Working at Foxconn
This is part II of a post on the manufacture of Apple products.
http://open.salon.com/blog/toritto/2012/02/12/as_american_as_apple_1
Who makes your iphone? Apple?
No.
Who actually makes your iphone - puts it together, packs it in a box and ships it off to Apple Stores?
It is actually manufactured by Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, Ltd.
Commonly known as Foxconn.
Who the hell is Foxconn you ask?
Foxconn is the world’s largest manufacturer of consumer electronics. It’s clients include Acer, Cisco, Dell, HP, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Nintendo, Nokia, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba and Vizeo.
But Foxcomm’s largest customer is Apple. It is Foxcomm which manufacturers the tens of millions of iphones and ipads at "Foxconn City" in Shenzhen, China. It is the largest employer in China even though it is headquartered in Taiwan. Money makes strange bedfellows.
You will find Foxconn anywhere you can find cheap labor. It has operations in Mexico, Brazil and India but China contains its largest factories by far.
Foxconn City, also known as ipod City is a walled complex of 1.2 square miles where hundreds of thousands of semi-skilled workers labor six days a week in 12 hour shifts. Foxconn City includes 15 factories, dormitories, a swimming pool, its own radio and TV station, its own fire brigade, grocery store, bank restaurants and a hospital.
Nothing like Foxconn exists in the United States.
To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.
Tens of thousands of workers earn less than $17 a day for 12 hours. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. "The scale is unimaginable," he said.
Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.
When CNN reporter Stan Grant met with an 18-year-old factory worker referred to as "Miss Chen," he introduced her to the product that she's spent long hours assembling for the first time. The young woman was astonished by the Apple iPad and exclaims, "Wow, I want it." Chen's job is to install iPad screens, but she's never seen the finished product. Neither could she afford the product.
A recent report of factory conditions reiterates a recent New York Times expose that delved into the dark side of manufacturing Apple products.
"They use women as men, and they use men as machines. There's another way of saying it," Chen said. "They use women as men and they use men as animals."
The company has been scrutinized for a spike in suicides in 2010, factory explosions detailed in the Times article and covering up poor working conditions during audits.
Recent allegations lift the blame from the factories and point it at Apple. Geoffrey Crothall of the non-governmental agency China Labor Bulletin blames the disparity between Apple's profits and Foxconn's compensation.
"These companies are making huge profits but workers feel that they are not getting a fair share," Crothall told CNN. "But just because Apple is making a profit doesn't mean they are passing that onto Foxconn; the margins are slim."
In its defense, Apple's labor standards are higher than the industry standard and have increased the number of audits they performed last year. It's worth noting that Apple isn't the only company benefitting from the cheap labor overseas. However, the counter argument is that Apple is a leader in the industry and must set the bar even higher for itself.
Foxcomm made that iphone you are holding. It has a well deserved reputation for unsafe labor conditions, underage employees, inhumanely long hours and a spate of worker suicides.
Chief executive Terry Gou hasn’t helped his company’s image with comments like one recent public statement that compared the company’s one million employees to animals in a zoo.
Last fiscal year (ending September 2011) Apple reported sales of $108 billion and net profits before taxes $34.2 billion. For the last 14 weeks of 2011, Apple smashed its own record with sales of $46.3 billion and net profit of $13 billion.
That cheap labor sure pays off - especially when you can shrug your shoulders - "Hey, they don’t work for us!".
Enjoy your phone.
Now let me ask the question again.
How "American" is Apple and companies like it? Seems to me not very "American" at all. The jobs are overseas. The profits are stashed overseas. Apple contributes massively to our balance of payments deficit with China. Yet Apple enjoys the benefits of our property law. The benefits of U.S. military protection. The hoards of Congress protecting its interests. The clout of our media and open access to our market. Yet Apple feels no social obligation. It's only obligation is to make more. The only thing not in China are the Apple executives.
Besides the phone you continually play with, like crack, what have they done for us lately?
Where is the big loss if they left?
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Aristoxenus
JALI 17
L in the Southeast
Missilynn
Poor Woman
Laura Wilkerson
Salon.com
Comments
"How about them Dodgers?"
:(
Except that we did.
Just a few generations ago.
Only we didn't provide clean, warm dorms (except for our military) and three squares a day. And we didn't find that a few underaged workers got into the mines and factories - we conscripted thousands upon thousands of such young for people difficult, dangerous work such as coal mining, under the harshest conditions available - for a lot less than $17 PER MONTH, not per day. And we carefully kept no records of the death toll or the suicide rate of these kids.
We do set the all-time record for being mealy-mouthed hypocrites though........ Don't we?
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It has been tried before to break the "corporations" to our will by boycotts. In some things it can be successful. When it is tried with others, however, it can be a disaster. When we here in Canada hear the call for a boycott of the oil companies, many tried their damnedest to comply, but this country is too big to manage without private transportation.
What CAN be done though is to take down one company at a time. Perhaps Occupy might select one - Apple or Hewlitt/Packard - any one will do. Once named we could all boycott that one company. Buy our computers from another. Break that company and no other company will ever ignore you again. If another does, then break them too! It won't require many such lessons of the power of the public dollar to break a company before they get the message in full.
A little bit of "dollar discipline" will do them a world of good!
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http://open.salon.com/blog/f_arouete/2012/02/23/does_the_american_apple_rot_at_its_capitalist_core
To quote John Perkins in his jaw-dropping book Confessions of and Economic Hit Man
"Today, men and women are going into Thailand, the Philippines, Botswana, Bolivia and every other country where they hope to find people desperate for work. They go to these places with the express purpose of exploiting wretched people - people whose children are severely malnourished, even starving, people who live in shantytowns and have lost all hope of a better life, people who have ceased to even dream of another day. These men and women leave their plush offices in Manhattan or San Francisco or Chicago, streak across continents and oceans in luxurious jetliners, check into first-class hotels, and dine at the finest restaurants the country has to offer. Then they go searching for desperate people.
Today, we still have slave traders. They no longer find it necessary to march into the forests of Africa looking for prime specimens who will bring top dollar on the auction blocks in Charleston, Cartagena and Havana. They simply recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell in the markets of their choosing, Or they may elect not even to own the factory themselves; instead, they hire a local businessman to do all their dirty work for them.
These men and women think of themselves as upright. They return to their homes with photographs of quaint sites and ancient ruins, to show to their children. They attend seminars where they apt each other on the back and exchange tidbits of advice about dealing with the eccentricities of customs in far-off lands. Their bosses hire lawyers who assure them that what they are doing is perfectly legal. They have a cadre of psychotherapists and other human resource experts at their disposal to convince them that they are helping those desperate people.
The old-fashioned slave trader told himself that he was dealing with a species that was not entirely human, and that he was offering them the opportunity to become Christianized. He also understood that slaves were fundamental to the survival of his own society, that they were the foundation of his economy. The modern slave trader assured herself (or himself) that the desperate pople are better off earning one dollar a day than no dollars at all, and that they are receiving the opportunity to become integrated into the larger world community. She also understands that these desperate people are fundamental to the survival of her company, that they are the foundation for her own lifestyle. She never stops to think about the larger implications of what she, her lifestyle, and the economic system behind them are doing to the world - or of how they may ultimately impact her children's future."