Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Companies lobby against legislation prohibiting slave labor" video.
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Yeah... sorry, but if people still don't know about this, let me just put it out there.
Read Foxconn's Wikipedia entry if you need more info, but basically.
There have been reports from workers in Foxconn factories, which is the main manufacturer for Apple, and almost all other big tech companies in the US, of: excruciating working hours, without intervals, and insane extra hours, usually everytime a new high selling product comes out.
This goes back to early days of iPhone mind you, with Steve Jobs himself trying to give out excuses or say it never happened.
Remember the multiple cases of workers commiting suicide? That was just a single chapter into this whole thing. What international press and tech press have written about this is just a tiny part of the whole.
Foxconn has been reported for and accused of, multiple times, horrible working conditions, violent treatment of workers, employing child labor down to 12yrs of age in badly disguised "internship programs" with chinese schools, insane overwork and work hours, plus a whole ton of other stuff.
The suicide string was just a consequence of a long term practice of work abuse that was closer to slave labor already. Workers in some factories reported being forced to work all day everyday with almost no pause for restroom and meal, and some of those factories were purposedly located in remote areas so that there was basically nothing for these workers to do but work, sleep few hours in their cramped horrible bunks, and then wake up and go directly back to work.
People started killing themselves both because of bleakness, desperation and the hellish conditions they were in, and because a work death compensation would likely pay their families more than they hoped to get in a year or more of those horrible working conditions.
Employing Uighur slave work wouldn't be even the worst that they already did, and Apple never cut ties with it.
And there is one major reason for that, which I've already explained a few times in other comments - there is NO alternative to Foxconn. Not for the sort of insane mass manufacturing needed to attend developed countries demands.
That's not even to mention the insane ammount of slave work and bloodshed in cobalt mines, which all goes into the production of batteries and electronics we currently all use.
So, to be clear, it's not only Apple on this - it's also all the other tech companies for which Foxconn manufactures products. This includes, and this is not an exhaustive list: Acer, Amazon, Apple, Blackberry, Cisco, Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Sega, Sony, Toshiba, Vizio.
Basically, all major companies that have large production of electronics products.
But really, if we expand it to cobalt mining and many other minerals needed for production of electronic components, it's just all companies, in all countries, which everyone is contributing to.
Production of complex commodities just helped making the process as opaque as possible.
And yes, fast fashion, cosmetics, and several other industries all work in similar ways.
There's no magic in cheap everything. It's just a result of out of sight out of mind exploitation.
And people complain about chinese companies copying stuff from corporations that have been exploiting them all these years? Heh. You do understand that the whole way China works today is the product of western capitalism, right? The environmental problems, the worker exploitation, the lack of regulations, the lack of welfare, the cheap labor, the human rights violations... it's all directly or indirectly related to China becoming a factory for the rest of the world, in the early industrial revolution model.
And don't think for a bit that it wasn't done on purpose. These big tech companies all knew and know what's happening there. As lots of us consumers also do. We just chose to do nothing about it.
And obviously, legislation also won't do anything about it. At most, it'll give opportunities for governments and whatnot to throw in some more ineffective lawsuits against big corporations, a way to compensate for all the tax evasion tactics these corporations have.
But it has nothing to do with Uighurs exploitation, worker exploitation, and human rights violations. It never has. I guess some politicians are dumb and ignorant enough not to know for how long this dynamic has been playing out, but I'm sure several of them know plenty well, and know nothing is gonna change there.
It's just playing to the crowd, empty threats, or find ways to take these corporations down a notch.
Because you know, if people really wanted for these things to stop, it's not indirect laws that are gonna change it, because quite frankly, it hasn't changed anything for decades now. It's sitting down with chinese government, through diplomatic channels, and agreeing on policies that would stop products being made in China by US private companies from going out of the country altogether, in the very least.
These random visits and whatever other measures Apple and other companies claim to do are all ineffective, they have always been, by design or not. And they know it full well. They won't allow 3rd party auditing, they block the factories from press, and it's all controled by them, so why th f*ck would an honest report ever come from it?
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