It's interesting to listen to stories like this because they make it truly difficult to access your own feelings. You want to dislike or even hate it but a moment later you realize, in order to do so, you'd have to pass those judgements onto yourself. And so you kind of brush it off or feel like you're somehow doing the right thing by just hearing about it. There is no option other than simply not using electronics, or maybe only buying used electronics claiming the recycling karma offset. And whats kind of crazy is that I love programming. It's not only my job to use these devices, but I love to make them do new things. If I'm to continue to love it I have to live in a mind with forgetful acceptance or forced ignorance. I don't see a 3rd option.
recycling karma. I went through this phase a few years back in Shanghai. I refused to buy anything new and would call a friend for his old iPod in a drawer when mine died. This worked for a bit but has limitations.
I'm back in China now, after a two year break to the U.S. Ten years in Shanghai was too much for me. I needed some perspective from home. Now I'm back, in Chengdu. My rules are simple. In all aspects of my life, where I can, I incrementally raise the labor bar and try to provide more than just a job. The IT projects I do, I tell my clients I only do high-end work and pay my talent well. And I do pay them well; generally 50% to 200% over their prior jobs. I also get to cherry pick the best talent and have very satisfied clients. This approach has its limitations and I'll adjust my approach when I reach their limits.
For you, there are two things you can do:
1 - Choose wisely who you give your money to. If you feel you can't easily raise the bar in the electronics you buy because all suppliers are playing the same game, do so in other aspects of your life. For many, there is choice in food and other local things you buy.
2 - Get involved more closely in who your elected representative are. These guys set the global and local trade rules. Let them know at the ballot box what you think.
I don't know where you're from, but that's one of the odd things about the US culture I'm from. We often can't imagine how to participate meaningly in the decisionmaking which rules our lives. (Aside from pushing a button for someone every few years or not buying something, which isn't serious participation.) So we're left with the hyperindividualist idea that we can only affect our measly personal purchasing decisions, while wealthy elites are deciding for us.
> A point which seems to be missed (and which is, thankfully, made in the podcast) is that these terrible conditions are better than the alternative.
This is often brought up, but strangely "the alternative" is defined as "the way things were before" instead of "better working conditions." The fact is that there is no one "alternative" to these kinds of business situations; there are many different alternatives, some of them better and some of them worse. Conditions can be improved, if people want it. Otherwise, there would still be 12-year-olds working 80 hour weeks in factories in the US and Europe.
Hopefully the story is more honest than the title, since Foxconn is less an "Apple factory" than it is the company that pretty much assembles all of the best electronic devices in the world (at least according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Clients).
It’s a clever way of framing it. Apple has become this huge and powerful entity and they are very much unlike every other technology company out there.
If you list all the companies or pick another one that’s not Apple they will just say noncommittal nice things and try to shift responsibility away from them. “But we have to do this to stay competitive, everyone else does!” “We have even stricter guidelines for our suppliers than our competitors!” “Have you tried looking at this other company?”
Apple is extremely successful, extremely rich and always in the Spotlight. They are the most likely company to actually do something to improve conditions.
This is incredible storytelling and is very humanist. I'd really recommend listening to it. We use these devices everyday and don't even think about it.
I find Steve Jobs repellent, but he was once committed to manufacturing hardware in the United States.
The minor undercurrent of criticism since his passing has been Apple's manufacturing vendors in Asia. Forgotten is the drag on NeXT by its decision to build a factory in Fremont, CA. It was way overbuilt, and sucked up a lot of the money fronted by Canon and Ross Perot to keep NeXT alive while it was largely unable to sell much of anything.
Steve Jobs took it up publicly before he died about how the American government could make manufacturing in the US to be a more attractive option for companies like Apple.
in the good ole days even before Standard Oil, fierce competition and W-2 (and IRS/SS in that matter), the reason behind owning any business was not to get rich or satisfy the board with higher dividend, but to give people job and ability to keep their families respected.
to me its a simple math: Apple produce stuff in China saving 40% of production costs, then sells its goods in America putting 40% profit margin on it. I smell greed, regardless if people accept to be ripped of or not.
"in the good ole days even before Standard Oil, fierce competition and W-2 (and IRS/SS in that matter), the reason behind owning any business was not to get rich or satisfy the board with higher dividend, but to give people job and ability to keep their families respected."
I don't know of any such time. Which good ole days are you talking about? I think you're dreaming of a romantic past that never existed.
Half the people who came to America did it for money. It was the place where you didn't owe anybody anything, and nobody owed you anything either. That was the beauty of it.
> to me its a simple math: Apple produce stuff in China saving 40% of production costs, then sells its goods in America putting 40% profit margin on it. I smell greed, regardless if people accept to be ripped of or not.
So, you expect Apple to manufacture in the States, and then sell it to you without a margin (over production costs)... And how exactly are those poor Apple engineers and Apple Store Employees are supposed to make money?
If some day Apple manufactures iDevices in America, then an iPad would cost $799, or Apple would go out of business.
This is not to say I'd like Apple's partner (Foxconn) to enslave chinese workers so I could buy an iPad cheaper... I'd be happy if my iPad would be $549 (instead of $499) AND those workers were receiving more money for their hard work.
One of the reasons manufacturing costs are so high in the united states is due to labor costs. Put simply, America cannot beat the cost efficiency of Chinese production. Samsung however decided to put a plant into Austin for production of the A5 chip. (A Korean company building in Texas for a product assembled in China)
On a more cynical note, Apple's shareholders would not be happy if they could be making more profit by making it in China and selling it for $549. Another downsides to having shareholders run your company.
> So, you expect Apple to manufacture in the States, and then sell it to you without a margin (over production costs)... And how exactly are those poor Apple engineers and Apple Store Employees are supposed to make money?
Apple has over $80 billion in cash. That's all left over after their employees have been paid. They could afford to manufacture their goods in a first-world country, sell their products at the same price, and still pay their employees the same rate.
Ok, change the world, buy some Apple shares, enter shareholders meeting, put up your proposal to vote. Wath your shares value drop to one third and be happy.
Bullshit is not even a big enough word for that drivel. Elephant shit, Mammuth shit...
Entrepreneurs were always in it for the money. Even if you want to help humanity, you still have to be in it for the money, because otherwise you go broke and can't help humanity anymore, either.
From what I understand of what I read of Jobs, what you posted isn't the issue. He wanted to bring the manufacturing of Apple products back to the US but there were other issues at play such as labor laws and extraneous fees that came with building and supporting manufacturing plants in the US.
I don't know the details but this is supposedly one of the issues he spoke about to Obama.
As I recall, the US stupidly made that uncompetitive by enforcing anti-"dumping" duties on DRAM chips. We required that RAM sold to the US should be really expensive, to protect our (then largely hypothetical) local suppliers. So clone PCs built abroad could include cheap DRAM chips while Apple could not legally do the same.
Eventual solution? Move Mac assembly offshore to places like Cork, Ireland.
That is not correct. What happened was an earthquake in Taipei in the early 90s leveled most of the worlds RAM factories. This sent the price of RAM through the roof and took years to level off. Other IC manufacturers, sensing an opportunity, started making RAM as well. Then the factories in Taipei got back up and a price war ensued in the late 90s.
US memory makers had exited the arena long before. Now it was multinationals fighting other multinational corporations for an edge and they knew they could use the US court as their proxy.
PC manufacturing left the US because the labor was expensive not because of the price of any of the components. No matter what you heard the US still manufacturers a lot of things but: a) it's mostly automated, b) really highend specialty c) unlike the car factory, these manufacturing jobs really do require a degree.
There were many rounds of US dumping investigations involving DRAM, some of which caused the manufacturers to raise prices voluntarily and others of which actually caused duties to be implied. This process started as far back as 1985:
http://www.japanlaw.info/lawletter/april86/eoq.htm
> 'The papers also disclosed that Apple Computer had filed a last-minute request that "a product imported by Apple containing Korean DRAMs not be considered within the scope" of the dumping ruling. Micron Technology, which initiated the dumping complaint, opposed the Apple petition'
The earthquake you're talking about happened in 1999, right?
FWIW, the Fremont Mac plant was extremely automated, well ahead of its time in that regard. The anti-dumping duties applied to memory imported alone or in circuit boards but did not apply to memory chips in finished products - that last possibly for the practical reason that nobody wants customs inspectors tearing apart VCRs to see if they can find untaxed memory chips.
Yes you are right I was confused, I thought it was the Taiwan earthquake that caused RAM prices to spike (and it did), but this was earlier. I think the previous RAM spike might have come from the Windows 95 release. A Google search on Japanese earthquakes only displays the one from last year. One chatroom mentions the '93 earthquake.
FWIW, no matter how you cut it California is still an expensive place to do business. All the automation in the world couldn't save that factory. Not for what they were making. Now it's about specialization, automation (in the short term) is still more expensive than millions of chinese factory workers.
It'd be great to see the iSight script if you're up for sharing. I also wonder what was wrong with your MBP, from the photos it looked like there was some initial activity and then a lot of nothing, then a final check and I guess they returned it fixed? Hilarious, thanks for sharing.
It depends on a library called CocoaSequenceGrabber. I'm sure you can find it somewhere, but the first Google link seems to be dead. I also have no idea whether it works on recent versions of OS X.
A fan was making a lot of noise. (Not just the usual noise fans make when they spin up; it sounded broken, like it was grinding against something.) They couldn't hear it, and didn't fix it. (Later, I brought it back and asked them to please just replace the fan, regardless of whether they could hear it. They did.)
Great storytelling and I have no doubt that it is all true. One thing that bothered me in this monologue was he kept saying things like, "Do you think that THEY don't know?" "Do you think that Apple doesn't know?"
Problem for me being that Apple is a corporation and doesn't have one mind. Does anyone at Apple know? I'm sure people who visit the factories do. Does the information get passed around throughout the organization so that everyone knows? I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Do most people who work at Apple want to be intentionally ignorant? Probably, but I don't think there's some huge conspiracy going on. Most Apple employees are no different than consumers. They have no knowledge of this from Apple internals and don't think about it much.
If anyone gets the chance to go see the Mike Daisey monologue excerpted (The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs) I'd highly, highly recommend it whether you love Apple, hate Apple, or are somewhere in between. He's an amazing storyteller.
Just to turn this around a bit for a different perspective.
How many US products are made by prison labour? Who has worse conditions: a Foxconn employee paid a low wage and living in a dorm or a US prisoner deprived of liberty, exposed to violence and paid practically nothing? Who will live better and longer, the grandchildren of Foxconn employees or those of US prisoners?
The US has an astonishingly high incarceration rate compared to other countries thanks to government policy. The US economy clearly benefits from the misery caused by this system. Why would any foreigner want to support it?
'This American Life' is a lot more than just the transcript - the show really has to be listened to. Get the podcast and listen to it while you drive - it's worth it.
"There are 20 cafeterias at the Foxconn plant. Now you just need to visualize a cafeteria that holds 10,000 people."
I'm still trying.
This story tells you everything you already know, but makes you really realize it. Like you should play it once a month to remind yourself of what we all conveniently forget.
edit It's more likely the cafeterias seat only 4,000. I guess that's better.
If one of you guys, someday happen to be wealthy; i highly recommend hiring people that work at Foxconn and other corporate farms of misery; they would probably be really, and i mean really the most loyal and thankful workers in the world if you can give them a decent salary for decent amount of hours.
They do get a decent salary by local standards, and (so long as they're being paid for it) tend to want all the hours they can get. There was a riot a few years ago in a chinese plant because the plant owners stopped giving so much overtime and the workers were upset that they lost out on the extra work.
If you read Apple's status reports, one of the problems they seem to be battling is that these jobs are so good that workers are willing to pay huge bribes to middlemen in order to get the jobs. The workers are routinely willing to give up at least a month's salary to get these jobs, often more.
(Apple can't ban this practice outright because it's too widespread (and probably serves a useful market purpose), so they try to put a cap on it and make sure workers pay only a month's salary to get the job, no more than that.)
They get an above average salary by local standards. I wouldn't call this decent. I'm not calling out Apple's manufacturing partners here, whom are better than most, just making the situation more clear.
edit: As to "huge bribes to middlemen", I live close to a Foxconn factory making Apple products in Chengdu. I've seen recruiters in a suburban (poor) farmer's market with a table setup recruiting people for Apple jobs. Yes, they were clear the jobs were for Foxconn making Apple products. I had my wife talk to one of them. Perhaps other factories at some times have been competitive to the point where employees paid fees to recruiters, but it doesn't appear to be happening where I live as of a few weeks ago.
Some of our suppliers work with third-party labor agencies to hire contract workers from countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. These agencies, in turn, may work through multiple subagencies in the hiring country, the workers’ home country, and, in some cases, all the
way back to the workers’ home village. By the time the worker has paid all fees across these agencies, the total cost can equal many months’ wages, forcing workers into debt to gain employment.
Apple views recruitment fee overcharges as debt-bonded labor, or involuntary labor, which is strictly prohibited by our Code. We limit recruitment fees to the equivalent of one month’s net wages and require suppliers to reimburse
overpaid fees for all foreign contract workers in their facilities, including workers not assigned to Apple projects. To the best of our knowledge, Apple is the only company in the electronics industry that mandates reimbursement of excessive recruitment fees.
Apple forced companies to reimburse more than $3.4 million that year to foreign contract workers, fees of as much as "thousands of dollars per worker".
The workers were upset they were missing out on money, not "work". I bet there wouldn't have been riots if the company had simply quadrupled their salary before cutting overtime.
