I hope this makes people reconsider if they really need a new laptop, iphone, etc. I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited.
> I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited.
A lot of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart shopping complex the next town over. Now they're upgrading that to an Amazon distribution center in the next state over.
On this board, I expect a lot of people will explain (unsympathetically but not completely unreasonably) that the benefits of these exploitative conditions outweigh the costs (this unfortunate soul's death included).
I think you can have reasonably priced quality products and worker well-being, but good luck making your case to shareholders and their apologists.
What would need to rise is a collective consciousness of what a shitty system this is. Most people are too distracted to even pay attention, let alone do something about it.
> Most people are too distracted to even pay attention, let alone do something about it.
This is by design. As long as it's profitable to exploit labor, nothing will change. It is far far easier to keep people distracted and blind to all of this than it is to make them 'wake up,' or make any changes to their lives.
> This is by design. As long as it's profitable to exploit labor, nothing will change.
Do you by chance believe in "Intelligent Design" as an explanation for complex biological systems? It's not obvious to me that inefficient social systems (i.e. not optimized for worker/human happiness) require "design"? If we create an organism who's survival condition is "generate profit" won't it just do that as efficiently as we let it? When I think about exploitative systems as requiring "malice by design" I rarely seem to uncover a solution other than "wait for someone else to be less evil" or occasionally "live with it and treat the worst of the symptoms".
To me the irony is that you seem to narrow Intelligent Design to merely mean a fatuous scientific theory that is unnecessary for explaining the development of complex biological systems. But the very inception of Intelligent Design was in fact "malicious by design."[1]
Intelligent Design was the functional equivalent of `s/creationism/intelligent design/g` in a creationist textbook to get around a Supreme Court ban from 1987. That revised textbook was then banned by a district court in 2005.
I'm fairly certain that Ken Miller and the many others who fought to keep that book out of classrooms in 2004-05 understood clearly that the "Intelligent Design" side was acting in bad faith. I'm also fairly certain they weren't constrained by their knowledge of the "designed malice" of the other side but instead used that fact to rally more citizens to their cause.
This maybe isn't the place to get super political but I'll give it a shot.
The systems of production aren't optimized for worker or human happiness, they are optimized for profit making. That is certainly a design choice, at least on a firm-by-firm level. Maybe nobody sat down and said, "how can I make my workers miserable today?" but they have certainly sat down and said, "how can I profit more today?" And typically, when there is a choice between that profit and workers' happiness, profit wins.
Once all or most firms start operating by this logic, the exploitation becomes inescapable. If the firms are smart, they will band together to use some of their profit to influence politics, shaping systems that enable them to make more profits.
"Live with it and treat the worst of the systems" would be sort of like the American Democratic party: enact reforms and put restrictions on what firms can do so that they can't exploit so much. This rarely seems to work, first because firms find a way around restrictions, second because the restrictions are often shaped or even written by the firms that are to be regulated. (If you're going to be regulated, you might as well make it happen on your terms.) As you said, it treats the symptoms but not the cause.
I don't know about "wait for someone else to be less evil", but I suppose that would be people who can see the problems with the current system but propose no solution. Also, you might have some people in this category who do think that the system could work, if only people were nicer to each other. But again, the problem isn't a lack of niceness, it's that the system is optimized for profit at all costs; given a choice between niceness or profit, profit usually wins.
An alternative would be to actually treat the cause of the problem. Have a system where firms are optimized for human needs rather than for profit.
Social systems is created by Humans consciously. Complex biological systems are by evidence we have, created by evolutionary process and in fact, not intelligent.
Company policy doesn't want you to disclose your salary. I think this is an explicit thought out design. Companies doesn't want worker union, history tells us why.
Church policy to stop people from learning how to read. Church want you to keep believing in God and doctrines and has mutual benefit with the monarch via believe in Divine right.
The people will work towards less control. Just as in computers, centralized power is simply not scalable. We will eventually move towards something like worker-owned cooperatives.
> A lot of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart shopping complex the next town over. Now they're upgrading that to an Amazon distribution center in the next state over.
Despite their convictions to the contrary, those are a different set of people.
It's more like "ONE half of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart", and "the OTHER half of America is using an Amazon distribution center in the next state over".
I'm not sanguine that Americans would pay fair-trade prices for household products. (And to be completely fair, there's certainly a half of America that just couldn't afford to pay the prices even if they wanted.)
> I think you can have reasonably priced quality products and worker well-being, but good luck making your case to shareholders and their apologists.
If the market could bear a higher priced product that’s ethically sourced, why wouldn’t companies simply raise the price to what the market bears, and pocket the profit instead of ethically source it?
You would need stronger unions to fix this. China does not allow real unions and US has weird union laws that make their relationship with companies confrontational (really: Unions in Europe and US are very different).
The US has enterprise-level or workplace level bargaining. Most European countries have sector-level bargaining.
In the US workplaces are divided into unionized and non-unionized. Unionized firm is in competitive disadvantage against non-unionized firms. This results a situation where firms fight against unionization very aggressively and unions respond in same. It's very confrontational and aggressive.
In Europe firms with more union members are not in competitive disadvantage relative to firms with fewer union members, because negotiations happen sector level. For example restaurant workers union(s) meet restaurant business representatives and they make industry-wide agreements.
I am not OP, I do not have links to facts but I can give you some examples from people I know, there may be other industries companies with worse conditions.
- working extra hours is paid double and this hours are limited
- you are forced to take you vacation days off, you can't chose the money and work the full year
- your work place provides you food or you get "food tickets" that you can use in stores to buy only food.
- if you have to work on national holly-day you will get paid double
I think you would like the places that offer you food tickets, this means on top of your pay you get extra tokens to buy food. Some places(not as often) have special places where you can sit and eat cooked food.
I think this is good so the workers won't skip on food, it is also a negotiation thing, when I see offers I see that you get paid X amount + food tickets.
Under these rules, the boards of directors of companies in Germany are required to include a significant portion of their voting membership to be drawn from worker population. As such, governorship of the company is at least partially beholden to the input of the persons who create all its value.
This is starkly contrasted by US capitalism, where the workers who create all the company's value have effectively no say (apart from collective bargaining and strike) in any directions the company takes. The idea of workers voting on the board is laughable in the states.
Co-determination was enshrined right after WWII, in part because the Germans looked around at the industrialized barbarism of the Third Reich and asked themselves "how can we prevent this from ever happening again"? The answer they came up with, in more ways than just co-determination, was to pointedly not hand the country's capitalists everything they wanted. They decided to place serious checks upon the power of capitalists.
It's important to never forget that once in power, the Third Reich's first act was to round up, imprison and murder labor union leadership, socialists and communists. Co-determination is one way to remember.
The US has enterprise-level or workplace level bargaining. Most European countries have sector-level bargaining.
In the US workplaces are divided into unionized and non-unionized. Unionized firm is in competitive disadvantage against non-unionized firms. This results a situation where firms fight against unionization very aggressively and unions respond in same. It's very confrontational and aggressive.
In Europe firms with more union members are not in competitive disadvantage relative to firms with fewer union members, because negotiations happen sector level. For example restaurant workers union(s) meet restaurant business representatives and they make industry-wide agreements.
I think you're overly optimistic about how little people care about price.
I'd argue that if you could halve the price by literally using slaves to manufacturer them, most people wouldn't care as long as those slaves were on the other side of the planet.
There's also the matter of difficulty keeping up with which products are tied to which bad actors, possibly far up their supply chain.
Distributing responsibility for determining which companies are being ultra-shitty but not breaking the law imposes far too much time-cost on consumers to be reasonable, on top of the regular costs of participating in boycotts. They're not an effective means of enforcing society norms. Regulation is—making being ultra-shitty illegal works way better than imposing a cost of ((time it takes to keep up with and track shitty-company news)+(cost of participating in boycotts)) times (number of consumers) across your entire society. That's clearly untenable and it's not really the fault of individual consumers that boycotts don't work for enforcing social norms, since they can't really work, in the general case, once your economy scales past the local cottage industry level. It's impractical in a global, or even national economy. Then there's game-theoretical pressure to defect from a boycott, et c.
Even the highly-engaged consumer will catch and (weakly, ineffectually) punish maybe single-digit percentages of the awfulness occurring in their economic footprint, at great time and probably monetary cost, unless they check out from the economy almost entirely.
> I'd argue that if you could halve the price by literally using slaves to manufacturer them, most people wouldn't care as long as those slaves were on the other side of the planet.
But I'd say that's mainly because they don't know or don't truly understand the situation. The reason for that is that literally billions of dollars are spent on advertising that papers over human rights issues by blasting competing messages about luxury, fashion, desirability, economy, etc. A passive consumer isn't going to be able to overcome the environment of information asymmetry that's actively maintained by wealthy corporations.
Then there's also the issue of how the race to the bottom also actively destroys most ethical alternatives, which just turns understanding into despair over the lack of ethical options.
I think if you put the half-price, slave-made product and a double-priced, ethically made alternative next to each other in a store, I think consumers would chose the latter if they were both sold under signs that clearly communicated the realities of the lives of the workers that made them. That's not going to happen because the incentives are for the company that mistreats its workers is to lie and cheat, so I don't think the market can solve this issue. It's going to require sustained intervention by ethical governments to fix the incentives in favor of human rights.
People are fickle when it comes to adding ethical considerations to their purchasing decisions. The same person who will buy the cheapest meat without considering how the animal was treated will also vote for stricter animal welfare laws.
In terms of worker's rights, I expect there would be more support for laws governing higher minimum conditions for workers of imported goods than there would be support for more expensive products that directly compete with cheaper products made by more exploited workers.
>The same person who will buy the cheapest meat without considering how the animal was treated will also vote for stricter animal welfare laws.
A more expensive meat says nothing about how the animals were treated. Maybe it just means some business owner is making more money from it. Voting for animal welfare laws is much more impactful.
>In terms of worker's rights, I expect there would be more support for laws governing higher minimum conditions for workers of imported goods than there would be support for more expensive products that directly compete with cheaper products made by more exploited workers.
I think this is a good point, and is also likely why conservatives tend to prefer "minimal government" and "market forces."
As a society I think we need someone to keep us in check as individuals. Note: This doesn't mean totalitarianism, we can come to the same conclusions democratically.
This just means that socially we're more likely to vote for fair working conditions — but privately it's incredibly easy for us to be tempted into a choice that benefits us in the short-term and hurts someone else (or even ourselves) in the long-term.
I know I can buy more expensive meat from farms that treat animals ethically and supports local farms. When I look at my bank account as I'm grocery shopping on a Sunday... I'm not buying the more expensive meat. I'm capable of it, but I'm also financially risk-adverse.
There have been plenty of successful boycotts and news exposes in the past to get companies to deal with various issues and they seem to have worked.
If you want the depressing version what will more likely happen is all those workers will be replaced by robots and they'll be forced back to their previous far worse conditions
In a song with 49 million plays on Spotify alone, Kanye West said "Nike, Nike treat employees just like slaves
Gave LeBron a billi' not to run away," right around the time when Nike was getting serious heat from its labor conditions overseas
It is only if you buy into the denatured myth of "humanity" that has prevailed in modernity. The reality is that we (with all our capacities, including ethical cognition & emotions) did not evolve to exist in faceless societies of billions, spanning the entire globe.
These societies obviously are not feasible in the long-term - that they ever could be is a (false) consequence of that denatured superstition.
I am reminded of the following Terry Pratchett bit:
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
I hope people would actually do some research before biting on the clickbait. Foxconn has a lower suicide rate than the national average, and compared to working conditions in most of China is virtually first world.
If you want to see REAL human suffering, look to something like the shipbreaking yards in India and Bangladesh.
yeah, not sure you're that familiar with the site this is posted on. Its an anarchist blog/forum that makes exactly zero dollars from advertising. Not sure there's anything I can say that would change or effect the idea that somehow these peoples suffering is something to be sneered at or simply dismissed.
Consider what those “exploited” workers would be doing if enough fewer people bought iPhones for their labor not to be needed. Would they be better off than they are now?
Presumably they are not being held against their will, so this is the best job they could find.
Low-skilled factory labor is a worse job than sitting in a Silicon Valley office all day, but it’s probably better than rural poverty or unemployment.
>You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be helped with foreign aid? Maybe–although the historical record of regions like southern Italy suggests that such aid has a tendency to promote perpetual dependence. Anyway, there isn’t the slightest prospect of significant aid materializing. Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of course–but they won’t, or at least not because we tell them to. And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard... [0]
No one is arguing that these factories shouldn't have been built. No one is arguing that these jobs don't pay more. The concern is the conditions for the worker are simply inhumane and the companies commissioning this work should be held responsible for knowingly profiting off this behavior. These would be Apple-owned factories, not Foxconn's, if Apple hadn't figure out they can pass the blame to rights abuses to whoever's name is on the building.
In that essay Krugman treats wage and working conditions as interchangeable, and I think that's the right approach. Two different jobs with different wages can be equally desirable if one has better working conditions than the other. So to say "Apple should pay more" vs "Apple should have better working conditions" is the same statement, there's no meaningful distinction. Either way the workers would benefit at the company's expense, and the tradeoff between working for, say, Apple vs what the best job there was before Apple built the factory is the same.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here?
desirability = wage - working conditions?
Apple paying marginally more than another job doesn't excuse the working conditions in the factory. There isn't a formula that makes subhuman conditions acceptable.
Consider what those “exploited” workers would be doing if enough fewer people bought iPhones for their labor not to be needed. Would they be better off than they are now?
This is the same attitude that led to the rise of unions in America.
The factory owners kept telling their circle of friends that the workers were better off than not working at all. It was all a big echo chamber until one day "better off" turned into "not good enough" and people died.
I'm not a big union guy, but I see a lot of history repeating itself in SV.
I don't think industry in developing countries necessarily needs to be exploitative. We don't need to stop these industries but we need to demand reasonable treatment and living conditions. The very fact that the workers' alternative is poverty means that they'll have a high tolerance of mistreatment, and that any good capitalist would be dumb not to exploit them. This asymmetry between employee and employer is not a justification that they should "just be happy they have any work at all", it should be a reason to demand symmetry from the employer.
There's no straightforward solution, but the status quo is not good enough.
> I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited.
It's interesting that we think in terms of what extra amount we would pay.
Apple commands the highest profit margins in the industry per device manufactured which is in part due to the negotiated labor costs it pays to companies like Foxconn.
Why not instead ask Apple to pay more for labor instead?
They already go out of their way to source recycled materials and conflict free materials. Is it so hard to expect them to pay or ask their ODMs to pay living wage labor costs with favorable working conditions?
Doubt it. Didn’t happen with rubber. Didn’t happen with chocolate. Didn’t happen with Californian tomatoes. Technology will press the exploitation out when you don’t need people.
Progress is incremental. A Foxconn worker has a much higher standard of living than his father who worked in a toy factory. His father had a higher standard of living than his grandparents who were subsistence farmers. This wouldn't happen if everyone had to pay twice as much for devices.
You're correct that farming is likely better than factory work. It might even be more rewarding writing code 9-5. The problem with subsistence farming is that you might starve to death if a drought, flood, or disease kills half your crops.
And in the modern U.S., the very same can happen to the working poor if they loose their job, or an unforeseen expense comes up to make paying for life's necessities suddenly impossible. Perhaps even at the same rate that a natural famine once every decade or so has killed off the poor; last season at least 80,000 people died in the U.S. from the flu [1], a disease that disproportionately affects the working poor and homeless due to poorer overall health. Not much has changed for the poor in this modern world even if they aren't subsistence farmers.
But evidently flu deaths are not so rare. Just as starving to death is a consequence of economics for the farmer, dying of the flu is a consequence of economics for the poor in the United States. One cannot pay for food during a famine, and the other cannot pay for health services during the yearly epidemic.
What is your point exactly? That industrialized civilization isn’t actually better than abject rural poverty, because a tiny minority of people still die of poverty-related causes? How do the numbers stack up on each side?
80,000 people is less than 1 in 3750 Americans — I’ll take my chances with those odds over living somewhere with regular famines.
> I doubt doing farmwork 12 hours a day is worse than doing the same mundane repetitive action 16 hours a day.
Then why do Chinese farmers line up outside the gates of factories hundreds of miles from home in the hope of getting a job? If farming gave them an equivalent or better quality of life, they would just stay at home and keep farming.
Because their cousin is sick. Because they want their daughter to go to school in the city and move up the socioeconomic ladder. Because their parents are injured and can no longer work. These jobs require sacrificing all of your personal freedom to support others. They require enduring human rights abuses themselves to so others don't have to work this very job. The reasons why farmers are leaving their fields isn't for their personal well being at all, it is altruism.
The intensity of farm work isn't even comparable. You aren't toiling in the fields doing the same exact thing for hours every day, every month, every year like you do in a factory. Most labor happens during harvest and planting seasons, maintenance labor throughout the year is focused on improving your living conditions or other local projects, something you can't do if you are working for the factory. Unfortunately, things come up that can only be fixed with immediate or continued access to capital, so you have to send one of your family members hundreds of miles away to work in a factory to fuel an emergency fund. The problem with farm work isn't the work, it's the lack of enough pay to deal with disaster.
Then why do Chinese farmers line up outside the gates of factories hundreds of miles from home in the hope of getting a job?
Because they've been forced to relocate from their farms to manufactured cities by the government which then bulldozed their villages.
Then once they're in the city, their choice is to work in the greenhouses of a big government-backed company, or work in the factory of a big government-backed company.
I take your point, but a higher standard of living that has increased suicide rates? If we think about the results of those products, as the consumer isn't going to be buying directly from Foxconn but integrated into something from Apple or the like, then is that a 'fair' distribution of wealth made from the final product. It's a tricky one, for sure
The suicide rate of Foxconn has always been significantly lower than the US. Part of the reason is because healthy, working adults aren't likely to commit suicide in the first place. Even so, in 2010, which was by far the worst year, 14 Foxconn employees committed suicide out of 930,000 employees [1]. The US suicide rate is 13.7 out of 100,000 [2].
It's worth noting that there are qualitative differences to be considered, and people committing suicide at that rate (or any rate at all) should be investigated to address the conditions of these workers. To simply look at a comparison of the rates misses out that different factors and motivations drive these suicides.
Suicide rates are also very biased by how employers, friends and family, and authorities handle the death.
Across many cultures people tend to underreport suicides - but to different extents.
It's also worth noticing that some behaviors leading to death like overdose, heavy drinking and dangerous activities are not counted as suicide but sometimes they share the same psychological conditions.
I haven't seen anything on subsistence farmers in particular. The closest is the general rural population. Around 80% of Chinese suicides are from the rural population, and the overall Chinese suicide rate is an order of magnitude bigger than the Foxconn suicide rate.
Southeast Asia has a very, very large problem with subsistence farmer suicides. Some programs such as restricting access to human-poisonous pesticides have helped where they were implemented, but yes, if you're worried about suicide, you should look at the rural areas, not at the factories.
Urbanization is a powerful force; it happens because people want to leave the rural life behind, and as it continues, it pushes the contrast ever more in favor of urban life; people move to the cities because of the opportunities, economy and culture there; and as they do so, they "carry" even more opportunities, economy and culture away from the rural areas to these cities.
progress is only incremental because of this absurd belief that any improvement in your life means you have no room to complain - it's how we in the west justify the continuing imperialism of the developing world that we destroyed
Part of the problem, for developers, is that build toolchains are a garbage heap of hacks that get slower and slower.
So you need crazier and crazier laptops to support the containers and IDEs and transpilation and asset pipelines and all that.
I code on a 5 year old laptop very happily. But the only reason I can do that is I code close to raw language, with a minimal build chain. I expressly design my software to need less support.
Most pros don’t have that luxury. It’s incorporate the new hotness or we won’t be able to attract the cheap devs fresh out of school.
I work in biology, and barring the simplest scripts everything computational we do is run on the university supercomputer because its waaaay faster and cheaper than keeping expensive hardware up to date ourselves, in fact I can get away with just using my phone and the supercomputer if I REALLY wanted. I know in video editing, similar 'rendering farms' are used instead of the top spec personal machines of yore. How long until developers also adopt this philosophy of remote computing, or is the switch already happening?
We tried to do this here. It's fairly functional, but there's a number of issues procuring enough exclusive-use hardware, and interfacing with devices - such as phones - is nigh-impossible remote. There's just too much latency to fully move everything remote. The heavy toolchains we use aren't actually THAT heavy - it's measured in minutes, not hours, so remoting introduces too much friction to make it work.
I recently had to buy a new laptop because the cheap dev laptop I had (6GB RAM, Celeron Quad-core) couldn't run IntelliJ with a reasonable amount of performance, even when I tweaked the settings significantly for lower resource consumption. It was the CPU -- it was just way too slow.
I'm currently on an ancient HP elitebook that's my main programming machine, but I compile on a different machine with ssh and use Vim for all my text editing.
Opening pycharm on it makes it crawl, and it struggles on the web without noscript.
You're dead wrong, unfortunately. I was just in a thread on a Tesla forum about a wireless phone charger kit, and people were bragging about cancelling their order from one place that sold it for $x in order to buy it from another place that ripped it off and sold it for $y.
There were justifications, of course. "oh, they're all made in the same factory anyway". "company A probably didn't even design it in the first place, they just want you think they did. It's all marketing". "They didn't lower the price when they removed this one component that's no longer needed".
These are all people who don't need the gadget in the first place, and can easily afford to pay the higher price for it. In fact, they were going to in the first place, before the cheaper option came along. They think they're wise consumers. They think they got a bargain. They think you're a sucker if you "overpay".
Lots of caveats, sure. I have no idea who designed the product. Maybe they're both ripoffs of someone else's part. Maybe they are built in the same factory. Maybe the only difference is who is making a huge profit off the markup, and how much they're making off of it.
But the point stands. People want to pay as little as possible, they feel virtue in that, and they'll invent reasons to justify paying less, no matter what.
Back in the 80's AT&T used to use the advertising slogan, "You get what you pay for" to indicate that its phone service wasn't the cheapest, but it was the best.
Today the 20-somethings I work with balk at paying more than $10 for a logoed T-shirt. This is true for the vast majority of people in that age group, which is why stores like Ross and TJMaxx flourish, while the high-end department stores struggle, and luxury brands (coughLVcough) cope by moving production from Italy to China, or import Chinese workers into European factory camps to keep the "Made in Italy" logos on their goods.
What am I supposed to do as the consumer. Am I to not buy new electronics at all in protest? If 10,000 of us were to do this do you think the drop in revenue would be attributed to dissatisfaction with the working conditions instead of underperformance in sales and marketing?
If there was a way for me to paypal $20 to the employees myself on top of a new iPhone there could but its not something that consumers have much control over and I am skeptical that just using outdated devices addresses the situation
I don't think there is anything that consumers could do when the entire market is supported by this model. This is something that will have to be driven by government regulation, not the market that benefits from this system. The best thing you could do is support politicians who care about these human rights abuses, and who don't care about angering shareholders.
Individual consumption choices definitely matter [1], but working alongside others in your workplace and community is even more impactful. It's a longterm bet, but if you start talking with others around you about their own conditions, I think people will eventually start to see the parallels. Imagine if American workers refused to support trade deals unless they included rights for workers as part of them, for example. But it starts with recognizing that the people around us are in the same boat.
[1] I am currently resisting buying an iPhone XS even though I really want one, because I'm trying to work on mine.
This looks like a hunt for culprits, even if such course of action does not make much sense. Please be aware that these are suicides, not murders. The workers, even the suicidal ones, are free and self-responsible people, presumed to be capable of taking care of themselves and their life, which includes their physical and mental health. Here's a dull, yet important word of advice for everyone: be aware and caring of yourself as a living person and don't hesitate to change course if your current path leads to misery of any kind, let alone to (premature) death.
It sounds like he did try to change course by moving and applying for other jobs and positions. The tragedy, well one of them at least, is that the system doesn’t value poets (or librarians). This guy had to die for his work to make it out into the greater world.
Indeed, it's sad to see that high of a price for one's recognition. That reminds me of Pieter Hintjens' words - "Ironic that dying turned out to be the greatest marketing stunt of my life."
Companies just won't advertise that they are made using exploitative conditions. The 'ethically made' technology label will have the same fate as organic, fair trade, etc. type labels: it will be priced out of reach for the vast majority of consumers.
Those in silicon valley with their Model 3 and sustainable earwax-based soaps will rave about their latest ethical laptops, while the rest of the country saves up income for years to buy the cheapest new model computer available and strives to make it work as long as possible. Most consumers are already well priced out of paying more for preference or good conscious.
How were people able to afford the technology of the 80s and 90s that were made in developed countries? The biggest change from the shift of everything to China has been increased corporate profit.
The 80s Walkman or VCR made in Japan, the home computer made in the USA or GB were affordable. My 25 year old model M keyboard was made in Scotland. With the steady rise of automation it should be possible to do whilst paying workers a decent wage whether in China or at home.
If we have to lose the bottom of the market and the £300 laptops that are barely functional after a single software installation and a security upgrade, well everyone would benefit from losing those.
The answer to "How were people able to afford the technology of the 80s and 90s that were made in developed countries" is that many of them were not able to afford that, and did not, especially in poorer countries.
The number of households having such devices was much lower, in large part because of the cost; devices such as home computers, laptops and smartphones changed the world not when they were invented but when they became cheap enough to be really widespread; when you could buy a Japan VCR or USA computer without having Japan or USA levels of income, which the vast majority of global population don't. If we lose the bottom of the market with the cheap smartphones, well, then hundreds of millions of people worldwide would not have smartphones.
A VCR was pretty much ubiquitous. A home computer was not, in most part not because of cost but because of not being able to see the point. Smartphones are more expensive than they've ever been. If you buy cheapo you're buying something a few years old and terrible.
There was no lack of them in other countries, what has changed is the number of countries able to afford consumerism at all.
Are you comparing like with like? No. The hundreds of millions of people worldwide buying cheap are NOT buying Apple or Sony either, are they? They're buying the brands that aren't even in first world countries.
No shareholder will agree to cut profits. The price of sustainability will be tacked on top of existing profit margins, as it is in all products where it is relevant. Like all sustainable products, it will be available only to those X% income levels who can afford to pay the premium on sustainable products.
I wasn’t old enough at the time to remember the relative pricing of those things as a consumer, but things like walkmans, televisions, and IBM laptops seemed much more affluent then compared to now.
Sony themselves were perhaps. There were plenty lower down the market made in Japan brands though, such as Aiwa, Akai, Sharp and dozens of others.
A TV was a cheap almost commodity thing when CRT based by the 80s. Only the arrival of widescreen CRT and flat screens that pushed the prices into the absurd. I imagine the 60s and 70s was the era for TV prices to be dropping.
Sure there's been a little inflation and price rises too. Overall the switch to China hasn't benefited first world consumers from price benefits from the brands. The price benefits have been in places like Primark with a £1 T shirt and the unknown brands on Amazon marketplace. A pair of Levis or an Apple device is just as "for the affluent" as they've ever been. Often more so, despite manufacture moving somewhere cheap.
> out of reach for the vast majority of consumers.
Everywhere I look people are walking around with the latest iPhone (this time they literally named it "excess max"). People you wouldn't expect to have it. As for me, I'm in the top 10% of earners and I carry an iPhone 6, of which I have replaced the screen and the battery.
So we want ethically sourced tech? Maybe you're right and we wouldn't be able to keep buying the new model year after year. But we could definitely afford to have them if we saved up and then took care of what we owned.
Maybe there would be a trend toward repairability, durability, and maintainability of tech, things of practical matter, and away from inane concerns such as fashion and emojis. Maybe the Apples of the world would have to disburse some of their two hundred billion dollars to the factory employees. Maybe then some of the hands that assemble the iPhones would be able to hold the finished product.
It would have to be enforced by regulations or law. No different than child labor laws and overtime compensation laws. Businesses, shareholders, do not care about worker exploitation.
And if prices double, it's plausible sales drop to one quarter what they are now, and the problem gets even worse.
If all the technology just went away and these people went back to working in the fields, because they had no other choice, would that be better? Maybe it would be less stressful but they'd also make less money. Maybe they're worse off from having the choice. Maybe they're not entirely responsible for making this choice because of deception, the trap that is earning more than your peers but still not being wealthy enough to ever quit.
The problem is that the lowest paid workers everywhere are those who are going to buy a cheap laptop or phone and who aren't going to make choices intended to keep other workers from being exploited (They can't - their other choice is not having a lap or phone at all).
The solution can't come from consumer choices. It has to come from either labor militancy or the state putting forward some kind of solution - basic income, minimum wage or something else.
Another perspective is this: China's extreme poverty rate (people living on less than $1.90/day) fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012. China is rapidly entering the global middle class, and their workers are rapidly demanding better conditions.
All of that was because China wanted to industrialize, and they did it. Should we avoid buying labor from countries that are pursuing rapid industrialization?
(This is a genuine question, actually, on my part. I'm still torn between "capitalism has brought tons of people out of poverty" and "real people are exploited every day.")
Not buying a laptop doesn’t influence practices. What does is buying a laptop from a manufacturer who prioritizes labor conditions. No such major manufacturer exists. Which is why this isn’t going to be solved by individual choice but either by regulation or by declaring it to not be a problem.
Unfortunately 'lot' does not have any definitive size. I'd imagine just considering how people think here, that there would not be more than 2-3% people who'd pay 25% more for a gadget because of ethical concerns.
The price of the device is not at all correlated worker exploitation. Genuine apple devices cost 10x an average phone you could get in China, yet who does Foxconn produce phones for?
Wouldn't this just result in more of these people being unemployed rather than exploited? And if those are the two options, is the former a better outcome?
Paying people more than the prevailing market rate is a form of charity. Why should Apple contribute charitably in that particular way, rather than giving an equivalent amount of money to, for example, people suffering from famines in Africa, who are much worse off according to any metric you could imagine than Chinese Foxconn employees?
Prices wouldn't even have to rise. The gross margin on an iPhone is ~60%, meaning there is plenty of leeway to improve working conditions while maintaining profitability. Of course this would mean less profit for shareholders and executives, so this would never happen.
