Tim Culpan posted an article on Bloomberg.com that may be of interest to anyone owning an iPad.
Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics, is installing anti-jump nets along dormitories at its production facility in Hebei Province, Xinhua’s International Herald Leader reported, citing its own journalist at the site.
Nets at the campus, in the city of Langfang, northern China, are similar to those already in place at Foxconn’s facilities in Shenzhen. Edmund Ding, spokesman for Foxconn flagship Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., didn’t answer calls to his mobile phone after normal office hours today.
Foxconn, which makes Apple Inc. iPads and Sony Corp. games machines, began putting up nets after at least 10 workers committed suicide this year.
Read the rest of the release here.
Jason Mack also has a report on the Daily Tech Blog here.
...with a picture from Gizmodo (see the larger picture on the blog article above).
It is sad to know that technology consumption may be contributing to this much unhappiness. Manufacturing, with its challenges, has become a distant enterprise to many Americans. Let's hope those who are seeking to rebuild the US job scene take these lessons into consideration.
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Comments: 22
Consumer awareness and pressure can make a difference. The ultimate threat is a boycott. I participated in a successful boycott. I should say "eventually" successful. The company agreed to our demands, but not right away. It took about 10 years.
But in the case of hot mobile electronic devices, it would be a mighty hard sell to tell consumers not to buy these products because of bad factory conditions or for any other reason. There are reports that mobile phone use may lead to cancer. I don't know whether this is in fact a serious concern for mobile users. But let's just suppose for a moment that it is. Would that deter consumers from using mobile phones? Or maybe a better question, how many years would it take for people to start taking the threat seriously?
Like with tobacco -- anti-smoking campaigns have been effective up to a point, over the course of decades rather than a few years. But kids and adults still like getting a boost from a drug whether nicotine or caffeine or anything else. They are willing to "buy" this boost even when they know it comes at the cost of illness and early death. Smokers know they are shortening their lives with every puff. They would rather live a shorter life with the thing they love (nicotine or whatever) than a long life without it.
So are electronic devices addictive? I don't know, that's not what I was trying to say. Just that people love them and will not easily give them up.
ANOTHER QUESTION:
SHOULD consumers give up (or decide not to buy) their iPhones, etc.?
Is the product itself what is wrong in this overall situation? Clearly, the work conditions at the factory are an issue which can be separated from the merits of, or problems with the product itself.
ANOTHER ISSUE is the price of an item vs. the "real cost" -- which means including all the effects, for example the effect of more people getting cancer, or for another example the short term and long term environmental impact of mining and manufacturing processes.
So we need to adjust prices to reflect the real cost of things, and use that money to build solutions.
To get back to the factory workers conditions, the obvious issue US consumers do not want to think about is quasi-slave labor and child labor being the reason they can delight in buying cheap goods.