Do you care about the condition of the employees who make your high end gadgets?

[DesiPower]

More fallout, now South Korea joins the discussion, I guess they are pissed not being able to compete with cheap chinese labor even for reputed big companies how have a substantial market in their country...
Samsung and Apple are at war, no wonder SK is raising it voice...

linky...

According to the Korea Daily, citing sources, factory workers in China who are producing iPads collectively earn about $8 per unit among them, or about 1.6 percent of the cheapest iPad's selling price.

Korean factory workers, on the other hand, share about $34 per unit among them, giving them 6.8 percent of the sales price, according to the report.

 

[alent1234]

Tim Cook gave a speech yesterday that Apple is doing more to improve working conditions than anyone else.

too bad for almost every android phone maker it means apple can force costs up a little and still make a lot of money while everyone except samsung will probably be driven out of the market

 

[0roo0roo]

More fallout, now South Korea joins the discussion, I guess they are pissed not being able to compete with cheap chinese labor even for reputed big companies how have a substantial market in their country...
Samsung and Apple are at war, no wonder SK is raising it voice...

linky...

Boohoo.

Koreans don't even hire american engineers like apple does... lol

Maybe someday chinese workers will bitch about some other country with cheaper labor than themselves.

 

[LumbergTech]

or

Pick 1.

the people in the field look healthier just by their posture

 

[halik]

or

Pick 1.

/thread

China's population has seen a phenomenal increase in both living standard and disposable income over the last 20 years. See page 8
http://www.scribd.com/doc/35832909/CreditSuisse-Expert-Insights-20100806

 

[0roo0roo]

/thread

China's population has seen a phenomenal increase in both living standard and disposable income over the last 20 years. See page 8
http://www.scribd.com/doc/35832909/CreditSuisse-Expert-Insights-20100806

yep

http://www.forbes.com/sites/raykwon...anonymous-spent-26-billion-last-year-for-fun/
"China's Rich and Mostly Anonymous Spent $26 Billion Last Year -- For Fun"

china doesn't need charity.

 

[BoomerD]

Not only do I not care, I prefer that my high tech gadgets be washed in the blood of the peons who make them.
I demand some real human sacrifice in the name of high tech.

Pfft...it's China. Perhaps not the last country on Earth that I might care about, but certainly WAY down the list...

 

[Colt45]

I try and buy things from the first world. Part of it is quality, other part is that my job isn't very far removed from manufacturing, and i'd like to return the favour - something like that.

Suppose a third part is knowing that things made in the first world are a lot less likely to leach heavy metals, or be grown somewhere polluted as shit, or adulterated with melamine and whatnot.. I guess I'm saying that regulation is worth something to me. Both to protect the workers, and the consumers. I think there needs to be far more inspections on imports.


Of course none of that really applies in the electronics situation, there's basically no choice. (My phone is made in Finland, though. I suppose chinese parts.)

 

[bfdd]

I love people who work and do things. I do not want to pay a salesman a 10000% markup over what they paid the person to put something together. I refuse to pay retail for anything made in China, so I don't own very many gadgets.

 

[Ns1]

lol, American Life retracting entire piece. Not journalism, but theater.

Rob Schmitz: Cathy says you did not talk to workers who were poisoned with hexane.

Mike Daisey: That’s correct.

RS: So you lied about that? That wasn’t what you saw?

MD: I wouldn’t express it that way.

RS: How would you express it?

MD: I would say that I wanted to tell a story that captured the totality of my trip.

Ira Glass: Did you meet workers like that? Or did you just read about the issue?

MD: I met workers in, um, Hong Kong, going to Apple protests who had not been poisoned by hexane but had known people who had been, and it was a constant conversation among those workers.

IG: So you didn’t meet an actual worker who’d been poisoned by hexane.

MD: That’s correct.

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic *- not a theatrical *- enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations.

NOTE: This American Life has retracted this story because we learned that many of Mike Daisey's experiences in China were fabricated. We have removed the audio from our site, and have left this transcript up only for reference. We produced an entire new episode about the retraction, featuring Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz, who interviewed Mike’s translator Cathy and discovered discrepancies between her account and Mike’s, and New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, who has reported extensively on Apple. Ira also re-interviewed Mike Daisey to learn why he misled us.

 

[0roo0roo]

oh man....

and another fun fact
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/china-fact-of-the-day-6.html
"The richest 70 members of China’s legislature added more to their wealth last year than the combined net worth of all 535 members of the U.S. Congress, the president and his Cabinet, and the nine Supreme Court justices.The net worth of the 70 richest delegates in China’s National People’s Congress, which opens its annual session on March 5, rose to 565.8 billion yuan ($89.8 billion) in 2011, a gain of $11.5 billion from 2010, according to figures from the Hurun Report, which tracks the country’s wealthy. That compares to the $7.5 billion net worth of all 660 top officials in the three branches of the U.S. government.

The wealth gap between legislatures holds with statistically comparable samples. The richest 2 percent of the NPC — 60 people — had an average wealth of $1.44 billion per person. The richest 2 percent of Congress — 11 members — had an average wealth of $323 million.

The wealthiest member of the U.S. Congress is Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who had a maximum wealth of $700.9 million in 2010, according to the center. If he were in China’s NPC, he would be ranked 40th. Per capita income in China is about one-sixth the U.S. level when adjusted for differences in purchasing power."

 

[SaDiZTiKStyLeZ]

Just think of them as not human. Robots even. All those Asians are created in science lab test tube pods anyway. Think X-Files type shit yo.