Apple Faces New China Worker Abuse Claims 158
AmiMoJo writes "Technology giant Apple is facing fresh allegations of worker rights violations at Chinese factories of one of its suppliers, the Pegatron Group. China Labor Watch has alleged that three factories of Pegatron violate a 'great number of international and Chinese laws and standards.' These include underage labour, contract violations and excessive working hours. Li Qiang, executive director of China Labor Watch, claimed that 'our investigations have shown that labour conditions at Pegatron factories are even worse than those at Foxconn factories.' The campaign group said that it had found that average weekly working hours in the three factories investigated by it were approximately 66 hours, 67 hours, and 69 hours, respectively."
Want to hurt Chinese workers? Improve Conditions. (Score:2, Interesting)
The country I live in (USA, you may have heard of it) once counted abundant, low cost labor as a comparative economic advantage. At that time, we exploited this advantage, which resulted in a sustained economic boom, accompanied by exploding output, and eventually the creation of a middle class. Our middle class then organized themselves and enforced much better working conditions. This eliminated our labor cost advantage, but we were able to make do with productivity improvements and a shift to services.
Imagine if, say, the UK meddled in our business in the 1880s and forced us to improve factory conditions prematurely. Our growth would have been slowed and the eventual creation of the middle class would have been delayed. A well-meaning effort to improve the lives of a few then would have hurt the quality of life for many later.
Those who criticize Chinese working conditions are either ignorant of economics and history or have an agenda to hold China back.
Further Reading:
http://www.hamiltoninstitute.com/the-problem-with-sweatshops-is-that-there-are-not-enough-of-them-discuss/ [hamiltoninstitute.com]
Re:Why is constantly Apple vilified for this? (Score:2, Interesting)
If Apple was serious about getting these conditions improved, they would be proactive about, not reactive. They only do something about it when they get bad press about it and then they basically hire a 3rd party to say "Oh, everything is OK. It's just a handful of troublemakers jumping off the building to make Apple look bad"
From what I hear, they are quite proactive actually. They just didn't tell the world until accusation, including some completely made up accusations, kept flying at them.
Re:Who is better then? (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, those same condition would be illegal in the US
No they wouldn't. Hours worked, conditions worked in, all would be legal in the U.S. and in fact some workers here have it worse (farm workers for example).
They are still terrible condiions in china, report or no report.
But they are worse for all of the other companies except for Apple. because other companies are not even checking. That is my point. No matter how bad conditions of people working on Apple products are, they are X times worse for products from any other company.
Therefore if you actually care about chinese workers, you would buy either Apple products or no modern electronics at all (since pretty much nothing is assembled in the U.S.).
Obviously you and the original poster are not buying Apple products; therefore you do not ACTUALLY care about workers in China at all. You just hate Apple. Which is fine, but you really should admit that you actually don't care if Chinese workers live or die.