5 ms·

After the mess that was the last Apple Foxconn story, and with all the economic pressure that affects newspapers & news media, it becomes increasingly difficult

After the mess that was the last Apple Foxconn story, and with all the economic pressure that affects newspapers & news media, it becomes increasingly difficult for me to believe stories like these. It's not that I don't suppose that there're bad working conditions at Foxconn - there probably are. No, it's that even if the journalist in this story managed to sneak in, and work there, he probably added tons of hyperbole and wrong encounters into his story, just to make it all the more dramatic. Otherwise, nobody would be interested in it, nobody would read it, and there'd be no money. I really think it's hard to believe journalists these days, especially if the stories are unheard of and outrageous. The decline of advertising money and newspaper subscriptions has lead to a decline of journalistic integrity and objectivism, I think. Addendum, I studied journalism & communication, most of my friends are journalists, and I'd say they try hard, but the economic pressure sounds untenable sometimes. Some of them earn so little money, that I wonder how they even manage to pay rent.

paulerdos 14y ago
It is hard to know who to believe. The journalist who has something to gain by exaggerating the suffering of the workers, or the company which has much more to gain by hiding the suffering. The truth is somewhere in between. Based on the Foxconn on-the-job-site suicide rate being significantly higher than other on-the-job-site suicide rates (important to compare apples-with-apples, no pun intended), the truth probably lies closer to the journalist version.
- misnome 14y ago
  If you are comparing apples-to-apples, then surely you should weight your statement on who to believe by how easy it is for each person to exaggerate/hide. It's super easy for a journalist to exaggerate something like this, with relatively little risk for a massive gain. On the other hand, a "Company" hiding things involves many, many more people involved in the conspiracy, and the penalty for failure isn't really that much (how many decades of big-companies-with-bad-working-conditions stories have we had?). It also doesn't give any sense of context - how reliable the newspaper is, what the average working conditions are for that class of facility, etc etc. Also, again it doesn't seem (or at least the writeup doesn't) to include the information about foxconn being more than just apple, that seems to get forgotten every time there is a Foxconn story.
  - smoyer 14y ago
    "Apples-to-apples" ... perfect wording!
  - cooldeal 14y ago
    >Also, again it doesn't seem (or at least the writeup doesn't) to include the information about foxconn being more than just apple, that seems to get forgotten every time there is a Foxconn story. The story is about making an iPhone 5, which is expected to boost the GDP of the US. http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-apple-iphone-gpd-jpmorgan-20120911,0,6089094.story http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-apple-iphone-... As we're constantly reminded by the Apple blogs and on here, Apple takes 75% of the profits in the phone industry and have huge margins which their competitors can't come close to, so isn't it logical that Apple gets more of the bad press for bad working conditions since they are in the best position to improve the workers' pathetic work and living environment?
  - paulerdos 14y ago
    You raise a seemingly valid point. But, your data seems to be different than mine. Many companies, especially large multi-national ones have an excellent track record of media manipulation and the ability to successfully hide massive problems. Think about how rare whistle blowers are. Easy example that I was personally affected by: Vioxx from Merck where Merck knew about the problems with the drug but pushed it through anyway and got away with it for years. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6192603/ns/health-arthritis/t/report-vioxx-linked-thousands-deaths/ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6192603/ns/health-arthritis/t/re... . Think about big tobacco, think about Chiquita and its activities in Columbia, think about Dow Chemical/Union Carbide...
- glenra 14y ago
  What evidence suggests the suicide rate for Foxconn workers is "significantly higher" than would otherwise be expected? Near as I can tell, the only complaint is that there was a large raw number of suicides a while ago...in a company so huge it has more workers than the population of Wyoming. Last time I looked it up, the suicide rate there seemed to be lower than the rate among chinese people, lower than the rate among chinese college students, lower than the rate among US factory workers and so on. And that problem was largely in the past, not an ongoing issue.
  - paulerdos 14y ago
    "lower than the rate among US factory workers". This is a common comparison fallacy. The baserates you appear to be comparing with are all general population baserate. The baserate that I was thinking about was how many factory workers committed suicide on-site. That is the Apples-to-Apples comparison. Eg: How many Apple employees committed suicide on campus vs how many Foxconn employees committed suicide at their factory camp/dorm.
    - glenra 14y ago
      That is NOT a relevant comparison. Foxconn employees live in dormitories on-site while US factory workers don't, so you'd essentially be trying to compare ALL the suicides of Foxconn employees to SOME of the suicides of other workers. (Though I'm not sure they'd fail even THAT comparison.) If I recall correctly, even the rate at which Americans are murdered on the job is higher than the rate at which Foxconn employees commit suicide there. So if you want to keep claiming there's something uniquely bad about Foxcon in this regard, let's hear some actual numbers from you. What specific numbers are you looking at that lead you to believe Foxconn is unusually bad?
norswap 14y ago
tl;dr You don't anything about this (I don't either) but you doubt it because there is "economic pressure". Right. The same comment can apply to every single item posted to this website, yoohoo.
- terhechte 14y ago
  I'm not talking about the rest of this site, I'm talking about journalism in particular, and how it changed compared to 1-2 decades ago. There's a huge difference between startup blog posts (which are for example other items posted here) and journalism, as a fourth constitutional force: Responsible for educating the people in an objective and truthful way, so they can form their own opinions, express their ideas, and thus participate in politics (by that I do't mean working in Washington. Lookup Habermas). In short, journalism should rinse democracy. I fear that this function (actually the only relevant function that journalism enjoys, imho) is less and less fulfilled. I just took the doubts I have about this article as an example of that. A working journalistic system shouldn't have to fear really hard economic pressure, otherwise it can't work correctly anymore. This relates to all other contents on this site as well, as long as they're journalistic and not public relations.
eckyptang 14y ago
It's probably true and there's nothing Apple or anyone can do about it apart from stop selling things. I dealt with several Chinese manufacturers in the late 1990's who were doing custom PCB runs for one of our products. They treated their staff like shit then and hid it all under the rug when you went to see them. They wheeled out the turd polish in double-quick time. I don't think it's changed and I don't think it will change unless people on the production lines just say "no". This has happened in the textile industry over there (according to my cousin who is an importer of textiles) and staff are earning great rates now. The cheaper staff are in Mexico and India now. Regarding the money - the cost of living is pretty damn cheap over there by their standards. Note: I don't like buying products myself which are responsible for this sort of thing, but I'm not that sympathetic. As for the journalists - they are as full of crap as the factory bosses are.
- damian2000 14y ago
  Its probably not in the same league in terms of numbers, but its impressive that the Raspberry Pi foundation just announced recently that they are now manufacturing their computers at home, in the UK, and maintaining the same retail price. So with advanced technologies and automation, plus some determination, there is something they can do. Its also revealing that the RPi foundation is non-profit so they aren't trying to maintain a bottom line. http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1925 http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1925
tatsuke95 14y ago
>"I really think it's hard to believe journalists these days, especially if the stories are unheard of and outrageous." You really think piss-poor working conditions in Second-World factories are "unheard of and outrageous"? It's been going on for centuries. Sure, this story was impeccably timed, and I'm sure there are liberties taken here and there, but that's because running a magazine/newspaper is a business. That doesn't provide carte blanche to deny that there is truth behind the writing. I think it's a dangerous precedent when the populace begins to say, "you can't believe the media". In fact, I'm sure that there are terrible governments around the world that would love the population to think that way. I'm a big believer in capitalism and globalization, so I think that, net, having these factories in China is beneficial. But I also don't disclaim that they are probably horrible, unhealthy places to work. How much responsibility is Apple's, and how much is China's is the important question.
- terhechte 14y ago
  I also think that it's dangerous to not trust media anymore. I was expressing my fear that that might happen. I don't think the working conditions are outrageous, I also don't think that they're piss-poor though. Relative to the environment (china) they may be not so bad. I was saying that media is trying to market it as outrageous to generate higher sales. This may be a cultural thing, but while I do believe in free markets and capitalism, I think that there're certain parts of society which need to be handled separately as the optimization for economic success (the cheaper the better) doesn't fare well (imho) with health and media. I like the approach of the UK, where the BBC is state paid but not state controlled. But this is a huge separate discussion and I can understand different viewpoints here and I'm afraid it's often about cultural differences which viewpoint we chose.
- csense 14y ago
  > centuries "Industrialization of China did occur on a significant scale only from the 1950s, in the Maoist Great Leap Forward." [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution_in_China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution_in_China
sequoia 14y ago
he probably added tons of hyperbole and wrong encounters into his story, just to make it all the more dramatic. Are you basing this accusation on something or just pulling it out of thin air? You probably cheat on tests, steal other people's ideas, and slack off at work so everyone else has to work harder to accommodate you. Baseless accusations don't feel good, do they?
- terhechte 14y ago
  No, I based it on a general feeling based on several other stories like the 'This American Life' Foxconn report. I'm also not saying that he is lying, just that he is distorting reality. Finally, I wasn't trying to write about this author in particular, but more about general journalism. I may well be wrong there, but I tried to express an opinion based on a theory (explained in the post) that economic pressure can lead to a lower quality of journalistic output. My examples of hyperbole & more were, then, just examples of typical traits of said process. It's well known, that journalistic outlets of less quality (Sun in the UK, Fox News in the US, BILD in Germany, etc) do just what I explained above: They add unnecessary hyperbole, shift facts & more - as long as the story sells. I was just expressing that less money may lead to less quality.

paulerdos 14y ago

It is hard to know who to believe. The journalist who has something to gain by exaggerating the suffering of the workers, or the company which has much more to gain by hiding the suffering. The truth is somewhere in between. Based on the Foxconn on-the-job-site suicide rate being significantly higher than other on-the-job-site suicide rates (important to compare apples-with-apples, no pun intended), the truth probably lies closer to the journalist version.

misnome 14y ago
If you are comparing apples-to-apples, then surely you should weight your statement on who to believe by how easy it is for each person to exaggerate/hide. It's super easy for a journalist to exaggerate something like this, with relatively little risk for a massive gain. On the other hand, a "Company" hiding things involves many, many more people involved in the conspiracy, and the penalty for failure isn't really that much (how many decades of big-companies-with-bad-working-conditions stories have we had?). It also doesn't give any sense of context - how reliable the newspaper is, what the average working conditions are for that class of facility, etc etc. Also, again it doesn't seem (or at least the writeup doesn't) to include the information about foxconn being more than just apple, that seems to get forgotten every time there is a Foxconn story.
- smoyer 14y ago
  "Apples-to-apples" ... perfect wording!
- cooldeal 14y ago
  >Also, again it doesn't seem (or at least the writeup doesn't) to include the information about foxconn being more than just apple, that seems to get forgotten every time there is a Foxconn story. The story is about making an iPhone 5, which is expected to boost the GDP of the US. http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-apple-iphone-gpd-jpmorgan-20120911,0,6089094.story http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-apple-iphone-... As we're constantly reminded by the Apple blogs and on here, Apple takes 75% of the profits in the phone industry and have huge margins which their competitors can't come close to, so isn't it logical that Apple gets more of the bad press for bad working conditions since they are in the best position to improve the workers' pathetic work and living environment?
- paulerdos 14y ago
  You raise a seemingly valid point. But, your data seems to be different than mine. Many companies, especially large multi-national ones have an excellent track record of media manipulation and the ability to successfully hide massive problems. Think about how rare whistle blowers are. Easy example that I was personally affected by: Vioxx from Merck where Merck knew about the problems with the drug but pushed it through anyway and got away with it for years. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6192603/ns/health-arthritis/t/report-vioxx-linked-thousands-deaths/ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6192603/ns/health-arthritis/t/re... . Think about big tobacco, think about Chiquita and its activities in Columbia, think about Dow Chemical/Union Carbide...
glenra 14y ago
What evidence suggests the suicide rate for Foxconn workers is "significantly higher" than would otherwise be expected? Near as I can tell, the only complaint is that there was a large raw number of suicides a while ago...in a company so huge it has more workers than the population of Wyoming. Last time I looked it up, the suicide rate there seemed to be lower than the rate among chinese people, lower than the rate among chinese college students, lower than the rate among US factory workers and so on. And that problem was largely in the past, not an ongoing issue.
- paulerdos 14y ago
  "lower than the rate among US factory workers". This is a common comparison fallacy. The baserates you appear to be comparing with are all general population baserate. The baserate that I was thinking about was how many factory workers committed suicide on-site. That is the Apples-to-Apples comparison. Eg: How many Apple employees committed suicide on campus vs how many Foxconn employees committed suicide at their factory camp/dorm.
  - glenra 14y ago
    That is NOT a relevant comparison. Foxconn employees live in dormitories on-site while US factory workers don't, so you'd essentially be trying to compare ALL the suicides of Foxconn employees to SOME of the suicides of other workers. (Though I'm not sure they'd fail even THAT comparison.) If I recall correctly, even the rate at which Americans are murdered on the job is higher than the rate at which Foxconn employees commit suicide there. So if you want to keep claiming there's something uniquely bad about Foxcon in this regard, let's hear some actual numbers from you. What specific numbers are you looking at that lead you to believe Foxconn is unusually bad?

norswap 14y ago

tl;dr You don't anything about this (I don't either) but you doubt it because there is "economic pressure". Right. The same comment can apply to every single item posted to this website, yoohoo.

terhechte 14y ago
I'm not talking about the rest of this site, I'm talking about journalism in particular, and how it changed compared to 1-2 decades ago. There's a huge difference between startup blog posts (which are for example other items posted here) and journalism, as a fourth constitutional force: Responsible for educating the people in an objective and truthful way, so they can form their own opinions, express their ideas, and thus participate in politics (by that I do't mean working in Washington. Lookup Habermas). In short, journalism should rinse democracy. I fear that this function (actually the only relevant function that journalism enjoys, imho) is less and less fulfilled. I just took the doubts I have about this article as an example of that. A working journalistic system shouldn't have to fear really hard economic pressure, otherwise it can't work correctly anymore. This relates to all other contents on this site as well, as long as they're journalistic and not public relations.

eckyptang 14y ago

It's probably true and there's nothing Apple or anyone can do about it apart from stop selling things. I dealt with several Chinese manufacturers in the late 1990's who were doing custom PCB runs for one of our products. They treated their staff like shit then and hid it all under the rug when you went to see them. They wheeled out the turd polish in double-quick time. I don't think it's changed and I don't think it will change unless people on the production lines just say "no". This has happened in the textile industry over there (according to my cousin who is an importer of textiles) and staff are earning great rates now. The cheaper staff are in Mexico and India now. Regarding the money - the cost of living is pretty damn cheap over there by their standards. Note: I don't like buying products myself which are responsible for this sort of thing, but I'm not that sympathetic. As for the journalists - they are as full of crap as the factory bosses are.

damian2000 14y ago
Its probably not in the same league in terms of numbers, but its impressive that the Raspberry Pi foundation just announced recently that they are now manufacturing their computers at home, in the UK, and maintaining the same retail price. So with advanced technologies and automation, plus some determination, there is something they can do. Its also revealing that the RPi foundation is non-profit so they aren't trying to maintain a bottom line. http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1925 http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1925

tatsuke95 14y ago

>"I really think it's hard to believe journalists these days, especially if the stories are unheard of and outrageous." You really think piss-poor working conditions in Second-World factories are "unheard of and outrageous"? It's been going on for centuries. Sure, this story was impeccably timed, and I'm sure there are liberties taken here and there, but that's because running a magazine/newspaper is a business. That doesn't provide carte blanche to deny that there is truth behind the writing. I think it's a dangerous precedent when the populace begins to say, "you can't believe the media". In fact, I'm sure that there are terrible governments around the world that would love the population to think that way. I'm a big believer in capitalism and globalization, so I think that, net, having these factories in China is beneficial. But I also don't disclaim that they are probably horrible, unhealthy places to work. How much responsibility is Apple's, and how much is China's is the important question.

terhechte 14y ago
I also think that it's dangerous to not trust media anymore. I was expressing my fear that that might happen. I don't think the working conditions are outrageous, I also don't think that they're piss-poor though. Relative to the environment (china) they may be not so bad. I was saying that media is trying to market it as outrageous to generate higher sales. This may be a cultural thing, but while I do believe in free markets and capitalism, I think that there're certain parts of society which need to be handled separately as the optimization for economic success (the cheaper the better) doesn't fare well (imho) with health and media. I like the approach of the UK, where the BBC is state paid but not state controlled. But this is a huge separate discussion and I can understand different viewpoints here and I'm afraid it's often about cultural differences which viewpoint we chose.
csense 14y ago
> centuries "Industrialization of China did occur on a significant scale only from the 1950s, in the Maoist Great Leap Forward." [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution_in_China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution_in_China

sequoia 14y ago

he probably added tons of hyperbole and wrong encounters into his story, just to make it all the more dramatic. Are you basing this accusation on something or just pulling it out of thin air? You probably cheat on tests, steal other people's ideas, and slack off at work so everyone else has to work harder to accommodate you. Baseless accusations don't feel good, do they?

terhechte 14y ago
No, I based it on a general feeling based on several other stories like the 'This American Life' Foxconn report. I'm also not saying that he is lying, just that he is distorting reality. Finally, I wasn't trying to write about this author in particular, but more about general journalism. I may well be wrong there, but I tried to express an opinion based on a theory (explained in the post) that economic pressure can lead to a lower quality of journalistic output. My examples of hyperbole & more were, then, just examples of typical traits of said process. It's well known, that journalistic outlets of less quality (Sun in the UK, Fox News in the US, BILD in Germany, etc) do just what I explained above: They add unnecessary hyperbole, shift facts & more - as long as the story sells. I was just expressing that less money may lead to less quality.