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Remember when Foxconn got loose lips and started popping off about a certain Apple HDTV that’s in development? Seems like someone at Apple put the fear of god into its manufacturing partner, because all of a sudden, Foxconn is claiming that they had “neither confirmed, nor speculated” about any such thing.
Working conditions in Foxconn’s Chinese manufacturing plants have been the turd floating around Apple’s Scrooge McDuck swimming pool of money for a while. Now Apple is reportedly partnering with Foxconn to improve working conditions in its plants, and they’re splitting the cost to get there.
A lot has been said and written about the conditions under which Foxconn workers construct the millions of iPads that are sold each quarter. But strip all that away, focus on the process itself, and what are you left with? Turns outs out a lot of painstaking detail and far more hand assembly than you might have imagined.
After the people Apple hired to clear its name wrote up a gloomy report of Foxconn working conditions, the manufacturer vowed to reform. First up: shorter, legal working days. But now these overworked workers want to keep overworking. What?
The Fair labour Association, a workers’ rights watchdog group, was hired by Apple to inspect its Foxconn operation — under a considerable amount of flack recently. So what’d they find? Illegal working hours, legal pay, crooked unions, and danger.
Apple CEO and fleece jacket advocate Tim Cook is in China, and decided to swing by the factory that cranks out Apple’s pads and phones. Maybe it’s just all the n-hexane in the air, but things look cheery! Extra rations!
Apple sold millions of iPads over the weekend, and that would presumably mean that hundreds of thousands of workers slaved extra-long hours to produce them all, right? Not so, according to Apple’s latest Supplier Responsibility report.
Since This American Life retracted its episode about Foxconn working conditions, there’s been no shortage of Mike Daisey hate. But it turns out that Woz seems to think Mike Daisey’s not all bad.
I’m a little split on the whole Mike Daisey issue; on the one hand theatre should be free to present anything it likes, and use storytelling for effect. On the other hand, up until now, Daisey hasn’t presented anything he’s said as being anything but the truth.
