Labor Activist: Apple May Be Terrible, But All Others Are Worse 218
CheerfulMacFanboy writes "Labor Activist Li Qiang wants you to know that the iPhone 4 in his pocket is not an endorsement of Apple's policies, just an acknowledgment that the company is doing a better job of monitoring factory conditions than its peers. The founder of leading advocacy group China Labor Watch (CLW) told us that, though the Cupertino company does more-thorough inspections than competitors, it is responsible for poor working conditions at its suppliers' factories and needs to invest some of its record-breaking profits in improving them. 'Although I know that the iPhone 4 is made at sweat shop factories in China, I still think that this is the only choice, because Apple is actually one of the best. Actually before I made a decision, I compared Apple with other cell phone companies, such as Nokia,' he said through a translator. 'And the conditions in those factories are worse than the ones of Apple.'"
Re:Wow, that's what passes for best these days (Score:0, Interesting)
The WTO guidelines are quite clear: it is illegal to discriminate against a product based upon the country of origin, or their lack of labor laws or health & safety standards. Enjoy your NWO...
Re:Wow, that's what passes for best these days (Score:3, Interesting)
They could even slap a "No 13-year-olds were ripped out of school to make this piece of shit for a little cheaper" sticker on it.
Re:Wow, that's what passes for best these days (Score:2, Interesting)
Huh? Being restrained against your will, e.g. no bathroom breaks, is not a human rights violation? People need sleep, sleep deprivation, e.g., 36 hours without sleep, is sometimes used as an instrument of torture. People will sell themselves (or others) into slavery if they are desperate enough. That doesn't make slavery right or less nightmarish.
To me it sounds like you are an apologist.
Proof please (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead of just saying one company does better than the other, I think Mr. Li Qiang would be much more helpful to his cause if he actually published his findings and methodology.
Or are we suppose to simply believe him on his word?
Re:Wow, that's what passes for best these days (Score:3, Interesting)
The short answer is no to both. You couldn't actually manufacture most of the components for electronic equipment in the civilized world any more, because the whole supply chains are in china, and your price would skyrocket because the difference in labour costs is a factor of 20 or so. Sure, when you talk about foxconn assembly that's a small portion of the total cost of an iPhone, but if you talk about every component doing that, it would be a nightmare.
Second of all, the point of free trade is to drive costs up in other countries, that necessarily means they will have a competitive advantage for a while, but in the long run they will be a market. Does anyone think anyone making 50 cents an hour as a labourer in the 3rd world will ever buy a 500 dollar phone? Right, they can't. Ever. They're lucky to have clean drinking water. So if you ever want to sell them cars, computers, phones, airplanes or whatever they need to earn more money.
What will have to happen is that labourers in china will stop working for a pittance and start demanding a lot more money, that might mean mass strikes or it might mean an honest effort to pay people more money. That's a long process though. But, it's what happened in Japan, Italy, Taiwan, Korea, to a lesser extent Germany and a few 'eastern bloc' countries, and I'm only talking about since the end of WW2. The problem is that right now at least in china, if a million workers go on strike there are a million more to replace them, and no union protection for the ones on strike. Oh and because they went on strike no one else will give them jobs ever either.
You may think it's bad to work a 12 year old kid for 16 hours a day. but 30 years ago he would never have gone to school, and been working 16 hours a day on a farm from the time he was able to contribute, and he might have still starved. At least in the factory there is a chance of his lifestyle improving and he probably won't starve. That doesn't make it good, or right, but the sad reality is that progress requires people shift from the fields to factories, and it's up to them and their country to demand they get treated fairly. We can complain all we want to china, but they have us by the balls, and both parties know it. If we demand they do anything they don't like, they claw back on something we need (be it rare earths or just 'lose' export licences for things people want). And in general in china they have been working very hard at least in the last 30 years to educate their youth, and to get them prepared to be modern knowledge workers etc. They train more engineers than in the US, (about the same per capita), and most of the advanced degrees in anything useful in the 'west' are going to foreigners, probably about a third of which are chinese. There's probably a lost generation or two there, of people who are going to be exploited because they have no education, no skills and no way to get those things. But a huge portion of chinese kids growing up today will grow up into education and work very much like we have in the west, if not exactly like in the west because they're hiring western teachers to teach western curriculum's. Progress isn't perfect, and it would be nice to do better, but on the scale of things china is doing a half decent job. Which is sort of the same commentary in the article about apple. It could be better, but it could be worse too. And they're doing all of those things because we're paying them 4 dollars a day to make a tv, rather than paying them nothing as subsistence farmers, or worse, what we actually did to china, which was drugging them up on opium for most of a century.
Re:Even Korean brands? (Score:2, Interesting)
The article's title is very misleading in this regard.
It should read "Apple may be terrible, but other Chinese manufacturers worse".
Samsung is not even considered in the comparison because it's not made in China.
Re:Interesting headline change (Score:4, Interesting)
Neither the article, nor comments here are excusing Apple, nor suggesting they don't need to improve.
They are just correcting the hysterics of the media and of the slashdot haters, which have been implying Apple is the big offender. It's the very opposite of the truth.