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Apple is a two-faced Janus/Juno. On the customer-facing side they are all about providing a good user experience and also going through the motions about carbo

by mc32 5y ago

Apple is a two-faced Janus/Juno. On the customer-facing side they are all about providing a good user experience and also going through the motions about carbon neutrality and justice and whatever else makes for good marketing these days. On the manufacturing side it they could not care much less. They say they care about pay and justice and so on and so forth, but where the rubber hits the road --where it inconveniences them and does not add to the bottom line, they do not appear to care.

quesera 5y ago
That's an oversimplified and cynical take. Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company. Foxconn has a history of treating in-country employees like all the other local companies do. Multiply by a few thousand for scale, and some rate of bad things is inevitable. Apple audits Foxconn, but audits do not catch everything (and not immediately!). Note also that Apple effectively shut down this Foxconn plant by refusing to accept manufactured product until the situation was rectified. Extrapolating from a few cases of dramatic failures on the part of Apple's manufacturing partners is dishonest at best.
- dutchbrit 5y ago
  The thing is, it's always the same with Foxconn. Apple should know better... (and the same goes for other Foxconn customers)
  - quesera 5y ago
    This is true, but Foxconn is the only game in town for the kind of manufacturing (precision and volume) that Apple requires. Foxconn doesn't uniformly suck, either. They abide by local laws, and they clearly cut corners and fail more often than they should -- but it's not like Foxconn is the seventh plane of Hell and all interactions are tainted with sin.
    - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
      And in this case, it's a sub contractor of Foxconn that's responsible for accomodation and that's behind the horribly substandard food.
    - mhoad 5y ago
      The last time they were in the news that I recall it was because workers were killing themselves in such large numbers that they decided installing “suicide nets” was the solution. Apple 1000% are capable of making sure that nothing like that ever happened again and yet here we are not long after. Apple has a very sketchy history in general when it comes to China and there is no reason at this point to assume this is some innocent mistake.
      - gruez 5y ago
        >The last time they were in the news that I recall it was because workers were killing themselves in such large numbers that they decided installing “suicide nets” was the solution. My city has installed suicide netting on bridges, presumably because residents "were killing themselves in such large numbers". Should they be getting similar flak?
        arpa 5y ago
        That actually might be a good idea.
        renewiltord 5y ago
        If a city can't exist without people committing suicide, maybe it shouldn't exist.
        marcosdumay 5y ago
        Somebody does deserve. Just because people were killing themselves on that city, it doesn't mean it's the city fault. But that logic does not apply to corporation dorms.
      - maerF0x0 5y ago
- ParanoidShroom 5y ago
  >Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company Please back this statement up. I'm honestly curious. It's a company, they optimize for their interest. They will invest according to that image/reputation value. But as any company, profits... But this reply just sounds like blind PR.
  - setr 5y ago
    > It's a company, they optimize for their interest. They will invest according to that image/reputation value. Given this article exists, which specifically targets damages against apple’s image/reputation value, then it seems clear to me there exists at least some incentive for apple to do as GP describes
    - grogenaut 5y ago
      There might be an incentive != they are doing things about it. ParanoidShroom righly asked for proof from GP, you offered "they are incentivized" that's not proof.
  - Bud 5y ago
    https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2021_Progress_Report.pdf https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2... https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Combat-Human-Trafficking-and-Slavery-in-Supply-Chain-2020.pdf https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Comb... https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/ https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/
- lp0_on_fire 5y ago
  > Foxconn has a history of treating in-country employees like all the other local companies do. Multiply by a few thousand for scale, and some rate of bad things is inevitable. Apple audits Foxconn, but audits do not catch everything (and not immediately!). They have a LONG and storied history of treating in-country employees like this. This isn't some new revelation. Apple has had more than enough time to start moving their manufacturing to a country that doesn't allow this sort of thing. They won't do that, though, because their pricing is already exorbitant for that they offer and it just doesn't work if you have to pay western wages and respect western labor laws.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  > Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company. Citation definitely needed. Apple has a global revenue of about $360B, but the automotive industry is an order of magnitude larger at $3.6T. You're suggesting that the automotive industry expends about 1000x less per dollar of revenue on supply chain working conditions than Apple does?
  - smabie 5y ago
    The entire automotive industry isn't one company.
FearlessNebula 5y ago
I never understood why Apple catches so much flack for this. They don’t own Foxconn, it’s a contact. There’s only so much they can audit, and is there any other company they could choose instead who has iPhone-level manufacturing scale? I suspect they’ve got no choice but Foxxcon and Pegatron. Pick your poison.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Apple is making money hand over fist, and they've got nearly $200B cash on hand. They aren't directly responsible for the working conditions, but they set the terms of the contract. They could pay more, and demand humane treatment and living wages in their contract. With that warchest, they could afford their own manufacturing facilities -- Foxxcon vs Petragon is a false dichotomy. But they don't. This is their responsibility, but they prefer to keep it at arms-length and pretend that they don't know what conditions will result from paying a certain price per unit.
  - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    The factory in question doesn't make just iphones. It also makes Amazon firesticks "among other things" Apple specifically getting called out here is odd to say the least. Besides, Apple is the only company that has put the said plant under probation. If anything, the other companies should be getting some flak for not even caring. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/rumour-leads-to-protest-in-foxconn-factory-near-chennai/article37983801.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/rumour-lea...
    - klyrs 5y ago
      I agree, other companies should be getting flak for this. Apple does not deserve less attention. Apple has the power and financial standing to make a difference here. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. Just because others are using this facility isn't an excuse by any means. Like I said, Apple could build another factory. They choose not to, because they profit from the human rights abuses.
Syonyk 5y ago
A good read on the subject is "Dying for an iPhone" by Chan. The book documents the last 20 years or so of Apple's labor interactions with Foxconn and makes a fairly compelling argument that Apple, like most other companies, says one thing and then does enough to be seen "doing something about the problem" while not actually doing anything of substance (the problem with the suicides was that they were getting ripped apart in the press for it, so the solution was to make it harder to commit spectacular suicide). It also documents the "creative abuses" that local governments and Foxconn seem to have with schools and such - "internships" that are not optional, are claimed to be CprE/EE/etc, and are really just bonus labor for the busy season. "Your degree is nice, now turn this screw." It's hard to say where Apple's responsibility ends and Foxconn's begins - the two are woven so tightly anymore that the boundaries are blurred. Major chunks of Foxconn's operation are purely Apple assembly plants, and Apple, of course, literally wouldn't exist today without Foxconn. I've decided that I'm done with Apple for now and have been seeking alternatives (Kobo Elipsa for PDF references, PineBook Pro for laptop, and a little flip phone for cell connectivity at the moment) - it was their labor practices, on top of their eagerness to do on-device content scanning, and a few other things that just pushed me over the edge. Unfortunately, there's not really a good space in modern tech that remotely qualifies as "ethical to use," anymore. I've been trying to go down some weird roads of low power ARM systems, but a lot of those are still made in China. At least some of the Rpi boards are made in the UK, and Purism has the USA-made Librem 5 at some significant cost. Unfortunately, the only sane answer I keep coming to is that the best solution is to abandon consumer tech entirely. It's the field in which I've made my living, and there's certainly some good to come out of it, but if you trace where the hardware comes from, and then look at how the software is designed (to capture all the behavioral surplus it can for the surveillance capitalism processing pipeline, Zuboff's book goes into great detail here)... it's slavery for the hardware and human-toxic psychological exploitation for the software. The less I use the stuff, the less desire I have to use it.
- sabellito 5y ago
  I agree with everything you said, and have been going down the same road, but this bit: > It's hard to say where Apple's responsibility ends and Foxconn's begins I don't think it's hard at all. Apple, as with any other business, bears full responsibility together with its suppliers. Really appalled by the people in this thread saying that "the others do worse!". Crazy stuff.
cmurf 5y ago
Apple have plenty of money and resources to have a full time independent team tasked with investigating all their contractors working conditions, and preventing these things from happening, before the media shines a light on it. And yet they don't. Or worse, perhaps they do know, and yet still do nothing until the media reports it.
api 5y ago
That could be applied to every corporation that outsources manufacturing, which is almost all of them. The same could also be said of the "greenwashing" effect of outsourcing. We move polluting industries overseas so we don't see it and companies can make two-faced claims about being "carbon neutral" by not counting overseas manufacturing.
daneel_w 5y ago
Do you think your non-Apple smartphone or non-Apple laptop is somehow "righteous" and assembled at some other special plant with more dignified treatment of their workers? Think again.
- temp10298385 5y ago
  Are you suggesting we accept human misery and injustice as necessary evils? Or are you advocating for change as these problems are endemic to modern manufacturing?
  - daneel_w 5y ago
    Neither. I'm just surprised at the ignorance of people who think that any other brand isn't partaking in similar sweatshops, or the very same one - Foxconn is the world's largest assembly contractor (and more), serving all the major brands. They're not just "the Apple factory".

by mc32 5y ago

quesera 5y ago

That's an oversimplified and cynical take. Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company. Foxconn has a history of treating in-country employees like all the other local companies do. Multiply by a few thousand for scale, and some rate of bad things is inevitable. Apple audits Foxconn, but audits do not catch everything (and not immediately!). Note also that Apple effectively shut down this Foxconn plant by refusing to accept manufactured product until the situation was rectified. Extrapolating from a few cases of dramatic failures on the part of Apple's manufacturing partners is dishonest at best.

dutchbrit 5y ago
The thing is, it's always the same with Foxconn. Apple should know better... (and the same goes for other Foxconn customers)
- quesera 5y ago
  This is true, but Foxconn is the only game in town for the kind of manufacturing (precision and volume) that Apple requires. Foxconn doesn't uniformly suck, either. They abide by local laws, and they clearly cut corners and fail more often than they should -- but it's not like Foxconn is the seventh plane of Hell and all interactions are tainted with sin.
  - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    And in this case, it's a sub contractor of Foxconn that's responsible for accomodation and that's behind the horribly substandard food.
  - mhoad 5y ago
    The last time they were in the news that I recall it was because workers were killing themselves in such large numbers that they decided installing “suicide nets” was the solution. Apple 1000% are capable of making sure that nothing like that ever happened again and yet here we are not long after. Apple has a very sketchy history in general when it comes to China and there is no reason at this point to assume this is some innocent mistake.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >The last time they were in the news that I recall it was because workers were killing themselves in such large numbers that they decided installing “suicide nets” was the solution. My city has installed suicide netting on bridges, presumably because residents "were killing themselves in such large numbers". Should they be getting similar flak?
      - arpa 5y ago
        That actually might be a good idea.
      - renewiltord 5y ago
        If a city can't exist without people committing suicide, maybe it shouldn't exist.
      - marcosdumay 5y ago
        Somebody does deserve. Just because people were killing themselves on that city, it doesn't mean it's the city fault. But that logic does not apply to corporation dorms.
    - maerF0x0 5y ago
ParanoidShroom 5y ago
>Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company Please back this statement up. I'm honestly curious. It's a company, they optimize for their interest. They will invest according to that image/reputation value. But as any company, profits... But this reply just sounds like blind PR.
- setr 5y ago
  > It's a company, they optimize for their interest. They will invest according to that image/reputation value. Given this article exists, which specifically targets damages against apple’s image/reputation value, then it seems clear to me there exists at least some incentive for apple to do as GP describes
  - grogenaut 5y ago
    There might be an incentive != they are doing things about it. ParanoidShroom righly asked for proof from GP, you offered "they are incentivized" that's not proof.
- Bud 5y ago
  https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2021_Progress_Report.pdf https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2... https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Combat-Human-Trafficking-and-Slavery-in-Supply-Chain-2020.pdf https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Comb... https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/ https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/
lp0_on_fire 5y ago
> Foxconn has a history of treating in-country employees like all the other local companies do. Multiply by a few thousand for scale, and some rate of bad things is inevitable. Apple audits Foxconn, but audits do not catch everything (and not immediately!). They have a LONG and storied history of treating in-country employees like this. This isn't some new revelation. Apple has had more than enough time to start moving their manufacturing to a country that doesn't allow this sort of thing. They won't do that, though, because their pricing is already exorbitant for that they offer and it just doesn't work if you have to pay western wages and respect western labor laws.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
> Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company. Citation definitely needed. Apple has a global revenue of about $360B, but the automotive industry is an order of magnitude larger at $3.6T. You're suggesting that the automotive industry expends about 1000x less per dollar of revenue on supply chain working conditions than Apple does?
- smabie 5y ago
  The entire automotive industry isn't one company.

FearlessNebula 5y ago

I never understood why Apple catches so much flack for this. They don’t own Foxconn, it’s a contact. There’s only so much they can audit, and is there any other company they could choose instead who has iPhone-level manufacturing scale? I suspect they’ve got no choice but Foxxcon and Pegatron. Pick your poison.

klyrs 5y ago
Apple is making money hand over fist, and they've got nearly $200B cash on hand. They aren't directly responsible for the working conditions, but they set the terms of the contract. They could pay more, and demand humane treatment and living wages in their contract. With that warchest, they could afford their own manufacturing facilities -- Foxxcon vs Petragon is a false dichotomy. But they don't. This is their responsibility, but they prefer to keep it at arms-length and pretend that they don't know what conditions will result from paying a certain price per unit.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  The factory in question doesn't make just iphones. It also makes Amazon firesticks "among other things" Apple specifically getting called out here is odd to say the least. Besides, Apple is the only company that has put the said plant under probation. If anything, the other companies should be getting some flak for not even caring. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/rumour-leads-to-protest-in-foxconn-factory-near-chennai/article37983801.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/rumour-lea...
  - klyrs 5y ago
    I agree, other companies should be getting flak for this. Apple does not deserve less attention. Apple has the power and financial standing to make a difference here. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. Just because others are using this facility isn't an excuse by any means. Like I said, Apple could build another factory. They choose not to, because they profit from the human rights abuses.

Syonyk 5y ago

A good read on the subject is "Dying for an iPhone" by Chan. The book documents the last 20 years or so of Apple's labor interactions with Foxconn and makes a fairly compelling argument that Apple, like most other companies, says one thing and then does enough to be seen "doing something about the problem" while not actually doing anything of substance (the problem with the suicides was that they were getting ripped apart in the press for it, so the solution was to make it harder to commit spectacular suicide). It also documents the "creative abuses" that local governments and Foxconn seem to have with schools and such - "internships" that are not optional, are claimed to be CprE/EE/etc, and are really just bonus labor for the busy season. "Your degree is nice, now turn this screw." It's hard to say where Apple's responsibility ends and Foxconn's begins - the two are woven so tightly anymore that the boundaries are blurred. Major chunks of Foxconn's operation are purely Apple assembly plants, and Apple, of course, literally wouldn't exist today without Foxconn. I've decided that I'm done with Apple for now and have been seeking alternatives (Kobo Elipsa for PDF references, PineBook Pro for laptop, and a little flip phone for cell connectivity at the moment) - it was their labor practices, on top of their eagerness to do on-device content scanning, and a few other things that just pushed me over the edge. Unfortunately, there's not really a good space in modern tech that remotely qualifies as "ethical to use," anymore. I've been trying to go down some weird roads of low power ARM systems, but a lot of those are still made in China. At least some of the Rpi boards are made in the UK, and Purism has the USA-made Librem 5 at some significant cost. Unfortunately, the only sane answer I keep coming to is that the best solution is to abandon consumer tech entirely. It's the field in which I've made my living, and there's certainly some good to come out of it, but if you trace where the hardware comes from, and then look at how the software is designed (to capture all the behavioral surplus it can for the surveillance capitalism processing pipeline, Zuboff's book goes into great detail here)... it's slavery for the hardware and human-toxic psychological exploitation for the software. The less I use the stuff, the less desire I have to use it.

sabellito 5y ago
I agree with everything you said, and have been going down the same road, but this bit: > It's hard to say where Apple's responsibility ends and Foxconn's begins I don't think it's hard at all. Apple, as with any other business, bears full responsibility together with its suppliers. Really appalled by the people in this thread saying that "the others do worse!". Crazy stuff.

cmurf 5y ago

Apple have plenty of money and resources to have a full time independent team tasked with investigating all their contractors working conditions, and preventing these things from happening, before the media shines a light on it. And yet they don't. Or worse, perhaps they do know, and yet still do nothing until the media reports it.

api 5y ago

That could be applied to every corporation that outsources manufacturing, which is almost all of them. The same could also be said of the "greenwashing" effect of outsourcing. We move polluting industries overseas so we don't see it and companies can make two-faced claims about being "carbon neutral" by not counting overseas manufacturing.

daneel_w 5y ago

Do you think your non-Apple smartphone or non-Apple laptop is somehow "righteous" and assembled at some other special plant with more dignified treatment of their workers? Think again.

temp10298385 5y ago
Are you suggesting we accept human misery and injustice as necessary evils? Or are you advocating for change as these problems are endemic to modern manufacturing?
- daneel_w 5y ago
  Neither. I'm just surprised at the ignorance of people who think that any other brand isn't partaking in similar sweatshops, or the very same one - Foxconn is the world's largest assembly contractor (and more), serving all the major brands. They're not just "the Apple factory".