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As usual, there's always another side to the story. Why do you think these companies continue to be inundated with resumes and applicants? A good read is Fact
by United857 15y ago
As usual, there's always another side to the story. Why do you think these companies continue to be inundated with resumes and applicants?
A good read is Factory Girls by Leslie Chang. I went to listen to a talk she gave last year on her experience at Shenzhen. She made a comment that Shenzhen is a very tough place to live. The place is very industrial and polluted. But when she went to the hometown village of one of her friends (a factory worker) for several days during the Chinese New Year, she found herself missing Shenzhen because the conditions of Chinese countrysides were even worse.
This isn't t justify business practices of Apple, Foxconn, or other manufacturers, but it's important to remember that whether an environment is good or bad really depends on what we are benchmarking it with.
- mechanical_fish 15y agoYou're right, and the moral of that story is: Poverty sucks! Poverty is so bad that even the process of rapidly growing out of that poverty seems incomprehensibly awful to the non-poor. On the other hand, just because these little letters of protest can't magically fix the whole Chinese economy doesn't mean they're necessarily useless. Worker rights are not won all at once. They're negotiated a little bit at a time. The more bad PR companies get, the higher the cost of dealing with it, and the easier it becomes for workers to negotiate better working conditions. Much of Foxconn's response to this dustup will be cosmetic. But cosmetics cost money, too, so some of the response will consist of real reform.