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I hope this makes people reconsider if they really need a new laptop, iphone, etc. I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they cou

I hope this makes people reconsider if they really need a new laptop, iphone, etc. I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited.

abricot 8y ago
Unfortunately, like with clothes, paying 10ntimes as much would still not guarantee this.
virmundi 8y ago
Doubt it. Didn’t happen with rubber. Didn’t happen with chocolate. Didn’t happen with Californian tomatoes. Technology will press the exploitation out when you don’t need people.
klenwell 8y ago
> I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited. A lot of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart shopping complex the next town over. Now they're upgrading that to an Amazon distribution center in the next state over. On this board, I expect a lot of people will explain (unsympathetically but not completely unreasonably) that the benefits of these exploitative conditions outweigh the costs (this unfortunate soul's death included). I think you can have reasonably priced quality products and worker well-being, but good luck making your case to shareholders and their apologists.
- adamc 8y ago
  What would need to rise is a collective consciousness of what a shitty system this is. Most people are too distracted to even pay attention, let alone do something about it.
  - asdff 8y ago
    > Most people are too distracted to even pay attention, let alone do something about it. This is by design. As long as it's profitable to exploit labor, nothing will change. It is far far easier to keep people distracted and blind to all of this than it is to make them 'wake up,' or make any changes to their lives.
    - clayg 8y ago
      > This is by design. As long as it's profitable to exploit labor, nothing will change. Do you by chance believe in "Intelligent Design" as an explanation for complex biological systems? It's not obvious to me that inefficient social systems (i.e. not optimized for worker/human happiness) require "design"? If we create an organism who's survival condition is "generate profit" won't it just do that as efficiently as we let it? When I think about exploitative systems as requiring "malice by design" I rarely seem to uncover a solution other than "wait for someone else to be less evil" or occasionally "live with it and treat the worst of the symptoms".
      - ravar 8y ago
        I really like this line of questioning as a response to the gp. hopefully I will be able to use this myself.
      - jancsika 8y ago
        To me the irony is that you seem to narrow Intelligent Design to merely mean a fatuous scientific theory that is unnecessary for explaining the development of complex biological systems. But the very inception of Intelligent Design was in fact "malicious by design."[1] Intelligent Design was the functional equivalent of `s/creationism/intelligent design/g` in a creationist textbook to get around a Supreme Court ban from 1987. That revised textbook was then banned by a district court in 2005. I'm fairly certain that Ken Miller and the many others who fought to keep that book out of classrooms in 2004-05 understood clearly that the "Intelligent Design" side was acting in bad faith. I'm also fairly certain they weren't constrained by their knowledge of the "designed malice" of the other side but instead used that fact to rally more citizens to their cause. [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8498-judge-intelligent-design-is-re-labelled-creationism/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8498-judge-intelligen...
- WalterSear 8y ago
  > A lot of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart shopping complex the next town over. Now they're upgrading that to an Amazon distribution center in the next state over. Despite their convictions to the contrary, those are a different set of people.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    True. It's more like "ONE half of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart", and "the OTHER half of America is using an Amazon distribution center in the next state over". I'm not sanguine that Americans would pay fair-trade prices for household products. (And to be completely fair, there's certainly a half of America that just couldn't afford to pay the prices even if they wanted.)
- Nokinside 8y ago
  You would need stronger unions to fix this. China does not allow real unions and US has weird union laws that make their relationship with companies confrontational (really: Unions in Europe and US are very different).
  - ghostly_s 8y ago
    Any readings on how European unions work?
    - harrumph 8y ago
      >Any readings on how European unions work? To me, the major and defining difference between US vs. European management/labor relationships is found in Germany's principle of co-determination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-determination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-determination Under these rules, the boards of directors of companies in Germany are required to include a significant portion of their voting membership to be drawn from worker population. As such, governorship of the company is at least partially beholden to the input of the persons who create all its value. This is starkly contrasted by US capitalism, where the workers who create all the company's value have effectively no say (apart from collective bargaining and strike) in any directions the company takes. The idea of workers voting on the board is laughable in the states. Co-determination was enshrined right after WWII, in part because the Germans looked around at the industrialized barbarism of the Third Reich and asked themselves "how can we prevent this from ever happening again"? The answer they came up with, in more ways than just co-determination, was to pointedly not hand the country's capitalists everything they wanted. They decided to place serious checks upon the power of capitalists. It's important to never forget that once in power, the Third Reich's first act was to round up, imprison and murder labor union leadership, socialists and communists. Co-determination is one way to remember.
    - Nokinside 8y ago
      The US has enterprise-level or workplace level bargaining. Most European countries have sector-level bargaining. In the US workplaces are divided into unionized and non-unionized. Unionized firm is in competitive disadvantage against non-unionized firms. This results a situation where firms fight against unionization very aggressively and unions respond in same. It's very confrontational and aggressive. In Europe firms with more union members are not in competitive disadvantage relative to firms with fewer union members, because negotiations happen sector level. For example restaurant workers union(s) meet restaurant business representatives and they make industry-wide agreements.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  > I think you can have reasonably priced quality products and worker well-being, but good luck making your case to shareholders and their apologists. If the market could bear a higher priced product that’s ethically sourced, why wouldn’t companies simply raise the price to what the market bears, and pocket the profit instead of ethically source it?
  - aneutron 8y ago
    Congratz, you have a grasp of Apple's business model
icebraining 8y ago
Would their lives be better if we bought fewer laptops and phones?
trevyn 8y ago
I think guilt and shame are losing their power to control behavior. On the whole, I think this is a good thing; they’re toxic emotions.
stupidbird 8y ago
I think you're overly optimistic about how little people care about price. I'd argue that if you could halve the price by literally using slaves to manufacturer them, most people wouldn't care as long as those slaves were on the other side of the planet.
- calimac 8y ago
  Most are lying if they say they care about the location of the slave. Saudi Arabia recently eliminated slavery in 1965. Now they contract and imprison Indians, and packis to build their glass towers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Few care about anything other than having what they want now and looking good for other people. ...PATHETIC
- eiaoa 8y ago
  > I'd argue that if you could halve the price by literally using slaves to manufacturer them, most people wouldn't care as long as those slaves were on the other side of the planet. But I'd say that's mainly because they don't know or don't truly understand the situation. The reason for that is that literally billions of dollars are spent on advertising that papers over human rights issues by blasting competing messages about luxury, fashion, desirability, economy, etc. A passive consumer isn't going to be able to overcome the environment of information asymmetry that's actively maintained by wealthy corporations. Then there's also the issue of how the race to the bottom also actively destroys most ethical alternatives, which just turns understanding into despair over the lack of ethical options. I think if you put the half-price, slave-made product and a double-priced, ethically made alternative next to each other in a store, I think consumers would chose the latter if they were both sold under signs that clearly communicated the realities of the lives of the workers that made them. That's not going to happen because the incentives are for the company that mistreats its workers is to lie and cheat, so I don't think the market can solve this issue. It's going to require sustained intervention by ethical governments to fix the incentives in favor of human rights.
- ashrk 8y ago
  There's also the matter of difficulty keeping up with which products are tied to which bad actors, possibly far up their supply chain. Distributing responsibility for determining which companies are being ultra-shitty but not breaking the law imposes far too much time-cost on consumers to be reasonable, on top of the regular costs of participating in boycotts. They're not an effective means of enforcing society norms. Regulation is—making being ultra-shitty illegal works way better than imposing a cost of ((time it takes to keep up with and track shitty-company news)+(cost of participating in boycotts)) times (number of consumers) across your entire society. That's clearly untenable and it's not really the fault of individual consumers that boycotts don't work for enforcing social norms, since they can't really work, in the general case, once your economy scales past the local cottage industry level. It's impractical in a global, or even national economy. Then there's game-theoretical pressure to defect from a boycott, et c. Even the highly-engaged consumer will catch and (weakly, ineffectually) punish maybe single-digit percentages of the awfulness occurring in their economic footprint, at great time and probably monetary cost, unless they check out from the economy almost entirely.
cmurf 8y ago
It would have to be enforced by regulations or law. No different than child labor laws and overtime compensation laws. Businesses, shareholders, do not care about worker exploitation. And if prices double, it's plausible sales drop to one quarter what they are now, and the problem gets even worse. If all the technology just went away and these people went back to working in the fields, because they had no other choice, would that be better? Maybe it would be less stressful but they'd also make less money. Maybe they're worse off from having the choice. Maybe they're not entirely responsible for making this choice because of deception, the trap that is earning more than your peers but still not being wealthy enough to ever quit.
Aunche 8y ago
Progress is incremental. A Foxconn worker has a much higher standard of living than his father who worked in a toy factory. His father had a higher standard of living than his grandparents who were subsistence farmers. This wouldn't happen if everyone had to pay twice as much for devices.
- news_to_me 8y ago
  I wonder how many subsistence farmers committed suicide.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Well, 79% of suicides in China (2009-2014) were in rural areas. There was a massive drop in the country's rate as people moved to urban areas. As a related note, during the worst year, Foxconn had 930k workers, and 14 deaths by suicide, so approximately 1.5/100k. In the US, all age groups above 14 have a suicide rate over 10/100k.
  - tzs 8y ago
    I haven't seen anything on subsistence farmers in particular. The closest is the general rural population. Around 80% of Chinese suicides are from the rural population, and the overall Chinese suicide rate is an order of magnitude bigger than the Foxconn suicide rate.
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    Southeast Asia has a very, very large problem with subsistence farmer suicides. Some programs such as restricting access to human-poisonous pesticides have helped where they were implemented, but yes, if you're worried about suicide, you should look at the rural areas, not at the factories. Coincidentally, the same seems to be true in USA - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-americas-farmers-killing-themselves-in-record-numbers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer... Urbanization is a powerful force; it happens because people want to leave the rural life behind, and as it continues, it pushes the contrast ever more in favor of urban life; people move to the cities because of the opportunities, economy and culture there; and as they do so, they "carry" even more opportunities, economy and culture away from the rural areas to these cities.
setquk 8y ago
Call me cynical but most of the populous has an amazing ability to turn a blind eye when they’re benefiting from it in some way.
geodel 8y ago
Unfortunately 'lot' does not have any definitive size. I'd imagine just considering how people think here, that there would not be more than 2-3% people who'd pay 25% more for a gadget because of ethical concerns.
closeparen 8y ago
Would the Foxconn worker fare better in this scenario? How?
nylonstrung 8y ago
What am I supposed to do as the consumer. Am I to not buy new electronics at all in protest? If 10,000 of us were to do this do you think the drop in revenue would be attributed to dissatisfaction with the working conditions instead of underperformance in sales and marketing? If there was a way for me to paypal $20 to the employees myself on top of a new iPhone there could but its not something that consumers have much control over and I am skeptical that just using outdated devices addresses the situation
- asdff 8y ago
  I don't think there is anything that consumers could do when the entire market is supported by this model. This is something that will have to be driven by government regulation, not the market that benefits from this system. The best thing you could do is support politicians who care about these human rights abuses, and who don't care about angering shareholders.
umanwizard 8y ago
Consider what those “exploited” workers would be doing if enough fewer people bought iPhones for their labor not to be needed. Would they be better off than they are now? Presumably they are not being held against their will, so this is the best job they could find. Low-skilled factory labor is a worse job than sitting in a Silicon Valley office all day, but it’s probably better than rural poverty or unemployment.
- savanaly 8y ago
  I fully agree with this. To quote Paul Krugman: >You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be helped with foreign aid? Maybe–although the historical record of regions like southern Italy suggests that such aid has a tendency to promote perpetual dependence. Anyway, there isn’t the slightest prospect of significant aid materializing. Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of course–but they won’t, or at least not because we tell them to. And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard... [0] [0] https://slate.com/business/1997/03/in-praise-of-cheap-labor.html https://slate.com/business/1997/03/in-praise-of-cheap-labor....
  - asdff 8y ago
    No one is arguing that these factories shouldn't have been built. No one is arguing that these jobs don't pay more. The concern is the conditions for the worker are simply inhumane and the companies commissioning this work should be held responsible for knowingly profiting off this behavior. These would be Apple-owned factories, not Foxconn's, if Apple hadn't figure out they can pass the blame to rights abuses to whoever's name is on the building.
    - savanaly 8y ago
      In that essay Krugman treats wage and working conditions as interchangeable, and I think that's the right approach. Two different jobs with different wages can be equally desirable if one has better working conditions than the other. So to say "Apple should pay more" vs "Apple should have better working conditions" is the same statement, there's no meaningful distinction. Either way the workers would benefit at the company's expense, and the tradeoff between working for, say, Apple vs what the best job there was before Apple built the factory is the same.
notJim 8y ago
Individual consumption choices definitely matter [1], but working alongside others in your workplace and community is even more impactful. It's a longterm bet, but if you start talking with others around you about their own conditions, I think people will eventually start to see the parallels. Imagine if American workers refused to support trade deals unless they included rights for workers as part of them, for example. But it starts with recognizing that the people around us are in the same boat. [1] I am currently resisting buying an iPhone XS even though I really want one, because I'm trying to work on mine.
JDiculous 8y ago
Prices wouldn't even have to rise. The gross margin on an iPhone is ~60%, meaning there is plenty of leeway to improve working conditions while maintaining profitability. Of course this would mean less profit for shareholders and executives, so this would never happen.
TylerE 8y ago
I hope people would actually do some research before biting on the clickbait. Foxconn has a lower suicide rate than the national average, and compared to working conditions in most of China is virtually first world. If you want to see REAL human suffering, look to something like the shipbreaking yards in India and Bangladesh.
- pyrale 8y ago
  One could hope this kind of thread was not a place for whataboutism and pain metering.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  Has the rest of the world had to install nets to catch suicide jumpers?
  - jononor 8y ago
    You know that they have been working many years on a suicide net for the Golden Gate bridge, right? I believe installation began some months ago.
    - ellius 8y ago
      The Golden Gate Bridge is a landmark, not a workplace.
  - Paperweight 8y ago
    We're talking about places where they don't even bother to put up nets because it's cheaper to scrape them off the ground.
- ansible 8y ago
  > If you want to see REAL human suffering, look to something like the shipbreaking yards in India and Bangladesh. Or the e-waste recycling done in Ghana: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-behind-e-waste-dump-africa-180957597/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-...
cptskippy 8y ago
> I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited. It's interesting that we think in terms of what extra amount we would pay. Apple commands the highest profit margins in the industry per device manufactured which is in part due to the negotiated labor costs it pays to companies like Foxconn. Why not instead ask Apple to pay more for labor instead? They already go out of their way to source recycled materials and conflict free materials. Is it so hard to expect them to pay or ask their ODMs to pay living wage labor costs with favorable working conditions?
swayvil 8y ago
Or we could just sell them for the same price but lie about the exploitation. High-quality lies are quite cheap. You can build whole worlds out of them for nothing.
asdfman123 8y ago
Another perspective is this: China's extreme poverty rate (people living on less than $1.90/day) fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012. China is rapidly entering the global middle class, and their workers are rapidly demanding better conditions. All of that was because China wanted to industrialize, and they did it. Should we avoid buying labor from countries that are pursuing rapid industrialization? (This is a genuine question, actually, on my part. I'm still torn between "capitalism has brought tons of people out of poverty" and "real people are exploited every day.")
throwaway080383 8y ago
I'm curious how much it would cost to say double the worker's salaries (or halve their hours at the same pay). How many Foxconn man-hours does it take to produce an iPhone, and what is the average hourly wage?
draw_down 8y ago
Or maybe the people who run these companies could treat their workers better. Just a crazy thought!
asdff 8y ago
Companies just won't advertise that they are made using exploitative conditions. The 'ethically made' technology label will have the same fate as organic, fair trade, etc. type labels: it will be priced out of reach for the vast majority of consumers. Those in silicon valley with their Model 3 and sustainable earwax-based soaps will rave about their latest ethical laptops, while the rest of the country saves up income for years to buy the cheapest new model computer available and strives to make it work as long as possible. Most consumers are already well priced out of paying more for preference or good conscious.
- corey_moncure 8y ago
  > out of reach for the vast majority of consumers. Everywhere I look people are walking around with the latest iPhone (this time they literally named it "excess max"). People you wouldn't expect to have it. As for me, I'm in the top 10% of earners and I carry an iPhone 6, of which I have replaced the screen and the battery. So we want ethically sourced tech? Maybe you're right and we wouldn't be able to keep buying the new model year after year. But we could definitely afford to have them if we saved up and then took care of what we owned. Maybe there would be a trend toward repairability, durability, and maintainability of tech, things of practical matter, and away from inane concerns such as fashion and emojis. Maybe the Apples of the world would have to disburse some of their two hundred billion dollars to the factory employees. Maybe then some of the hands that assemble the iPhones would be able to hold the finished product. Maybe all of that would be a good thing.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Priced out of reach? How were people able to afford the technology of the 80s and 90s that were made in developed countries? The biggest change from the shift of everything to China has been increased corporate profit. The 80s Walkman or VCR made in Japan, the home computer made in the USA or GB were affordable. My 25 year old model M keyboard was made in Scotland. With the steady rise of automation it should be possible to do whilst paying workers a decent wage whether in China or at home. If we have to lose the bottom of the market and the £300 laptops that are barely functional after a single software installation and a security upgrade, well everyone would benefit from losing those.
joe_the_user 8y ago
The problem is that the lowest paid workers everywhere are those who are going to buy a cheap laptop or phone and who aren't going to make choices intended to keep other workers from being exploited (They can't - their other choice is not having a lap or phone at all). The solution can't come from consumer choices. It has to come from either labor militancy or the state putting forward some kind of solution - basic income, minimum wage or something else.
rconti 8y ago
You're dead wrong, unfortunately. I was just in a thread on a Tesla forum about a wireless phone charger kit, and people were bragging about cancelling their order from one place that sold it for $x in order to buy it from another place that ripped it off and sold it for $y. There were justifications, of course. "oh, they're all made in the same factory anyway". "company A probably didn't even design it in the first place, they just want you think they did. It's all marketing". "They didn't lower the price when they removed this one component that's no longer needed". These are all people who don't need the gadget in the first place, and can easily afford to pay the higher price for it. In fact, they were going to in the first place, before the cheaper option came along. They think they're wise consumers. They think they got a bargain. They think you're a sucker if you "overpay". Lots of caveats, sure. I have no idea who designed the product. Maybe they're both ripoffs of someone else's part. Maybe they are built in the same factory. Maybe the only difference is who is making a huge profit off the markup, and how much they're making off of it. But the point stands. People want to pay as little as possible, they feel virtue in that, and they'll invent reasons to justify paying less, no matter what.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I think it's a generational thing. Back in the 80's AT&T used to use the advertising slogan, "You get what you pay for" to indicate that its phone service wasn't the cheapest, but it was the best. Today the 20-somethings I work with balk at paying more than $10 for a logoed T-shirt. This is true for the vast majority of people in that age group, which is why stores like Ross and TJMaxx flourish, while the high-end department stores struggle, and luxury brands (coughLVcough) cope by moving production from Italy to China, or import Chinese workers into European factory camps to keep the "Made in Italy" logos on their goods.
i_phish_cats 8y ago
The price of the device is not at all correlated worker exploitation. Genuine apple devices cost 10x an average phone you could get in China, yet who does Foxconn produce phones for?
pera 8y ago
AFAIK the Fairphone 2 is the only ethically made cell phone, and it actually cost half the price of an iPhone X :)
- PsylentKnight 8y ago
  It's not available outside Europe, sadly.
PunchTornado 8y ago
Honestly, I paid £2400 for my new macbook. They don't need to increase the prices. They need to pay decent salaries and don't take over 50% profit.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  Paying people more than the prevailing market rate is a form of charity. Why should Apple contribute charitably in that particular way, rather than giving an equivalent amount of money to, for example, people suffering from famines in Africa, who are much worse off according to any metric you could imagine than Chinese Foxconn employees?
  - PunchTornado 8y ago
    it can be a business decision for happier and better working employees
mruts 8y ago
I wouldn’t, and I doubt anyone else would either.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
Part of the problem, for developers, is that build toolchains are a garbage heap of hacks that get slower and slower. So you need crazier and crazier laptops to support the containers and IDEs and transpilation and asset pipelines and all that. I code on a 5 year old laptop very happily. But the only reason I can do that is I code close to raw language, with a minimal build chain. I expressly design my software to need less support. Most pros don’t have that luxury. It’s incorporate the new hotness or we won’t be able to attract the cheap devs fresh out of school.
- l30n4da5 8y ago
  this resonates with me. I recently had to buy a new laptop because the cheap dev laptop I had (6GB RAM, Celeron Quad-core) couldn't run IntelliJ with a reasonable amount of performance, even when I tweaked the settings significantly for lower resource consumption. It was the CPU -- it was just way too slow.
- androidgirl 8y ago
  I definitely feel it. I'm currently on an ancient HP elitebook that's my main programming machine, but I compile on a different machine with ssh and use Vim for all my text editing. Opening pycharm on it makes it crawl, and it struggles on the web without noscript.
- asdff 8y ago
  I work in biology, and barring the simplest scripts everything computational we do is run on the university supercomputer because its waaaay faster and cheaper than keeping expensive hardware up to date ourselves, in fact I can get away with just using my phone and the supercomputer if I REALLY wanted. I know in video editing, similar 'rendering farms' are used instead of the top spec personal machines of yore. How long until developers also adopt this philosophy of remote computing, or is the switch already happening?
  - freeone3000 8y ago
    We tried to do this here. It's fairly functional, but there's a number of issues procuring enough exclusive-use hardware, and interfacing with devices - such as phones - is nigh-impossible remote. There's just too much latency to fully move everything remote. The heavy toolchains we use aren't actually THAT heavy - it's measured in minutes, not hours, so remoting introduces too much friction to make it work.
restalis 8y ago
This looks like a hunt for culprits, even if such course of action does not make much sense. Please be aware that these are suicides, not murders. The workers, even the suicidal ones, are free and self-responsible people, presumed to be capable of taking care of themselves and their life, which includes their physical and mental health. Here's a dull, yet important word of advice for everyone: be aware and caring of yourself as a living person and don't hesitate to change course if your current path leads to misery of any kind, let alone to (premature) death.
- gloriousduke 8y ago
  It sounds like he did try to change course by moving and applying for other jobs and positions. The tragedy, well one of them at least, is that the system doesn’t value poets (or librarians). This guy had to die for his work to make it out into the greater world.
  - restalis 8y ago
    Indeed, it's sad to see that high of a price for one's recognition. That reminds me of Pieter Hintjens' words - "Ironic that dying turned out to be the greatest marketing stunt of my life."
chottocharaii 8y ago
We’re not going to have a market solution, only a regulatory one; if one is coming at all
taneq 8y ago
Wouldn't this just result in more of these people being unemployed rather than exploited? And if those are the two options, is the former a better outcome?
fipple 8y ago
Not buying a laptop doesn’t influence practices. What does is buying a laptop from a manufacturer who prioritizes labor conditions. No such major manufacturer exists. Which is why this isn’t going to be solved by individual choice but either by regulation or by declaring it to not be a problem.

abricot 8y ago

Unfortunately, like with clothes, paying 10ntimes as much would still not guarantee this.

virmundi 8y ago

Doubt it. Didn’t happen with rubber. Didn’t happen with chocolate. Didn’t happen with Californian tomatoes. Technology will press the exploitation out when you don’t need people.

klenwell 8y ago

> I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited. A lot of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart shopping complex the next town over. Now they're upgrading that to an Amazon distribution center in the next state over. On this board, I expect a lot of people will explain (unsympathetically but not completely unreasonably) that the benefits of these exploitative conditions outweigh the costs (this unfortunate soul's death included). I think you can have reasonably priced quality products and worker well-being, but good luck making your case to shareholders and their apologists.

adamc 8y ago
What would need to rise is a collective consciousness of what a shitty system this is. Most people are too distracted to even pay attention, let alone do something about it.
- asdff 8y ago
  > Most people are too distracted to even pay attention, let alone do something about it. This is by design. As long as it's profitable to exploit labor, nothing will change. It is far far easier to keep people distracted and blind to all of this than it is to make them 'wake up,' or make any changes to their lives.
  - clayg 8y ago
    > This is by design. As long as it's profitable to exploit labor, nothing will change. Do you by chance believe in "Intelligent Design" as an explanation for complex biological systems? It's not obvious to me that inefficient social systems (i.e. not optimized for worker/human happiness) require "design"? If we create an organism who's survival condition is "generate profit" won't it just do that as efficiently as we let it? When I think about exploitative systems as requiring "malice by design" I rarely seem to uncover a solution other than "wait for someone else to be less evil" or occasionally "live with it and treat the worst of the symptoms".
    - ravar 8y ago
      I really like this line of questioning as a response to the gp. hopefully I will be able to use this myself.
    - jancsika 8y ago
      To me the irony is that you seem to narrow Intelligent Design to merely mean a fatuous scientific theory that is unnecessary for explaining the development of complex biological systems. But the very inception of Intelligent Design was in fact "malicious by design."[1] Intelligent Design was the functional equivalent of `s/creationism/intelligent design/g` in a creationist textbook to get around a Supreme Court ban from 1987. That revised textbook was then banned by a district court in 2005. I'm fairly certain that Ken Miller and the many others who fought to keep that book out of classrooms in 2004-05 understood clearly that the "Intelligent Design" side was acting in bad faith. I'm also fairly certain they weren't constrained by their knowledge of the "designed malice" of the other side but instead used that fact to rally more citizens to their cause. [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8498-judge-intelligent-design-is-re-labelled-creationism/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8498-judge-intelligen...
WalterSear 8y ago
> A lot of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart shopping complex the next town over. Now they're upgrading that to an Amazon distribution center in the next state over. Despite their convictions to the contrary, those are a different set of people.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  True. It's more like "ONE half of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart", and "the OTHER half of America is using an Amazon distribution center in the next state over". I'm not sanguine that Americans would pay fair-trade prices for household products. (And to be completely fair, there's certainly a half of America that just couldn't afford to pay the prices even if they wanted.)
Nokinside 8y ago
You would need stronger unions to fix this. China does not allow real unions and US has weird union laws that make their relationship with companies confrontational (really: Unions in Europe and US are very different).
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  Any readings on how European unions work?
  - harrumph 8y ago
    >Any readings on how European unions work? To me, the major and defining difference between US vs. European management/labor relationships is found in Germany's principle of co-determination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-determination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-determination Under these rules, the boards of directors of companies in Germany are required to include a significant portion of their voting membership to be drawn from worker population. As such, governorship of the company is at least partially beholden to the input of the persons who create all its value. This is starkly contrasted by US capitalism, where the workers who create all the company's value have effectively no say (apart from collective bargaining and strike) in any directions the company takes. The idea of workers voting on the board is laughable in the states. Co-determination was enshrined right after WWII, in part because the Germans looked around at the industrialized barbarism of the Third Reich and asked themselves "how can we prevent this from ever happening again"? The answer they came up with, in more ways than just co-determination, was to pointedly not hand the country's capitalists everything they wanted. They decided to place serious checks upon the power of capitalists. It's important to never forget that once in power, the Third Reich's first act was to round up, imprison and murder labor union leadership, socialists and communists. Co-determination is one way to remember.
  - Nokinside 8y ago
    The US has enterprise-level or workplace level bargaining. Most European countries have sector-level bargaining. In the US workplaces are divided into unionized and non-unionized. Unionized firm is in competitive disadvantage against non-unionized firms. This results a situation where firms fight against unionization very aggressively and unions respond in same. It's very confrontational and aggressive. In Europe firms with more union members are not in competitive disadvantage relative to firms with fewer union members, because negotiations happen sector level. For example restaurant workers union(s) meet restaurant business representatives and they make industry-wide agreements.
ryandrake 8y ago
> I think you can have reasonably priced quality products and worker well-being, but good luck making your case to shareholders and their apologists. If the market could bear a higher priced product that’s ethically sourced, why wouldn’t companies simply raise the price to what the market bears, and pocket the profit instead of ethically source it?
- aneutron 8y ago
  Congratz, you have a grasp of Apple's business model

icebraining 8y ago

Would their lives be better if we bought fewer laptops and phones?

trevyn 8y ago

I think guilt and shame are losing their power to control behavior. On the whole, I think this is a good thing; they’re toxic emotions.

stupidbird 8y ago

I think you're overly optimistic about how little people care about price. I'd argue that if you could halve the price by literally using slaves to manufacturer them, most people wouldn't care as long as those slaves were on the other side of the planet.

calimac 8y ago
Most are lying if they say they care about the location of the slave. Saudi Arabia recently eliminated slavery in 1965. Now they contract and imprison Indians, and packis to build their glass towers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Few care about anything other than having what they want now and looking good for other people. ...PATHETIC
eiaoa 8y ago
> I'd argue that if you could halve the price by literally using slaves to manufacturer them, most people wouldn't care as long as those slaves were on the other side of the planet. But I'd say that's mainly because they don't know or don't truly understand the situation. The reason for that is that literally billions of dollars are spent on advertising that papers over human rights issues by blasting competing messages about luxury, fashion, desirability, economy, etc. A passive consumer isn't going to be able to overcome the environment of information asymmetry that's actively maintained by wealthy corporations. Then there's also the issue of how the race to the bottom also actively destroys most ethical alternatives, which just turns understanding into despair over the lack of ethical options. I think if you put the half-price, slave-made product and a double-priced, ethically made alternative next to each other in a store, I think consumers would chose the latter if they were both sold under signs that clearly communicated the realities of the lives of the workers that made them. That's not going to happen because the incentives are for the company that mistreats its workers is to lie and cheat, so I don't think the market can solve this issue. It's going to require sustained intervention by ethical governments to fix the incentives in favor of human rights.
ashrk 8y ago
There's also the matter of difficulty keeping up with which products are tied to which bad actors, possibly far up their supply chain. Distributing responsibility for determining which companies are being ultra-shitty but not breaking the law imposes far too much time-cost on consumers to be reasonable, on top of the regular costs of participating in boycotts. They're not an effective means of enforcing society norms. Regulation is—making being ultra-shitty illegal works way better than imposing a cost of ((time it takes to keep up with and track shitty-company news)+(cost of participating in boycotts)) times (number of consumers) across your entire society. That's clearly untenable and it's not really the fault of individual consumers that boycotts don't work for enforcing social norms, since they can't really work, in the general case, once your economy scales past the local cottage industry level. It's impractical in a global, or even national economy. Then there's game-theoretical pressure to defect from a boycott, et c. Even the highly-engaged consumer will catch and (weakly, ineffectually) punish maybe single-digit percentages of the awfulness occurring in their economic footprint, at great time and probably monetary cost, unless they check out from the economy almost entirely.

cmurf 8y ago

It would have to be enforced by regulations or law. No different than child labor laws and overtime compensation laws. Businesses, shareholders, do not care about worker exploitation. And if prices double, it's plausible sales drop to one quarter what they are now, and the problem gets even worse. If all the technology just went away and these people went back to working in the fields, because they had no other choice, would that be better? Maybe it would be less stressful but they'd also make less money. Maybe they're worse off from having the choice. Maybe they're not entirely responsible for making this choice because of deception, the trap that is earning more than your peers but still not being wealthy enough to ever quit.

Aunche 8y ago

Progress is incremental. A Foxconn worker has a much higher standard of living than his father who worked in a toy factory. His father had a higher standard of living than his grandparents who were subsistence farmers. This wouldn't happen if everyone had to pay twice as much for devices.

news_to_me 8y ago
I wonder how many subsistence farmers committed suicide.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Well, 79% of suicides in China (2009-2014) were in rural areas. There was a massive drop in the country's rate as people moved to urban areas. As a related note, during the worst year, Foxconn had 930k workers, and 14 deaths by suicide, so approximately 1.5/100k. In the US, all age groups above 14 have a suicide rate over 10/100k.
- tzs 8y ago
  I haven't seen anything on subsistence farmers in particular. The closest is the general rural population. Around 80% of Chinese suicides are from the rural population, and the overall Chinese suicide rate is an order of magnitude bigger than the Foxconn suicide rate.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  Southeast Asia has a very, very large problem with subsistence farmer suicides. Some programs such as restricting access to human-poisonous pesticides have helped where they were implemented, but yes, if you're worried about suicide, you should look at the rural areas, not at the factories. Coincidentally, the same seems to be true in USA - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-americas-farmers-killing-themselves-in-record-numbers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer... Urbanization is a powerful force; it happens because people want to leave the rural life behind, and as it continues, it pushes the contrast ever more in favor of urban life; people move to the cities because of the opportunities, economy and culture there; and as they do so, they "carry" even more opportunities, economy and culture away from the rural areas to these cities.

setquk 8y ago

Call me cynical but most of the populous has an amazing ability to turn a blind eye when they’re benefiting from it in some way.

geodel 8y ago

Unfortunately 'lot' does not have any definitive size. I'd imagine just considering how people think here, that there would not be more than 2-3% people who'd pay 25% more for a gadget because of ethical concerns.

closeparen 8y ago

Would the Foxconn worker fare better in this scenario? How?

nylonstrung 8y ago

What am I supposed to do as the consumer. Am I to not buy new electronics at all in protest? If 10,000 of us were to do this do you think the drop in revenue would be attributed to dissatisfaction with the working conditions instead of underperformance in sales and marketing? If there was a way for me to paypal $20 to the employees myself on top of a new iPhone there could but its not something that consumers have much control over and I am skeptical that just using outdated devices addresses the situation

asdff 8y ago
I don't think there is anything that consumers could do when the entire market is supported by this model. This is something that will have to be driven by government regulation, not the market that benefits from this system. The best thing you could do is support politicians who care about these human rights abuses, and who don't care about angering shareholders.

umanwizard 8y ago

Consider what those “exploited” workers would be doing if enough fewer people bought iPhones for their labor not to be needed. Would they be better off than they are now? Presumably they are not being held against their will, so this is the best job they could find. Low-skilled factory labor is a worse job than sitting in a Silicon Valley office all day, but it’s probably better than rural poverty or unemployment.

savanaly 8y ago
I fully agree with this. To quote Paul Krugman: >You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be helped with foreign aid? Maybe–although the historical record of regions like southern Italy suggests that such aid has a tendency to promote perpetual dependence. Anyway, there isn’t the slightest prospect of significant aid materializing. Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of course–but they won’t, or at least not because we tell them to. And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard... [0] [0] https://slate.com/business/1997/03/in-praise-of-cheap-labor.html https://slate.com/business/1997/03/in-praise-of-cheap-labor....
- asdff 8y ago
  No one is arguing that these factories shouldn't have been built. No one is arguing that these jobs don't pay more. The concern is the conditions for the worker are simply inhumane and the companies commissioning this work should be held responsible for knowingly profiting off this behavior. These would be Apple-owned factories, not Foxconn's, if Apple hadn't figure out they can pass the blame to rights abuses to whoever's name is on the building.
  - savanaly 8y ago
    In that essay Krugman treats wage and working conditions as interchangeable, and I think that's the right approach. Two different jobs with different wages can be equally desirable if one has better working conditions than the other. So to say "Apple should pay more" vs "Apple should have better working conditions" is the same statement, there's no meaningful distinction. Either way the workers would benefit at the company's expense, and the tradeoff between working for, say, Apple vs what the best job there was before Apple built the factory is the same.

notJim 8y ago

Individual consumption choices definitely matter [1], but working alongside others in your workplace and community is even more impactful. It's a longterm bet, but if you start talking with others around you about their own conditions, I think people will eventually start to see the parallels. Imagine if American workers refused to support trade deals unless they included rights for workers as part of them, for example. But it starts with recognizing that the people around us are in the same boat. [1] I am currently resisting buying an iPhone XS even though I really want one, because I'm trying to work on mine.

JDiculous 8y ago

Prices wouldn't even have to rise. The gross margin on an iPhone is ~60%, meaning there is plenty of leeway to improve working conditions while maintaining profitability. Of course this would mean less profit for shareholders and executives, so this would never happen.

TylerE 8y ago

I hope people would actually do some research before biting on the clickbait. Foxconn has a lower suicide rate than the national average, and compared to working conditions in most of China is virtually first world. If you want to see REAL human suffering, look to something like the shipbreaking yards in India and Bangladesh.

pyrale 8y ago
One could hope this kind of thread was not a place for whataboutism and pain metering.
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
Has the rest of the world had to install nets to catch suicide jumpers?
- jononor 8y ago
  You know that they have been working many years on a suicide net for the Golden Gate bridge, right? I believe installation began some months ago.
  - ellius 8y ago
    The Golden Gate Bridge is a landmark, not a workplace.
- Paperweight 8y ago
  We're talking about places where they don't even bother to put up nets because it's cheaper to scrape them off the ground.
ansible 8y ago
> If you want to see REAL human suffering, look to something like the shipbreaking yards in India and Bangladesh. Or the e-waste recycling done in Ghana: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-behind-e-waste-dump-africa-180957597/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-...

cptskippy 8y ago

> I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited. It's interesting that we think in terms of what extra amount we would pay. Apple commands the highest profit margins in the industry per device manufactured which is in part due to the negotiated labor costs it pays to companies like Foxconn. Why not instead ask Apple to pay more for labor instead? They already go out of their way to source recycled materials and conflict free materials. Is it so hard to expect them to pay or ask their ODMs to pay living wage labor costs with favorable working conditions?

swayvil 8y ago

Or we could just sell them for the same price but lie about the exploitation. High-quality lies are quite cheap. You can build whole worlds out of them for nothing.

asdfman123 8y ago

Another perspective is this: China's extreme poverty rate (people living on less than $1.90/day) fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012. China is rapidly entering the global middle class, and their workers are rapidly demanding better conditions. All of that was because China wanted to industrialize, and they did it. Should we avoid buying labor from countries that are pursuing rapid industrialization? (This is a genuine question, actually, on my part. I'm still torn between "capitalism has brought tons of people out of poverty" and "real people are exploited every day.")

throwaway080383 8y ago

I'm curious how much it would cost to say double the worker's salaries (or halve their hours at the same pay). How many Foxconn man-hours does it take to produce an iPhone, and what is the average hourly wage?

draw_down 8y ago

Or maybe the people who run these companies could treat their workers better. Just a crazy thought!

asdff 8y ago

Companies just won't advertise that they are made using exploitative conditions. The 'ethically made' technology label will have the same fate as organic, fair trade, etc. type labels: it will be priced out of reach for the vast majority of consumers. Those in silicon valley with their Model 3 and sustainable earwax-based soaps will rave about their latest ethical laptops, while the rest of the country saves up income for years to buy the cheapest new model computer available and strives to make it work as long as possible. Most consumers are already well priced out of paying more for preference or good conscious.

corey_moncure 8y ago
> out of reach for the vast majority of consumers. Everywhere I look people are walking around with the latest iPhone (this time they literally named it "excess max"). People you wouldn't expect to have it. As for me, I'm in the top 10% of earners and I carry an iPhone 6, of which I have replaced the screen and the battery. So we want ethically sourced tech? Maybe you're right and we wouldn't be able to keep buying the new model year after year. But we could definitely afford to have them if we saved up and then took care of what we owned. Maybe there would be a trend toward repairability, durability, and maintainability of tech, things of practical matter, and away from inane concerns such as fashion and emojis. Maybe the Apples of the world would have to disburse some of their two hundred billion dollars to the factory employees. Maybe then some of the hands that assemble the iPhones would be able to hold the finished product. Maybe all of that would be a good thing.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Priced out of reach? How were people able to afford the technology of the 80s and 90s that were made in developed countries? The biggest change from the shift of everything to China has been increased corporate profit. The 80s Walkman or VCR made in Japan, the home computer made in the USA or GB were affordable. My 25 year old model M keyboard was made in Scotland. With the steady rise of automation it should be possible to do whilst paying workers a decent wage whether in China or at home. If we have to lose the bottom of the market and the £300 laptops that are barely functional after a single software installation and a security upgrade, well everyone would benefit from losing those.

joe_the_user 8y ago

The problem is that the lowest paid workers everywhere are those who are going to buy a cheap laptop or phone and who aren't going to make choices intended to keep other workers from being exploited (They can't - their other choice is not having a lap or phone at all). The solution can't come from consumer choices. It has to come from either labor militancy or the state putting forward some kind of solution - basic income, minimum wage or something else.

rconti 8y ago

You're dead wrong, unfortunately. I was just in a thread on a Tesla forum about a wireless phone charger kit, and people were bragging about cancelling their order from one place that sold it for $x in order to buy it from another place that ripped it off and sold it for $y. There were justifications, of course. "oh, they're all made in the same factory anyway". "company A probably didn't even design it in the first place, they just want you think they did. It's all marketing". "They didn't lower the price when they removed this one component that's no longer needed". These are all people who don't need the gadget in the first place, and can easily afford to pay the higher price for it. In fact, they were going to in the first place, before the cheaper option came along. They think they're wise consumers. They think they got a bargain. They think you're a sucker if you "overpay". Lots of caveats, sure. I have no idea who designed the product. Maybe they're both ripoffs of someone else's part. Maybe they are built in the same factory. Maybe the only difference is who is making a huge profit off the markup, and how much they're making off of it. But the point stands. People want to pay as little as possible, they feel virtue in that, and they'll invent reasons to justify paying less, no matter what.

reaperducer 8y ago
I think it's a generational thing. Back in the 80's AT&T used to use the advertising slogan, "You get what you pay for" to indicate that its phone service wasn't the cheapest, but it was the best. Today the 20-somethings I work with balk at paying more than $10 for a logoed T-shirt. This is true for the vast majority of people in that age group, which is why stores like Ross and TJMaxx flourish, while the high-end department stores struggle, and luxury brands (coughLVcough) cope by moving production from Italy to China, or import Chinese workers into European factory camps to keep the "Made in Italy" logos on their goods.

i_phish_cats 8y ago

The price of the device is not at all correlated worker exploitation. Genuine apple devices cost 10x an average phone you could get in China, yet who does Foxconn produce phones for?

pera 8y ago

AFAIK the Fairphone 2 is the only ethically made cell phone, and it actually cost half the price of an iPhone X :)

PsylentKnight 8y ago
It's not available outside Europe, sadly.

PunchTornado 8y ago

Honestly, I paid £2400 for my new macbook. They don't need to increase the prices. They need to pay decent salaries and don't take over 50% profit.

umanwizard 8y ago
Paying people more than the prevailing market rate is a form of charity. Why should Apple contribute charitably in that particular way, rather than giving an equivalent amount of money to, for example, people suffering from famines in Africa, who are much worse off according to any metric you could imagine than Chinese Foxconn employees?
- PunchTornado 8y ago
  it can be a business decision for happier and better working employees

mruts 8y ago

I wouldn’t, and I doubt anyone else would either.

erikpukinskis 8y ago

Part of the problem, for developers, is that build toolchains are a garbage heap of hacks that get slower and slower. So you need crazier and crazier laptops to support the containers and IDEs and transpilation and asset pipelines and all that. I code on a 5 year old laptop very happily. But the only reason I can do that is I code close to raw language, with a minimal build chain. I expressly design my software to need less support. Most pros don’t have that luxury. It’s incorporate the new hotness or we won’t be able to attract the cheap devs fresh out of school.

l30n4da5 8y ago
this resonates with me. I recently had to buy a new laptop because the cheap dev laptop I had (6GB RAM, Celeron Quad-core) couldn't run IntelliJ with a reasonable amount of performance, even when I tweaked the settings significantly for lower resource consumption. It was the CPU -- it was just way too slow.
androidgirl 8y ago
I definitely feel it. I'm currently on an ancient HP elitebook that's my main programming machine, but I compile on a different machine with ssh and use Vim for all my text editing. Opening pycharm on it makes it crawl, and it struggles on the web without noscript.
asdff 8y ago
I work in biology, and barring the simplest scripts everything computational we do is run on the university supercomputer because its waaaay faster and cheaper than keeping expensive hardware up to date ourselves, in fact I can get away with just using my phone and the supercomputer if I REALLY wanted. I know in video editing, similar 'rendering farms' are used instead of the top spec personal machines of yore. How long until developers also adopt this philosophy of remote computing, or is the switch already happening?
- freeone3000 8y ago
  We tried to do this here. It's fairly functional, but there's a number of issues procuring enough exclusive-use hardware, and interfacing with devices - such as phones - is nigh-impossible remote. There's just too much latency to fully move everything remote. The heavy toolchains we use aren't actually THAT heavy - it's measured in minutes, not hours, so remoting introduces too much friction to make it work.

restalis 8y ago

This looks like a hunt for culprits, even if such course of action does not make much sense. Please be aware that these are suicides, not murders. The workers, even the suicidal ones, are free and self-responsible people, presumed to be capable of taking care of themselves and their life, which includes their physical and mental health. Here's a dull, yet important word of advice for everyone: be aware and caring of yourself as a living person and don't hesitate to change course if your current path leads to misery of any kind, let alone to (premature) death.

gloriousduke 8y ago
It sounds like he did try to change course by moving and applying for other jobs and positions. The tragedy, well one of them at least, is that the system doesn’t value poets (or librarians). This guy had to die for his work to make it out into the greater world.
- restalis 8y ago
  Indeed, it's sad to see that high of a price for one's recognition. That reminds me of Pieter Hintjens' words - "Ironic that dying turned out to be the greatest marketing stunt of my life."

chottocharaii 8y ago

We’re not going to have a market solution, only a regulatory one; if one is coming at all

taneq 8y ago

Wouldn't this just result in more of these people being unemployed rather than exploited? And if those are the two options, is the former a better outcome?

fipple 8y ago

Not buying a laptop doesn’t influence practices. What does is buying a laptop from a manufacturer who prioritizes labor conditions. No such major manufacturer exists. Which is why this isn’t going to be solved by individual choice but either by regulation or by declaring it to not be a problem.