do you really think apple and nokia and samsung and [otherstuffwebuy] from a certain big city in china where foxcon is, do not know that 13 and 14 year olds build this stuff for endless hours every day in a city whose air quality makes hong kong's look pristine?
a company known for how much it prides itself on the detail of shape and color and components doesn't know?
or...do they just see what they want to, like we all do when we buy 'stuff from china'?
anything that can be made by hand, IS made by hand because the labor costs are, effectively, zero....when you compare one of these workers wages to what you'd make at the local fast-food restaurant, it's effecitvely no dollars per hour....there are no unions...the chinese unions are communist fronts and if you are desperate enough to go to them for your non-existant employee rights, you go to prison for complaining...even being a member of a union can get you thrown in prison...
there are no yoga breaks, bathroom breaks, or cigarette breaks...and beyond the 'neon city' of Popular Electronic Gadget are other factories....no machines in these buildings...just the hushed sounds of tiny fingers, under camera watch their entire shift, attached to bodies that work no less than 12 hours a day...14 is the average...or the 'hot new gadget' will peg it to 16hrs a day for months and months...straight 16 hour days under the watchful gaze of cameras in every room and hallway and space one of these human bodies can move in at work...a foxcon worker dies after working a 36 hour shift, not an anomaly by the way...
this isn't a post-apocalyptic crap-making journey set in the future....it's now...robots aren't making these phones...mostly human hands in China are because it's cheaper....
and that's how you get your Smart Phone and tablets...tell yourself their lives are better, say whatever you need to in order to justify your purchases that make you feel 'connected', but at least be 'connected' to the human lives and the truth of them that build your stuff...
...btw, there are no iPads sold retail in China...most workers that build them have never even seen one whole, much less turned on...
this message brought to you by the work of one Mike Daisy who went to China, as a huge apple fanboy, to find out the truth...all fact-checking on Mikes story have proven out, except where one relies on 'official' information ( for example, wether the foxcon cafeteria seats 10,000 or 4,000..it's 4,000 - all labor org's that have managed to 'see', unescorted, into factories ( auditors ) that Mike visited...winds up he didn't exaggerate anything...aww, were you hoping otherwise? yeah, me too )
...Apple refuses to comment on Mike's story, not surprisingly, except that their own auditors did find 91 underage workers in various suppliers to their products and though Apple asked them all to stop the practice, many still continue without further bother by Apple...
The good news is that child labor is being worked on, but kids slip under the radar on fake id's...sadly, not to have fun but to work...
Apple will claim to be 100% transparent, and also refuse to talk about any of this on the air with anyone...which is rather Orwellian in its own right...Apple also refuses to name the suppliers who DO violate their own company policies which means few can independently verify Apple's claims...if anyone...
The harsher critics say that except for memo's and external auditing and training programs, as well as a formal refusal to not buy from various suppliers there, Apple's own reports every year actually show little change from year to year with non-compliance regarding working hours, hazardous waste and various other pollution sins, poor health care for injured employees etc etc...
as if everyone should be happy that people are raised from 'abject horror' in economic terms to 'abjectly exploitive conditions' should be happier...and not complain...and not talk about it...
I'd like to think those of us who buy the stuff these human beings slavishly work on to build for us, still have enough personal integrity to openly talk about what's important to us and at what price? we should be able to ask ourselves, before we buy a thing, what it cost beyond mere dollars and is there anything that those of us WITH money for things we don't need but instead want, can do to make sure these workers actually DO acquire a better standard of human existence? should we be OK with waiting 100 years BEFORE this happens for them?
i'm not ok with it myself and have altered how i spend money but i'm not writing this to come off as self-righteous anything...i still have plenty of 'made in china'...'out of sight, out of mind' is alright if we're talking about socks, but about human beings?...no, i'm not 'ok' enough with that to ignore it....
are you? can you talk about what you're 'ok' with amongst your friends on facebook and twitter? or are we so consumed with our own consuming; is a gadget so much a fashion statement now; and is our need to see things as we want to see them, versus how they really are, all the evidence The Future needs to condemn us in one fell swoop as a couple generations of self-absorbed, specious, trend junkies?
finally...pardon the self-reference...i HAVE noticed an abject "Pish!!" response, an almost visceral sense of defensiveness coming my way when i have tried to broach the above with my other gadget loving friends ( fiends? )...in a society that so much claims to value free speech and thought, the barks and violent dismissiveness for anyone, not just myself, to broach this topic is stunning....
we can talk about WHAT we buy, but not HOW it's made...i can say i bought an iPad, but i'm not allowed to think about or discuss outloud who and how went into building it....that, to me, is one of the scariest parts of buying any of this stuff at all...fawning and gushing is allowed...critique and wonder are not...
that doesn't seem like 'thinking outside' of any 'box' to me...it seems like being confined by it...
Really? Wow.
