APPLE AND WORK CONDITIONS

author=Lucidstillness
Conditions inside Chinese factories can vary greatly, but some are certainly better than others. I recall reading comments from Hasbro a while back going over the precautions they take to ensure that no abuses are taking place in the factories they use.

I don't believe this for a minute. If they spent money making safety procautions, they would not have clients. Everything I've ever heard about Chinese working conditions suggests that these factories, while terrible by US standards, are absolutely normal and typical by Chinese standards. The entire country's industrial sector works like this, and most of the workers are still grateful for the jobs because otherwise they'd starve to death.

...On the other hand. I just tried to look up an example of one of the most ridiculous abuse situations in a Chinese factory that I could remember, to show that Foxconn wasn't anywhere near as bad by comparison. Only to find that the company in the news article I remembered was in fact... Foxconn.

Foxconn Installs Anti-Suicide Nets at Its Facilities

Basically they had a rash of worker suicides due to the terrible working conditions, so their response was to... put up nets around the building to catch people who jumped off. They also brought in buddhist monks for the sake of the departed, started playing soothing music over the intercom, and added break rooms with punching bags so workers could beat out their frustration. Oh, and they did actually raise wages! Which makes them better than 95% of Chinese companies, and is probably the result of the fact that they've been in the American news several times.

"Most U.S. manufacturers turn a blind eye to these kind of issues in China." says the article. And it's absolutely true. The vast majority of Chinese factories work in conditions that modern westerners would consider deplorable. They simply don't place as high of a value on human life as we do; you can probably chalk that up to a cultural difference, if you want to be generous. China has too many people and they don't really mind if a handful of them die. There are plenty more to replace them. It's callous and relatively awful, but that's their world. It's obviously way worse than would be allowed in the US or Europe today, but I don't think it's nearly as bad as US and European working conditions were in the 1800s, back when we had children in coal mines and no safety precautions in factories whatsoever beyond being told when you're hired "try not to lose any limbs." Good times.

I hope Steve Jobs is in hell. He and his business practices personally have cost me thousands in revenue through software development. Macs are overly complicated to use and cumbersome when Windows makes it easy. Such as one mouse button and having to hold ctrl and click for a drop down menu. Having to wait for your top menu to appear, your devices need to be ejected instead of simply removed, disappearing scrollbars, iffy gesture controls on macbook pros. Hoops to publish software... but hey they're sleek and trendy and supposedly don't have viruses!

Know what's more fucked? You can buy twice the mp3 player if you don't buy an ipod. Let's say a 4 GB ipod shuffle for $50, you can get an 8 GB for $50 with a video screen. Then you can use any program to put your MP3s on your mp3 player.

You know that would never happen, Dyhalto.