Businessweek article on Foxconn/Hon Hai: "The Man Who Makes Your iPhone"

So you are comparing the suicide rate/living conditions of a US university to the suicide rate/living conditions of a chinese sweatshop where the average worker gets about $15 a day? I guess anything to justify keeping the latest i(blank) cheap.

 

I understand where you are coming from, but the reason these workers are being driven to suicide is because of poor working conditions at a factory that builds electronic status symbols for us. A worker at foxconn would have to work over 30 days just to buy the cheapest ipad3.

 

Compared to what? If the conditions are better than where they came from, is the problem Foxconn or is the issue misplaced?

One question here is what is the media angle. It's a mistake to compare Chinese factory conditions to American factory conditions. It's sensible to compare between chinese factory conditions. Unfortunately, I'm not knowledgeable on that. I am knowledgeable on media viewpoint manipulation practices, so I question what the true situation is.

 

The conditions where they came from are probably better than they are at foxconn. They migrate to foxconn because $15 a day is enough to make sure their family back home can survive.

Well I think the true situation is that people are jumping off the roof of a chinese factory in protest of poor working conditions. Do the working conditions in other chinese factories suck? Probably. There is no such thing as OSHA or the Dept of Labor in china. The reason that this particular factory has the attention of the media is that it builds products for one of the worlds largest and richest companies, and these products are used predominantly by people who make more in one hour than a foxconn worker makes in one day. And then when said people grow tired of this product, it ends up going back to china where it destroys their environment as more poor people try and extract the precious metals and minerals that were used to make it.

 

Teh highlighted is changed text by me... to spout the truth, instead of just a position.

 

Exactly. People exploited to produce things cheaply.

 

I don't think we can make that assumption. The working conditions are miserable and unconscionable. We are willing to buy goods produced under inhumane conditions in order to save a buck. But the conditions themselves, and separation from family, are enough to explain the suicides without the assumption that people are killing themselves in protest.

Buddhists in Vietnam during the war sometimes burned themselves to death in protest, and Chinese have engaged in protests that risked and sometimes led to their own deaths. But I am not aware that the Chinese have any cultural history of committing suicide as an act of protest.

Protest is ineffective unless it is clear that it is a protest. I don't think it is at all clear that these suicides, which are fewer than the overall rate of suicide in China, are protests.

That does not change the fact that we, collectively, have a responsibility to demand that our products be produced under safe and healthy working conditions, and that workers be paid a living wage.

Hey, Bob, if you're going to change my words, at least spell them right.

 

Make no mistake, I'm not defending bad working conditions. I am concerned that by assailing one factory, many may think that they are helping the situation. Instead, what happens is the factory assailed spends money....on PR. Hiding the working conditions takes a higher priority than improving them.

I'm also do not see how what is being made and working conditions are linked. What about the workers building a dam? or staples? In one case they can never buy the product and in another they can buy a lifetime supply. It's the working conditions that matter. The Apple products use or misuse belongs to Apple and their consumers, not the Chinese manufacturing.

Properly addressing poor working conditions requires a strong media and widespread reporting of all factories and conditions. I support that. Pressure to allow accurate reporting nationwide will reap much better progress than assailing Foxconn or any one product type. The Arab spring is due to information exchange amoung many, not any one group's media target.

 

And there I go a thinking I was all cute and shit again... sorry if it made ya upset Bra, that wasn't my intent... :yo:

 

^ That's okay. It's just that changing other people's words inside a quote is one of my pet peeves. The proper way is to quote the actual words, and then your preferred version outside the quote. There are people here (not you) who make a habit of turning a statement around 180 degrees inside a quote. If I was a mod, that (not what you did) would be grounds for immediate and permanent banning.

I was just commenting on your misspelling of the word "the" which is not spelled "teh".

 

Ya GOTS ta know Bra... when I replaced your word with teh, it was intentional... and not a slur on what you posted, nor something I will apologize for as directed in some ill manner to you - for that was never the intent.

Demand ain't just USofA consumers Bra... and globalization will bring more organized labor... which... has some merits, as well as downfalls when you look at the current models.

Anyways Bra... Teh 1st thing I say, when I change anything, is I have changed it... and I did with your word too... and hopefully you take it for the truth I wanted to say was rooted in your words, just not mentioned directly until my alteration of your quote.

 

^ Okay. Thanks.

 

I think it might be time for me to wade in here, now that I've finally stopped just lurking on this board and have actually started posting things. I should point out that a big part of what I do is corporate investigation in China, and I have looked into Foxconn in the past.

What I'll say first is that Foxconn is one of the nastiest companies that I've ever looked into in China. It's a terrible employer; its methods are underhand; and I'm not going to say that it's involved in corruption or corporate espionage because it's easily the most litigious company in China. But it is not unique in its poor employment conditions or underhand methods. And, in spite of employing more than 1m Mainland Chinese people, it is not a Mainland Chinese company.

And what I'll say next is that I always find it odd that everyone focuses on Apple. If your electronics are from Sony, Panasonic, Olympus, Lenovo, Dell, HP-Compaq, Creative, or pretty much anyone else, they're made by Foxconn. I suppose you could argue that Apple is more hypocritical because it markets itself as nice, but still, it seems a little unfair to ignore everyone else.

The conditions back home are the sort of picturesque poverty that you'll see on an episode of Lonely Planet where the presenter says it's lovely because these people aren't "Westernised" (by which he means that they don't have electricity or healthcare or running water).

And people wouldn't make the move to work at Foxconn, or at any other horrible factory in Dongguan or Foshan or wherever if they didn't think it was worth it. These people are from very poor inland rural areas where $15 a day is a lot. They save their money, work for five years, and then go home: they have enough money to buy or build a house and to live comfortably. I'm British, and when I was a kid, several of my relatives worked on oil rigs in the North Sea. Their jobs were horrible, but they saved enough money after a few years to give up, go home, buy a house, and live comfortably. I've spoken to a lot of these rural migrant workers, and their attitudes are the same as those of the oil-rig workers that I knew as a kid. They don't like it, but they think it's worthwhile.

Actually, there is (中华人民共和国人力资源和社会保障部).

What's interesting, as far as Foxconn is concerned, is the new Labour Law, which came into effect on 1 January 2008. It brought in lots of new regulations and restrictions, banning unpaid overtime, limiting employees' hours, and so on. It also allowed for close inspection of companies in order to ensure that they complied with the rules. In order to comply with the regulations, most outsourced electronics manufacturers in China saw their labour costs rise by around 15%. The industry rumour is that Foxconn's labour costs went up by 70%. This says a lot about what Foxconn is like as an employer.

You make a good point. But one thing that doesn't seem to have been addressed much in this thread is the issue of "Chinese manufacturing". Foxconn is seen throughout as a Chinese manufacturer. It's a Taiwanese company. Most of its 1m+ employees are in Mainland China, but Foxconn is headquartered in Taiwan, managed from Taiwan, and is Taiwanese owned.

And that's worth bearing in mind. When the new Labour Law that I mentioned earlier came into effect, it had a devastating (and yet arguably quite good) effect on the economy in Dongguan, the horrible town in Guangdong where much of the world's clothes, electronics, and general rubbish are made. The reason for this is that a lot of Taiwanese companies with low-end manufacturing facilities there and elsewhere in Guangdong shut down their shoe factories and clothing sweatshops, and moved to Cambodia and Bangladesh, where labour protection wasn't as strong. Hundreds of thousands of people were made redundant and headed back to the countryside: for much of 2008, it was quite a serious threat to social order in rural China. But it allowed Dongguan and other cities to move up the value chain: the central government wanted to start moving out of this ultra-low-end manufacturing.

Anyway, the worst of the employers, according to people I've spoken to in Dongguan, Shenzhen, and elsewhere, weren't "Chinese manufacturers". They were Taiwanese, from the vibrant democracy across the strait. Certainly there's a degree of Mainland Chinese culpability for the poor working conditions, in that Mainland authorities allowed them to happen. But it is important to remember that in many cases, it's not Mainland companies imposing these unpleasant conditions.

 

The relationship between China and Taiwan is strange. On one hand, the Chinese make a big political issue of eventually "reacquiring" Taiwan. On the other hand, the economic interwinding of the two countries is immense. In fact, the mutual interdependence may be so great that hostilities may not be to either countries advantage.

I have to admit, it's an unusual situation when Taiwan moves manufacturing out of China since China is too expensive.

 

Claiming that China will never stand for Taiwan doing whatever it's about to do, and threatening to invade Taiwan if it keeps making moves towards formal independence, are rites of passage for senior Chinese officials as they move up the leadership ladder. You have to do it to prove your patriotism and show your commitment to the Party. But everyone knows that it's all just empty threats: the Chinese leadership knows that it and the Taiwanese leadership both want to maintain the status quo, because it's in everyone's interests.

It's a natural progression, really: Taiwanese companies moved their manufacturing out of Taiwan to the Mainland when Taiwan's economic development meant that it was no longer a good place for low-skilled, labour-intensive manufacturing; it's only natural that they'd do the same thing when Mainland China reaches a similar stage.

 

Since you are much more familiar with China, what is their present and future relationships with both South and North Korea?