fascinating read. from what I've gathered its a story about a three-hundred fifty billion dollar international company that employs child labor and once had to install suicide nets on their factory buildings. the story indicates they've also decided the counterintelligence level data they collect from their walled garden of proprietary-only apps is entirely insufficient to thwart oncemore being pressed to acquiesce to a living wage. ultimately theyve chosen a subversion campaign where they themselves pretend to be small developers and in doing so, bankroll what I imagine to be an otherwise successful campaign of suppression and profiteering.
EDIT: oof, capitalism strikes again. i assume the 'I work for apple' and 'well the devs just didn't form their own lobby' crowd has an opinion about their faceless godking. if devs are hackers and hn is devs, I don't understand why there's any defense of this company at all. Lisa needs braces. you deserve to be compensated for your hard work.
> ABC News[48] and The Economist[49] both conducted comparisons and found that although the number of workplace suicides at Foxconn was large in absolute terms, the suicide rate was actually lower than the overall suicide rate of China[50] or the United States.[51] According to a 2011 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, China had a high suicide rate with approximately 22.23 deaths per 100,000 persons.[52] In 2010, the company's employee count was a reported 930,000 people.[53]
What's the suicide rate amongst people with a steady, full-time job, though?
I would imagine that nation-wide suicide statistic would be heavily skewed by people who are elderly, disabled, extremely socially isolated or otherwise on the fringes of society.
>story about a three-hundred fifty billion dollar international company that employs child labor and once had to install suicide nets on their factory buildings.
Neither of those statements are true. Please refrain from making emotional arguments based on misinformation.
You're right. They're currently valued at over a trillion dollars, and the ones responsible for the suicide nets/child labor/political prisoner labor is their suppliers, not Apple. Crisis averted, right?
Apple is the only company that regularly audits their suppliers for exactly the complaints that you're saying are their fault. What would you have them do? And why aren't you this vociferous against Microsoft or Samsung or any other companies that use the exact same suppliers? All your posts come off as being just anti-Apple as opposed to reasoned complaints.
It's great that Apple audits themselves, but it doesn't mean much if they're repeatedly being called-out for bad working conditions. It would appear that they don't work very closely with their manufacturers, and if they do then the optics are that they're turning a blind-eye to their manufactures. You're asking me what I want them to do? I want them to stop working with people who hunt down religious minorities and keep them as political prisoners.
I particularly hate Apple because they contradict themselves more than any other company their size. They claim that privacy is a human right, but they sell out to every government who asks politely. They go to great length to make usable software, but none of that usability empowers the user. They've built a dumb-pipe for money in the same way Disney World is a high-margin playground for mildly affluent idiots. I hate it, and refuting their asinine "PR spin" is a personal vendetta of mine. Actually it's something I do to lots of companies, including a number of startups posted here. It's a miracle I haven't been banned for toxicity on that front, at least.
In any case, I'll gladly stop slamming Apple the day they develop a working relationship with their customers and drop their holier-than-thou act. Until then, it's open season!
So, in summary... you're just an anti-Apple troll. Apple does stop relationships with companies that violate their guidelines. This is objectively true and there is evidence of them severing ties with suppliers that don't fix issues found during their audits. They do claim privacy is a human right and every action they take supports that goal but that doesn't mean that they can just start doing illegal things. They wouldn't be able to stay in business if they didn't comply with the laws of the governments in the countries that they operate in. By that standard, how are you doing business or buying any products with any company that operates in China? You're either a hypocrite or you're just selectively choosing where your unrealistic standards are applied. Are you saying you don't own any Microsoft products? Samsung products? Google products?
Apple is legitimately the only company that puts their money where their mouth is. It obviously is not far enough to satiate you (which, in my opinion is wholly unrealistic for a company with operations of that size) so I have to wonder what companies you actually do buy products from. If you use a smartphone or computer of any kind, you're just a huge hypocrite. It's fine to say that they don't go far enough but, considering that they go farther than literally any other electronics or tech company to make sure that their products are sustainable and made with fair labor, it doesn't make any sense that you would be against them to the extent that you are.
It's convenient that this transitivity of evil always stops exactly when it comes to writing snarky comments on a device that inevitably has as questionable of a supply chain as any Apple device.
As far as the suicide nets go, during their worst year of suicides, Foxconn had a suicide rate of 1.5 per 100,000, which is over 10 times less than the suicide rate of the US or China.
You can read more about it in "Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and The Lives of China's Workers" by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, and Ngai Pun. Published in 2020.
How does the publication date of the book affect the timeframe where the incidents occurred? The book is still only referencing events from over 11 years ago.
The parent was claiming that the suicide nets are 'misinformation'. Apple themselves admit to suggesting the use of nets to avoid factory suicides at Foxconn plants - that link serves purely to dispel the idea that it's misinformation.
Yet, your statement makes it clear that Apple didn’t install nets at Foxconn’s factory. So the original statement was objectively false as was the implication it was needed when US collages have higher suicide rates.
Apple doesn’t have real control over Foxconn any more than Microsoft, Sony, Google, Nintendo, etc who all use them, but people where competing for those jobs.
This whole Foxconn suicide net thing is really screwed up. I was there in person working for another US tech company, not Apple, but in the same Shenzhen factory compound during the big hubbub. It wasn't nearly as bad as the news reported.
The rest is anecdotal first-hand data from me, so feel free to ignore it:
2. The working conditions were bad, but not THAT bad. It was a shitty factory job where you were under a lot of scrutiny, but probably not as much as working at Amazon today.
3. The pay at those Foxconn jobs was great. People were making multiples of what they could earn back home for way less effort. Foxconn factory workers thought of themselves as hot shit, much like factory technicians used to think of themselves in the USA before all those jobs disappeared. It looked like there was a nice corporate ladder you could work your way up, too, since they'd filter things through multiple layers of increasingly-elite technicians/engineers on their way to me.
The place looked like a lot like a college campus when I was there. Tons of young, happy-looking people working hard and getting paid well for it.
IMO this all stems back to that debunked and retracted NPR report talking about armed guards and a prison-like atmosphere. The worst thing I had to deal with in Shenzhen was there not being enough butter in the cakes at the factory's onsite bakery when I bought my coworkers a couple of big birthday cakes.
That’s not really what’s going on ether, the CCP doesn’t let foreign companies setup and run factories inside of China.
So Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, Nintendo, Nokia, Sony etc all end up using Foxconn to manufacture electronics at scale. Foxconn is actually slightly above average for Chinese manufacturing, but that’s really saying more about working conditions in China than anything positive about Foxconn.
Not quite, the corporate structure is a little complicated but they are sort of made up of separate companies. Which is why “Foxconn Industrial Internet Co Ltd” for example has it’s own stock and is located at “2F C1 Foxconn Technology Park 2 Donghuan 2 Road Longhua Stre Shenzhen, 518109 China”
The horrifying working conditions are more of a reference to the children and political prisoners of China who are forced to work in factories for Apple suppliers.
No, you said it in reference to suicide nets. Nobody mentioned children and political prisoners before now.
Children and political prisoners may be used as forced labor in China, but pretending that has something to do with Apple in particular is more misinformation.
Apple have programs in place to try to prevent this.
It is misinformation. Apple isn't the company whose employees are doing it and Apple is not ignoring these issues with their supplier. They regularly audit them, they regularly shift away to other suppliers when their audit remediation isn't followed (see their move to TSMC), and Apple also doesn't use child labor.
You're attempting to dispel the misinformation you posted with more misinformation?
We're not defending Apple. We're against misinformation. In the same way that people hurt the "Right to Repair" movement by claiming that Apple sues third-party repair stores merely for existing (they don't, they only sue for IP infringement), this misinformation hurts this cause because it makes it easy for people to ignore it. If you can easily disprove an accusation like this, it makes it easy to ignore other accusations coming from the same sources or surrounding the same arguments.
EDIT: oof, capitalism strikes again. i assume the 'I work for apple' and 'well the devs just didn't form their own lobby' crowd has an opinion about their faceless godking. if devs are hackers and hn is devs, I don't understand why there's any defense of this company at all. Lisa needs braces. you deserve to be compensated for your hard work.