to generate higher sales.
This may be a cultural thing, but while I do believe in free markets and capitalism, I think that there're certain parts of society which need to be handled separately as the optimization for economic success (the cheaper the better) doesn't fare well (imho) with health and media. I like the approach of the UK, where the BBC is state paid but not state controlled. But this is a huge separate discussion and I can understand different viewpoints here and I'm afraid it's often about cultural differences which viewpoint we chose.