Hello,

You may watch this video about one factory of Apple (production of devices e.g. iphone smartphones):

URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoQtErxn6jo

This video is in French, but you might probably get a feeling about the problem. Many problems are reported taking place in the factory. Working conditions are far to be good for employees.

This video reports many important problems, which are unfortunately not always according to the human rights.
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

It was shown that Apple tried anyhow to improve the working condition, but still...

Further reading about the situation in China today is indicated below.

The working situation in China is not very good.
Most of our products in EU are Made in China. Well, up to you, but it could be recommended to stop buying Chinese products, because of these ethics!

Think maybe twice. Do you still want to buy an iphone? What is your opinion about this?

Regards

--
Literature:
http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783642396625
http://www.amazon.com/China-Truth-Ab.../dp/B0048EL8JG

All I can say really is here in America, it is getting harder and harder to find products made at home.

If I gave up everything made in China, wow, my items would drop..... Big time.

And ... "Apple is not exactly alone in this." All of our electronic toys are made "far, far away, out of mind."

Furthermore: "obviously, Apple has no choice."

The only other alternative would be: to make these products in America, where they might only need be shipped a few hundred miles from the point where they had been made "with American pride" by gainfully-employed American workers.

This, "of course," is absolutely inconceivable, because it would not be: "Cheaper."

It is always "cheaper" to engage a work-force that is 10,000 sea-miles away from you to produce "every possible product that your entire nation might require," instead of employing anyone in your own country to do the same thing.

The same rules, by the way, also apply to the software that runs them: it is absolutely necessary to employ over two million H-1B, L-1, et al, Visa holders in the USA, to do the "the best and the brightest" work for which (inexplicably ...) "qualified American workers simply 'cannot be found.'"

... That is, when you haven't simply out-sourced both your programming pool and your entire IT infrastructure to an "offshore-contracting company" whose representatives in the perfectly-starched blue suits say the perfectly-starched right things to your perfectly-starched suckers company executives.

Fact is, these companies, although "foreign," are actually behaving exactly as industrialists always do, regardless of country. Exactly as they do, I should say, unless they are compelled to do otherwise. In the manufacturing equation, "labor is a variable cost, and nothing more." Like any "cost," it is a thing to be "minimized."

Corporations, like any other such human(!) invention, are "driven only to optimize," unless they are compelled to do otherwise. (And, lest we stand on our soapboxes and pillory them as "inhuman," we should sternly remind ourselves that "these are the ground-rules upon which we have required them to 'operate, or perish.' ")

Perversely, the "cost to the consumer" in a much-better situation would be negligibly larger in most cases. And, in the case of Apple (and every other smart-phone manufacturer ...), it could actually be unchanged. The trouble is that "quarterly returns might be "ten cents less per share" than "Analysts Expected," resulting in "an overnight plunge in stock-price followed quickly by the sacking of several executives." That(!) is the ... again, very human ... fear that drives most corporate decisions.

I moved Tonka Toys to China after moving Tonka Toys from Minnesota to West Texas.

I marveled at the chinese laborer with bare feet working in the stripping room. Wading through caustic wet ash that will peel the skin off of any normal human being.

I don't see no outrage over the toy business in this thread. So I'll shut up.

rokytnji, there's plenty of outrage to go around.

Whenever they are left to themselves, many, if not most, industrialists seem to prefer sweatshops and company towns to other forms of a labor force; their actions say so, even if their words do not. Since sweatshops and company towns have fallen into disrepute in many quarters, they've moved to an "out-of-sight out-of-mind" policy.

Remember that Henry Ford was considered an industrial revolutionary for deciding to pay his employees a reasonable wage, though it wasn't necessarily for the reasons of legend.

Well, The move from Minnesota.

That was to cut workers wages in 1/2. Minnetonka. Original home of Tonka Toys.
So when you punch in "Tonka Toys" MinneTonka map search. The original home of Tonka toys pulls up.

Elpaso Tx was making money for the corp. Then Hasbro bought it.
Then Hasbro decides China can cut labor costs by more than 1/2 again. Hence the China move.
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Edit: Just a Tidbit of info. Tonka Toys leased the old Farrah buildings on Viscount Ave. Farrah was a clothing manufacture. Something that was big business all through Elpaso Texas. Levis, Wrangler. All were there.

Tonka got Farrahs building because Farrah workers wanted a raise. You know. To live?
They moved Farrah to Mexico instead. Same for Levi and Wrangler. The word is Mariquiladora.
That defines Apple also.

End of edit.
########################################


Funniest and saddest part is. Prices do not drop. Quality goes down. Labor laws like wearing rubber boots (something that costs money to protect a worker) are thrown out of the door.

Think of that when Xmas rolls around. Apple is just a drop in the ocean and all one can do is stress and get grey hair over getting upset over it. People vote with their wallets.

Something I do not see many people doing. Morals go out the window with a Capitalistic mind set. Takes a lot of money to make poor people.

I do not see any change coming any time soon. Anywhere.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...48969714003799

http://www.salon.com/2015/05/31/bees..._to_save_them/

We got bigger problems than just a Apple sweat shop going on.
What is that saying about forest and trees?

I own a Iphone 5S by the way. The wife's umbilical cord on me. So be outraged all you want. Bet you cannot do anything about it. But fume about it. Like I care.

Here I go again. Not following my own signatures advice again.

The US president tries hard to keep jobs in US and to give back the industry the strength of many years ago.

Well, if you would produce with respect of human, it would be of course more expensive.
But, first, we would give us pride - human will be respect
and second you would get more jobs in US and the economy will growth again and get much better.

You shall stop producing in such countries and get support from your nation, buying the right fair-made product.

The best nations in the world, politics EU and US, shall really talk together not to import such not fairly made products, and get back their industries.

You will definitely this way first improve the quality of products and help everyone.

Can I have 10lbs of what you are smoking so I can go back to blissful ignorance?

Since nobody listens anyways, and I see a certain agenda, (USA centric), going on here that ignores anything else I bring up. Here is something for you.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...nd-has-become/

This is my last post in this thread.

A very interesting book that you might like to read is titled, simply, Company Town.

Hershey, Pennsylvania. Lowell, Massachusetts ...

... "The GooglePlex" ... Facebook HQ ... One Infinite Loop ...

They're all "company towns."

It does not pay to be altruistic about these things. As long as the USA is able to print millions of its own Dollars out of thin air and use those Dollars to buy things internationally, that's what it will continue to do. And China will continue to accumulate "debts" of trillions of those Dollars ... until it decides to change the rules, as it is likely to do in September if not sooner.

Notice that the USA can only do this with regards to "foreign exchange." If it did this domestically, it would experience "visible" hyper-inflation ... as opposed to the present form, which is off-the-books. As long as the US Dollar, which costs the USA nothing, will be accepted at-par with every other national currency on Planet Earth because of its present status as a "world reserve currency," it has a license to steal print money. Foreign governments around the world are stuck holding trillions of "US Dollars" in debts to a country that is cheerfully "importing and consuming," but giving nothing back.

As I said, this will change, when the Chinese Yuan becomes another "reserve currency," enabling China to dispose of its Dollar-debts on the open market, where they will bring cents on the Dollar, and to insist that its own currency be used for purchases. Naturally, this is a two-edged sword, because the USA does possess a mothballed but still-existing manufacturing infrastructure. When the USA realizes that it is now the only place on Earth where "the Dollar is still worth a Dollar," it will rediscover its "lost youth." But it will do so only because it has no choice, as the game of international trade again becomes a game that can be won or lost by any player in the field.

(I frankly don't know what's been taking the IMF, et al, so long. This game has been "rigged" for decades. Perhaps Chinese leaders simply wanted to be sure that the hook was as firmly-set as they could make it before they acted.)

It is pointless to "blame the President" because the rules and principles that make up these things are fashioned throughout any Government, both by the Legislature and by various non-elected Bureaus. The CEO of the organization has technical authority but very little influence.

My open fear is that the policies regarding computer software will not change until someone leverages our extreme vulnerability, to carry out an unprecedented act of para-military aggression in which the individual lives of perhaps millions of individual citizens (and their children) are laid bare. I guess I have very different notions of what "World War III" will actually look like, when it comes. I think it is very close, now, and that no one sees it coming.

Until the China's financial dream for CEO's will totally collapse , there are no chances that human rights will be there completely respected.

Isn't any international regulations that might control better and limit what is not concevable in countries, such as US ?

Civil rights, environmental disaster, human dignity, worker safety, dumping of products, intelligence thefts, chemical contamination of goods and foods, and the list goes on and on. Not much to like there from an enlightened point of view.

Not sure I see any truth to this. "The US president tries hard to keep jobs in US..." Clinton signed the free trade, Nixon "opened" China. Ross Perot was booed when he said there was going to be loss of jobs.

The US could easily survive entirely on it's own workforce I suppose. The Iphone may end up costing the more realistic $4000 by the time you add in living wages, worker protections, Obamacare and such.

I try to buy ethical goods and try to reduce reuse and conserve but it's life and sometimes you want to go to a movie or buy a gizmo.

And it's not only in China. These types of factories, or maquiladoras (as rokytnji pointed out), operate in Mexico, and I believe in different Asian countries as well, apart from China. And guess what, many (if not most) of these factories belong to big companies from the U.S. and other developed countries.

The fact is, big capitalists don't care about working conditions and employment rights. If they could get people to work 16 hours/day for free, they'd do it to reduce production costs and be able to compete with rival companies. So, the reason why these slave houses exist is not only because China and other countries don't have proper labour policies to protect their workers, but also because it's cheaper for Western companies to employ the workforce from these countries instead of their own's (which obviously harms the working conditions of the people they employ, but also affects the right to work of people in Western countries).

So, OP, if you want to stop buying products made in China, that's fine, but then you should be consistent and stop buying any other product made in maquiladoras in India, Mexico and other countries.

Actually producing it in the states would add ~$4 to the cost of the phone. But produced here means taxed at normal tax rates and not sheltering the overseas.

Interesting read.

"Actually producing it in the states would add ~$4 to the cost of the phone." Not sure I agree with this.

If the entire supply chain were in the USA and provided fair wages and benefits then I'd have to say it would still cost more like $4000. Even today cities and states offer incentive plans that obscure the real costs of a product. Round Rock paid millions upon millions to keep Dell there. How much did Tesla demand (oops, request)?


I used to work at big computer place. It went belly up when they were forcing divisions to buy from open market instead of corporate sources. You'd be shocked how low these imported supplies were or maybe how much it cost big computer company to make them.

I did talk to a guy from TI who built and tried to get a plant running in the Philippines. In the end they lost money from what a US plant would have cost but that was an entirely different set of problems.