Crowded dorms,no flush toilets and food crawling with worms at iPhone plant

https://www.independent.ie/world-news/asia-pacific/crowded-dorms-no-flush-toilets-and-worms-in-food-how-protest-forced-change-for-women-at-indian-iphone-plant-41194516.html

by DocFeind • 5 years ago

163 96 5 years ago

independent.ie

mc322• 5 years ago

Apple is a two-faced Janus/Juno.

On the customer-facing side they are all about providing a good user experience and also going through the motions about carbon neutrality and justice and whatever else makes for good marketing these days.

On the manufacturing side it they could not care much less. They say they care about pay and justice and so on and so forth, but where the rubber hits the road --where it inconveniences them and does not add to the bottom line, they do not appear to care.

quesera6• 5 years ago

That's an oversimplified and cynical take.

Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company.

Foxconn has a history of treating in-country employees like all the other local companies do. Multiply by a few thousand for scale, and some rate of bad things is inevitable. Apple audits Foxconn, but audits do not catch everything (and not immediately!).

Note also that Apple effectively shut down this Foxconn plant by refusing to accept manufactured product until the situation was rectified.

Extrapolating from a few cases of dramatic failures on the part of Apple's manufacturing partners is dishonest at best.

dutchbrit• 5 years ago

The thing is, it's always the same with Foxconn. Apple should know better... (and the same goes for other Foxconn customers)

ParanoidShroom• 5 years ago

Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company

Please back this statement up. I'm honestly curious.

It's a company, they optimize for their interest. They will invest according to that image/reputation value. But as any company, profits... But this reply just sounds like blind PR.

lp0_on_fire2• 5 years ago

Foxconn has a history of treating in-country employees like all the other local companies do. Multiply by a few thousand for scale, and some rate of bad things is inevitable. Apple audits Foxconn, but audits do not catch everything (and not immediately!).

They have a LONG and storied history of treating in-country employees like this. This isn't some new revelation. Apple has had more than enough time to start moving their manufacturing to a country that doesn't allow this sort of thing. They won't do that, though, because their pricing is already exorbitant for that they offer and it just doesn't work if you have to pay western wages and respect western labor laws.

LeifCarrotson• 5 years ago

Apple spends orders of magnitude more money and effort to ensure worker conditions in their supply lines than any other company.

Citation definitely needed.

Apple has a global revenue of about $360B, but the automotive industry is an order of magnitude larger at $3.6T. You're suggesting that the automotive industry expends about 1000x less per dollar of revenue on supply chain working conditions than Apple does?

FearlessNebula• 5 years ago

I never understood why Apple catches so much flack for this. They don’t own Foxconn, it’s a contact. There’s only so much they can audit, and is there any other company they could choose instead who has iPhone-level manufacturing scale? I suspect they’ve got no choice but Foxxcon and Pegatron. Pick your poison.

klyrs4• 5 years ago

Apple is making money hand over fist, and they've got nearly $200B cash on hand. They aren't directly responsible for the working conditions, but they set the terms of the contract. They could pay more, and demand humane treatment and living wages in their contract. With that warchest, they could afford their own manufacturing facilities -- Foxxcon vs Petragon is a false dichotomy. But they don't. This is their responsibility, but they prefer to keep it at arms-length and pretend that they don't know what conditions will result from paying a certain price per unit.

dehrmann2• 5 years ago

Half the reason to go with a contractor is you know they'll do sketchy things, but you get to plead ignorance.

maerF0x02• 5 years ago

I suspect they’ve got no choice but Foxxcon and Pegatron

If my quick google is correct they could buy foxconn for ~$3B USD out of the 36B cash on hand. Or start building a competitor...

gimmeThaBeet• 5 years ago

I would mostly agree, the thing I try to understand is the motivations for working with these ODMs.

There's sort of the line of business. Just assuming from a black box, Apple wants to build devices in these low-cost countries. Is it a competitive advantage to do this themselves? Do they have the skillset and wherewithal to do it well? They design chips, but they have TSMC make them, because among other things, there's much more to being a fab that bluntly, I think apple is not equipped for. Similarly, I think, design the products, figure out processes, then get them from the companies that spend all their time coordinating and building the stuff at a global scale.

Not to exculpate Foxconn, this is not the first time there's been stories like this of Indian facilities of Taiwan ODMs. And usually the first thing that gets pointed out, is that the ODM is itself using local contractors. So the reality is, where does the buck actually stop? The big question I have, is how would apple do this themselves? Is it that Foxconn has not quite figured out how to operate in India effectively, or is there some implicit outsourcing of misery to the next sub-contractor?

I assume apple also works with everyone else who has the scale to build iPhones like Wistron and Flex, but apple already similarly put one of Wistron's Indian factories on probation after a riot due to unpaid wages(?). I want to say they were mainly doing macbooks and ipads?

My understanding was one of the things is that the ODM books all the components and sort of capital for building things, so there's some capital structure things that I probably don't fully appreciate. No guarantee that's correct though...

evilduck3• 5 years ago

I think it's as simple that for every "Apple can do no wrong" out of touch fanboy, there's about a half dozen "Apple can do nothing good" commenters online that are angered by Apple simply continuing to exist. No amount of oversight, auditing or spending will appease them even if it's tenfold as much as the next best tech company.

Syonyk2• 5 years ago

A good read on the subject is "Dying for an iPhone" by Chan. The book documents the last 20 years or so of Apple's labor interactions with Foxconn and makes a fairly compelling argument that Apple, like most other companies, says one thing and then does enough to be seen "doing something about the problem" while not actually doing anything of substance (the problem with the suicides was that they were getting ripped apart in the press for it, so the solution was to make it harder to commit spectacular suicide).

It also documents the "creative abuses" that local governments and Foxconn seem to have with schools and such - "internships" that are not optional, are claimed to be CprE/EE/etc, and are really just bonus labor for the busy season. "Your degree is nice, now turn this screw."

It's hard to say where Apple's responsibility ends and Foxconn's begins - the two are woven so tightly anymore that the boundaries are blurred. Major chunks of Foxconn's operation are purely Apple assembly plants, and Apple, of course, literally wouldn't exist today without Foxconn.

I've decided that I'm done with Apple for now and have been seeking alternatives (Kobo Elipsa for PDF references, PineBook Pro for laptop, and a little flip phone for cell connectivity at the moment) - it was their labor practices, on top of their eagerness to do on-device content scanning, and a few other things that just pushed me over the edge.

Unfortunately, there's not really a good space in modern tech that remotely qualifies as "ethical to use," anymore. I've been trying to go down some weird roads of low power ARM systems, but a lot of those are still made in China. At least some of the Rpi boards are made in the UK, and Purism has the USA-made Librem 5 at some significant cost.

Unfortunately, the only sane answer I keep coming to is that the best solution is to abandon consumer tech entirely. It's the field in which I've made my living, and there's certainly some good to come out of it, but if you trace where the hardware comes from, and then look at how the software is designed (to capture all the behavioral surplus it can for the surveillance capitalism processing pipeline, Zuboff's book goes into great detail here)... it's slavery for the hardware and human-toxic psychological exploitation for the software.

The less I use the stuff, the less desire I have to use it.

sabellito• 5 years ago

I agree with everything you said, and have been going down the same road, but this bit:

It's hard to say where Apple's responsibility ends and Foxconn's begins

I don't think it's hard at all. Apple, as with any other business, bears full responsibility together with its suppliers.

Really appalled by the people in this thread saying that "the others do worse!". Crazy stuff.

cmurf• 5 years ago

Apple have plenty of money and resources to have a full time independent team tasked with investigating all their contractors working conditions, and preventing these things from happening, before the media shines a light on it. And yet they don't. Or worse, perhaps they do know, and yet still do nothing until the media reports it.

api• 5 years ago

That could be applied to every corporation that outsources manufacturing, which is almost all of them. The same could also be said of the "greenwashing" effect of outsourcing. We move polluting industries overseas so we don't see it and companies can make two-faced claims about being "carbon neutral" by not counting overseas manufacturing.

daneel_w2• 5 years ago

Do you think your non-Apple smartphone or non-Apple laptop is somehow "righteous" and assembled at some other special plant with more dignified treatment of their workers? Think again.

temp10298385• 5 years ago

Are you suggesting we accept human misery and injustice as necessary evils? Or are you advocating for change as these problems are endemic to modern manufacturing?

lnsru2• 5 years ago

Basically it’s outsourced slavery. But who cares in the West? It’s like the deepest levels of cruise ships filled with Asian workers that nobody sees. One sees shiny stores and shiny ships and it’s ok.

On the other hand Apple does audit the suppliers and I believe, that internally they know very well what’s happening in the factories.

quesera6• 5 years ago

By this logic, just about every job in early-development countries (e.g. and relevantly: large parts of China and India), is slavery.

If we accept the colloquial gross misuse of "slavery" to mean "crappy jobs that the workers depend on for survival", then I'm inclined to agree on principle, but I feel similarly about food service workers in the US and subsistence farmers everywhere.

cultofmetatron• 5 years ago

in many countries, people count themselves lucky if they have a job making $10/day. It very much is slavery, just with extra steps.

vorpalhex• 5 years ago

There's a difference between making federal minimum wage and the indentured servitude these workers find themselves in. McDonalds workers are free to go home at the end of their shift and eat whatever they want. These workers sleep 8 to a room with no temperature control, no privacy, shared bathrooms and rations that we literally would not feed to prisoners.

We aren't talking about 100 or 200 people. We are talking about 1 million as of 2011. Foxconn's solution to suicide jumpers was.. netting. There's shitty working conditions and then there's.. this.

https://www.wired.com/2011/02/ff-joelinchina/

lnsru2• 5 years ago

Why can’t be these extreme expensive devices be a positive example? Adding 2$ for manufacturing cost would be less than 0,2% of retail price, but give somebody meal without worms. Ok, poor shareholders earning less is an argument.

My friend is Burger King worker in Germany. He has some vacation days, low but stable wage and can go home after his shift and cook his special body building meals. Not much slavery.

tastyfreeze• 5 years ago

Most of these jobs you consider outsourced slavery pay better than anything local. If you were getting paid 25% more than any other job back home you would consider it good pay.

Nbox9• 5 years ago

Can we stop comparing low wage workers with slavery? Slavery is much worse, at least how it was practiced in North America. It was more than low wages and and economically exploitative relationship, it was a different set of laws & rights for an ethnic group.

Slaves had severe legal restrictions on movement, education, religion, marriage, and participating in commerce. Slaves also had very limited legal protections against bodily harm caused by their masters. This is an inherently different type of relationship than someone working in a Foxconn factory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_codes

_xnmw• 5 years ago

In other words, it is like every other factory in India. Why should anyone expect anything different?

kayodelycaon• 5 years ago

People believe money is the solution to this problem. Apple has a lot of money. Therefore, Apple should be able to fix this. Since they don't fix it, they aren't spending enough money to fix it.

More money makes solving a lot of problems easier. Can Apple actually put in enough money to fix it? If they can, they aren't. If they can't... this isn't a problem solvable by money.

Which is it? I don't know. The question comes down to, what does trying hard enough look like? shrug

mhoad10• 5 years ago

Apple promised everyone they can fix it during earlier scandals.

That was their claim to make.

I think we are free to hold them accountable to that.

hughrr2• 5 years ago

Sounds like my student accommodation 25 years ago. We had human shit flowing down the hall on numerous occasions, the rooms were so small you could only lie down in one axis and the refectory food put people in hospital and wasn't even recognisable as described. It actually turned me vegetarian. All for £120 a week.

This is always what happens when you subcontract responsibility out. The middle-man works out how to keep the margin as large as possible and that means the bottom rung gets squashed and everyone up the chain is getting lied to. This has been universally true through my entire life from (real) estate agents, IT contracting agencies, education and service contracts.

mohanmcgeek3• 5 years ago

The food for the workers was also seemingly college canteen food because the whole accomodation setup was a converted college + student dorm (which had been closed since COVID)

Edit: Found a video of someone complaining about the food when it was still a college hostel. Now imagine what students, who do not have the same organizing abilities as workers, had to go through.

https://youtu.be/RH336--NQVg

dkarl• 5 years ago

This is always what happens when you subcontract responsibility out. The middle-man works out how to keep the margin as large as possible and that means the bottom rung gets squashed and everyone up the chain is getting lied to.

Not always. You can have reliable middlemen who verify claims and investigate and blacklist fishy suppliers, but the buyers have to want it. Consider how we as purchasers of expensive electronics tend to buy from established retailers (middlemen) who invest in processes to ensure the legitimacy of the name-brand products they stock, instead of buying from an unknown company that was created last week and is selling the same products at a much cheaper price. We consider the risk that the unknown company with no history may have sourced counterfeits, intentionally or unintentionally, and we buy from a retailer we trust instead.

It sounds like Foxconn's approach to acquiring accommodations for their workers is like buying an Hermes handbag under a bridge for $20.

aix1• 5 years ago

Sorry to hear you had to endure that.

And £120 a week sounds like a rip-off. I remember paying just under £40 a week in Greater London at around the same time. The accommodation was pretty basic (a room in a hall of residence with shared loos/showers/kitchens) but pretty well looked after.

Compared to student residences (общежития) in the former USSR the accommodation seemed almost luxurious.

hughrr2• 5 years ago

Oh it was a complete rip off. It was apparently the luxury end of things but they put us in the “overflow” block. Catering was included in that price.

It was renewed every 3 months so we moved into a 4 bed house which we rented for £400pcm and got 5 of us in it by using the living room as a bedroom. We got three weeks money back from the housing management after complaining loudly.

narrator• 5 years ago

Edit: Touché.

pphysch• 5 years ago

Sorry to distract from your anti-China rant but TFA is about a factory in India.

iqanq2• 5 years ago

The Indian government wanted iPhones to be made in India under Indian standards. I mean, the factory is literally in their country. If they want something to be done about it they can do it themselves.

atonse2• 5 years ago

Not a great example. Wasn’t there a revolt at the Indian factory where people threw chairs and broke glass because they weren’t getting paid on time?

nebula88043• 5 years ago

Isn't this the same factory?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-VzxTDs5eA

On a side note, I don't know why but it feels so satisfying to watch them destroy the iPhone factory. I wish we had that bravery here in the US. You even think about causing any damage and the cops will come and put a bullet in your head or throw in you prison for 10,000 years.

unbanned• 5 years ago

Could you imagine; pig iron casework, 360p resistive touch screen, Siri unironically calls you sir, broken English UI, live chat features where they copy paste you canned responses. Sublime.

iqanq2• 5 years ago

"Sir, kindly plug phone to wall charger."

908B64B197• 5 years ago

I would be willing to pay extra for Apple devices made here in America.

All American engineering and design, all American manufacturing. I think it's a real possibility; Apple has deep pockets and the ability to plan ahead and is the perfect company to bring manufacturing to the 21st century thanks to innovation and automation.

mhoad10• 5 years ago

Right. All of that is true and has been for years. It was famously true the first time they were caught in a situation like this.

They chose not to do any of that.

aimor2• 5 years ago

"Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China"

I laughed the first time I saw that because of how proudly it was featured for such a mundane statement. In 2014 I bought the Moto X in part because it was assembled in the US. Remember, it costs $14/hr to pay a US worker compared to $4/hr in China, which makes up some fraction of the cost of a $400 phone but I'm not sure how much. I was also never really clear on how much of the assembly was done in the US. At some point companies were saying things like, "Built in USA" "Final Assembly in USA" or whatever other term they thought could be used to imply "Made in USA"/"Assembled in USA" without alerting the FTC.

In general it's not terribly difficult to find products made in the US. It's a hunt, it takes time, it often costs more, and sometimes the material are from overseas. But clothes, toys, furnishings, food, it's still made here by the people and their businesses which care to make it here.

So why isn't "Made in USA" etched on the back of iPhones today? I think it's not a priority of the company. Maybe that's cynical given that two years ago there was all this news about Mac Pro towers being assembled in Texas [1]. But Apple is the most profitable company in the world, and chooses to etch "Designed by Apple in California" on the back of every phone despite the means to say more, so I don't know why I should expect Apple manufacturing to move to the US unless there is financial incentive.

To be clear: I assume Apple estimates how many people feel the way you and I do (will pay for Made in USA) and concludes now is not the time.

As an aside, I once saw a sale for Tommy Hilfiger USA "All American II" towels. Made in India.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EsN2LCcXUAErEkr?format=jpg&name=...

seanmcdirmid• 5 years ago

Supply chains are more relevant now than labor of assembly costs. It is cheaper to produce many of the components in China for a lot of other reasons (much of them not pretty, like reduced enforcement of environmental standards).

nebula88043• 5 years ago

Are you sure its $14/hr? I was watching the documentary about the Chinese Car Windshield company opening a plant in Ohio and they were paying workers there something like ~30ish an hour. I recall some lady was sad because the old GM plant was playing closer to 40 but still happy to have the job. Isn't this the same kind of work? Wouldn't it be closer to the 30$ figure?

pezzana• 5 years ago

Have any estimates been made for what it would cost to move all iPhone assembly to the US?

Crowded dorms,no flush toilets and food crawling with worms at iPhone plant

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