iPod ’sweat shop’ claim denied
p2p news / p2pnet: Apple Computer is said to be looking into claims that young women in China who help build its nano music player are working under sweat-shop conditions for bare-bones pay.
The claim was originally made in Britain’s Mail on Sunday and, “The paper also says the factories are not directly owned by Apple, but are instead run by Foxconn,” says Perry Wu in ChinaTechNews.
“Either way, the paper suggests, and I agree, that Apple is ultimately responsible for what happens at the factories that manufacture its goods.”
But, Wu goes on, he’s, “no fan of big corporations bullying workers” or a, “friend to shoddy, sensationalist journalism” and the Mail on Sunday report, “smacks of hyperbolic journalism in an almost ‘laowai/nongmin jin cheng’ sort of way.
“Workers live in dormitories? Good for them. I’ve worked in the offices of Chinese companies that also give white-collar workers dormitories – and they provide showers.
“Visitors are not permitted into the factory? Since when were you able to tiptoe around the vats of beer at Anheuser-Busch’s brewery in Williamsburg, Virginia? Or when was the last time you showed up at Microsoft’s compound unannounced in Redmond and expected the royal treatment?
“And the workers toil in ‘a five-storey factory that is secured by police officers’? Is that to keep the workers inside or the hoi polloi outside? Maybe they are police officers, but chances are good the journalist made a common “laowai” mistake and assumed that the “bao’an”, or rent-a-cop security officers, were instead “jingcha”, or official police.
“27 British pounds per month is the price of a few pints for you and your friends in an English pub, right? However if the workers did not have to pay for the dormitory, that is a decent, albeit low, wage. The journalist should instead wonder why the buying parity of Chinese and Britons is so lopsided and ask Apple to reduce its high-priced iPod devices. Put this in perspective: a decent 512mb MP3 player in China costs US$35, while the same sort of device in the United States can cost US$110. Yet a McDonald’s Big Mac in China costs about US$1.50 while the same dead cow sandwich costs US$2.50. I’m no Myron Scholes, but the differences in the ratios shows you that you can not make a valid argument between China and Britain based on the buying power of British money in Britain.”
Wu says corporate social responsibility is important to any company operating in China, “But the same type of ethics extend to newspapers who wish to antagonize for no other reason than to attract eyeballs. It should be the newspaper’s job to promote good fact-finding and sources. One of the journalist’s sources for the article was a security guard outside the factory who said mostly women worked at the company because, ‘they are more honest than male workers’. Thank goodness we had such an authoritative figure to let us know about the machinations at the factory.”
Wu says if he comes across “like an apologist for Apple,” he’s not, and if he also looks like, “an apologist for China,” he isn’t.
There’s, “nothing better than waking each morning and looking at my American passport,” he states, adding:
“But what I do not like is ignorance, and poorly researched sensationalist articles do nothing to make the world a better place. If Apple does terrorize its workers, give us better reasons to believe. And if they don’t, the journalist should be fired and the paper should apologize to the security guard for interrupting his nap time.”
Meanwhile, “”Apple is committed to ensuring that working conditions in our supply chain are safe, workers are treated with respect and dignity, and manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible,” says a written statement from Apple’s spokesman Steve Dowling, quoted by the Associated Press.
“We are currently investigating the allegations regarding working conditions in the iPod manufacturing plant in China. We do not tolerate any violations of our supplier code of conduct.”
Staff at Foxconn, which also makes product for Intel, Dell and Sony, “refused comment when contacted Friday at the company’s China headquarters in Shenzhen, a city bordering Hong Kong,” says the story, adding, “a spokeswoman for the company quoted in the state-run Beijing Times newspaper denied workers were mistreated at its factories.”
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Also See:
sweat-shop conditions – iPod sweat-shop accusation, June 15, 2006
ChinaTechNews – Hyperbolic Apple iPod Factory Woes, June 16, 2006
Associated Press – Apple investigating allegations of poor labor conditions, June 16, 2006
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June 17th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
“Wu says if he comes across “like an apologist for Apple,” he’s not, and if he also looks like, “an apologist for China,” he isn’t.”
Well that solves that then.