iPad I beg every Apple Users' Attention!!

[Tamara]

Originally Posted by tiananmen

Dear my friends,
They are at the age 18, or 19. It is the age that his contemporaries in U.S. should sit in the classroom of a university. It is the age that their parents are concerning their daily life. It is the age that they should enjoy the sunshine that every corner of the worlds owns.

I hate to disappoint you but lots of 18 and 19 year olds in the US are not sitting in classrooms but are out there working or trying to find work.

[yvanleterrible]

I see my craft dying in north america.
It used to be a time when there were more than 1,500 cabinet makers in my 60,000 souls population home town. We're now less than a hundred doing it. No one wants to learn it. We can't compete with the Walmarts, Ikeas and others. A customer can buy a chair there for less than it costs me for the materials I'd need to make it!
There are suicides here too...
I think about it often...

[Tamara]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Maybe you are too young to remember 1997. A big outcry and similar articles appear several times each year since then when some journalists want to write something that is sure to get easy publicity. It has nothing to do with Apple, it is usually labor unions who try to stir up some public sympathy so that they get more concessions in talks with employers in Europe and/or the US. All big corporations have been targeted. The big guys are being watched, they couldn't afford to exploit the workers even if they wanted to (I don't want to imply that they do want to)

I'm old enough to clearly remember 1997 but I don't recall anything in particular from that year similar to this. A big difference in 1997, you didn't have a huge population connected to the internet where a story like Foxconn can be easily repeated via forums/blogs/etc.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by Tamara

I hate to disappoint you but lots of 18 and 19 year olds in the US are not sitting in classrooms but are out there working or trying to find work.

Without getting into this debate, your comment misses the point entirely.

[Fotoman]

Thanks Tiananmen for posting it here. I'm very aware of the Foxconn working conditions, suicides, etc., and have been following this story for many months (Gizmodo and BoingBoing have been featuring this.)

The Foxconn story should be spread everywhere that related discussions happen, like this forum, for example.

It strikes me that CEOs like SJ, who likes to portray himself as a force for progressive ideas, should spend less time using Apple's might to try to kill flash, and more time using their financial clout to force foxconn into providing more humane working conditions.

[WillAdams]

Here's an article which mentions an effort over a decade ago to eliminate child labour from sporting goods manufacture:

http://www.america.gov/st/hr-english...D0.390423.html

Interesting historical perspective on the matter.

William

[stustaff]

wasnt there a story by an undercover reporter who got into the factory and reported that well it was pretty much ok and better than most other chineses factories!

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/19/u...ng-conditions/

a few quotes

"Each employee would sign a 'voluntary overtime affidavit,' in order to waive the 36-hour legal limit on your monthly overtime hours. This isn't a bad thing, though, as many workers think that only factories that offer more overtime are 'good factories,' because 'without overtime, you can hardly make a living.'"

"This super factory that holds some 400,000 people isn't the 'sweatshop' that most would imagine. It provides accommodation that reaches the scale of a medium-sized town, all smooth and orderly."

"Each employee would sign a "voluntary overtime affidavit," in order to waive the 36-hour legal limit on your monthly overtime hours. This isn't a bad thing, though, as many workers think that only factories that offer more overtime are "good factories," because "without overtime, you can hardly make a living." For the workers desperate for making money, overtime is like "a pain that can breathe:" without it, the days without money make them "suffocate;" with it, the restless work would only add more "pain" to the body, thus aging quicker. Most of the time they staunchly choose the latter, but even the right to choose such isn't available to all. Only those with the seniors' "trust," with good connections, or those in key positions, can often get to work overtime."

heres a post in the comments that made me think

"I was waiting for the plot twist in this secret "undercover" article that was going to reveal some atrocity or gross neglect for safety. Yet it never came...

I think the author was trying to illicit a negative reader response to the disparity between workers' wages and the retail price of products they manufacture. There are numerous reasons this disparity exists, the most prominent being that China has fixed the value of its currency against the U.S. dollar. This results in Chinese companies being able to sell goods which 1.) Can enjoy high demand due to low costs while 2.) Incurring no risk of the Chinese Yuan strengthening in value and reducing the amount of product that foreign nations can purchase (specifically the United States). Unfortunately, I'm not quick to shed a tear for the price disparity. Buyers (across the world) are always looking for the best price and China is willing to make it happen - like it or not, this is THEIR culture to form and shape as they see fit. They are very hesitant to blindly embrace the norms and values of North America or Western Europe.

The conditions the author described actually sounded rather innocuous - were we supposed to be appalled because the workers moved at a brisk pace and squeezed between some boxes to read a sticker? Perhaps overtime is becoming offensive in certain cultures? I'm only 26 years of age yet I've worked at several jobs in the last 10 years where 20-40 hours of overtime per WEEK was normal. The workers in the article were waiving a limit of 36 overtime hours per MONTH and, unless I read the article wrong, they were being paid OVERTIME for those hours. Furthermore, it sounded as though these workers were EAGER to work the overtime.

China is having its own "industrial technology revolution" of sorts, much like America and Europe centuries earlier - a generation of citizens sacrificing their lives in the hope of a better future for their offspring. Nations like the United States, the primary buyer of the product mentioned in this article, do not gather their wealth in one generation. It takes years of personal and generational sacrifice to give their offspring just a little more than they had.

Perhaps the author should have visited a Chinese textile mill - that "undercover" mission would have dropped more than a few jaws.

[Kolenka]

Originally Posted by Fotoman

The Foxconn story should be spread everywhere that related discussions happen, like this forum, for example.

It strikes me that CEOs like SJ, who likes to portray himself as a force for progressive ideas, should spend less time using Apple's might to try to kill flash, and more time using their financial clout to force foxconn into providing more humane working conditions.

There is a lot of blame to spread around here. Foxconn is absolutely huge, and you'd be hard pressed to find an electronics product that Foxconn was not involved in manufacturing.

Kindle? Foxconn.
Sony Reader? Foxconn.

Devices like the Nook and iRex wouldn't surprise me to be Foxconn as well. You've got the biggest PC manufacturers in the world, Dell and HP both using Foxconn to build their stuff. A lot of cheaper-end TVs are Foxconn and their ilk (the good stuff tends to be manufactured in Japanese plants, where margins are high enough to afford the more expensive labor). Ever buy a game console (or handheld like the DS or PSP)? Foxconn.

If we are to lash Jobs for this, we need to lash the CEOs of pretty much every major electronics firm with a US presence.

[Fotoman]

Originally Posted by Kolenka

If we are to lash Jobs for this, we need to lash the CEOs of pretty much every major electronics firm with a US presence.

I'm perfectly happy to lash all of them... I'm an equal opportunity lasher

[scottjl]

Originally Posted by Tamara

I wonder if this would have got any notice if the headlines didn't include Apple or iPhone and had said Tegra 2 instead?

nope.. just like israel making headlines for "banning" ipads over nothing.. or that super model getting hers confiscated.

want to sell headlines these days? tie it in to apple.. steve jobs.. or oil spills..

[mores]

Originally Posted by Tamara

I hate to disappoint you but lots of 18 and 19 year olds in the US are not sitting in classrooms but are out there working or trying to find work.

What are you talking about? The world needs academics. Not bakers, delivery men, handymen, construction workers or anything else. We can all get by on our brains alone if only we wanted to.



Sheesh. This post reminds me of those emails that ask us to forward a heart-warming email about some poor kid/animal/person and some good samaritan will count those emails and then help this poor kid/animal/person.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by scottjl

nope.. just like israel making headlines for "banning" ipads over nothing.. or that super model getting hers confiscated.

want to sell headlines these days? tie it in to apple.. steve jobs.. or oil spills..

Waiting for the inevitable "BP Execs used Apple iPhones to discuss hiding Oil Spill Extent" articles

[dmaul1114]

Unfortunately most everything we buy these days--especially tech gadgets--involves near slave labor in factories in countries like China.

It's by no means exclusive to Apple. If one wants to do something about it, they pretty much need to not buy electronics or much of anything else.

[Maggie Leung]

Suicide clusters aren't unheard of, especially among the young, unfortunately. Cornell University in the U.S. has been struggling with recent suicides, for instance.

http://www.suicideinfo.ca/csp/assets/alert36.pdf

http://www.usatoday.com/news/educati...es-16_ST_N.htm

Cause and effect are hard to nail down. I'm guessing that brain development, not completed till the 20s, plays into it. The part of the brain that determines judgment and such isn't fully developed till then.

http://www.actforyouth.net/documents...olbraindev.pdf

[Tamara]

Originally Posted by mores

What are you talking about? The world needs academics. Not bakers, delivery men, handymen, construction workers or anything else. We can all get by on our brains alone if only we wanted to.

You missed the point. The OP seemed to have this rosy picture of the US where 18 year olds are all living the easy life going to school while mom & dad support them which is not true.

I think the world needs bakers, delivery men, etc. If we didn't have these people, how would you get a coffee and pastry at Starbucks? How would UPS deliver a package without deliverymen? How would roads/houses/cars/etc get built without tradespeople? Besides, not every kid is cut out to be an academic or has interest in being one.