The Darker Side of Apple: The Human Cost of Your iProducts

Before you begin to read the rest of this thread, I would like to make clear a couple of things that I feel I may have to defend later, but choose to be upfront about it now, in order to make myself clear.

WE all have to be dependent on technology. This is not a theory.... but a fact. Now with that said, there is a sort of wastefulness that our society seems to have down packed. We will wait in line for 2 days for a product, and never wonder how demanding it is to make all of these products.

This man (Steve Jobs) has clearly changed tech for the average layman. Even though I'm sure his phone at home was wayyyy better than anything he would put on the market. I know I would. Anyway.

This is simply an article to not keep people from technology, but to put a face/life/deaths behind that $300 product thats all the rage... this week. We have become a throw away society, and until people begin to see that simply things, such as not getting an upgrade every few days, as many tend to notice older versions of some products are better then the new ones, we can change the lives of many, yes, this will make a few people a million dollars less rich, but I would rather think of someone else's life.

Here is a link to the article. The video has been removed

China's Foxconn: Workers Worked to Death

It was back in the spring of 2010 when at least 10 suicides were reported at Foxconn's manufacturing plant in Shenzhen China. Foxconn is the world's largest electronic manufacturer making product for Hewlett-Packard, Nokia and Apple's iPad.

With nearly one million employees throughout China, the suicides raised many questions about the safety and working conditions for the people working in those plants.

As research for his show, Daisey visited Foxconn—a place many journalists and Americans have never visited—and what he found surprised him beyond belief.

"What I was really shocked by was institutionalized dehumanization," he says. "The systems that are put in place are working and the objective of them working is to work people, basically, to death."

He's talking about "massive production lines" where people work "endlessly." Workers are never rotated and end up doing the same task hundreds of thousand of times. "I met many workers whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from doing that work…. [Hands] literally swollen, literally deformed [and] permanently warped," he explains.

finance.yahoo.com...


I found the vid anyway!
Keen On... Mike Daisey: Why Apple is Committing a Great Sin


Peace, NRE.

This is more about Foxconn than it is about apple.
I heard about these stories and read up on them when they broke... and from what I've heard lately the situation at Foxconn hasn't improved much since.

If Apple were a morally responsible company, they'd either demand change at Foxconn (which, if I recall, they did some time ago) or switch to a different supplier...

but whether we like it or not, what always rules is the bottom dollar.
To swich suppliers is to raise costs... and to raise costs is to lose market share... and to lose market share is to lose money.

Sick world we live in.

Very sad for them, AND... possibly us one day...

...I cannot help but seriously envision the work-force in America to be the same if the mentality of the Tea-party and extremist republicans materialized one day...

This type of work-environment sounds like a dream come true for extremist Tea-party and Republicans from their actions and words of recent... A slave/master ONLY type of work-force!!!

It COULD happen here one day folks...

Yea well I went through 4 --V3 RAZRs which have been considered dinosaurs for a long time now. I never did any text on my phones nor did I have a wifi or net connection on it. I just talked. Imagine that. Just talking.
Then I discovered that my provider would soon not support the older generation phones, and my last one began to fail with my wife's so we had to enter the new generation.
Now I have a Samsung model that has every bell and whistle on it I seldom use but it is the future I guess.
anyway I have never used an Apple product simply because of Jobs and his connections to this abuse.
it is no small thing. but I imagine my new phone is also partly made in china. I know the battery is, they almost all are.
Never the less, when I know specifics about someone and how they run their corporation and where they get their products I can so choose not to buy them. Such as when a certain convenience store chain gouged on gasoline when World Trades came down. I will not get gas or anything else from that chain.. I never will. Ever. I never forget.
so I do not own nor will I own any Apple products. Besides their apple logo has a bite taken out of it. Which is exactly what Jobs did to the pocketbook of every single person standing in line to by overpriced products made by oppressed peoples. He was viewed more than once taking the bite out of a big green apple. It was no coincidence. DH

I don't know.....WHAT!!!???? why just apple? Why not every other American Corp. Waging a silent soft war on Asia? That is how the article began before attacking apple solely? Disinfo I say

Capitalism is a very sad state of affairs. Here I am going on record of supporting Hugo Chavez. Yes, I do. I wish the USA would privatize everything from banking, oil, gas, food, etc, etc.

The fact, we have nearly 50 million people on EBT or food stamps is proof enough. Disgusting and intolerable.

We are quickly becoming a third world nation. Not because of the lack of elbow grease of Americans. It is the lack of corporate people staying put in the nation they profited upon.

We are weak and accept anything that comes our way. We thank the people that pay us slave wages and continue working 6 or 7 days a week. Weak? We are weak.

The USA is in a very dire state of mind. Wake up people.

reply to post by HangTheTraitors

...I cannot help but seriously envision the work-force in America to be the same if the mentality of the Tea-party and extremist republicans materialized one day...

This type of work-environment sounds like a dream come true for extremist Tea-party and Republicans from their actions and words of recent... A slave/master ONLY type of work-force!!!

Hardly.

Such mundane tasks are almost always more effectively accomplished by machines of some type. Many of the Asian cultures/communities -refuse- to allow automation into their production lines because they want to put their people to work.

The issue, here, isn't even with FoxConn's policies - they are helpless in this regard, as it is highly likely the Chinese government will not allow them to install automation in those facilities (because doing so would cut into the number of jobs that business could provide).

Why you think the Tea Party is for this is beyond me. Perhaps you have bumped your head a few too many times.

An efficient business is one that has the correct tools available to its employees to do their job safely, accurately, and timely (in that order of importance - additional lines/stations are almost always more effective in the long run than rushed work that results in errors that jeopardize contracts and can result in breach-of-contract fines). Employees should be fulfilled in their work and given opportunities to expand and/or advance their skills and position (you may not always be able to offer an employee a promotion, but you can offer them cross-training that can improve their skill sets).

Now - not all businesses have to work that way. Ultimately - he who owns the business and signs the pay checks decides how he/she is going to treat his/her employees. Said employees are more than free to take their skills elsewhere - to another business or to practice on their own.

You're using a sort of inverse-slavery concept, here. You use the idea that people are enslaved in business to justify an attempt to control that business... rather than make efforts to improve the freedom and options the individual has. Reading between the lines, you are saying: "we have to work at these places, so we should be allowed to control them." Which is a self-slaving attitude.

And that is the conspiracy that people miss.

It's the conspiracy to hide the fact that you are allowed to take your skills and do something with them that enables you to make a living. It's the conspiracy to make you dependent upon someone else for your living. It's the conspiracy to make you lose in either case; you subject to government control/intrusion or debt-induced employee servitude.

So you have to take the unlisted third option - which is to slap both of them back into their respective places.

Unfortunately - we all get caught up in attempting to decide, for others, what should and should not be done to actually live as free citizens. We've become a nation of self-centered dictators who feel our vote should be the final say in how other people a thousand miles away in a different climate should live, work, and behave.

Anyway. If you're buying an i-whatever, you are not doing your "rich and greedy" arguments much good. i-anythings are highly overpriced and underpowered for what you get. Of course - it's designed so toddlers can't even # it up - so the chances you'll do something Apple thinks -may- be beyond your skill level are about zero. So, you'll spend less time talking to people who have to try and go back and figure out how to un-# your computer (God Forbid people learn how to use a computer, or at least stop to read what damned buttons and boxes they are clicking on).

I suppose IT is a very good analogue for the human race. People idolize systems that give them almost no freedom and cost far more than they are worth; while getting angry at self-induced problems encountered in systems that give more freedom but require more awareness and functional thought to operate. In either case, upon encountering a problem with either system; people treat those who try and fix the problem like a piece of property responsible for causing the problem (that was, 90% of the time, self-induced) and act like they are too good to pay that person for fixing the computer they were too stupid to operate correctly.

Not all tech experiences are bad - often, for friends, they are much more humble and do not insist they are right.

(I will never forget a day someone was bragging to me about how stable an operating system was and how it didn't get viruses. The next day, his first words to me are.. "so, I hear you are pretty good with computers..." - the whole class immediately erupted in laughter at the irony.)

Darker side of apple?? How about darker side of China period. Can't blame American corps only. Blame China for enslaving their people for cheap/free labor

reply to post by balon0

East Asian people are very hard working so if they rather die than continue to work then something is terribly wrong. It is not Apple's fault but Foxconn's. They brought the attention to Apple because they feel Apple has the leverage or clout to do something about it.