Posted on 12/18/2014 2:25:06 PM PST by WhiskeyX
A BBC investigation for Panorama has exposed poor working conditions in factories making Apple products in China.
The undercover team secretly filmed the iPhone production line and found Apple's promises to protect workers were routinely broken.
One undercover reporter - making parts for Apple computers - had to work 18 days without a day off.
Other workers were filmed falling asleep. Apple say they will investigate any concerns brought to them.
The BBC's Richard Bilton reports from Shanghai.
[VIDEO]
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
'Occupy' protesters descend on iPhone 5 debut (photos)
On the other hand, Apple's security knows how to put a stop to Occupy idiocy that others wouldn't do.
Video: Did Apple Store Security Threaten To Break Occupy Protesters' Teeth?
Hey BBC:
China is a damned hard place to be a worker. Their system is extremely demanding and abusive, and human rights are trampled continuously.
Unless you live without any of the myriad high-tech electronic and other devices common in today's world, you too are complicit in the "maltreatment of labor in China", every time you purchase something "Made In China".
Try living for just one week without using anything "Made In China". That includes not just electronic gizmos, but also clothing, furniture, household items, cleaning and personal supplies, transportation, office supplies, etc. etc.
What do you know of the wages and condition of the people in China who make the things you use every day? Are you aware of their struggles? Do you even choose what to buy based on whether or not it was "Made In China"?
After a week of no "Made In China", report back on how well your self-righteousness about Apple is holding up.
And by the way, the same holds true for all of the companies who have stuff manufactured in China. I'm not defending Apple.
Friggin' BBC wankers. Anything for a headline and some web hits. High-tech whores.
I wasn’t trying to make any statement particularly against Apple by finding and posting the links. Those links simply came up easier in a quick search.
Starting many factories in corrupt countries won’t make the corruption go away. I am making that statement.
The only way to stop much of the corruption is to assure that anyone and everyone who wants to make useful products can do so without hindrances instituted by the established (regulations, licenses, etc.), and that’s going to happen in the very near future. All who are willing to do some real work should find ways to live by working with their own minds and hands. And we don’t need to be staring at screens all of our lives.
I didn't think you were, Family. It is a sad state of affairs that Apple is the target of so many poor writers who use the hook for advertising hits. They don't do the right kind of research before they write and post tripe. All they are interested in is getting those hits. The suicide issue is one of those. Apple assembly lines had little to nothing to do with the FoxConn suicides but Apple was the largest corporation in the world by market cap. . . and even though the workers who suicided were working on products for other companies, it was "sexier" to put Apple's name in the headline. . . even though at the time the closest FoxConn assembly line working on Apple products was 150 miles away! It is just human nature.
First one, then another picks up that one and re-writes the article and the headline, and pretty soon it's Apple workers committing suicide and Apple is the bad guy. Pretty soon they are "Apple employees" committing suicide at Apple owned plants, not subcontractors' factories, owned by a Taiwanese multi-billionaire. And THEN, it's Steve Jobs erecting anti-Suicide nets. . . which he had nothing to do with! These myths promulgate like hydra heads.
Even when the facts come out, and it's never as bleak as the horror stories painted it, people prefer to believe the falsehoods over the truth. . . its just more shocking and juicier. . . and of course they can link to all those lurid, but WRONG stories as their proof. There are always 100 of those echo-chamber wrong stories for each almost impossible to find story with the facts and data that debunks them! Sometimes I hate the internet.
I am educated as an economist and learned how to critically evaluate data and how to do research long ago. . . and I have a good Built-in BS-O'Meter. It is very rarely wrong. One of the things I do know is the motives that make people do what they do for work. . . and that's why a lot of these slave labor things just don't ring true. . . especially when you see the videos and photos of the lines of young people applying for jobs at FoxConn. It is an employers market there. They don't NEED to use slave labor. There are 100 applicants for every opening they have!
Our politicians chased our manufacturers to China by over-regulation and nit-picking idiocy of labor laws.
A good example. We built the Empire State Building in 1931 from design, engineering, construction, to opening, in a little over 14 months and one week. The Golden Gate Bridge was built from selling the bonds in 1932 to completion in 1937, five years. . . including approaches. In Stockton, where I used to live, it took them 20 years to get approval to build a divided grade crossing at two important intersections under the railroad tracks. . . and FIVE years to build each of them! When Obambi entered office he said there were shovel ready jobs. . . several of them were to widen Interstate 5 in Stockton and Hwy 99. . . they moved in K-Bars and started the work, in 2008. It is now almost 2015 and the K-Bars are still there, as are the orange cones, and the freeways are STILL not widened. . . and no one seems to be working on these shovel ready jobs but a lot of digging was done but nothing has been completed. It takes forever to do anything because Judges get to second guess everything. . . sometimes multiple judges. And there are multiple agencies who get to stick their sticky idiotic fingers into the decision making process and any one of them can veto the process, send it back to square one, require changes to the entire design to protect the spotted deer tick, or state that you didn't hire enough tutu wearing poofie thinking engineers from Zaire on your design team, so START OVER! (Well, that's only in San Francisco).
Speaking of SF, Bagdad by the bay. The new SF-Oakland Bay Bridge, California hired a Chinese Company, a dockside crane company, who had NEVER BUILT A BRIDGE BEFORE, to build a new, never before built concept bridge. Do you see this coming from a mile away?
This is a company who faked EVERY CRITICAL WELD X-RAY and arranged for CalTrans to fire or transfer the supervising engineers who screamed to high heaven about the X-Rays and welds not being right, and kicked the supervising bridge architects out of the plants building the parts. . . and CalTrans management ignored the money flowing over and out of the treasury until it was BILLIONS over budget. The company delivered a supposedly waterproof BoxBeam bridge that LEAKS when it rains, has substandard concrete (supplied by a DAMNOCRAT donor) down in Caissons in the bay that has not SET properly ("Oh, it'll be OK, someday, eventually it will set, we promise, maybe! But we can't take it out because it's holding up the suspension tower, and if we take out the tower we'll miss our deadline and not get our bonuses!"), and huge stainless steel BOLTS that are rusting in their first year(!) and coming loose, and supposedly sealed cables that are already CORRODING internally(!!!!) and the improprieties and graft are being investigated by the California HIGHWAY Patrol investigators (!), but not by the DAMNOCRAT Attorney General, or CalTrans, who gave themselves bonuses for what a good job they did, instead!!!!!
bump
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/129561-how-many-people-does-it-take-to-make-9-million-samsung-galaxy-s3-smartphones
Buried at the bottom of the Reuters report is another equally interesting tidbit: According to an unnamed Samsung official, its smartphone factory in South Korea is running at its full capacity of 5 million units per month. Back in March, a Foxconn insider said the company was gearing up to produce 57 million iPhone 5 handsets this year divide that by 12, and you get 4.75 million units per month.
Foxconn worker etches out the Apple sign on the back of an iPadNow, Im not entirely sure how Samsung does this, but South Korea actually has a rather high income per capita $24,000 and the average monthly salary for a factory worker is $2000 per month. The average monthly wage for a Chinese Foxconn worker is only $400. As far as I can tell, this simply means that Apple pays significantly less to produce its iPhones. A report from February confirms this disparity: If you average it all out, Chinese workers get $8 per iPad, while Korean workers get $34 per iPad.
If we throw some other numbers into the mix, we can derive some other interesting facts about the manufacture of Apple and Samsung smartphones. In March, what seems like the diary of a Foxconn worker was published on the web. This worker, named Li Qi, says that in the lead-up to the launch of the new iPad, his production line churned out 150 iPads per hour. Li Qis base wage is 2,350 yuan per month ($370) and considering Foxconn employees work six days a week and eight hours per day, that means he gets paid around $15 per day, or $1.85/hour.
Most of my career I've been an electronics designer for small companies, 50-150 employees, typically tech-oriented (usually 2/3 engineers). So when we have a design and we're ready to manufacture, we try like hell to give it to a manufacturing outfit in the States. The times we've gone overseas (Taiwan or China) it's been either non-profitable in the long run, or an unmitigated disaster. Overseas manufacturing only works for the really big guys.
I have no idea how it's all gonna shake out eventually, but I sure hope that the idiots who try to whittle away at, or take down, the American companies like Apple, lose their shirts litigating and bitching and p!ssing and moaning... for God's sake let the companies do their jobs!
There's SO much real EVIL in the world, Boko Haram and ISIS and Taliban and North Korea and Iran, just for starters... geez, WTF are these people doing, tearing away at the folks that are on our own side????
What's the cost of living comparison for the people whose wages you quote?
And don't forget to factor in the cost/value of the company-supplied housing, food, transportation (or lack of need for same), whatever else.
Having a higher dollar figure wage doesn't mean squat if the daily costs are commensurately higher. Korea's nowhere as inexpensive as China.
Trust me, I know this first-hand. I could increase my salary 40-50% just by taking an offer on the West Coast or in New York City. But what good is it when the cost of living there more than compensates for the "raise" and I end up with the same or even less, at the end of the year. Screw that.
Got data? It appears you're just trolling, so probably not, but I figured I'd ask anyway.
So you have a real world choice. Would you rather be a Korean worker putting together Samsung Galaxies or a Chinese coolie working on Apples/Foxcons iPhone assembly lines?
I know what job I would take. An easy decision.
BTW I am aware of the trap you mention...Taking a West Coast job that pays more but that pay gets eaten up by the higher cost of living
Yes. Being a coolie for Apple/Foxcon is probably a step up from laboring in Chinese rice fields and Chinese agriculture in general out in their rural areas. It is probably preferable
Who knows? Maybe a Chinese Foxcon slave labor guy can save up some money to buy some pigs and chickens when he returns back to the farm
BUT YA GOTTA LOVE how CRApple likes to remain one step removed from their slave labor operation by hiring Foxcom. While Samsung is in direct control, thus is responsible, for its Korean Galaxy factories. The libs and gays running CRAppple are addicted to making higher profits that translates into more luxurious living for them. While Samsung Galaxy assembly operations (factories) benefits the Korean nation (by employing Koreans) by being less profitable due to higher labor costs.
My take away is the liberal & gay goobers running CRApple are amoral, mindless, directionless comfort seekers on a grand scale.... Similar to libs the world over.
Uh, DennisW? Samsung is on the list as one of FoxConn's prominent customers. FoxConn does manufacturing and assembly work for Samsung just as it does for most other large Electronics firms in the World.
FoxConn's customer list.As of January 2012, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd.'s subsidiary FoxConn Technology Group assembles approximately 40% of the consumer electronics in the world according to numerous sources including Wikipedia and the New York Times. Here is a partial list of 50 of FoxConn's most prominent customers I've been able to compile from news articles where their contractural relationships were mentioned over the past five years, which include the period when the suicides occurred:
- Acer Inc. (Taiwan)
- Alcatel (France)
- Amazon (United States)
- Apple Inc. (United States)
- Archos (France)
- ASRock (Taiwan)
- Asus (Taiwan)
- Barnes & Noble (United States)
- BenQ (South Korea)
- Blackberry (Canada)
- Cisco (United States)
- Dell Inc.(United States)
- EVGA Corporation (United States)
- Fujitsu (Japan)
- GE Thomson
- Google (United States)
- Griffin Technologies (United States)
- Gründig Mobile (Germany)
- Hewlett-Packard (United States)
- HTC (Taiwan)
- Huawei (China)
- Intel (United States)
- IBM (United States)
- Kyocera Communications (Japan)
- Lenovo (China)
- Lenovo/Motorola Mobility (China)
- LG Lucky GoldStar (South Korea)
- Microsoft (United States)
- Microsoft MSI (Taiwan)
- Motorola Communications (United States)
- NCR (United States)
- NEC Casio Communication (Japan)
- Netgear (United States)
- Nintendo (Japan)
- Nokia Oyj (Finland)
- PackardBell (Netherlands)
- Panasonic (Japan)
- Philips (Netherlands)
- Pioneer Electronics (Japan)
- Samsung (South Korea)
- Sanyo (Japan)
- Sharp (Japan)
- Siemens (Germany)
- Sony (Japan)
- TCL Communication Technology (China)
- Telefunken (Germany)
- Thomson (France)
- Toshiba (Japan)
- Vizio (United States)
- Xiaomi (China)
- Zoostorm (New Zealand)
- ZTE (China)
Look just after Pioneer, and just before Sanyo. What prominent Korean company do you see there, Dennis?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.