Now Can We Start Talking About the Real Foxconn?

http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-blog/2012-03-20-now-can-we-start-talking-about-the-real-foxconn/

by dailo10 • 14 years ago

80 53 14 years ago

go.bloomberg.com

sargun• 14 years ago

Perhaps our factories in the US need to take a hint from Foxconn. "Foxconn-run health centers right on campus" - sounds like a great way to reduce health-insurance costs by requiring your employees to take preventative care. Especially, with the high healthcare costs that manufacturing companies have to pay.

jbarham• 14 years ago

> requiring your employees to take preventative care

Sounds unconstitutional to me.

silvestrov• 14 years ago

Would you care to explain your logic behind that judgement? For a non-US citizen, that line of thought can be hard to follow.

olalonde3• 14 years ago

Why? Sounds like it would fall in the "freedom to contract" category. If you don't want your employer requiring you to take preventive care, go work somewhere else.

LaGrange• 14 years ago

That's one of the more annoying things about the lies that happen. If we unfairly paint other places as unimaginably horrible, we become immunized to actual abuse happening on our own turf. It just fuels the „what are you complaining about, others have it worse” crowd, and I don't think we need more of that.

The fact is, the factories are bad. There's too much overtime, and people aren't paid enough (just like anyone in their country, though), safety rules are sometimes lax. But if you look around, you'll find places that are even worse (than this specific factory) here in Poland, in a supposedly „civilized” country.

alan_cx• 14 years ago

Bloomberg, a pro business publication, writes an article defending the cheapest place business can get its products made. Is that any sort of surprise? Lets face it, it must be annoying for businesses who want to make competitive products at the cheapest place to get that done, that Foxconn is derided as some sort of slave labour camp. So is it any surprise that we now get a "campaign" to reposition Foxconn to make it more acceptable to use?

Now, fair enough that Bloomberg champions the needs of big business, and fair enough that big business wants and need to use these places to build their products. But that does not mean that there is no agenda here. There might not be, but there is certainly a sniff of re-branding going on here.

All Im saying is there is good grounds to be sceptical at the motivation here.

stevenpworrel• 14 years ago

There's more than enough ground to be skeptical. Most of it reads like a job interviewer's contrived response to "What are your 3 biggest weaknesses?"

"The biggest gripe, which surprised us somewhat, is that they don’t get enough overtime. They wanted to work more, to get more money." This, the biggest gripe, at a place that had to deploy suicide nets around the building perimeters. I can't think of a more patronizing way to write this article.

I, personally, don't know what goes on at Foxconn. But the chance at holding accountable those who enable injustice was lost the day the US bank representative stood proudly in front of Congress and announced "We're too big to fail."; knowing that any backlash would be brief and easily defeated. At that moment it became clear to me that propaganda, which many thought the internet would disable, is more powerful than ever.

Disinformation has far greater utility than information.

DanBC3• 14 years ago

Suicide rates at Foxconn are about what you'd expect for a place with that population; the rate is less than the US. (Although that's not saying much.)

There's some caution needed though. Most workers are female which is traditionally higher for attempted but lower for completed suicide, and they don't have as many readily accessible means. (EG, American young men have access to guns.)

The reporters say they spoke to people, freely, and Foxconn didn't know who they spoke to. The reporters seem remarkably ignorant about the fears people have about speaking out when living in an oppressive regime. (China probably executes more people than any other country; there are over 50 crimes that carry the death penalty; some criminals are interviewed for tv programmes before they are executed).

There are a lot of problems at Chinese factories. The fact that poor peasants consider factory work to be better than their regular life just shows how bad life in China is for poor people.

Natsu• 14 years ago

It's not actually unreasonable to think that there are factory workers who want more OT. I can find you plenty such to talk to here in the US (I'm the computer guy, but I know plenty of actual factory workers). Just don't ask them during a 60-hour week how they feel about it.

The suicide thing is probably bogus, though it would depend on who is collecting the stats on that and how. It seems too good and that's what gives me pause. If they're being graded on that now, they have incentive to under-report it. I'm not sure if we'll ever know the truth, though.

For example, I'm reminded of one incident I saw where they gave out awards for a "perfect" day. In truth, that shift was new. They didn't know how to reject defective products, so they didn't. Oops.

They found out, but they never bothered to take the award plaque off of the trophy wall. It sits there to this day, unbeaten.

psykotic• 14 years ago

I recently finished Peter Hessler's book Country Driving (all of his three China books are excellent, by the way). Workers wanting more OT (and more guaranteed hours in general) is a common refrain in the third of the book which deals with the emerging factory towns in Wenzhou province. Working at the smaller factories entails unsteady, unpredictable hours. Another major concern for workers is not working under too dangerous conditions, represented in the book by fake leather factories, which use chemicals with foul, dangerous fumes in their manufacturing process. Taking everything into account, I imagine a place like Foxconn must look attractive compared to most of the ready alternatives.

philwelch2• 14 years ago

There's a suicide barrier on the Aurora Bridge in Seattle. I guess that means Seattleites are all mistreated by their employers as well? Don't buy anything from Amazon or drink Starbucks!

modeless• 14 years ago

Nice ad hominem, but you're ignoring that the other side has just as much motivation to stretch the truth. As this article points out, sensational "sweatshop" smear stories sell, and if anyone thought that the media was above lying about this in their quest for eyeballs, Daisey proved them wrong.

kiloaper• 14 years ago

That's a bit of a false dichotomy isn't it? Just because he criticises this particular view doesn't mean he condones or defends the other side or their apparent 'truth stretching'. It's also derailing. 'We can't criticise this article unless we address X, Y and Z as well'.

nikcub• 14 years ago

The BusinessWeek feature on Foxconn was written before Bloomberg bought the magazine.

brown9-23• 14 years ago

the cheapest place business can get its products made

citation?

ttt_4• 14 years ago

http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/25/change-security-internet-op...

China

Cost of labor per hour: $1.27

Nature of outsourcing: general manufacturing, electronic assembly and parts manufacturing, apparel (shoes, socks and clothing)

ig1• 14 years ago

Actually Bloomberg is notable that it's reporting division has uncovered a number of major labour abuse stories:

Most significantly it's 2006 cover story on the use of South American slave labour by car companies:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...

And more recently on Victoria Secret's use of child labour:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-15/victoria-s-secret-r...

Only last month they ran this story about slavery in the pipeline of American seafood:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-23/slaves-put-squid-on...

hessenwolf3• 14 years ago

About ten years ago I met a Maylaysian girl in Australia who had worked for 2 dollars a day at a sweat shop when she was younger. I asked her how it was, and she said it was fine, accomodation and food were paid for and 2 dollars was pretty okay in Malaysia. Just saying.

mtts• 14 years ago

That's a very good point, but let's also not forget that at the time she didn't know any better and expected working for 2 dollars a day at a sweat shop to be normal (viz the slaves in Mauretania mentioned here on HN yesterday who couldn't conceive of there being anything wrong or unusual about their being enslaved).

hessenwolf3• 14 years ago

She works as a management consultant in IT in Singapore, last time I checked...

jacalata• 14 years ago

If it was so great, why was she in Australia?

olalonde3• 14 years ago

First, she didn't say it was great. Second, there's probably some selection bias at play here since there aren't that many HNers in developing countries.

olalonde3• 14 years ago

Same experience here. I live a few blocks away from the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen and I almost get laughed at when questioning the well being of Foxconn employees. They are apparently doing just fine.

mseebach• 14 years ago

I enjoyed this Economist article, and it seems to make some of the same points, but in a different context: http://www.economist.com/node/21549956

nkoren• 14 years ago

For the record, I'm a fairly bleeding-heart liberal and former globalisation sceptic. What turned me around was moving to India in 2001-2002. I was working for an architecture & planning firm, and was fairly shocked by the working conditions at the construction sites. Temporary slum-like shantytowns -- totally informal mud-and-corrugated metal shacks -- were set up to house the workers, who worked for 7 days per week, from dawn to dusk. They had one day off per month, at new moon. They had no safety gear whatsoever. Children as young as 5 were at work carrying construction materials around. Food and housing -- such as it was -- were provided for free, but the average take-home pay amounted to three dollars per month.

This wasn't evil Westerners coming in and mercilessly exploiting the natives; this was simply the bog-standard working conditions in every construction site across the country. When I saw that, I realised that the entire Western dialectic about sweatshops ("Michael Jordan earns $40M for endorsing shoes that are made by 12-year-olds earning $1 per day!") was completely irrelevant and corrupt. What I realised is that a classically "awful" sweatshop would be entail a spectacular improvement in both salaries and working conditions, compared to the alternatives. Yes, a sweatshop would still be bad if compared to working conditions in the West, but people in developing countries -- particularly at the time -- didn't have access to working conditions in the West, so that was a meaningless comparison to make. The only legitimate comparison was to the alternatives actually available to them, and seen in that light, a typical Nike sweatshop looked like Nirvana.

Fortunately, India continued to go down the path of globalisation, and I still work there frequently. Western businesses set up shops which "exploited" the native workers by giving them vastly better salaries and working conditions than anything they'd ever had before. Successive waves of these businesses created a climate of tremendous economic mobility, with workers constantly jockeying to jump to each emerging income tier. In just over a decade, I've seen several hundred million people come out of absolutely grinding poverty into a lifestyle which is still poor but not truly deprived; I've seen several hundred million more acquire a standard of living that -- considering the difference in purchasing parity power -- is perfectly in line with first-world norms. This has had a knock-on effect in every sector of the economy, including those where the Western presence isn't particularly felt. When I go to construction sites now, for example, the workers still tend to live in (better) temporary shanty-towns next to the construction sites, but now they have safety gear, their pay has increased about 40-fold, and their children go to school rather than work.

It has been an absolute pleasure to watch this happen. From everything I've seen, the rise of China -- which Foxconn epitomises -- has roughly paralleled this course of development, only more so.

Frankly, the question of "how bad is Foxconn, really?" should have been answerable with a single data point: their suicide rate is lower than that of China's as a whole. That should tell you something. Foxconn is undoubtedly imperfect, but that one fact demonstrates that it must be better than the alternatives. Much of the negative perception of Foxconn has been driven by cultural misunderstanding rather than reality. When sensationalist journalists tried to turn the (statistically lower) rate of suicide into a news story, the instincts of Foxconn managers were to save face, act humble, and vow to do better. That's how you gain respect in Confucian culture, but to Americans it looked like an admission of guilt. It would have been better if their PR department had foregone the absurd suicide nets and such, and simply said "Look, our suicide rate is lower than the rest of China's, so take that, biatches!"

That would have gotten the truth across more succinctly than anything else.

ttt_4• 14 years ago

>> This wasn't evil Westerners coming in and mercilessly exploiting the natives; this was simply the bog-standard working conditions in every construction site across the country.

I think while your perception of the native working conditions and the improvement that westerners brought to that is probably true, it also misses the point completely.

The criticism is not about the working conditions per se, but rather that the western companies knowingly hand-pick nations with the worst-off working conditions because it cheapens their productive chain. It's not about the company exploiting the local workers more so than usual, but that they choose to manufacture in countries that regularly allow local workers to be exploited and so they can too without "worrying".

What makes it worst is that the western companies do not share the cultural traits and history that makes the country what it is, but rather they come from a place where stricter rules are valued, and are valued for a reason (quality of life, safety, health, rights), that they then choose to ignore in favor of their own bottom line.

That is what the real issue is. It IS inhumane from their part and they SHOULD be questioned on their decisions and practices.

I know that there are plenty others factors that drive companies there, but it's still a decision and they should be accountable, if not legally than morally.

[Edit: is there something wrong with the comment that its being downvoted?]

peteretep3• 14 years ago

> The criticism is not about the working conditions per se, but rather that the western companies knowingly hand-pick nations with the worst-off working conditions because it cheapens their productive chain

You could also flip this 'fact' around, and present it as: Western companies knowingly hand-pick nations with the biggest need for the investment they're providing.

But in both cases, you'd be missing the point that the money is just going where it gets the biggest return, and that that trumps most other concerns.

edanm• 14 years ago

The thing is, if we don't let companies do this "morally bad" act, then these companies and the people living in them are worse off. So while you might have a theoretical case to make about the morality, in practice, these companies are Making The World Better.

This isn't their intent, but it is the practical outcome of what they do.

P.S. You shouldn't be downvoted, your comment was good.

bane• 14 years ago

Agreed, there's a strange attitude in certain groups that seems to believe that entire industries, built to first world standards, with first world pay, should simply fall out of orbit into a developing economy and bring them all the wonderful benefits of the first world. They simply don't understand that to get to a modern developed economy, you have to develop into one. Even South Korea, which has probably one of the fastest third-to-first development stories in history, took decades, and they're only moving about 50 million people up the wealth ladder. They even started with a relatively literate, well educated work force.

Still, I wonder if there are ways of hacking the development curve to get more people and their entire economy moving faster. China for example, appears to be going through a modern version of the industrial revolution, intense pollution and all...and China may be too far along their process for this to matter. But as Chinese wages and conditions improve, the next "cheap place to build our crap" will need to start from someplace...just like many countries are developing telecom infrastructures without landlines, I wonder if future fast-growth developing countries can develop without having to go through the nastiness of an Industrial Revolution.

wisty• 14 years ago

> Then in 2010

The stable door is always shut after the horse has bolted.

Foxconn is a Taiwanese company, and a household name in China. Insanely high profile, lots to lose, and relatively little protection. The owner is presumably well connected (he's been running factories in Shenzhen since 1988); but while he'll have some friends who'll bend a few rules, I doubt he has anyone in the right place who will risk their life for him (i.e. a close family member at the top). There were bound to be investigations, and his government connections could have risked execution if they help cover anything up.

After the suicides, Foxconn came under heavy attack from the Chinese media. They simply couldn't afford to break any rules after that. I don't know if they did before the deaths (and I doubt they were any worse than many other factories in China), but of course they were squeaky-clean afterwards.

brudgers• 14 years ago

If someone really believes that they are talking with random workers in a communist country prior to an interview with a powerful CEO of a major manufacturer, their journalistic instincts may be somewhat lacking.

The focus of the story is not on Apple and the consequences of consumerism. Instead, it is on Foxconn and the human difficulties inherent in the industrialization of an economy. The shifting of the ground is deliberate.

Daisey's story and Schmitz reporting agree on the fact that Apple's business processes entail problematic operational practices [references below].

That the Bloomberg article ignores them is a not unexpected response to the sort of muckraking Daisey engaged in. The current media campaign is far more sophisticated, but at its heart its motivations are no different from the response to The Jungle a century ago.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/apple-economy/app....

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/apple-economy/china-c....

yabatopia2• 14 years ago

The discussion about questionable labor practices and sweatshops distracts us from the biggest problem Western countries should have with China: China is a totalitarian state, a one party dictatorship.

The comparison between India and China is flawed: India is a democracy (albeit far from perfect), China is not. China is a dictatorship that has been violating human rights on a massive scale for decades and decades.

Call me old-fashioned, but I try to avoid doing business with totalitarian regimes. It just isn't right. My heart bleeds every time I buy a gadget or any other product made in China. Most of the time I don't even have a choice. Oh, Made In Taiwan, where are you?

And perhaps it's time to ask ourselves: is it really a good idea to transfer and outsource more and more technological research and production - one of the cornerstones of our modern and future society - to a totalitarian state like China?

guard-of-terra3• 14 years ago

"My heart bleeds every time I buy a gadget or any other product made in China" You realise there's a link between purchasing power and democracy? If so, how do you think would you help Chinese by not buying their goods?

(Skipping goods that you know are produced by bad people is still fine)

yabatopia2• 14 years ago

To be honest: I really don't know. Are economic sanctions in the interest of the Iranian people? Or the people in Syria?

Hopefully it can prevent that the situation gets even worse. Or that those in power become even more powerful.

Note that it takes more than prosperity to become a democracy. It certainly helps, but there are more factors at play.

Zarathust• 14 years ago

We have to remember that 300 persons threatened to jump from the rooftop if their conditions didn't improve a few months ago. It cannot be that much of a rose garden either right?

A common logical fallacy is occurring here: An argument is made toward a larger picture, the argument is false therefore the larger picture doesn't exist. It only proves that the American Life author was wrong and that further investigation is needed, not at all that Foxconn is a nice place.

brown9-23• 14 years ago

I think you are assuming that the mass suicide threat was legitimate. It may have just been a smart negotiating ploy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3448378

pasbesoin• 14 years ago

For me, one of the elephants in the room that is the larger discussion about "third world" outsourcing and manufacture, is the other side of the dynamic: What is happening in portions of the "first world". That is, the fear in the first world. (Note: I'm in the U.S.)

The first world build up, both deliberately and circumstantially (e.g. World War II), a fairly strong system of profit-sharing and workforce representation and safety.

Then, increasing geographic mobility (physical, and communication) provided means of operating portions or the entirety of a business outside of that scope, while maintaining the first world market/destination for finished product.

Given that much of the first world was in one form or another "democratic", at that point, those populations faced a choice. Erect barriers to insure the propagation of those protections within their societies, but at perhaps the expense of less individual, immediate wealth -- at least, as measured in objects possessed. Or allow this "outsourcing", undermining domestic production and attendant protections in favor of individual gains -- short term gains, for those not in a position of major equity or enabling and so profiting off of the inter-societal transfers.

In my perspective, barring a regression, at this point we are headed towards a world society as well as economy. However, the timeframes are still such that individuals can end up "losers" with regard to opportunities available or lost during their productive lifespans.

In the U.S., for example, many people are "losing", right now.

The question arises: Has what has happened been the best way forward that was possible? Or could the U.S. et al. have maintained greater barriers while still enabling progress? The ideo of "lifting up" the third world, instead of "racing to the lowest common denominator"?

I, for one, don't know the answer to that. Personally, though, I would have liked to try harder for it.

Many people in the U.S. are scared, and outraged, and fearful, and many other things, of what they see -- or what is reported -- in China and other places, because behind and beyond the immediate situation, they see or perhaps intuit at some level their own future.

Maybe in the 80's and even 90's, many people here just felt it was wrong that another person be treated like that. And they compared those circumstances to their own and wished the latter whole-heartedly for these other people.

Now, many people are just plain scared. If they're not already living in this future of decreasing expectations.

I think that is the, or at least one of, the elephants in the room, in this entire discussion.

We were supposed to be improving the lives of these folk. But now it looks to (rhetorical) me that it was, is at my and our own expense.

I'm not arguing for one interpretation or the other, here. But I would like to see this perspective -- this view from "the other side", if I've seen and understood it at least partially correctly -- added to the conversation.

And, to loop back to what I mentioned earlier, this happened in the context of "democratic" first world societies. (However imperfect that democracy might be.) So... in casting about for blame, if such is to be sought and found at all, I don't think those populations can simply point to business executives and "corrupt" politicians for the answer. Whether citizens voted, or didn't bother, they were and are part of the choice.

Now Can We Start Talking About the Real Foxconn?

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