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Bobby Yip / Reuters file
Workers are seen inside a Foxconn factory in the township of Longhua in the southern Guangdong province, in 2010.
BEIJING—Last week, the New York Times published a report about working conditions at factories producing Apple products in China. Under the spotlight was Foxconn Technology, a key manufacturer for Apple and “China’s largest exporter and one of the nation’s biggest employers, with 1.2 million workers,” responsible for churning out tens of millions of iPhones and iPads sold around the world.
The article focused specifically on Foxconn’s Chengdu factory, where employees have complained about nonstop shifts, arduous overtime, crowded dormitories, mental health (nearly twenty workers at Foxconn have committed suicide over two years), and a hazardous working environment that's led to at least one explosion, in May 2011.
The New York Times report was also published in Chinese in the well-respected business and economic news weekly Caixin, where Chinese readers could post comments in response to the story.
Since it was released over the Lunar New Year festival, a week-long holiday which brings the country to a rare standstill, reaction seemed relatively muted. As we write this, there were 650 comments on Caixin’s Weibo page (a Twitter-like Chinese microblog)--compared to the 1,770 comments on the Times’ website.
A cynical reaction in China
On Caixin’s Weibo site, some of the comments condemned Apple’s corporate practices, but many also criticized the Chinese government for failing to protect its own citizens.
“Labor protection and social security is not only the responsibility of corporations. If the government had regulations and supervised the corporations, then they cannot be that irresponsible,” wrote one person.
A significant number also captured a sentiment that was cynical but perhaps very pragmatic of many Chinese:
“If they don’t work for Apple, those workers don’t have anywhere to shed their sweat and blood.”
“Why not kick Apple out? Tens of thousands of people will lose their jobs.“
“They are criticizing Apple only, because Apple is a huge target. The migrant workers hired by state-owned enterprises here can hardly be as good as Apple’s. Take care of your own workers before you pay attention to other people’s suppliers.”
All of which was bolstered by something this week that explains--in part--why the response in China might not be as outraged as those in the West might expect.
Workers want those jobs
On Monday, tens of thousands of people lined up outside a job agency to apply for an estimated 100,000 new jobs Foxconn is seeking to fill at its factory in Zhengzhou, the capital of central Henan province.
Foxconn wants to double its current workforce of 130,000 at the Zhengzhou plant, which it opened last year. The facility already churns out 200,000 iPhones a day and is part of Foxconn’s grand plan to make Zhengzhou the world’s largest smartphone manufacturing base.
The basic starting salary advertised--according to a report posted on M.I.C. Gadget, a blogsite about tech and other related matters in China—is 1,650 yuan a month ($261), which includes dorm housing and food.
The pay is lower than comparable salaries Foxconn pays workers at its Shenzhen factory in southern China. But that may be a sacrifice Henan workers are willing to make initially.
With a population in excess of 100 million, Henan is China’s most populous province. A fifth of them are migrant workers who travel widely to find jobs in the country’s more prosperous regions like the south or coast.
With additional reporting from Bo Gu.
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Don't judge what goes on in China until you walk a mile in their shoes. China has about 3 times the number of people the US does. These people need food and shelter as much as anyone else. These jobs may not pay well by Western standards, but these folks would be starving on their farms or in the streets if these jobs were not available. As for the suicides - I bet 20 out of 1.2M is proportionately less than the suicide rate in any city in the US with over 1M people. I've been to Foxconn in ShenZhen, and they are able to produce goods and provide basic essentials for their employees on a scale you could not imagine. The only way the lives of the Chinese will improve, will be continued work like this, and incremental gains in wage and living conditions as wealth is slowly built throughout the country. That's the standard cycle in an industrial revolution. The alternative is massive instability, starvation on a colossal level, and a socio-economic backslide. We should be happy these people are employed.
Amen ...
I live here in Dallas and you are much too articulate to be Witten. Aside from that, I agree with your comment wholeheartedly.
Thin the heard!!
too many people devalues labor and the value of human life. they did it to themselves. you can't keep having babies!
Wow really? Apparently you know nothing of the culture. Chinese are only ALLOWED to have 1 child unless the parents are both only children. Then they can have 2....so how would you like to be told what you can or cannot do with regard to procreation? Speak, but only after you know the facts.
Well, actually, from a Chinese point of view, the one-child policy is not too bad at all. China is so crowded, without proper population control, it will be completely out of control. There will be so many social issues when the population is too big and without any control: employment, crimes, education opportunities, traffic, living conditions, crowd control, health care...food supply, energy consumption...etc... You really don't understand it unless you've lived there for a while. I am the only kid in my family, my parents would not have a second child even if they were allowed to. It was reasonable choice, especially in the cities. You can't even afford to send your kids to good schools, buy them toys and clothes, take them to amusement parks, etc...if you have more than one child, unless you are rich or something.
Fact: the one-child policy was strictly enforced in urban areas during 1970-1990s. In the countryside, if you first born child is a boy, technically you can't have another child. If a girl, then you will be given another shot to try to have a boy. But many pesants ignored the law, I personally know some friends from the countryside who have 2 or 3 siblings.
Personally, I feel lucky that I am the only child in my family. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here studying and living in the US, my parents can't afford to send more than 1 kid to the US.
Human rights...things like that, sound beautiful, but in China, when faced with survival, they are just superficial. We Chinese don't really have the luxury to care about those things.
Tell that to all the men who aren't going to be able to find wives in the future because the policy resulted in a lopsided population.
Again, well put. One size DOES NOT fit all. Your culture and country are NOT anything like ours. Even in this country, $100K/year would be rich in many areas but barely middle class in NY, San Francisco, etc. Situations and cultures are different state to state and urban to suburban to rural, to bs so naive to believe that you should live by the same rules as us, is ridiculous.
Is it just me, or are all the folks writing stuff against apple blatantly ignoring the FACT that most of the parts in there windows based computers come from the SAME factories and assembled under the SAME conditions? So maybe these same folks should consider badmouthing or boycotting or whatever the very computers they also write on? Wow this is an article with an obvious agenda against apple when actually ALL computer companies are guilty of using parts produced in the same way or worse. Just sayin......
The work "Apple" draws more clicks hence more revenue...
Steve Jobs voted for Obama. GE CEO Jeff Immelt is Obama's jobs czar and have been seen going to China quite a bit. EPA administrator Carol Browner is an admitted socialist.
You know, I find it very interesting that the same folks that are sooooooooo pissed off about jobs going oversees to places where we KNOW the workers are exploited, are the same ones that sided with that foolhardy Wisconsin Governor (whatever his name is) on breaking the unions. Folks fail to realize that what the Chinese experience over there is something we did not so very long ago. We created Unions (and strong ones), wobbled and fought long and hard for rights. Then...we assumed all was good and stopped supporting our workers....and now we are headed right back to those ways. We need to stand up and organize again....push for these jobs to remain in country...boycott non-American goods...be willing to walk away from these "goodies" that are produced oversees...quit being so damn spoiled. Im telling you...if we don't...it ain't gonna be pretty people.
Breaking the unions saves jobs. Unions bankrupted the steel, airline, auto, textile, and numerous other industries, forcing millions of jobs overseas.
Supposed progressives are sure eager to hearken back 50-100 years ago, it is they that are stuck in the past.
I say boycott all apple products, which I don't own any of. But you americans are so in love with your iphones and such a boycott would never work. So quit your complaining. If you're not prepared to do anything, say even less.
Then boycott Dell, Intel, HP, Canon, Lenovo, etc. as well. Grow up, they all do it.
What will happen when the worker one day wants the product he makes?
They do already, and they're buying. China made more cars last year than the US ... and they were almost all sold in China. China has nearly a billion cell-phone subscribers - three times our whole population. A couple of weeks ago, Chinese lining up to buy the new iPhones started a riot. Home ownership is in the 70% range. Incomes continue to rise in China, as does consumption.
Yes, people have no idea how rapidly capitalism has worked it's magic over there. They are growing 8-10%/yr but with that many people getting everyone out of poverty takes time. If they would just google "China traffic jamb" they might get a clue.
As mentioned earlier, their middle class is now larger than our entire population. They also graduate more PhD's then we graduate all degrees, and over there they can read and write when they finish high school.
I can't wait for the People of china to start rioting and shut down all the exports going out of their country! Where will all those IPhones come from?? All the worlds manufacturing is concentrated in China- one day the ships don't sail the worlds economy collapses!
Long live the Human Rights......and Made in China!
Lei Chen is one of the few who actually makes logical sense. China's low labor costs are the result of (a) a more-or-less free labor market in which supply and demand set labor rates, one with fewer built in labor protections than the US (but still, Chinese employers pay an array of employment taxes, roughly similar to our FICA, unemployment insurance, medical, etc. which add about 40% to the cost of labor.) (b) a possibly undervalued currency (however China's massive economic stimulus efforts and easy credit has led to inflation, which is putting downward pressure in the Yuan). China has a vast rural population -- say 600 million, about twice the total US population -- which is rapidly urbanizing. Hundreds of millions of young Chinese have migrated to the coastal areas seeking employment. Jobs are posted on the Internet on sites similar to Monster.com etc., employers interview candidates and offer jobs, which the candidates are free to accept or reject. Are the abuses? Of course. Some employers withhold a portion of wages, charge too much for housing, cheat on taxes, ... At least in the coastal area where I've worked (I recently oversaw a manufacturing operation in Shanghai and have lived in China for over 20 years), workers quit if they can find a better job and employers have been bidding up wages the past few years as the supply of workers from the inland rural regions is starting to dwindle ... partly as a result of Chinese businessmen who have invested in factories in the inland areas, as in this story.
The economic policies choices are not that hard to understand. If we want free trade, we, who live in a wealthy country with high wages, will need to compete with countries like China with cheap labor. We need to innovate -- continuously -- and compete in areas where we have a competitive advantage. Eventually China will get rich, wages will be too high to effectively compete in labor intensive industries (it's already happening), and the labor intensive industries will migrate to the Philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Africa. (Chinese businessmen are already setting up shop in these countries.)
The key to our competitiveness is education and an adequate supply of investment capital. It takes both to innovate and maintain our competitive edge.
By the way, it's not "slave labor," (although some convict labor reportedly made socks a few years ago). Its a tough labor market. The conditions in most of the Chinese factories I've been in -- and I've been in hundreds -- isn't all that bad. True, dormitory housing is crowded and very basic. Remember that people come to these companies to seek jobs voluntarily.
China jettisoned Marxism-Leninism and state planning thirty years ago and adopted a more-or-less capitalist free-market economy, with significant state ownership, a form of "State Capitalism" in key industries -- why do you think they've grown so fast? They've kept the Communist brand name, and run a one-party political system, which they've had since about 200 BC. Calling China "Communist", while perhaps technically accurate in the sense that that's what they call their ruling party, doesn't add useful meaning, since Chinese political ideology is nothing like the Communist ideologies that characterized the former Soviet Union and China during the cold war years. They're more Confucian than Communist.
Unless our trade policies, economic policies, and foreign policies are grounded in a factual understanding of ourselves and the rest of the world, we risk venting our understandable frustration at the wrong targets. Get out of denial, China isn't the enemy and neither is the free market. If there's an enemy, it's our failure as a nation to adequately educate our young people and the failure of financial markets in follow sound market principles as it extended home mortgages to people they shouldn't have, which led to the twin evils of an unsustainable housing bubble and massive defaults, which brought on the current recession ... but I digress.
There's an abundance of labor in China. This is no surprise. Half of China's population could disappear into sinkhole, and there would still be an oversupply of bodies.
We allow these things to go on by buying Apple's products (and most other electronics). If we want manufacturing jobs to return to the U.S., stop buying their crap. These businesses know full well what conditions exist in China, guess what, they don't give a s*#t. Whats more relevant is the fact that they don't give a s*#t about you either, as long as you buy their product. Stand up, made a change in what you do, or get used to the new USA, because this is how the 1% want it, and intend to keep it.
Boon ... Yes, these businesses do understand the social & economic conditions in China ... they've been doing business there for years. However, I suspect you don't. China is going through the same path of economic development -- with stunning success -- that virtually every other developing country has passed through. I've personally witnessed China's transformation from the early 1980s to 2010 from a Soviet-style planned economy of poverty to an essentially free-market economy with incomes up several thousand percent. The Chinese are freer, richer, better fed, better housed, and have more choices in virtually every aspect of their lives that any generation of Chinese in recorded history.
Companies from US and Europe have set up manufacturing there because the lower standard of living allows lower wages which keeps them competitive and consumer prices low. As China gets richer, labor intensive industries will move elsewhere, as they too migrate to higher-value added industries.
Yes it happened to Japan, they were the low cost high quality producers. but where are these company's going to go next? Africa is a festering lawless mess, the rest of the world labor costs are already higher than China's.
My point is that if people change their buying habits, we can change the environment these businesses operate in. If we wait for a communist regime to improve working conditions and wages of their people, we might as well wait for the law of gravity to reverse itself. The other problem is that quality of products made in China, leave much to be desired. When a product malfunctions or breaks, it's cheaper to replace it rather than fix it. When I was growing up I learned that you get what you pay for, and that 'made in the USA' was something that was desired around the world. The big three auto makers didn't get to where they are by outsourcing. Now they are almost irrelevant in our economy, except to robot manufacturers. Corporate greed understands only one thing, profit. The 1% cannot replace the revenue lost if we decide to make a stand. Otherwise we are lowering the standard of living in the US, while raising it in China. People just don't see it because their faces are plastered to their i-phones.
That is a lie. Conditions ARE improving in China, many of the really low wage jobs are moving to Viet Nam. India also has very low labor costs. As SH said, they only adopted capitalism a few decades ago, that is a major transition from what they were doing. Virtually all developing nations go through this.
Ultimately this will be good for the planet. It is people who have nothing that have nothing to lose. Poor uneducated Islamics are the "cannon fodder" for the Imams waging terrorism. They would have a much tougher time with some guy that had a house, car, TV, cell phone, family, and a job.
I challenge any of you to go out and find a cell phone made in the United States. Please let me know when you find it. At the same time, find me a flat screen TV manufactured in the US.
Zenith was the last. And even then, the components were made here, but assembled in Mexico. That was over 15 years ago.
so my opinion is that if you're bitching about the work conditions in China, yet own a cell phone or flat screen TV, then shut up because you're just as much a part of the problem as any of the companies.
Apple along with the rest of corporate america working in colusion with your Local GOp Politicians is where the blame should be targeted...
These companies will do anything to make an extra a buck, including Bribing Politicians to get Laws written and re-written to make all the corruption legal...
They have even managed to Bribe some of your Supreme Court Justices....Corporations have replaced People..
More pathetic liberal lies. Obama made GE's Inmelt his jobs czar. While on the job HE shipped an entire division over to China. Again, Biden bragged about a wind turbine deal he made with China.
Nice try.
All Apple has to do is to be more like HP and less like Walmart, in dealing with its supply chain. And they have no excuse either. Wallmart=low margin, Apple=high margin.
There is nothing new here.... think about it.. you need a job foxconn has opening for 100,00 workers if you are hunger you go get one of those jobs 261 a month isn't anything here but in china it does put food on the table but foxconn already does that and puts you in a dorm.. so you pay for a dorm and eats and send the rest home to save... does this sound like how farm workers ( illegal mexican workers) does it??? kind of close to home isn't it... but in china.. it is coming to the americans sooner then you think... look at the population growth... 2005 288,500,000 in 2010 314,400,000 about 30,000,000 more in only 5 years where are the jobs coming from? How about the food where will this come from??? this is 6 million people a year more just in the united states alone...
SO, let us see, a worker works one month for the equalivant of the cost of two iphones in the United States! I NOW understand why Apple is making SO much money!
Reading these sour grapes and whines, American are hopeless. There will never be a equal condition in the world, you are beaten and lose, and should take it gracefully and move to improve. There are always ways to up your game and beat back. Whining is not one of them.
This is what happens when you DON'T have regulations, when you DON'T have unions. Is this what the republicans want for the US?
Jon smith you have to bring politics into this right??? republicans want no regulations or unions... my god man wake up intill we come together as one nation in america we are lost.. please stop with your one blind sidedness.. oh never mind i just looked at your profile and posts i see you do the politic thing on everything you post... have a nice day Jon
Hi Larry,
Yes it is what they want for the U.S. I think the term used to describe this type of government Republicans are shooting for is called Fascism.P Plutocracy and Oligarchy are a couple of other descriptive terms as well.
John Smith is only speaking Truth. To deny the Truth and pretend it is not there is not only a mistake, it is what happened to the German people in the 1930's. You can pretend it's not happening but it will not make it go away.
More pathetic liberal lies. Fascism requires a strong central government. That makes progressives fascist. It is they that want to control what you eat, what you drink, what you drive, where you live, what you are taught, what information you have access to, etc. THAT is fascism. Unions are fascism. Conservatives, by definition, are anti fascist. They believe in LIMITED central government.
What the hell do you think Obama is doing? That is a fascist plutocracy. He ignores the courts and bypasses congress. He uses the justice dept has his own private storm troopers. He uses SEIU has his enforcement goons. The only voice he listens to is his own.
Okay if the Chinese want Steve Jobs I say let them have him.
Sweatshops keep iProfits up. Ridiculous
wow you say sweatshops keep iprofits up.. no people buying i-stuff keeps profit up...
It is not the manufacturing business's that caused our problem it is all of the stupid people here that did it to ourselves by buying all the products from china, WE all need to refuse and only buy american and it would change very quick, There's not a company over their that would not move back in a heart beat.
Roy Holt can i ask you where your computer parts are made in??? Please don't tell me america because foxxconn makes computer parts i build them...I'am laughing at the remark you made about all the stupid people that did it to ourselfs by buying the products from china... Roy have you tried to by made in america in the last 5 years????
It's up to china to police their own country. It's not up to american businesses to do this for them.
American businesses DO not want to the Chinese government to "police" those workers. They want to keep the status quo so that they continue to exploit the Chinese workers while making tons of profits.
headlines---American Airlines may cut up to 15,000 jobs.
American airline should start building their planes in China and hiring Chineese pilots.
then they will be profitable again. cheeper planes and cheeper pilot labor. the pilots can work in 24 hour shifts.
I'd fly chineese/ American air, wouldn't Apple owners.
Many parts of Airbus and Boeing planes are already being supplied by Chinese manufacturers( they are state-owned).
As for pilots...what you suggested may not come in the foreseaable future, because Chinese airlines have a shortage of pilots, they are hiring commerical pilots with high salaries from around the world...
There you go...all of those out of work middle aged guys with a high school education have a chance to immigrate to China and be a worker bee...better than unemployment eh fellas?
Don't laugh, many college grads, (accountants, teachers, etc.), went directly to China because there were no jobs for them here. If I recall they are paid less but the cost of living is also less.
Just because a person and his / her family can live off of 1.00 a month and live in a cardboard shack w/ no running water or toilet doesn't mean i want too.