Certainly you’ve assembled a piece of IKEA furniture and experienced that special kind of frustration that comes with realising the screw holes don’t line up and you have to take everything apart and put it together it again. Now imagine this problem at 230m in the air with massive steel girders instead of particle board. When those holes don’t line up, it’s a whole different kind of frustration. More »
Bill Maher interviewed Mike Daisey last week on Real Time, adding to the scourge of recent negative publicity surrounding the conditions at Apple supplier Foxconn. Daisey is the actor who wrote and performed the one-man show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a musing that faces the labour issue head-on. He actually went to China and talked to workers outside the infamous Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. More »
The ongoing issues that Apple faces regarding workplace conditions in its suppliers’ Chinese factories has left an ugly streak on the company’s bright and sparkly facade. Why not use all that power of innovation and design to tackle the core issue? Last night’s Conan featured an Apple commercial that ‘revolutionises the safety net’. Zing! More »
Joel Johnson, after he visited a Foxconn factory for Wired: To be soaked in materialism, to directly and indirectly champion it, has also brought guilt. More »
Despite the explosions, suicides, reported abuse and poisonous gas, Foxconn is apparently a very popular place to work. More »
In Adam Lashinsky’s book, Inside Apple, he examines how brutally insane and awful it is to work at Apple. Turns out having plainclothes spies and murky job descriptions isn’t enough, because Apple sometimes makes its new employees work on fake products until they prove themselves trustworthy. More »
The New York Times teamed up with a Chinese magazine to see how the Chinese feel about Foxconn, Apple, and the how their factory workers are treated. The results might not surprise you, but they will remind you that there’s more cost to your iPad than what’s on the price tag. More »
You probably remember the Foxconn explosion from last May that killed four people and left 18 others seriously injured. Charles Duhigg and David Barboza of the New York Times have a massive profile on the human side of a totally avoidable dust explosion in a plant frantically rushing to keep up with demand for iPads, and all the negligence that went into it. More »
Terry Gou is the chairman of Hon Hai Precision, the owners of Foxconn. He’s also an insensitive asshat. At the company year-end party at the Taipei Zoo he said: “I have a headache how to manage one million animals.” HILARIOUS! More »
