Foxconn Hires Top Spinners To Defend Its Image 162
An anonymous reader writes "Foxconn is insisting that it has done no wrong. But it has hired Burson-Marsteller to deal with the press failout from recent child labour allegations. Burson-Masteller is a PR heavy hitter called in when outfits have big image problems. It handled Tylenol poisonings, and, according to Corporate Watch, the Bhopal disaster, and Three Mile Island. It represented the private military group Blackwater after Baghdad allegations. Its clients have included the Argentinian military junta led by General Jorge Videla and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and Saudi Arabia after it was pointed out that most of the September 11 attackers were from that country."
If you need PR firms, you've failed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Foxconn has done plenty of wrong - consulting with this(or any) PR agency only affirms it. There's only one option that should be on the table - confess the truth no matter how bad it is, correct the wrongdoings of slave labor and mistreatment of their workers, and then make sure it never happens again.
It's kind of hard to justify your actions when people catch you doing not-so-good-stuff (to say it lightly) and then catch your lies as well. That, and it's even harder to do it when people keep on catching you do it.
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Foxconn doesn't care about justifying their actions, or about being honest. Far from it, that's the entire point of hiring major league PR firms. There will be confessing of any truths, but there will be plenty of shiny happy propaganda spewed around the globe.
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You can replace the name "FoxConn" with any corporations name and still be as correct.
Hell you can put in any Politicians name and still use that statement.
Re:If you need PR firms, you've failed. (Score:5, Informative)
You can replace the name "FoxConn" with any corporations name and still be as correct.
Sort of.
Burson-Marsteller should be familiar to all Slashdot denizens - they've been long-term astroturfers here for both Microsoft and Facebook. Both companies have been caught using them for smear campaigns against Google.
Now it looks like Apple/FoxConn have joined the pack, I'd say the Axis is complete again.
Re:If you need PR firms, you've failed. (Score:4, Informative)
Burson-Marsteller should be familiar to all Slashdot denizens - they've been long-term astroturfers here for both Microsoft and Facebook. Both companies have been caught using them for smear campaigns against Google.
The current CEO of Burson-Marsteller is Mark Penn, who is also famous for heading Hillary Clinton's election campaign [1] for the Democratic presidential candidacy in 2008. Many folks blamed Penn for his mis-handling of the primary, which was seen as Clinton's to lose.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Penn#Presidential_campaign_-_2008 [wikipedia.org]
Re:If you need PR firms, you've failed. (Score:4, Insightful)
And while Apple now use Reverb for their astroturfing, they're no strangers to Burson-Marsteller either. These business relationships run deep and muddy.
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You do not fully understand PR=B$ firms. Not only will there be shiny happy propaganda, there will be attacks and disparagement of anyone that challenges the shiny happy, people will be paid to shut up and people will be force to shut up under legal threats, already paid off media sources will carry the message and of course as a result of the internet, hundreds of marketdroids trolls with thousands of forum accounts will go to work, either promoting their message or when they lose flooding out forums that
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Re:If you need PR firms, you've failed. (Score:5, Insightful)
And sometimes you hire a major public relations firm and spend the money on spin instead of addressing the problem.
Re:If you need PR firms, you've failed. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:If you need PR firms, you've failed. (Score:5, Interesting)
Johnson & Johnson is one of the few remaining industrial capitalistic corporation.
Industrial capitalism is great is it see further than a quarter.
Financial capitalism is to be frown upon as it value short term gains and loss externalization.
Thank you Regan for starting the move from the industrial capitalism that made all of us relatively prosper,
to financial capitalism that have made the selected few ridiculously rich and put the many in a perpetual state of precariousness.
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Maybe we should go back to the era of family-owned corporations, if that is possible. Companies like Standard Oil and US Steel might ha
Re:If you need PR firms, you've failed. (Score:4, Insightful)
A boring, brief admissions is what PR firms usually advise, right? It ends the news cycle, because there's nothing more to dig up. Then you drip feed out some good stuff.
Good PR firms don't spin when things are bad. They take control of the news cycle, but in a really boring way.
Foxconn doesn't want PR. They don't care what you think of them, as long as you stop talking about them. And the best way to do that is to release dry boring facts.
Rebuilding their reputation will take years. Remember Nike? They ran sweatshops. It's taken them over a decade to lose that stain, despite being good employers. Foxconn doesn't need good PR now. They need to shut down the speculation-driven media cycle, but putting out boring but informative releases. They need a good PR firm when they have something positive to work with, and when people don't hate them so much, in a year or so.
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A big part of making Foxconn unsympathetic has to do with the lack of good news escaping to the US. Some happy stories about three siblings who saved the family farm by sending back money while earning advanced degrees in their time off from the factory would do it. Hero stories make good popular press. They have to have 50,000 stories like that to draw from with a million employees. They just have to find them and invite honest press to report them - they don't have to fake them up.
More examples: migr
Failed? Define failed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, corporations have no morals. They cannot have morals by definition. Their only goal and measure of success is profit. If did some bad things and hired a PR company afterwards and still profits are up, you haven't failed.
--Coder
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They lied, got caught lying, got caught trying to use a shill organization like the "Fair Labor Association", and stand to lose money trying to defend their own lies. Their own country's propaganda department is so incompetent that they could not contain it or explain it. Those billions are going to be spent on figuring out how to not fail any worse.
Unfortunately for you, I (along with many other reasonable people) don't have the idea that profitability should come at the cost of morality.
Re:Failed? Define failed? (Score:4, Insightful)
He's not saying he doesn't have any morals. He's saying that they haven't failed at all, seeing as the only thing that they've done wrong is betray morals that they literally cannot have.
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corporation 1. an association of individuals, created by law or under authority of law, having a continuous existence independent of the existences of its members, and powers and liabilities distinct from those of its members.
Where does it say they can't have morals? A corporation has to obey its shareholders- mostly people who are just trying to save money for retirement through mutual funds and would probabl
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if the only obligation of these entities is toward the morals of the shareholders, and they ignore or actively shirk this obligation, isn't that pretty much the definition of amorality?
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If profits are up but you broke some laws, then you have to spend more on lobbying.
Re:If you need PR firms, you've failed. (Score:5, Insightful)
...and then close your business. You forgot that part.
Labor markets are a tricky thing. The only way to do away with such practices is to make them all stop unilaterally. Someone here on slashdot related a story about a town in the south where slavery was made illegal while all surrounding areas still permitted it. It wasn't long before competition was able to have its affect on the town and they had to permit slavery after all. Those WalMart prices are simply too irresistible.
But this is the norm all across the planet. Occupy protesters on iPhones and on and on. Even the protesters support this kind of human exploitation. Business, left unchecked, can and will ruin humanity. Regulations on the markets and exchanges have proven to be necessary for decades and even centuries. Regulations on utilities have shown to be necessary. Any time or place where there is an unlimited demand (power, fuel, food, air, water, etc) or an artificial control on an unlimited or otherwise natural supply (copyright, creativity, knowledge, information, seeds, etc) you will find business [run and directed by humans] trying to leverage those things to their most potential even and including at the cost of human lives... 10s, 100s, 1000s, 1000000s of lives... they don't care. Apple doesn't care. Consumers don't care. The few who care have to make the difference and it has to be someone's job to care so that others don't have to. That's what government is supposed to be there for.
Granted, that's not the way things are.
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letting your currency float helps too. China forces a low exchange which helps keep the exports up. It abuses their own citizens but I don't think that factors in to their pinky and the brain world domination plan.
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the problem is 'free' trade, free trade only works between equals and near equals, free trade between US, Canada, Germany, UK, etc. would be fine, including developing countries just turns into exploitation
That's a silly thing to say. Exploitation knows no bounds. Ask Occupy Wall St. or Nelson Mandela or Kim Jung Un (or whatever the !@#$ his name is). All exploitation takes is one greedy, lazy jerk to convince a few other greedy, lazy jerks to band together to rob everybody else. The Europeans raised it to a fine art during the colonial period, and the US' colonialists taught them how fragile their scheme was when the "everybody else" part stands up together to say no.
If Chinese peasants want to work for
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Occupy protesters on iPhones and on and on. Even the protesters support this kind of human exploitation.
You don't seem to understand what Occupy is about. They are not saying get rid of capitalism or make everything super expensive so that wages in China can go up. They are merely saying that unchecked gambling by financial institutions and then walking away with bailouts, bonuses for failure and leaving the 99% of people who were not involved to pay for it has to stop. That has nothing to do with what this thread is about.
They don't want to give up iPhones and Starbucks, they want financial markets to stop h
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starting a company there is a nightmare, if you can even do it.
From anecdotes I've heard, it sounds like starting a business is rather easy and many people do it every day. I gather (not from anecdote) it's harder to make it a legally recognized company. But if you couldn't do that, then China wouldn't have a competitive economy.
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Interesting perspective you've got there. And to an extent, it's quite correct.
But what we're seeing is that 'back in the day' taking care of these problems locally worked primarily because technology did not effectively allow goods and services to be sourced from cheaper and more distant locations. But as technologies and efficiency improvements continue, we are effectively making cheaper sources more available and are removing all of the positive local effects we once had. Where once we had a thriving
Re:If you need PR firms, you've failed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Foxconn has done plenty of wrong - consulting with this(or any) PR agency only affirms it.
No it doesn't. All it indicates is that Foxconn perceives advantages from improving it's public relations. Anything else you wish to take from it is merely reaching from your personal subjectivity and preconceptions.
Maybe Foxconn has done wrong and seeks to spin the story to it's advantage. Maybe.
Or maybe it's done wrong and seeks to do right - PR firms don't only offer consulting for public communications, they can help guide genuine change within a company. Often "bad guy" companies have such a corporate culture because the board have a lack of expertise and influence on how and why to be a "good guy" company, a PR firm can fill in that gap. Any year one, nay, week one marketing student
Or, maybe the media have got it wrong and Foxconn seek to get the truth out there. Perhaps Foxconn are good guys and these reports are all lies. Well OK, probably not, but it's entirely plausable Foxconn's failings and their lack of response have at least been exaggerated in the media. When was the last time you read an article or watched a news report on something you have a very high level of knowledge about, and shook your head about how completely they'd got it wrong? Maybe I should re-phrase that: can you recall the last time they got it right?
I'm not trying to argue any of the above is the case, merely outline a few of the possibilities. Slashdot generally has a healthy respect for science on issues that clearly fit within the realm of science, but it would be easy to read the submissions and comments and conclude it's readership is totally incapable of applying any of it's lessons for any other topic.
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you act like it was some kind of fluke (Score:3)
mistreatment of workers is the entire purpose of outsourcing manufacturing to China in the first place. if you make Foxconn stop abusing people, you essentially put it out of business, because now the playing field is leveled so that other countries that are not brutal dictatorships will have a chance to enter manufacturing again.
the destruction of unions and the lowering of wages and the destruction of environmmental regulations was the very purposes of existence of companies like Foxconn, and their Americ
Easy to say (Score:2)
Easy to say, when _their_ spin doctors went at it first.
Sometimes silence is interpreted as guilt, for obvious, or, and that is a f***ing big OR unfounded reasons.
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There's only one option that should be on the table - confess the truth no matter how bad it is, correct the wrongdoings of slave labor and mistreatment of their workers, and then make sure it never happens again.
And destroy the Chinese economy? You think Foxconn is the only Chinese manufacturer where this goes on? The whole Chinese economy is based on slave-level labor. Why do think the American manufacturing industry has been sodomized over with a stiff wire brush in the last few decades?
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Foxconn has done plenty of wrong - consulting with this(or any) PR agency only affirms it.
Unfortunately, PR firms do a great job at muddying the waters -- even when they are completely transparent shills. The may well be astroturf shills on this very webpage, ready to "educate" us.
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The problem is the perception, not the working conditions. You have manage perceptions to maintain the value of your brand. Actually changing how you do business requires effort so the best thing to do is hire professional liars to change your image.
Quitting: Technically possible, not feasible. (Score:4, Insightful)
Quitting presumes that alternatives exist and that the government wouldn't find some charge to hold them up on if they quit at the wrong time.
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Re:Quitting: Technically possible, not feasible. (Score:4, Interesting)
What China practices is not capitalism. It is simply a more multinational-friendly version of despotism.
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Re:Quitting: Technically possible, not feasible. (Score:4, Insightful)
Capitalism IS despotism. The hierarchy in a corporation is usually very fucking clear, and perfectly totalitarian.
Re:Quitting: Technically possible, not feasible. (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realise that in true capitalism, there is absolutely no caring about who controls the capital. The importance is that capital controls everything but its owner.
In this regard, China is far more capitalist then the West, where there are a lot of regulations to address the biggest flaws of capitalism.
Re:Quitting: Technically possible, not feasible. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you need PR firms, you've failed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Slave labor implies these people are held against their will. That is not the case, they can quit any time. It's not Foxconn's fault those people are uneducated and can't find another job...
Not their fault, but very convenient for them.
It is wondrous system, funneling money upwards to the owners of the world by means of voluntary association of the poor in China and everyone in between.
And you can make it too. With a dream, some hard work and sticktoitiveness, you too can be a multinational megacorporation and bazillionaire.
The playingfield is not level, though, so in general, the richer you allready are, the more likely you are to make even more money in the babylon system.
If you have the nerve to be ruthless, not hesitating to trample down your fellow earthicans in the climb up, up, up the ziggurat, you'll have an edge.
Good Luck!
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They cannot quit because they would starve.
That is like saying that if there is no barbed wire fence and searchlights, there is no prison. Please Google "Devils Island". The prisoners there could walk off and die any time they wanted. There was nowhere they could go. They were still prisoners, not just guests or inmates. I think some slave owners worked the same way.
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What I find most irritating is the sancitmonious attitude of some Apple users who think their choice of table/phone is superior in more than technology.
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What I find most irritating is the attitude of Apple users who think their hardware is superior in anything other than number printed on the price tag.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Quote from the Foxconn CEO: “Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”
So - my first thought was, "it couldn't have been that bad, I'm sure there was some confusion in the translations".
And then he LITERALLY invited the director to the Taipei Zoo to "share his experience with the audience on how to manage different animals according to their individual temperaments."
So yes, Foxconn may really be as bad as they seem.
Do they cost 35 cents/hour? (Score:4, Interesting)
And does this PR agency charge 35 cents per hour and work 12 hour shifts 6 days a week?
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I'd prefer a news report rather than an editorial (Score:2)
I can get the level of bias and innuendo in that editorial easily enough from the MSM with the same thin layer of 'news story'.
Why is it so many alleged news sources feel the need to try and bend their readers to their view? The MSM is dying from this disease as there are now better and more plentiful sources.
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Why is it so many alleged news sources feel the need to try and bend their readers to their view?
Perhaps it wasn't intended as a message to their readers, but was instead intended to blackmail Apple/Foxconn into spending more on advertising. Follow the money.
Press Failout? (Score:2)
What's a "Press Failout"? Is that a deliberate play on "fallout" or an actual fail in itself?
was it their idea to compare apple to nike? (Score:2)
and umm. did they run any successful campaigns?
how did their sales pitch to foxconn go..
foxconn: so.. what previous employers you've had?
b-m: well, you remember blackwater? they're thought of as a pretty cool company now, right? and good old Ceaucescu? and of course everyone knows how forward thinking and free country Saudi Arabia is right??
(FLA is a shill organization. the article says that foxconn was tipped about about the inspections? well doh, there were fucking headlines on papers about how there wa
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Success is a very relative word here. In cases like this, success can be a company having the PR of Blackwater-errr.... Xe. errr.... Acadami, where failure can be a mob of tens of thousands with torches and sticks and rocks.
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well.. they handled blackwater ok I suppose as I have NFI what they're up to today and under what name, the case for the genius of carpathians not so well.
To rip Foxconn's claims apart... (Score:3)
Anyway, Foxconn is telling us that it has strict recruitment regulations to ensure full compliance with worker age regulations and laws.
That presumes that the records are accurate and that nobody falsifies them - including the Chinese government.
"We have sufficient access to workers who are of legal age and there is no incentive for us to break our own strict policies and Chinese law on the matter. Let us be very clear, Foxconn does not employ, in any capacity, any underage workers," the spokesperson said.
When you have to make a lot of product in a short amount of time, there is huge incentive to break your policies. Never mind that Chinese law only gets enforced if you're from the wrong family or alignment of families.
"It is a clear sign that SACOM is not interested in seeing actions that bring real benefit to workers in China. As such, they do a disservice to those companies who do provide competitive wages and benefits," Foxconn said.
SACOM is interested in bringing benefit to workers in China, just that they would rather see workers have some freedom - especially if it means openly speaking out against the multinationals and government officials that only want a pliant workforce.
In a sideways swipe to SACOM, Foxconn is working with "credible outside organisations such as the Fair Labor Association" to "ensure that our over a million employees in China have a safe and positive working environment and compensation and benefits that are competitive to everyone else."
Foxconn's definition of credible is "as long as they say things we like".
Foxconn top brass Terry Gou has been quoted as saying: "Hungry people have especially clear minds".
If his definition means willing to comply just for the meager rations given, even if one sees unspeakable acts.
Terry Gou also allegedly said [techeye.net], speaking at a zoo in Taipei: "I have a headache how to manage one million animals."
He sure has a very low opinion of the people that work for Foxconn if that's so good of a place.
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If some kids got in there it was probably a corrupt HR worker trying to get a gig for his nephews or something - and they've improved the screening process, requiring good government ID
Which, given China, is something that can easily be faked.
Calling Burston Marsteller a PR firm is a joke (Score:3)
There can't be many PR companies which have had clients like the Argentinian military junta led by General Jorge Videla who helped 35,000 people to disappear. Burson-Marsteller looked after the image of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and Saudi Arabia after it was pointed out that most of the September 11 attackers were from that country.
With clients like these, Burson Marsteller might as well be a propaganda firm given how many despotic countries outside the US are on the list.
Re:Calling Burston Marsteller a PR firm is a joke (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Calling Burston Marsteller a PR firm is a joke (Score:5, Insightful)
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I didn't know there was a difference between a PR firm and a "propaganda" firm.
Propaganda firms are usually government employees. And PR firm employees are usually better dressed.
But it is essentially the same old shit they shovel.
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I really don't know how they helped the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. As far as I know he got the FULL execution platoon 22 years ago. So, I'd say that's a pretty bad example.
PR firms always say they can never guarantee results, they can only provide efforts and their professional judgments.
And a monthly bill for services, describing all the wonderful efforts they made in your behalf.
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Well, on some fronts the Romanian propaganda certainly worked. The wife of the dictator of Romania, Elena Ceausescu was a woman who never finished middle school. In propaganda they basically made the world believe that she was a renowned scientist(chemical researcher) and the party even managed to get her a doctorate.
But propaganda can never withstand the shining light of truth and the image of the wife of the dicator as a brilliant scientist evaporated after the fall of communism in the eastern block.
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Ed Bernays, the man who got America's women addicted to cigarettes by subverting feminism in the service of his tobacco industry clients.
Why PR? (Score:3)
Why is this an Apple story? (Score:3)
It's not about them.
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Don't Blame Foxconn (Score:3)
I'll get modded flamebait for this but it's true. Everyone I know does not give a single f-ck about upgrading for the sake of having the newest, latest, greatest whatever gadget is coming out. Apples 'record sales' are largely symptomatic of a several much bigger problems. Greed, envy, waste, and more. 37 million iphones? with sales up 128% from last year. 15.4 million ipads - also doubled from last year. Apple isnt the only offender but they are tge biggest.
* http://allthingsd.com/20120124/apples-record-iphone-and-ipad-sales-beat-expectations/ [allthingsd.com]
Good for Foxconn, a large successsful business (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this an eyebrow raising story? Is Tylenol somehow like Bohpol? Tylenol was a corporation which was a victim of an attack on its brand and business practice, and hired a PR firm and made changes to bottle caps which are taught as the textbook business response to a press emergency. Having been to Foxconn / Han Hai and worked with people from there, and having read the hysterical descriptions of their operations in the USA press, I think they deserve credit for A) having already identified a scaleability problem (plan to put in robot labor), B) having raised the salaries significantly within weeks of the bad press, and now C) hiring a professional western PR firm to help them in a dilemma in western PR.
I'm not excusing everything that has happened in the course of Han Hoi Precision's growth curve, but they seem to be handling the industrial revolution reform at a pace in years rather than decades. Sure some of it is reaction to criticism, but rapid response is not the same as "cover up"! Some commenters seem to have no default setting between fanboy/troll, and any story with Foxconn in a headline becomes 5-Mod v. 0-Mod debate, more like American politics than indication that anyone is in any way concerned about China's development, pollution, or unemployment balance.
Re:Good for Foxconn, a large successsful business (Score:5, Insightful)
Most here only seem to see the sensationalism of certain aspects and ignore details that make the story less interesting.
Workers sometimes work 30 hours straight during a rush period for which they were paid for every hour. I've worked 36 hour shifts myself during plant startup/shutdown but since I was salaried I didn't get any extra pay.
These workers live in company dormitories because the surrounding areas have no housing for them. If the company didn't built dorms, they could not attract any workers.
Workers don't have hot running water in their dorms much like the surrounding area.
Workers don't even know their roommates which is not unlike large, densely populated cities where neighbors don't know each other especially if they don't share the same work shift.
Workers work for little pay according to US wages. For China their wages are better than normal.
There have been 20 suicides in the last two years for a work population of nearly 1 million which is well below the national average.
I don't pretend that work conditions are the best in the world. It's a minimum wage factory job and some people don't like those jobs whether they are in China or on an assembly line in the US. For the most part, Foxconn doesn't really care about their workers any more than a company should. They don't go out of their way to harm workers which some people seem to think.
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This kind of nonsense is a part of a very pervasive ideology within much of the left that is hysterically conspiratorial in its view of "the corporations" (which itself is just a buzzword for all business except mom-and-pops) and where the government needs to step in and micromanage every aspect of economic life. Many believe it; many also don't and use this as propaganda as they're fully aware of what you mentioned above. Their concern isn't truth, betterment of the workers, or anything like that--it's s
Let's look at Foxconn's Wikipedia page... (Score:2)
... and see if we can find any influence yet.
Ok (Score:3)
If you hire a guy like this one, then you have more than a little bit of shit up your sleeves.
Kill HP! (Score:2)
And all the companies that job their manufacturing to this company. Why Apple is singled out is completely beyond reason.
As a wise man once said: (Score:2)
"By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do
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Doonesbury ran a series of storylines on a firm like that a year or so ago.
Blaming the Saudis directly for 911 is stretching things slightly: Saudi Arabia is run by religous conservatives mired in the middle ages, the people who carried out the 911 attacks considered the Saudi rulers to be hypocritical liberals. They were incandescent with rage at the Saudi rulers allowing armed infidels onto their sacred soil during the first Gulf War and its aftermath.
Re:Track Record (Score:5, Insightful)
Saudi Arabia is run by religous conservatives
No, Saudi Arabia is run by clever, worldly people whose preferred tool for oppression is religious conservatism. If you believe that the Saudi Arabia is ruled by the religious, the USA by bastions of freedom and USSR was controlled selfless communists then the PR has worked on you too.
Religion is a symptom, not a cause.
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Yup, thats the mindset of the 911 crew!
With one little insignificant addition - they *cared*, really cared about this.
I could give you my opinion of the US, freedom and even the old USSR but that would take this thread waaay off topic and I really can't be bothered.
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I honestly haven't given it much thought but what in your eyes rule each of those nations?
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Dang, why are you just an AC? I like this a lot.
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inertia-laden cultural institutions
Why do you insist on using a euphemism (which barely euphemises, btw) instead of just saying "religion?"
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The same thing that's always truly ruled every nation of size, a morass of competing interests trying to take over so they can run everything.
The only reason we're not all just plugged in to a system ala The Matrix is that competing interests fight for the right to plug us in.
Many of us, of course, might as well be already.
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I wonder if it's just human nature on a macro scale. Fighting like animals but using politics as a weapon and the people as fodder.
Re:Track Record (Score:4, Informative)
The situation is a bit more complex than that. Saudi Arabia is run by the House of Saud, [wikipedia.org] a monarchistic dictatorship, who have backed the dictators [foreignaffairs.com] in the Arab Spring [wikipedia.org] including the sending of troops and tanks to Bahrain to brutally suppress protests there. They are also accused of assassinating the leaders of their own protests. [wikipedia.org] And some of the upper parts of the monarchy, and parts of Saudi Intelligence, are accused of backing terrorism, see The Kingdom and the Towers: [vanityfair.com]
In support of his claim that Saudi Arabia supported terrorism, Khilewi spoke of an episode relevant to the first, 1993, attempt to bring down the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. “A Saudi citizen carrying a Saudi diplomatic passport,” he said, “gave money to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the World Trade Center bombing,” when the al-Qaeda terrorist was in the Philippines. The Saudi relationship with Yousef, the defector claimed, “is secret and goes through Saudi intelligence.”
When Khalifa returned to Saudi Arabia, in 1995—following detention in the United States and subsequent acquittal on terrorism charges in Jordan—he was, according to C.I.A. bin Laden chief Michael Scheuer, met by a limousine and a welcome home from “a high-ranking official.” A Philippine newspaper would suggest that the official had been Prince Sultan, then a deputy prime minister and minister of defense and aviation, today the heir to the Saudi throne.
In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 Prince Turki, chief of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department (G.I.D.), sealed a deal under which bin Laden agreed not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban, not demand bin Laden’s extradition, and not bring pressure to close down al-Qaeda training camps. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden.
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What if they built them because of westerners whining about exploited people who have suicide as the only way out, not because there was a problem per se?
Does anybody know what was the reason people commited suicide there? There are hundreds of thousands of people working there in factories, were the suicides all work related or maybe some/most were a result of broken heart or bullying in their out-of-work social circles or any other thing people commit suicides because of?
Besides, can't people simply walk
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Walking away would get them in trouble with the local authorities, whether it be on an actual charge or not.
That, and they would not be able to find alternative work.
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Suicide rate at Foxconn: 1.8 per million workers, suicide rate in the United States (IIRC) 3+ per million workers, maybe Americans should try and get Foxconn jobs instead... :)
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Does anybody know what was the reason people commited suicide there?
Word got around that Foxconn was handing out large payments to the suicides' families as hush money. Providing for your family is a strong incentive among Orientals, and suicide doesn't have that much of a stigma there in comparison to the West.
Besides, can't people simply walk away instead of killing themselves?
The PRC tosses people in prison for tweeting against the party line.
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The problem is that Foxconn had to bring in a PR firm known for whitewashing despots.
Their regular PR agency, known as the PRC's propaganda arm, just wasn't cutting it.
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Their regular PR agency, known as the PRC's propaganda arm, just wasn't cutting it.
Let's face it, the PRC is shitty at propaganda. Nobody believes anything they say. They're pretty good at strong-arming, which is why people believe anything they want them to believe, but it's not on the strength of their words, but on the strength of their strength.
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I am less likely to buy a product produced by Foxconn, and awareness of these issues have tarnished a few brand names to me.
Even a 1% drop in sales for a company like Apple would result in billions of dollars in lost sales.
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What is the ethical alternative? If we're talking about an iPod you can just not have one, or you can buy used. If we're talking about a new computer, it's downright difficult to not have a PCB in there made and populated by Foxconn. And Foxconn has actually reformed their processes, doubling worker pay recently for example, so it's likely they are actually better than many or even most other manufacturers. That doesn't change the need to continue to shine a light on the subject. Foxconn can get the light o
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How is this relevant to this topic?