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I was offered a job at Foxconn to assemble iPhones for $1.7 per hour
- benologist 7y agoApple's rumored to profit several hundred dollars per iPhone sold, between the $1.70/hr not-employees, massive tax evasion, and dishonesty with hardware issues there's not much left to respect them for. Privacy, with the caveat that you're not the product except for Google paying $9 billion to make you their product.
- askafriend 7y agoDo you know the market rate for this kind of labor in the area? Is Foxconn competitive with other manufacturers? Feel free to cite any numbers if you've got em. From what I've heard, Foxconn is a highly desirable place to work with top of market pay and benefits. A lot of people move just to work for Foxconn. So clearly there's a dynamic going on here that'll take more nuance to understand than can be painted with a broad brush stroke from a Western perspective.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoIf the broad brush stroke had a social democratic Western labour perspective, the labour would be unionised and pay and benefits would be negotiated collectively. That doesn't seem to be the case. Of course the "market rate" will always depress wages as much as possible, because that's what markets are supposed to do - and also to excuse. But there are human externalities, and it takes a rather strange view of the value of human life to ignore them. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-l...
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> If the broad brush stroke had a social democratic Western labour perspective, the labour would be unionised and pay and benefits would be negotiated collectively. I'm amused that you're saying this about Communist China. :D
- wutbrodo 7y agoWell, "Communism with Chinese characteristics" is quite a strange beast.
- askafriend 7y agoMy argument isn't to excuse Foxconn. It's to point out that we're having this discussion at the wrong zoom level. There are complex geopolitical, social, and economic factors involved. In the system that exists, Foxconn is actually one of the better if not best actors. But of course HN wants to boil it down to Apple cutting a check to Foxconn employees because iPhone. Yes let's severely gimp a domestic company that generates over 5% of America's GDP (and 1% of the world's) in favor of paying Chinese manufacturers much more - when China incessantly steals American IP without care and prevents foreign companies from competing in their domestic markets. Great idea.
- benologist 7y agoI don't really see how this is about Foxconn. Foxconn only hires those people for Apple and Apple only have Foxconn do it because they'd have to pay more to do it themselves. How much they're paid is dictated by Apple. I think there's some parallel with Uber's contractor-vs-employee situation but it's much more apparent when you consider these people are exclusively working on Apple devices, within Apple's supply chain, subject to Apple's rules and rulings, even some of the components and the software come from Apple employees. Their $1.70 an hour should be compared to the US federal minimum wage or something because that's the number Apple decided to skip out on, even as they hoarded a quarter trillion dollars.
- 7y ago
- criddell 7y agoWhat about the racism? Is there nuance in that as well?
- patrick5415 7y agoYeah, seems surprising that most of the comments are about the wages and not the racism.
- lixtra 7y ago> From what I've heard, Foxconn is a highly desirable place to work with top of market pay and benefits. The article states differently: >> Foxconn is known for its high staff turnover, largely because of the low monthly salary of 2,100 yuan per month (US$313) in Zhengzhou. By comparison, the average salary in the city of Zhengzhou in 2018 was 6,929 yuan (US$1,035) per month.
- Retric 7y agoAverage salaries can be very deceptive especially in developing nations. The real question is what someone with minimal skills or education can make in the area.
- amelius 7y agoOr median salary instead of average salary.
- golemiprague 7y agoand cost of living and what is the same relationship between average and factory work wages in the west. So yes, a clickbait
- abalone 7y ago> A poster in an agency describes job qualification for Foxconn workers: age between 16 and 40, ninth-grade diploma, no Tibetan and Uygur ethnicities. Many damning things in the report but this straight up racism demands a firm response from Apple.
- atomical 7y agoWhy would it? Tim supports Saudi Arabia and their oppressive apps in the app store.
- atian 7y agoNope.
- ASalazarMX 7y ago> racism demands a firm response from Apple. Board: Will that make us more profitable? Tim: We will become less profitable, but in the long term, people will see that we- Board: No.
- protomyth 7y agoTim Cook is the architect of the Apple supply chain, and that's why he is the CEO instead of a product person. He is not innocent and has to have read the Foxconn job requirements of age between 16 and 40, ninth-grade diploma, no Tibetan and Uygur ethnicities. He knows what he is doing, and blaming just the board is a cop-out.
- bdcravens 7y agoProbably does demand a response, but this doesn't seem to be an "official" Foxconn policy: > These conditions on ethnicity do not appear on the Foxconn website, but do adorn the walls of private job agencies hiring directly for the technology giant
- VonGuard 7y agoWouldn't be such a big deal if the Chinese weren't literally interning and exterminating Uyghurs. Calling this stuff racism is like calling Nazi Germany Alt-Right... Stops WAAAY short of framing the problem.
- 11thEarlOfMar 7y agoThe only surprise here is that this unflattering portrayal was published in SCMP. They are accused of becoming another mouthpiece for the CCP, but this indicates there may still be some editorial latitude.
- guardiangod 7y agoFoxconn is a Taiwanese company.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y agoTaiwan is a Chinese country
- vidoc 7y agowould you mind elaborating a bit por favor?
- lgregg 7y agoChina and Taiwan don't have a great relationship. China claims Taiwan but Taiwan claims to be independent. There is a shadow affirmation by most world powers about Taiwan's independence. (i.e. the US hasn't affirmed their state but sells them guns)
- vidoc 7y agoi see, so here we would basically have the communist party let that kind of reporting, uncensored, because of the grand chessboard game with Taiwan. It is an entertaining theory but I'm afraid the very existence of the factory, to begin with, discredits it entirely.
- mrmonkeyman 7y agoLike China could do anything about it.
- z3t4 7y agoThese workers are basically human robots, but they are not only faster and more accurate then robots, they are much cheaper!
- jhayward 7y ago> they are not only faster and more accurate then robots, they are much cheaper! That's why they still hire humans. If the above statement wasn't true, they would be replaced with a robotic system.
- wswkb 7y agoWithout knowing what the median salary per hour is in that part of China, this is just rage-bait.
- azhenley 7y ago> Foxconn is known for its high staff turnover, largely because of the low monthly salary of 2,100 yuan per month (US$313) in Zhengzhou. By comparison, the average salary in the city of Zhengzhou in 2018 was 6,929 yuan (US$1,035) per month.
- wswkb 7y agoThen either they won't fill the positions or the average salary is too high. (And I asked for median, not average)
- claudiawerner 7y agoPerhaps whatever the median is, it's still too low.
- wutbrodo 7y agoSure, but then the story becomes "it's sad that poor countries exist" instead of "Apple has an exploitative supply chain". Not to mention that the numbers are meaningless without a sense of price levels. My cousin is a lawyer in Delhi and lives a life that would be recognizable to your I as very upper-middle class, and yet his equivalent USD salary is roughly one tenth of mine.
- m0zg 7y agoThat's what I don't get about Apple. You're selling a premium product that in some cases costs over $1K. How much labor does it take to put one together, amortized per millions of them? An hour? Would paying $35 to a US worker for that hour be out of line? I mean, this is the company that chooses to virtue signal on a ton of different first-world issues. How about not having your main, highest margin product made by 16 year old children in a sweat shop, earning starvation wages?
- wutbrodo 7y ago> made by 16 year old children in a sweat shop, earning starvation wages? Are they in fact starvation wages? I'm the last person to defend Apple, and I'm all for emotional appeals about ethical issues, but they're useless without an understanding of the facts, and none of the complainants on this thread seem interested in understanding whether what they're saying is accurate, presumably on the off chance that they'd lose the opportunity to pay themselves on the back for their outrage.
- m0zg 7y agoElsewhere in the comments someone dug up the stats: they earn one third the mean wage in that region. That's how what I'd expect given that they're making something that costs over three times their monthly salary and has a 30%+ margin.
- wutbrodo 7y agoI see the mean wage statistics, but interpreting means is very sensitive to the distribution and the income distribution in developing countries can be _very_ unintuitive. Something like a median (or lower percentile) is a much better indicator of a claim like "starvation wages".
- m0zg 7y agoI go by the stats I have. If you have the median, sure, bring it out. But are you going to seriously argue that $10/day is adequate pay when a single iPhone has more _margin_ baked in it than a worker makes in a month? I mean, seriously, how the fuck is this defensible at all?
- jftuga 7y agoWhy is 40 the max age? Just curious.
- acct1771 7y agoConstant manual labor, and very long hours, with not enough break in between.
- linyu0219 7y ago谢谢富士康和苹果，他们提供了很多工作机会，解决了基本的生存问题。
- mouthpieces 7y agoSpeaking of government mouthpieces, how many more sumbissions from nytimes.com do I have to ignore, before HN finally fucking downweights them off the home page. I don't come here to fucking read the fucking New York Times. I come here to get away from exactly that kind of bulk, generic, broad-audience information source.
- csense 7y agoWe should tariff those iPhones to take out of Apple's pocket all the money they save by not paying their people decent wages.