7 ms·

Now Can We Start Talking About the Real Foxconn?

80 points by dailo10 15y ago

sargun 15y ago
Perhaps our factories in the US need to take a hint from Foxconn. "Foxconn-run health centers right on campus" - sounds like a great way to reduce health-insurance costs by requiring your employees to take preventative care. Especially, with the high healthcare costs that manufacturing companies have to pay.
- jbarham 15y ago
  > requiring your employees to take preventative care Sounds unconstitutional to me.
  - silvestrov 15y ago
    Would you care to explain your logic behind that judgement? For a non-US citizen, that line of thought can be hard to follow.
    - w0utert 15y ago
      To be fair, where I live we have subsidized health care and mandatory health insurance for everyone, but still many forms of 'preventative health care' are considered unacceptable, an invasion of privacy or belittlement by the government. For example, nobody is talking about raising taxes on unhealthy food or asking heavy smokers and drinkers to pay more for their health insurance. Or ask them to enroll in some kind of sports or life-style program that would improve their health before it becomes an issue. I would be all for it by the way, but it's basically not part of any discussion by any political party.
    - nodata 15y ago
      I don't think the statement "stop eating badly or you lose your healthcare" would go down well.
      - DanBC 15y ago
        How about the statement "Eat what you like. Eat healthy and we pay your healthcare"?
      - brown9-2 15y ago
        The palatability of a statement has nothing to do with it's legality or constitutionality. Employment-related contracts have health and medical clauses in them all the time.
  - olalonde 15y ago
    Why? Sounds like it would fall in the "freedom to contract" category. If you don't want your employer requiring you to take preventive care, go work somewhere else.
    - rbarooah 15y ago
      The problem with that is that if you are poor, and there is no 'somewhere else' to work then you have no freedom.
- LaGrange 15y ago
  That's one of the more annoying things about the lies that happen. If we unfairly paint other places as unimaginably horrible, we become immunized to actual abuse happening on our own turf. It just fuels the „what are you complaining about, others have it worse” crowd, and I don't think we need more of that. The fact is, the factories are bad. There's too much overtime, and people aren't paid enough (just like anyone in their country, though), safety rules are sometimes lax. But if you look around, you'll find places that are even worse (than this specific factory) here in Poland, in a supposedly „civilized” country.
alan_cx 15y ago
Bloomberg, a pro business publication, writes an article defending the cheapest place business can get its products made. Is that any sort of surprise? Lets face it, it must be annoying for businesses who want to make competitive products at the cheapest place to get that done, that Foxconn is derided as some sort of slave labour camp. So is it any surprise that we now get a "campaign" to reposition Foxconn to make it more acceptable to use? Now, fair enough that Bloomberg champions the needs of big business, and fair enough that big business wants and need to use these places to build their products. But that does not mean that there is no agenda here. There might not be, but there is certainly a sniff of re-branding going on here. All Im saying is there is good grounds to be sceptical at the motivation here.
- stevenpworrel 15y ago
  There's more than enough ground to be skeptical. Most of it reads like a job interviewer's contrived response to "What are your 3 biggest weaknesses?" "The biggest gripe, which surprised us somewhat, is that they don’t get enough overtime. They wanted to work more, to get more money." This, the biggest gripe, at a place that had to deploy suicide nets around the building perimeters. I can't think of a more patronizing way to write this article. I, personally, don't know what goes on at Foxconn. But the chance at holding accountable those who enable injustice was lost the day the US bank representative stood proudly in front of Congress and announced "We're too big to fail."; knowing that any backlash would be brief and easily defeated. At that moment it became clear to me that propaganda, which many thought the internet would disable, is more powerful than ever. Disinformation has far greater utility than information.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    Suicide rates at Foxconn are about what you'd expect for a place with that population; the rate is less than the US. (Although that's not saying much.) There's some caution needed though. Most workers are female which is traditionally higher for attempted but lower for completed suicide, and they don't have as many readily accessible means. (EG, American young men have access to guns.) The reporters say they spoke to people, freely, and Foxconn didn't know who they spoke to. The reporters seem remarkably ignorant about the fears people have about speaking out when living in an oppressive regime. (China probably executes more people than any other country; there are over 50 crimes that carry the death penalty; some criminals are interviewed for tv programmes before they are executed). There are a lot of problems at Chinese factories. The fact that poor peasants consider factory work to be better than their regular life just shows how bad life in China is for poor people.
hessenwolf 15y ago
About ten years ago I met a Maylaysian girl in Australia who had worked for 2 dollars a day at a sweat shop when she was younger. I asked her how it was, and she said it was fine, accomodation and food were paid for and 2 dollars was pretty okay in Malaysia. Just saying.
- mtts 15y ago
  That's a very good point, but let's also not forget that at the time she didn't know any better and expected working for 2 dollars a day at a sweat shop to be normal (viz the slaves in Mauretania mentioned here on HN yesterday who couldn't conceive of there being anything wrong or unusual about their being enslaved).
  - hessenwolf 15y ago
    She works as a management consultant in IT in Singapore, last time I checked...
- jacalata 15y ago
  If it was so great, why was she in Australia?
  - olalonde 15y ago
    First, she didn't say it was great. Second, there's probably some selection bias at play here since there aren't that many HNers in developing countries.
    - hessenwolf 15y ago
      She didn't say it was great, but she didn't complain either. She was in university in Australia.
- olalonde 15y ago
  Same experience here. I live a few blocks away from the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen and I almost get laughed at when questioning the well being of Foxconn employees. They are apparently doing just fine.
mseebach 15y ago
I enjoyed this Economist article, and it seems to make some of the same points, but in a different context: http://www.economist.com/node/21549956 http://www.economist.com/node/21549956
nkoren 15y ago
For the record, I'm a fairly bleeding-heart liberal and former globalisation sceptic. What turned me around was moving to India in 2001-2002. I was working for an architecture & planning firm, and was fairly shocked by the working conditions at the construction sites. Temporary slum-like shantytowns -- totally informal mud-and-corrugated metal shacks -- were set up to house the workers, who worked for 7 days per week, from dawn to dusk. They had one day off per month, at new moon. They had no safety gear whatsoever. Children as young as 5 were at work carrying construction materials around. Food and housing -- such as it was -- were provided for free, but the average take-home pay amounted to three dollars per month. This wasn't evil Westerners coming in and mercilessly exploiting the natives; this was simply the bog-standard working conditions in every construction site across the country. When I saw that, I realised that the entire Western dialectic about sweatshops ("Michael Jordan earns $40M for endorsing shoes that are made by 12-year-olds earning $1 per day!") was completely irrelevant and corrupt. What I realised is that a classically "awful" sweatshop would be entail a spectacular improvement in both salaries and working conditions, compared to the alternatives. Yes, a sweatshop would still be bad if compared to working conditions in the West, but people in developing countries -- particularly at the time -- didn't have access to working conditions in the West, so that was a meaningless comparison to make. The only legitimate comparison was to the alternatives actually available to them, and seen in that light, a typical Nike sweatshop looked like Nirvana. Fortunately, India continued to go down the path of globalisation, and I still work there frequently. Western businesses set up shops which "exploited" the native workers by giving them vastly better salaries and working conditions than anything they'd ever had before. Successive waves of these businesses created a climate of tremendous economic mobility, with workers constantly jockeying to jump to each emerging income tier. In just over a decade, I've seen several hundred million people come out of absolutely grinding poverty into a lifestyle which is still poor but not truly deprived; I've seen several hundred million more acquire a standard of living that -- considering the difference in purchasing parity power -- is perfectly in line with first-world norms. This has had a knock-on effect in every sector of the economy, including those where the Western presence isn't particularly felt. When I go to construction sites now, for example, the workers still tend to live in (better) temporary shanty-towns next to the construction sites, but now they have safety gear, their pay has increased about 40-fold, and their children go to school rather than work. It has been an absolute pleasure to watch this happen. From everything I've seen, the rise of China -- which Foxconn epitomises -- has roughly paralleled this course of development, only more so. Frankly, the question of "how bad is Foxconn, really?" should have been answerable with a single data point: their suicide rate is lower than that of China's as a whole. That should tell you something. Foxconn is undoubtedly imperfect, but that one fact demonstrates that it must be better than the alternatives. Much of the negative perception of Foxconn has been driven by cultural misunderstanding rather than reality. When sensationalist journalists tried to turn the (statistically lower) rate of suicide into a news story, the instincts of Foxconn managers were to save face, act humble, and vow to do better. That's how you gain respect in Confucian culture, but to Americans it looked like an admission of guilt. It would have been better if their PR department had foregone the absurd suicide nets and such, and simply said "Look, our suicide rate is lower than the rest of China's, so take that, biatches!" That would have gotten the truth across more succinctly than anything else.
wisty 15y ago
> Then in 2010 The stable door is always shut after the horse has bolted. Foxconn is a Taiwanese company, and a household name in China. Insanely high profile, lots to lose, and relatively little protection. The owner is presumably well connected (he's been running factories in Shenzhen since 1988); but while he'll have some friends who'll bend a few rules, I doubt he has anyone in the right place who will risk their life for him (i.e. a close family member at the top). There were bound to be investigations, and his government connections could have risked execution if they help cover anything up. After the suicides, Foxconn came under heavy attack from the Chinese media. They simply couldn't afford to break any rules after that. I don't know if they did before the deaths (and I doubt they were any worse than many other factories in China), but of course they were squeaky-clean afterwards.
brudgers 15y ago
If someone really believes that they are talking with random workers in a communist country prior to an interview with a powerful CEO of a major manufacturer, their journalistic instincts may be somewhat lacking. The focus of the story is not on Apple and the consequences of consumerism. Instead, it is on Foxconn and the human difficulties inherent in the industrialization of an economy. The shifting of the ground is deliberate. Daisey's story and Schmitz reporting agree on the fact that Apple's business processes entail problematic operational practices [references below]. That the Bloomberg article ignores them is a not unexpected response to the sort of muckraking Daisey engaged in. The current media campaign is far more sophisticated, but at its heart its motivations are no different from the response to The Jungle a century ago. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/apple-economy/app... http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/apple-economy/app.... http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/apple-economy/china-c... http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/apple-economy/china-c....
yabatopia 15y ago
The discussion about questionable labor practices and sweatshops distracts us from the biggest problem Western countries should have with China: China is a totalitarian state, a one party dictatorship. The comparison between India and China is flawed: India is a democracy (albeit far from perfect), China is not. China is a dictatorship that has been violating human rights on a massive scale for decades and decades. Call me old-fashioned, but I try to avoid doing business with totalitarian regimes. It just isn't right. My heart bleeds every time I buy a gadget or any other product made in China. Most of the time I don't even have a choice. Oh, Made In Taiwan, where are you? And perhaps it's time to ask ourselves: is it really a good idea to transfer and outsource more and more technological research and production - one of the cornerstones of our modern and future society - to a totalitarian state like China?
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  "My heart bleeds every time I buy a gadget or any other product made in China" You realise there's a link between purchasing power and democracy? If so, how do you think would you help Chinese by not buying their goods? (Skipping goods that you know are produced by bad people is still fine)
  - yabatopia 15y ago
    To be honest: I really don't know. Are economic sanctions in the interest of the Iranian people? Or the people in Syria? Hopefully it can prevent that the situation gets even worse. Or that those in power become even more powerful. Note that it takes more than prosperity to become a democracy. It certainly helps, but there are more factors at play.
    - guard-of-terra 15y ago
      No they aren't. No they won't. Look at North Korea: so much for sanctions. The only weapon against oppressive regime is economic and cultural freedom and influence. Exchange wares, exchange ideas, and eventually there would be a market for democracy, so to speak. I know a very few countries that are both prosperous and non-democratic. And you won't mind all of those: they don't have to do bad things since they've got money.
Zarathust 15y ago
We have to remember that 300 persons threatened to jump from the rooftop if their conditions didn't improve a few months ago. It cannot be that much of a rose garden either right? A common logical fallacy is occurring here: An argument is made toward a larger picture, the argument is false therefore the larger picture doesn't exist. It only proves that the American Life author was wrong and that further investigation is needed, not at all that Foxconn is a nice place.
- brown9-2 15y ago
  I think you are assuming that the mass suicide threat was legitimate. It may have just been a smart negotiating ploy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3448378 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3448378
pasbesoin 15y ago
For me, one of the elephants in the room that is the larger discussion about "third world" outsourcing and manufacture, is the other side of the dynamic: What is happening in portions of the "first world". That is, the fear in the first world. (Note: I'm in the U.S.) The first world build up, both deliberately and circumstantially (e.g. World War II), a fairly strong system of profit-sharing and workforce representation and safety. Then, increasing geographic mobility (physical, and communication) provided means of operating portions or the entirety of a business outside of that scope, while maintaining the first world market/destination for finished product. Given that much of the first world was in one form or another "democratic", at that point, those populations faced a choice. Erect barriers to insure the propagation of those protections within their societies, but at perhaps the expense of less individual, immediate wealth -- at least, as measured in objects possessed. Or allow this "outsourcing", undermining domestic production and attendant protections in favor of individual gains -- short term gains, for those not in a position of major equity or enabling and so profiting off of the inter-societal transfers. In my perspective, barring a regression, at this point we are headed towards a world society as well as economy. However, the timeframes are still such that individuals can end up "losers" with regard to opportunities available or lost during their productive lifespans. In the U.S., for example, many people are "losing", right now. The question arises: Has what has happened been the best way forward that was possible? Or could the U.S. et al. have maintained greater barriers while still enabling progress? The ideo of "lifting up" the third world, instead of "racing to the lowest common denominator"? I, for one, don't know the answer to that. Personally, though, I would have liked to try harder for it. Many people in the U.S. are scared, and outraged, and fearful, and many other things, of what they see -- or what is reported -- in China and other places, because behind and beyond the immediate situation, they see or perhaps intuit at some level their own future. Maybe in the 80's and even 90's, many people here just felt it was wrong that another person be treated like that. And they compared those circumstances to their own and wished the latter whole-heartedly for these other people. Now, many people are just plain scared. If they're not already living in this future of decreasing expectations. I think that is the, or at least one of, the elephants in the room, in this entire discussion. We were supposed to be improving the lives of these folk. But now it looks to (rhetorical) me that it was, is at my and our own expense. I'm not arguing for one interpretation or the other, here. But I would like to see this perspective -- this view from "the other side", if I've seen and understood it at least partially correctly -- added to the conversation. And, to loop back to what I mentioned earlier, this happened in the context of "democratic" first world societies. (However imperfect that democracy might be.) So... in casting about for blame, if such is to be sought and found at all, I don't think those populations can simply point to business executives and "corrupt" politicians for the answer. Whether citizens voted, or didn't bother, they were and are part of the choice.

80 points by dailo10 15y ago

Perhaps our factories in the US need to take a hint from Foxconn. "Foxconn-run health centers right on campus" - sounds like a great way to reduce health-insurance costs by requiring your employees to take preventative care. Especially, with the high healthcare costs that manufacturing companies have to pay.

jbarham 15y ago
> requiring your employees to take preventative care Sounds unconstitutional to me.
- silvestrov 15y ago
  Would you care to explain your logic behind that judgement? For a non-US citizen, that line of thought can be hard to follow.
  - w0utert 15y ago
    To be fair, where I live we have subsidized health care and mandatory health insurance for everyone, but still many forms of 'preventative health care' are considered unacceptable, an invasion of privacy or belittlement by the government. For example, nobody is talking about raising taxes on unhealthy food or asking heavy smokers and drinkers to pay more for their health insurance. Or ask them to enroll in some kind of sports or life-style program that would improve their health before it becomes an issue. I would be all for it by the way, but it's basically not part of any discussion by any political party.
  - nodata 15y ago
    I don't think the statement "stop eating badly or you lose your healthcare" would go down well.
    - DanBC 15y ago
      How about the statement "Eat what you like. Eat healthy and we pay your healthcare"?
    - brown9-2 15y ago
      The palatability of a statement has nothing to do with it's legality or constitutionality. Employment-related contracts have health and medical clauses in them all the time.
- olalonde 15y ago
  Why? Sounds like it would fall in the "freedom to contract" category. If you don't want your employer requiring you to take preventive care, go work somewhere else.
  - rbarooah 15y ago
    The problem with that is that if you are poor, and there is no 'somewhere else' to work then you have no freedom.
LaGrange 15y ago
That's one of the more annoying things about the lies that happen. If we unfairly paint other places as unimaginably horrible, we become immunized to actual abuse happening on our own turf. It just fuels the „what are you complaining about, others have it worse” crowd, and I don't think we need more of that. The fact is, the factories are bad. There's too much overtime, and people aren't paid enough (just like anyone in their country, though), safety rules are sometimes lax. But if you look around, you'll find places that are even worse (than this specific factory) here in Poland, in a supposedly „civilized” country.

alan_cx 15y ago

Bloomberg, a pro business publication, writes an article defending the cheapest place business can get its products made. Is that any sort of surprise? Lets face it, it must be annoying for businesses who want to make competitive products at the cheapest place to get that done, that Foxconn is derided as some sort of slave labour camp. So is it any surprise that we now get a "campaign" to reposition Foxconn to make it more acceptable to use? Now, fair enough that Bloomberg champions the needs of big business, and fair enough that big business wants and need to use these places to build their products. But that does not mean that there is no agenda here. There might not be, but there is certainly a sniff of re-branding going on here. All Im saying is there is good grounds to be sceptical at the motivation here.

stevenpworrel 15y ago
There's more than enough ground to be skeptical. Most of it reads like a job interviewer's contrived response to "What are your 3 biggest weaknesses?" "The biggest gripe, which surprised us somewhat, is that they don’t get enough overtime. They wanted to work more, to get more money." This, the biggest gripe, at a place that had to deploy suicide nets around the building perimeters. I can't think of a more patronizing way to write this article. I, personally, don't know what goes on at Foxconn. But the chance at holding accountable those who enable injustice was lost the day the US bank representative stood proudly in front of Congress and announced "We're too big to fail."; knowing that any backlash would be brief and easily defeated. At that moment it became clear to me that propaganda, which many thought the internet would disable, is more powerful than ever. Disinformation has far greater utility than information.
- DanBC 15y ago
  Suicide rates at Foxconn are about what you'd expect for a place with that population; the rate is less than the US. (Although that's not saying much.) There's some caution needed though. Most workers are female which is traditionally higher for attempted but lower for completed suicide, and they don't have as many readily accessible means. (EG, American young men have access to guns.) The reporters say they spoke to people, freely, and Foxconn didn't know who they spoke to. The reporters seem remarkably ignorant about the fears people have about speaking out when living in an oppressive regime. (China probably executes more people than any other country; there are over 50 crimes that carry the death penalty; some criminals are interviewed for tv programmes before they are executed). There are a lot of problems at Chinese factories. The fact that poor peasants consider factory work to be better than their regular life just shows how bad life in China is for poor people.

hessenwolf 15y ago

About ten years ago I met a Maylaysian girl in Australia who had worked for 2 dollars a day at a sweat shop when she was younger. I asked her how it was, and she said it was fine, accomodation and food were paid for and 2 dollars was pretty okay in Malaysia. Just saying.

mtts 15y ago
That's a very good point, but let's also not forget that at the time she didn't know any better and expected working for 2 dollars a day at a sweat shop to be normal (viz the slaves in Mauretania mentioned here on HN yesterday who couldn't conceive of there being anything wrong or unusual about their being enslaved).
- hessenwolf 15y ago
  She works as a management consultant in IT in Singapore, last time I checked...
jacalata 15y ago
If it was so great, why was she in Australia?
- olalonde 15y ago
  First, she didn't say it was great. Second, there's probably some selection bias at play here since there aren't that many HNers in developing countries.
  - hessenwolf 15y ago
    She didn't say it was great, but she didn't complain either. She was in university in Australia.
olalonde 15y ago
Same experience here. I live a few blocks away from the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen and I almost get laughed at when questioning the well being of Foxconn employees. They are apparently doing just fine.

mseebach 15y ago

I enjoyed this Economist article, and it seems to make some of the same points, but in a different context: http://www.economist.com/node/21549956 http://www.economist.com/node/21549956

nkoren 15y ago

For the record, I'm a fairly bleeding-heart liberal and former globalisation sceptic. What turned me around was moving to India in 2001-2002. I was working for an architecture & planning firm, and was fairly shocked by the working conditions at the construction sites. Temporary slum-like shantytowns -- totally informal mud-and-corrugated metal shacks -- were set up to house the workers, who worked for 7 days per week, from dawn to dusk. They had one day off per month, at new moon. They had no safety gear whatsoever. Children as young as 5 were at work carrying construction materials around. Food and housing -- such as it was -- were provided for free, but the average take-home pay amounted to three dollars per month. This wasn't evil Westerners coming in and mercilessly exploiting the natives; this was simply the bog-standard working conditions in every construction site across the country. When I saw that, I realised that the entire Western dialectic about sweatshops ("Michael Jordan earns $40M for endorsing shoes that are made by 12-year-olds earning $1 per day!") was completely irrelevant and corrupt. What I realised is that a classically "awful" sweatshop would be entail a spectacular improvement in both salaries and working conditions, compared to the alternatives. Yes, a sweatshop would still be bad if compared to working conditions in the West, but people in developing countries -- particularly at the time -- didn't have access to working conditions in the West, so that was a meaningless comparison to make. The only legitimate comparison was to the alternatives actually available to them, and seen in that light, a typical Nike sweatshop looked like Nirvana. Fortunately, India continued to go down the path of globalisation, and I still work there frequently. Western businesses set up shops which "exploited" the native workers by giving them vastly better salaries and working conditions than anything they'd ever had before. Successive waves of these businesses created a climate of tremendous economic mobility, with workers constantly jockeying to jump to each emerging income tier. In just over a decade, I've seen several hundred million people come out of absolutely grinding poverty into a lifestyle which is still poor but not truly deprived; I've seen several hundred million more acquire a standard of living that -- considering the difference in purchasing parity power -- is perfectly in line with first-world norms. This has had a knock-on effect in every sector of the economy, including those where the Western presence isn't particularly felt. When I go to construction sites now, for example, the workers still tend to live in (better) temporary shanty-towns next to the construction sites, but now they have safety gear, their pay has increased about 40-fold, and their children go to school rather than work. It has been an absolute pleasure to watch this happen. From everything I've seen, the rise of China -- which Foxconn epitomises -- has roughly paralleled this course of development, only more so. Frankly, the question of "how bad is Foxconn, really?" should have been answerable with a single data point: their suicide rate is lower than that of China's as a whole. That should tell you something. Foxconn is undoubtedly imperfect, but that one fact demonstrates that it must be better than the alternatives. Much of the negative perception of Foxconn has been driven by cultural misunderstanding rather than reality. When sensationalist journalists tried to turn the (statistically lower) rate of suicide into a news story, the instincts of Foxconn managers were to save face, act humble, and vow to do better. That's how you gain respect in Confucian culture, but to Americans it looked like an admission of guilt. It would have been better if their PR department had foregone the absurd suicide nets and such, and simply said "Look, our suicide rate is lower than the rest of China's, so take that, biatches!" That would have gotten the truth across more succinctly than anything else.

wisty 15y ago

> Then in 2010 The stable door is always shut after the horse has bolted. Foxconn is a Taiwanese company, and a household name in China. Insanely high profile, lots to lose, and relatively little protection. The owner is presumably well connected (he's been running factories in Shenzhen since 1988); but while he'll have some friends who'll bend a few rules, I doubt he has anyone in the right place who will risk their life for him (i.e. a close family member at the top). There were bound to be investigations, and his government connections could have risked execution if they help cover anything up. After the suicides, Foxconn came under heavy attack from the Chinese media. They simply couldn't afford to break any rules after that. I don't know if they did before the deaths (and I doubt they were any worse than many other factories in China), but of course they were squeaky-clean afterwards.

brudgers 15y ago

If someone really believes that they are talking with random workers in a communist country prior to an interview with a powerful CEO of a major manufacturer, their journalistic instincts may be somewhat lacking. The focus of the story is not on Apple and the consequences of consumerism. Instead, it is on Foxconn and the human difficulties inherent in the industrialization of an economy. The shifting of the ground is deliberate. Daisey's story and Schmitz reporting agree on the fact that Apple's business processes entail problematic operational practices [references below]. That the Bloomberg article ignores them is a not unexpected response to the sort of muckraking Daisey engaged in. The current media campaign is far more sophisticated, but at its heart its motivations are no different from the response to The Jungle a century ago. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/apple-economy/app... http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/apple-economy/app.... http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/apple-economy/china-c... http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/apple-economy/china-c....

yabatopia 15y ago

The discussion about questionable labor practices and sweatshops distracts us from the biggest problem Western countries should have with China: China is a totalitarian state, a one party dictatorship. The comparison between India and China is flawed: India is a democracy (albeit far from perfect), China is not. China is a dictatorship that has been violating human rights on a massive scale for decades and decades. Call me old-fashioned, but I try to avoid doing business with totalitarian regimes. It just isn't right. My heart bleeds every time I buy a gadget or any other product made in China. Most of the time I don't even have a choice. Oh, Made In Taiwan, where are you? And perhaps it's time to ask ourselves: is it really a good idea to transfer and outsource more and more technological research and production - one of the cornerstones of our modern and future society - to a totalitarian state like China?

guard-of-terra 15y ago
"My heart bleeds every time I buy a gadget or any other product made in China" You realise there's a link between purchasing power and democracy? If so, how do you think would you help Chinese by not buying their goods? (Skipping goods that you know are produced by bad people is still fine)
- yabatopia 15y ago
  To be honest: I really don't know. Are economic sanctions in the interest of the Iranian people? Or the people in Syria? Hopefully it can prevent that the situation gets even worse. Or that those in power become even more powerful. Note that it takes more than prosperity to become a democracy. It certainly helps, but there are more factors at play.
  - guard-of-terra 15y ago
    No they aren't. No they won't. Look at North Korea: so much for sanctions. The only weapon against oppressive regime is economic and cultural freedom and influence. Exchange wares, exchange ideas, and eventually there would be a market for democracy, so to speak. I know a very few countries that are both prosperous and non-democratic. And you won't mind all of those: they don't have to do bad things since they've got money.

Zarathust 15y ago

We have to remember that 300 persons threatened to jump from the rooftop if their conditions didn't improve a few months ago. It cannot be that much of a rose garden either right? A common logical fallacy is occurring here: An argument is made toward a larger picture, the argument is false therefore the larger picture doesn't exist. It only proves that the American Life author was wrong and that further investigation is needed, not at all that Foxconn is a nice place.

brown9-2 15y ago
I think you are assuming that the mass suicide threat was legitimate. It may have just been a smart negotiating ploy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3448378 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3448378

pasbesoin 15y ago

For me, one of the elephants in the room that is the larger discussion about "third world" outsourcing and manufacture, is the other side of the dynamic: What is happening in portions of the "first world". That is, the fear in the first world. (Note: I'm in the U.S.) The first world build up, both deliberately and circumstantially (e.g. World War II), a fairly strong system of profit-sharing and workforce representation and safety. Then, increasing geographic mobility (physical, and communication) provided means of operating portions or the entirety of a business outside of that scope, while maintaining the first world market/destination for finished product. Given that much of the first world was in one form or another "democratic", at that point, those populations faced a choice. Erect barriers to insure the propagation of those protections within their societies, but at perhaps the expense of less individual, immediate wealth -- at least, as measured in objects possessed. Or allow this "outsourcing", undermining domestic production and attendant protections in favor of individual gains -- short term gains, for those not in a position of major equity or enabling and so profiting off of the inter-societal transfers. In my perspective, barring a regression, at this point we are headed towards a world society as well as economy. However, the timeframes are still such that individuals can end up "losers" with regard to opportunities available or lost during their productive lifespans. In the U.S., for example, many people are "losing", right now. The question arises: Has what has happened been the best way forward that was possible? Or could the U.S. et al. have maintained greater barriers while still enabling progress? The ideo of "lifting up" the third world, instead of "racing to the lowest common denominator"? I, for one, don't know the answer to that. Personally, though, I would have liked to try harder for it. Many people in the U.S. are scared, and outraged, and fearful, and many other things, of what they see -- or what is reported -- in China and other places, because behind and beyond the immediate situation, they see or perhaps intuit at some level their own future. Maybe in the 80's and even 90's, many people here just felt it was wrong that another person be treated like that. And they compared those circumstances to their own and wished the latter whole-heartedly for these other people. Now, many people are just plain scared. If they're not already living in this future of decreasing expectations. I think that is the, or at least one of, the elephants in the room, in this entire discussion. We were supposed to be improving the lives of these folk. But now it looks to (rhetorical) me that it was, is at my and our own expense. I'm not arguing for one interpretation or the other, here. But I would like to see this perspective -- this view from "the other side", if I've seen and understood it at least partially correctly -- added to the conversation. And, to loop back to what I mentioned earlier, this happened in the context of "democratic" first world societies. (However imperfect that democracy might be.) So... in casting about for blame, if such is to be sought and found at all, I don't think those populations can simply point to business executives and "corrupt" politicians for the answer. Whether citizens voted, or didn't bother, they were and are part of the choice.