The Apple in your hand was produced by Chinese Slaves.

[BridgeTroll]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/30/apple-chinese-workers-treated-inhumanely/print

Apple's Chinese workers treated 'inhumanely, like machines'Investigation finds evidence of draconian rules and excessive overtime to meet western demand for iPhones and iPads
Gethin Chamberlain guardian.co.uk, Saturday 30 April 2011 21.30 BST 


An investigation into the conditions of Chinese workers has revealed the shocking human cost of producing the must-have Apple iPhones and iPads that are now ubiquitous in the west.

The research, carried out by two NGOs, has revealed disturbing allegations of excessive working hours and draconian workplace rules at two major plants in southern China. It has also uncovered an "anti-suicide" pledge that workers at the two plants have been urged to sign, after a series of employee deaths last year.

The investigation gives a detailed picture of life for the 500,000 workers at the Shenzhen and Chengdu factories owned by Foxconn, which produces millions of Apple products each year. The report accuses Foxconn of treating workers "inhumanely, like machines".

Among the allegations made by workers interviewed by the NGOs â€" the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations and Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (Sacom) â€" are claims that:

■ Excessive overtime is routine, despite a legal limit of 36 hours a month. One payslip, seen by the Observer, indicated that the worker had performed 98 hours of overtime in a month.

■ Workers attempting to meet the huge demand for the first iPad were sometimes pressured to take only one day off in 13.

■ In some factories badly performing workers are required to be publicly humiliated in front of colleagues.

■ Crowded workers' dormitories can sleep up to 24 and are subject to strict rules. One worker told the NGO investigators that he was forced to sign a "confession letter" after illicitly using a hairdryer. In the letter he wrote: "It is my fault. I will never blow my hair inside my room. I have done something wrong. I will never do it again."

■ In the wake of a spate of suicides at Foxconn factories last summer, workers were asked to sign a statement promising not to kill themselves and pledging to "treasure their lives".

Foxconn produced its first iPad at Chengdu last November and expects to produce 100m a year by 2013. Last year Apple sold more than 15m iPads worldwide and has already sold close to five million this year.

When the allegations were put to Foxconn by the Observer, manager Louis Woo confirmed that workers sometimes worked more than the statutory overtime limit to meet demand from western consumers, but claimed that all the extra hours were voluntary. Workers claim that, if they turn down excessive demands for overtime, they will be forced to rely on their basic wage: workers in Chengdu are paid only 1,350 yuan (£125) a month for a basic 48-hour week, equivalent to about 65p an hour.

Asked about the suicides that have led to anti-suicide netting being fitted beneath the windows of workers' dormitories, Woo said: "Suicides were not connected to bad working conditions. There was a copy effect. If one commits suicide, then others will follow."

In a statement, Apple said: "Apple is committed to ensuring the highest standards of social responsibility throughout our supply base. Apple requires suppliers to commit to our comprehensive supplier code of conduct as a condition of their contracts with us. We drive compliance with the code through a rigorous monitoring programme, including factory audits, corrective action plans and verification measures."

[fsujax]

what?? those things are not made in the USA??? :-)

[cityimrov]

This seems pretty comparable to most other stuff our consumer accepts.  Most our clothing, shoes, and basically everything has some connection to similar conditions.  There's really no incentive or desire for most people to improve the conditions of these workers.  Sure, their are a few of us who want to but for the vast majority, "as long as I have my stuff at a reasonable price, I'll just look the other way."  

Really, that's what people accept.  The worst I've seen was a group of people complaining how they are overworked and they want more life-work balance near their server who isn't even from this country and if I read the reports right, probably works 12 hours a day/7 days a week for extremely low pay - these are the lucky ones!  I don't even want to think about the conditions are inside places like our meat factories are.  Oh yes, all this stuff happens inside US borders.    

I don't know why but most people around here just won't stand up (when talk comes to action) and just buy more ethically created products thus creating a corporate incentive to produce more ethnically created products.  

[wsansewjs]

If you look on the back of every Apple product, it always say "Engineered in California."

-Josh

[Doctor_K]

Meh.  "Engineered" and "produced" are awfully different, methinks.

[wsansewjs]

Meh.  "Engineered" and "produced" are awfully different, methinks.

That's my point. Apple doesn't want anyone to know where their products come from.

-Josh

[BridgeTroll]

This seems pretty comparable to most other stuff our consumer accepts.  Most our clothing, shoes, and basically everything has some connection to similar conditions.  There's really no incentive or desire for most people to improve the conditions of these workers.  Sure, their are a few of us who want to but for the vast majority, "as long as I have my stuff at a reasonable price, I'll just look the other way." 

Really, that's what people accept.  The worst I've seen was a group of people complaining how they are overworked and they want more life-work balance near their server who isn't even from this country and if I read the reports right, probably works 12 hours a day/7 days a week for extremely low pay - these are the lucky ones!  I don't even want to think about the conditions are inside places like our meat factories are.  Oh yes, all this stuff happens inside US borders.   

I don't know why but most people around here just won't stand up (when talk comes to action) and just buy more ethically created products thus creating a corporate incentive to produce more ethnically created products. 

Yes.  And it is illegal and undocumented aliens who are subjected to this.  Our border should be secured and a guestworker program implemented to halt these abuses.

[Shwaz]

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the somewhat newly installed suicide nets.

1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1

The nets went up in May, after the 11th jumper in less than a year died here. They carried a message: You can throw yourself off any building you like, as long as it isn’t one of these. And they seem to have worked. Since they were installed, the suicide rate has slowed to a trickle.

I seem to be witnessing some of those damage-control efforts on this still-warm fall day as two Foxconn executivesâ€"along with a liaison from Burson-Marsteller, a PR firm hired to deal with the post-suicide outcryâ€"lead me through the facility. I have spent much of my career blogging about gadgets on sites like Boing Boing Gadgets and Gizmodo, reviewing and often praising many of the products that were made right here at Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory. I ignored the first Foxconn suicides as sad but statistically inevitable. But as the number of jumpers approached double digits, latent self-reproach began to boil over. Out of a million people, 17 suicides isn’t muchâ€"indeed, American college students kill themselves at four times that rate. Still, after years of writing what is (at best) buyers’ guidance and (at worst) marching hymns for an army of consumers, I was burdened by what felt like an outsize provision of guiltâ€"an existential buyer’s remorse for civilization itself. I am here because I want to know: Did my iPhone kill 17 people?

My hosts are eager to help me answer that question in the negative by pointing out how pleasant life in the factory can be. They are quick with the college analogies: The canteens and mess halls are “like a college food court.” The living quarters, where up to eight workers share rooms about the size of a two-car garage, are “like college dorms.” The avenues and boulevards in the less industrial parts of the campus are “like malls.”

For all their defensiveness, my guides are not far off the mark. The avenues certainly look more like a college campus than the dingy design-by-Communism concrete canyons I half expected to find. Sure, everything on the Foxconn campus is a bit shabbyâ€"errant woody saplings creep out of sidewalk cracks, and the signage is sometimes rusty or fadedâ€"more community college than Ivy League, perhaps. But it’s generally clean. Workers stroll the sidewalks chatting and laughing, smoking together under trees, as amiable as any group of factory workers in the first world.


But “college campus” doesn’t quite capture the vastness of the place. It’s more like a nation-state, a gated complex covering just over a square mile, separated from the rest of Shenzhen’s buildings by chain link and concrete. It houses one of the largest industrial kitchens in Asiaâ€"perhaps the world. Shenzhen itself was developed over the past three decades as one of party leader Deng Xiaoping’s Special Economic Zonesâ€"a kind of capitalist hot spot. The experiment was a rousing success. Millions of workers, gambling that low but dependable wages would be more readily found in Shenzhen, migrated from the poor, rural western provinces, packing into the tenement complexes that soon riddled the city. Factory work offered a chance to change their lives and the lives of their families back home, but it offered little in the way of security. Many companies did not supply housing, leaving workers to find shelter in dodgy slums or encouraging them to sleep on the assembly line. When they did provide lodging, it was typically a dorm room crammed with bunk beds.

According to company lore, Foxconn founder Terry Gou was determined to do things differently. So when the firm built its Longhua factory in Shenzhen, it included onsite dormitoriesâ€"good ones, designed to be better than what workers could afford on their own. Terry Gou built on-campus housing, I am told, because Terry Gou cared about the welfare of his employees.

Up went a factory, up went a dorm. Up went an assembly line, up went a cafeteria. While other companies’ workers fended for themselves or slept under the tables they worked at, Gou’s employees were well fed, safe from the petty crime of a growing metropolis, and surrounded by peers and advocates.

It rings as unalloyed munificenceâ€"until a man puts his foot on the edge of a roof, looks across the campus full of trees and swimming pools and coffee shops, and steps off into nothing.

[BridgeTroll]

Nobody really wants to talk about it Shwaz.  Well... no one who uses Apple products.

[Shwaz]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdrCalO5BDs

http://www.youtube.com/v/cdrCalO5BDs

[Dog Walker]

I looked at the little stickers on all of the apples in my refrigerator and it states that they were grown in the USA, mostly in Washington State.  

[BridgeTroll]

   No doubt DW... probably harvested with slave labor invited in from south of the border...

[BridgeTroll]

  No doubt DW... probably harvested with slave labor invited in from south of the border...

Ah..  Easier to keep those guys out than it is to enforce our minimum, wage laws, right?

That way our own people can be victimized instead.  good plan, bt.

Why are you so confused?  Not trying to keep em out.  I want the border secured so those coming across can be documented and protected.  Sneaking across as you and our current administration seem to prefer invites the abuses.

[BridgeTroll]

  No doubt DW... probably harvested with slave labor invited in from south of the border...

Ah..  Easier to keep those guys out than it is to enforce our minimum, wage laws, right?

That way our own people can be victimized instead.  good plan, bt.

Why are you so confused?  Not trying to keep em out.  I want the border secured so those coming across can be documented and protected.  Sneaking across as you and our current administration seem to prefer invites the abuses.

Its the illegalization that makes the abuse possible.

Maybe we should have all the farmers do what Apple Corp does...

In a statement, Apple said: "Apple is committed to ensuring the highest standards of social responsibility throughout our supply base. Apple requires suppliers to commit to our comprehensive supplier code of conduct as a condition of their contracts with us. We drive compliance with the code through a rigorous monitoring programme, including factory audits, corrective action plans and verification measures."

[JaxDiablo]

I know.