Your iPhone Was Built, In Part, By 13 Year-Olds Working 16 Hours A Day

[woodyear99]

Apple is not the only company guilty of this. Many of our favorite high tech gadgets are built in a similar way.

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-child-labor-2012-1


We love our iPhones and iPads.
We love the prices of our iPhones and iPads.
We love the super-high profit margins of Apple, Inc., the maker of our iPhones and iPads.

And that's why it's disconcerting to remember that the low prices of our iPhones and iPads — and the super-high profit margins of Apple — are only possible because our iPhones and iPads are made with labor practices that would be illegal in the United States.

And it's also disconcerting to realize that the folks who make our iPhones and iPads not only don't have iPhones and iPads (because they can't afford them), but, in some cases, have never even seen them.
This is a complex issue. But it's also an important one. And it's only going to get more important as the world's economies continue to become more intertwined.

[captainchris]

wdmc!

[Arcmanov]

...but does it really matter to iPhone owners?

It might if there was an app for that... :/


.....SwiftKeyed from my Samsung Galaxy S2 with Tapatalk

[Doomtack]

^ Sounded like an iPhone owner there man...
Quick, cover it up with free apps and a new announcement!

[TriniXaeno]

Sad

Another dynamic at play here is the culture of the people in China.

They have a work ethic that is vastly different to the westerners. You can see it at play right here with Chinese workers in Trinidad at restaurants and groceries. And that's without the benefit of Apple Inc or FoxxConn.

They do that naturally.

[captainchris]

^ Naturally you say. How about the fact they DONT COMPLAIN ?

But other countries, and I am not saying other "first" world countries either, because China is very much up there, find that to be in-humane. Not them. They do not complain. Prob the fact that the cost of living their is not high and that the people there are comfortable?

[Arcmanov]

^ Sounded like an iPhone owner there man...

Nope.   Never have,  never will.

.....SwiftKeyed from my Samsung Galaxy S2 with Tapatalk

[W1nTry]

I'd just like to point out, so are your clothes, shoes, belts, pants, tonnes of imported foods, misc consumer products, appliances, etc etc etc.

I'm not saying its right, i'm just saying its alot of stink over one particular case because its a 'high-profile' product. Why aren't all the tonnes of other products out there we buy that are produced by below minimum wage, below proper age, below humane working conditions, below more less EVERYTHING not ALSO shouted to the high heavens? #humansarefickle

[woodyear99]

Yeah as I said in the original post, Apple isn't the only company guilty of this. It does shed some light on labor practices over there, hopefully things will improve.

[captainchris]

Foxxconn is also lead manufacturer of CPU Sockets for motherboards and a few high end Companies like Asus and MSI for example use them for the base product.

[woodyear99]

Not just the tech sector either...


http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/apr/28/sweatshops-supplying-high-street-brands


Marks and Spencer's, Next, Ralph Lauren, DKNY, GAP, Converse, Banana Republic, Land's End, Levi's. And so the list of brands go on and on. What do they all have in common? According to a deeply depressing report (pdf) by the International Textile Garment and Leather Workers' Federation (ITGLWF), the factories in Asia contracted to make their products are still responsible for shocking working practices.

More than a decade after sweatshop labour for high street brands became a mainstream issue, and after plenty of companies have instituted monitoring of their supply chains, the problem still seems endemic right across the global clothing and footwear sector.

Many of the factories supplying the brands likely to dominate the Olympics in 2012, such as Adidas, Nike, Slazenger, Speedo and Puma, "are routinely breaking every rule in the book when it comes to labour rights", according to the ITGLWF.

The list of brands ultimately sourcing from the 83 factories surveyed in the report is so comprehensive, it seems to make a mockery of the whole idea that the high street has cleaned up its act.

Factories in three countries – the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka – were surveyed, and not one of them paid a living wage to their combined 100,000-strong workforce. Many of them didn't even pay the legal minimum wage. What the report also makes clear is that this is a gender issue: 76% of the surveyed workforce are women. Globalised supply chains exploit predominantly female labour. It's an irony that probably escapes most of the women who do the bulk of high street shopping in the west. Women shopping for products made by other, underpaid, exploited, women.

What's more, things seem to be getting worse, rather than better. Employment is becoming more precarious as more workers are put on to temporary contracts, day labour, on call rather than with permanent jobs. That enables employers to dodge holiday pay, sick pay and written contracts. Employers also imposed compulsory overtime, lower wages and higher production targets on workers on these short-term contracts.

Such precarious employment makes it harder for trade unions to organise and recruit, because contracts are not renewed if the worker has been involved in trade union activity. On average, 25% of workers in Indonesia were short-term or temporary, while in the Philippines it rose to 85% in one factory, 50% at another.

[captainchris]

So those movies have some truth to them with what they show us.

[TriniXaeno]

damn, that picture is even more grim than the one painted in the Apple article.

[woodyear99]

Noticed there is a Sweatshop game yes, definitely relevant to GATT lol

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/109157


Sweatshop is a game from Channel 4 where you play as a factory manager trying to produce knock-off designer clothing. As you can tell by the title, it’s a game with a clear message that doesn’t pull any punches. There are real-world statistics and quotes about sweatshops between each level that set the game’s argument out clearly.

Wrapping around this dirty, depressing reality about sweatshops is an airy, bubbly art style and an upbeat chiptune soundtrack. Your missions are given by a jovial factory owner, who is constantly laughing and inappropriately joking with the young child he has employed to work in his factory. Meanwhile, when his back is turned, you face innocent but sometimes painfully unaware questions from the small disheveled child you are ordering about. The fashion designers talk down to the factory owner in the cutscenes, which causes him to turn around and passive-aggressively take it out on you by upping your quotas.

Still, hats and shirts have to be made, and the game presents this challenge in the form of a tower defense. Ingredients come down the conveyor belt and you place workers along the belt to combine them into clothing. You have a quota to fill and you can upgrade your workers with training or give them water, fans and radios to motivate them. Alternately, when they collapse due to exhaustion, you can just fire them and replace them. You even have the choice of hiring semi-skilled workers or just hiring children and working them till they collapse.

The contrast between the cheery visuals and depressingly bleak story make this game far more interesting than an average ‘educational’ game. You can even send your sweatshop items to your friends on Facebook, which is so eerily similar to FarmVille that it has to be intentional.

Talking Points: Does this work as a message game? Do you get the message better than you would through a documentary? How well does the sometimes frantic pace of the gameplay communicate the idea of a sweatshop? Are the ‘evil’ choices here as effective as the ‘good’ ones?

[Arcmanov]

I'd just like to point out, so are your clothes, shoes, belts, pants, tonnes of imported foods, misc consumer products, appliances, etc etc etc.

I'm not saying its right, i'm just saying its alot of stink over one particular case because its a 'high-profile' product. Why aren't all the tonnes of other products out there we buy that are produced by below minimum wage, below proper age, below humane working conditions, below more less EVERYTHING not ALSO shouted to the high heavens? #humansarefickle

It's not that we don't know eh W1nTry,  but iPhone owners (and Apple) make such a big f@#king deal about their so-called 'jesus phone',  that it's worth trumpeting, if only to publicly take em down a peg.

Last year,  Foxconn had to actually install SAFETY NETS for f@#k's sake,  around their Shenzen building to try to curb the rash of worker suicides.  The conditions are that bad.

... and we sit here and praise Steve Jobs,  when he knowingly presided over this f@#kery for YEARS!!!

You would think that such a 'high profile' company like Apple, with such high profit margins would actually TRY to find enough of a f@#k to give to try and make things better.... but no,  shiny new gadgets have to be built for as cheap as they can possibly get em, right? 

Ridiculous.


.....SwiftKeyed from my Samsung Galaxy S2 with Tapatalk

[Spazosaurus]

...at first I was like and then I went like

I wanna play that game.

[Mez]

iPedobear

[woodyear99]

The question really is, do consumers vote with their wallets? With knowledge of such poor working conditions people will still buy these gadgets, clothes etc. Its been going on for years, we place blame on the manufacturer but at the end of the day who is buying the blood merchandise....

Even your groceries not safe lol

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/health/news/article.cfm?c_id=204&objectid=10777149


The bananas look just the same. One bunch promises to help third world farmers pay for their children to go to school. You can even swipe your smartphone on the label to find out more. The other bunch doesn't make any promises but is confusingly labelled Ethical Choice. It's also a dollar cheaper.

Across the aisle, a slightly motley collection of organic vegetables offers pesticide-free goodness for you and your family. Except the carrots cost $6.99 a kilo instead of $2.99 and the asparagus looks shrivelled.

The tug-of-war between your conscience and your wallet continues all the way round the supermarket. Is it safe to buy fish? Understocked snapper is supposed to be an ethical no-no but at $37.99 a kilo, it's not so hard to give up. Fortunately gurnard - near the top of the ecological rankings - is on special today at $22.99.

At least half the space on the egg shelf is now devoted to free range, organic and barn varieties.The rest are labelled "caged eggs" - a helpful reminder of the gruesome pictures of battery hens you've seen on TV.

A free range tray on special costs about 50 per cent more but you don't know what you are getting. Does free range really mean eggs from healthy hens pecking happily in an open yard? Or, as small producers claim, does it mean thousands of hens kept inside giant sheds now the big companies have picked up the brand?


Welcome to the battleground of ethical shopping, where the average consumer's good intentions can be shot down by a barrage of conflicting information or just a well-aimed scud missile on the price tag.

Devinney and his colleagues tested consumers in eight countries with ethical dilemmas about their buying choices and compared the answers with their buying history.

They found people were well aware of issues such as sweatshop labour and poor environmental practices but thought the Government, companies or legal-business system should change, rather than them.

The researchers also found an "astounding reluctance" to consider ethical issues above price and quality. Even the colour of a running shoe mattered more to most people than the conditions under which it was made.

Some may find it heresy, he argues, but regardless of the moral merits, cost matters more for most ordinary people.

Consumer magazine research writer Jessica Wilson says shoppers may choose the cheapest product because they don't have reliable information on a company's environmental record or ingredient sourcing as they stand in the supermarket.

Under time pressure, price wins the day, she suggests. "It is often the only hard and fast information you have in front of you."

[woodyear99]

Hmm noticed a long report from 2010 with lots of details on the lives of Chinese underage workers. Check some of those pics...

Original report:
http://www.globallabourrights.org/reports?id=0034#comp


(Summary)
http://beefjack.com/news/sweatshops-produce-for-microsoft-samsung-hewlett-packard/

A report from The National Labor Committee has condemned Microsoft, amongst other companies,  of outsourcing production to sweatshops in China. One such facility, run by KYE Systems Corp. and located in Dongguan City, reportedly pays wages of under 52 cents an hour to workers often as young as 14 years old. It is not uncommon for these 15 hour shifts, every day of the week, in extremely cramped conditions. Hot days in can cause temperatures on the factory floor to soar to 86 degrees and workers will often end a shift with clothes dripping in sweat; the management only switches the air-conditioning on when their clients pay visits.

One teenage worker describes:

“We are like prisoners. It seems like we live only to work.  We do not work to live.  We do not live a life, only work.”
Others slump in exhaustion on the line. This, as well as playing music or even talking, is punished through such archaic methods as docked pay or cleaning of the toilets. They need permission to drink water and can’t go to the bathroom during working hours. Beatings and sexual harassment happen often; workers subjected to this physcological and physical pain must endure in silence, as there is no avenue for complaint. Workers injured are often docks wages or fired for failing to adhere to safety regulations, one such story being of a man losing a finger in a hole punch machine before being fired directly after emergency hospital treatment.

A military regime is played out within the KYE factory, with workers becoming “replaceable cogs in the wheel”. KYE is clearly aware of the immorality of such an operation, banning any photo-taking within their facility, even to clients. These clients include household names such as Microsoft, Samsung, Best-Buy, Hewlett Packard, Acer and Logitech.

Hopefully the market for these items, the consumer, will be made increasingly aware of such operations. With enough media attention, immoral and disgusting corporate regimes, like that enforced by KYE, can be forced to treat workers fairly or be brought to their knees by the influence of the European and American markets.

This will not happen quickly, but the sooner these practices stop, the better.

The original report can be found here.
http://www.globallabourrights.org/reports?id=0034#comp

[TriniXaeno]

The tug-of-war between your conscience and your wallet continues all the way round the supermarket.

This!

If the sweat shops go away, the prices of electronics will increase dramatically.

And with that, less sales and the economies of scale reduced....which further increases costs and by extension prices.

A lose lose situation, to be sure.

No one wants to see workers under those sort of conditions but at the same time, the majority of us won't want prices increased either.

And again, getting back to the culture of China. I'd go so far to say asians as a whole. These people are insanely hard workers. Like its part of their genetic make up (along with gaming, lol).

Even in the gaming industry, who else is better known for slaving away in the cyber equivalent of sweat shops making money for lineage and WoW.

http://www.technutopia.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-1537.html

http://www.1up.com/features/wage-slaves-mmo-goldfarming

China

Sack
This Lineage II Chinese farmer gets about 56 cents an hour. Lineage II had banned Chinese IPs because of their huge Chinese farming problem; however, Sack's farming center easily worked around it.

Indonesia

The Canadian
Smooth Criminal owns 30 percent of an Indonesia farming center and hired "The Canadian" as a manager. Their farmers mainly work in WOW on one of the 20 PCs they have set up.