If employees hate their job so much, can't they just quit?
The $205.4B Gulag
11–20 of 106 posts
Re: The $205.4B Gulag
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost all consumer electronics are made at these Chinese manufacturers. Only the high-end chips are from Taiwan, South Korea, or Arizona. I'm software engineer at a Danish company that also manufactures a lot of industrial electronics. Our insight is that China is still the cheapest place to manufacture PCBs but it is surprisingly more efficient to setup pick-and-place robots here in Denmark to place the components…
Almost all is not all right?
It's pretty safe to rest assured that the cheaper the device (or piece of clothing or mostly any consumer good) you're buying, the more shoddy the kitchen side of it is.
Re: The $205.4B Gulag
#13If employees hate their job so much, can't they just quit?
Is this a joke, or are you that out of touch with what poverty is like?
Re: The $205.4B Gulag
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost all consumer electronics are made at these Chinese manufacturers. Only the high-end chips are from Taiwan, South Korea, or Arizona. I'm software engineer at a Danish company that also manufactures a lot of industrial electronics. Our insight is that China is still the cheapest place to manufacture PCBs but it is surprisingly more efficient to setup pick-and-place robots here in Denmark to place the components…
Almost all is not all right?
Sure, a small but growing percentage of iPhones are assembled in India, sure. Some other manufacturers will be doing the same.
Re: The $205.4B Gulag
#15I'd like to remind people about the terrible working conditions in extremely wealthy places such as California too. Right now, University of California grad students and researchers, who produce a massive proportion of science on the West coast, are on strike. In most locations, it's nearly impossible to pay rent on their stipends. Grad students may be in training, but they are also the source of nearly all the novel ideas and the analysis and the basic work that goes into moving science forward. Principal Investigators these days write grants, and perhaps collaborate on the ideas and analysis, but in nearly every major paper I have seen come from a lab where I know the people well, it's the grad students at the heart of the intellectual work.
This inability to pay rent isn't as much because wages got lowered, it's mostly because certain cities decided that they didn't want any more housing, in order to appease land owners and drive up housing prices to astronomical levels. But it's also unethical to pay somebody for a job if they can't use those wages to live.
Fortunately I'm not aware of any police violence against the grad students yet, but there has been plenty of UC police violence in the past against striking workers.
This is not an identical situation to the delayed bonuses discussed in the article. But as tech heavy as HN we may not be as in touch with a workforces that get squeezed on basic ability to survive, such as assembly in China or grad students in California. (Or dare I mention the farm workers that put all the food on our table...)
Re: The $205.4B Gulag
#16I am making a concerted effort in my life to avoid buying things made in China. It’s harder than it sounds, and in the case of consumer electronics, impossible. If the point of this article is to make the reader feel bad for buying an iPhone, they’ve failed. Nearly every electronics device sold in the US is made or assembled in China, and most under even worse conditions than FoxConn.
Who decides to make it in China? Who demands that companies be highly highly profitable?
Re: The $205.4B Gulag
#17Re: The $205.4B Gulag
#18I guess for me the takeaway is:
Buy fewer electronics
Re: The $205.4B Gulag
#19If employees hate their job so much, can't they just quit?
More often than not, no. Many of these types of factories are intentionally designed to lock workers into a never ending loop, where they're tied in living paycheck to paycheck, often paying rent for a room that's owned by the same company that runs the factory, buying food from a store that's owned by the same company, etc. There are even cases where workers get paid in cash in a custom "currency" operated by the company so there is no way to ever break free after you're in the loop.
Re: The $205.4B Gulag
#20I am making a concerted effort in my life to avoid buying things made in China. It’s harder than it sounds, and in the case of consumer electronics, impossible. If the point of this article is to make the reader feel bad for buying an iPhone, they’ve failed. Nearly every electronics device sold in the US is made or assembled in China, and most under even worse conditions than FoxConn.
> If the point of this article is to make the reader feel bad for buying an iPhone, they’ve failed. Nearly every electronics device sold in the US is made or assembled in China
I would still say it's good to call attention to the problem even if there's no real solution for consumers.