Oh I’m sure Apple don’t knowingly allow anything, and I’m sure Foxconn agreed to whatever conditions the stupid gwailo gave them to “address” the issue. But before I’d believe that Foxconn did anything more than the bare minimum they thought they could get away with (suicide nets to prevent suicides, for example) I would need to some sort of proof positive.
But yeah ok, another time.
So, your evidence for the “forced child labor” accusation is a four year old article (meaning the facts presented may not apply to now), and further talks of students from vocational school- children don’t usually attend vocational school- and the only age given is 19.
The hours worked are pretty extreme, but there is nothing in that article that says “children”. Students, yes but as far as can be told, adult students.
I would like to know more about that because I suspect that there is a much bigger back story.
Mercury, cadmium and arsenic are far more worrying pollutants than a little tritium or radon, and have killed a lot more people than did Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Coal mines are regularly shut down because coal cannot be extracted safely.
Cannot find it, at least not with a brief search.
I swear I read it, but it was some decade or so ago. So my memory can be faulty.
As I said, their interests temporarily align with our own, nothing more.
Same as when companies banded together with users when SOPA first hit. They saw their bottom line endangered due to the thing they make their money off of being threatened. Same thing here. This would basically destroy trust in apple’s product if there exists a firmware that can be loaded in that 'oh hey all that super awesome security? GONE oh don’t worry only the DAMNIT MIKE I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU NOT TO MAKE ANY COPIES! What?! You mean it’s out in the wild now?! F$&$&$$ $&%&$*%) *#$%$!
Same as with Google. They are in the same boat and should be looked at as only occasionally having our needs in mind. This isn’t evil so much as organisms (corporations) developing survival stratagies that involve ‘don’t spew toxic waste where your food is.’
My only real question is what do we do with the information we are given so we are less gawkers on the sideline and more active participants.
How can the freest country in the world, a beacon for those in oppressive countries […]
Cool it with the nostalgia, will you?
Out here in the real world, in a country that has had socialised medicine for about fifty years, the only doctors that have ever been “forced to work for the government” were military conscripts back before they abolished the draft.
Doctors can charge whatever they like; the government refunds a set amount per procedure. If the doc charges the scheduled rate, the patient pays nothing and the government pays the doctor. If the doc wants to charge more, the patient pays up front then gets a partial refund from the government.
Doctors who charge dramatically more than the scheduled rate have many fewer potential patients, but some of them still do so, relying on prestige and quality of care to make up the competitive disadvantage.
Ain’t it wonderful to see market forces at work?
That really isn’t how free at the point of use healthcare works. There are plenty of private options available if you don’t want to use the NHS, for instance. No one is stopping doctors and nurses from working for them, or patients using them. There is no delicious irony, just bad-tasting false equivalence.
Canada?
Australia.
Sounds like a very sensical way of going about things, wish our system worked as straightforward. It’d mean a lot less sick and broke people.
If I was American, my parents would have been bankrupted by my birth.
And I would, most likely, have died halfway through my doctorate.
Which, apart from the personal inconvenience, would have removed some publications from the medical knowledge pool of humanity, raising the costs even further for the rest of you.
The only age mentioned specifically mentioned in that article was the 19-year-old quoted at the end. 19-year-olds in vocational school working in an electronics factory sounds like a very different thing to me from “forced child labor”.
I mean, I live in the country that has The Walton Family.
Oi! Don´t flatter yourself, mate.
Except for the fact that the EPA guy was correct on a lot of issues. I am sure if Ghostbusters ever franchised, it would be a NIMBY issue for local neighborhoods.
The Ghostbusters were dangerous and blase about their equipment, which included unlicensed particle accelerators whose capabilities are described as,
"Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Plus Ray got screwed on the predatory mortgage he got on his childhood home.
Yes I have too much time on my hands and am a total nerd.
So, one of the articles that I linked to, posted a mere fifteen months ago, talks about 12-year-old’s in Apple’s supply chain.
China Labor Watch, which regularly posts about habitually abusive employers like Apple and Samsung, released a report in 2012 that exposed Apple supplier Foxconn’s Yantai factory’s employment of children as young as 14 years old. The conditions in this infamously abusive factory were abysmal, leading to a spate of suicides a few years back and a series of riots, the latest of which was 18 months ago. As late as a mere 15 months ago (perhaps still ancient history according to @enso), conditions were indeed quite bad:
Overtime is supposed to be voluntary, but none of the [undercover] reporters were offered any choice. In addition to the excessive hours, one reporter had to attend unpaid meetings before and after work. Another reporter was housed in a dormitory where 12 workers shared a cramped room.
According to one researcher into abusive child and youth labor practices, Ross Perlin,
Foxconn is conspiring with government officials and universities in China to run what may be the world’s single largest internship program – and one of the most exploitative. Students at vocational schools – including those whose studies have nothing to do with consumer electronics – are literally forced to move far from home to work for Foxconn, threatened that otherwise they won’t be allowed to graduate. Assembling our iPhones and Kindles for meager wages, they work under the same conditions, or worse, as other workers in the Foxconn sweatshops.
Indeed, many of the students are paid less and the schools deduct a “commission” from their salaries. The internships are required for graduation and so this amounts to nothing less than conscripted labor. Although @enso believes that the onus is on Apple’s detractors to prove that Apple hasn’t spontaneously cleaned up their act in the last 15 months, I think that this is a ridiculous requirement, as these kinds of reports aren’t even that regular and it not only defies common sense but also recent history to assume the default position of believing that Apple has cleaned up its act.
It’s frankly naive to think that, given that these kinds of practices are common knowledge, that a company like Apple really has any ethics whatsoever. In fact their “ethics” are just part of what it takes to sell their abusively manufactured products to consumers who either aren’t bothered by abusive labor practices, or refusive to believe them. We all “have” to buy electronics, so I understand that these practices are difficult or impossible to get away from, but the only point I’m making is that we shouldn’t delude ourselves into valorizing these companies when they do something good because what they’re doing to the working classes of the world is violent and savage.
True,but he also was an asshole that didn’t listen to warnings from either the business who’s equipmant was to be shut down or his own people that a forced shutdown would probably be Very Bad.
Peck had my support for asking the right questions about the equipment, but he was being an asshole to people that’d just gotten off working a double with next to no sleep. He didn’t come there to help. He came there to make a name for himself by pushing people around who were in the spotlight of the moment.
So he was overzealous in his effort to protect the environment from the strange chemical, radiation, and existentialist hazards the Ghostbusters presented. There is no excuse for harassing people who were sleep deprived in dealing with the practical issues of confirmed life after death.
He came there to make a name for himself by pushing people around who were in the spotlight of the moment.
Also known at the time as “Pulling a Rudolph Guiliani”
The spelling was inconsistent for the name of the 12 year old boy in Indonesia. The Foxconn Yantai factory article only mentioned Nintendo, who you seem to have no problem with.
I’m not saying I want to work in an electronics factory in Asia, but only pointing out a company as being ‘without ethics’ when it’s in a high profile trial vs a TLA is possibly also ‘without ethics’.
Ever hear of Nestle (or hey Wal-Mart?).
As far back as 1984?
