Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Apple slaves revolt, destroy factory over $7/month pay" video.

  1. Just adding up to Louis' argument... and going a bit further, I just don't know when to shut my mouth I guess. I think it's fair to say you shouldn't calculate a fair wage based on your own currency or living standards... mainly because of currency exchange rates. Fair needs to be seen in comparison to similar sectors inside the society it's situated in. But there is a more or less reasonable way to do it, and that's looking up what the official or average minimum wage is in the country. For developing countries, the minimum wage is usually a little bit bellow of the ammount someone needs to pay the bills and feed themselves through a period of time. I mean, it's supposed to be the minimum ammount someone needs to live with basic human rights attended, but that's usually not true in developing countries.... it goes more towards the minimum ammount negotiated between government, unions and businesses - a compromisse. It's the case in Brazil, it's likely the case in India too. You don't make ends meet with just minimum wage in Brazil, but it's a baseline start I guess.... meaning less than it is just obviously criminal. So, you wanna know how unfair the wage is in this case. Some sources say India doesn't have an official minimum wage because it varies a lot depending on sector, but it should be somewhere between "160 rupees ($2.40) per day in Bihar to 423 rupees ($6.35) per day in Delhi". http://www.minimum-wage.org/international/india https://www.india-briefing.com/news/guide-minimum-wage-india-2021-19406.html/ Wanna go deeper? Correct me if I'm wrong Indian friends, but afaik... Narasapura, where the factory is located, is a big famous industrial complex in India where the minimum wage is actually pretty high, because cost of living also is. It's located in Karnataka, for which I found this chart: https://www.simpliance.in/minimum-wages/karnataka So, looking at the article and values this means workers were promised a wage that already doesn't sound super great, which was then subsequently slashed several times... for engineers going bellow the absolute minimum wage for unskilled workers, and it seems some floor workers got a single day wage or less for an entire month. In the middle of a pandemic in one of the countries worst hit by it. Was it an overreaction? I'm just gonna go ahead and say that it obviously wasn't. Lucky they didn't straight out lynch people there. And look, I even understand a bit the whole thing on saying that if it wasn't for these factories, all those people there might not have a job.... kind speculative and mostly bullshit, but still, it's a very common mindset for foreigners looking at the situation without much context. We've heard these types of arguments for factories in China too, particularly when people were killing themselves on the factory floor so desperate the conditions were. But you gotta ask yourself if that's really true or just a biased perception based on nationalistic feelings and fanboyism, potentially with a good ammount of racism and classicism thrown into the mix. Because one thing is going into those countries, promissing basic wages for basic work, not raising the standards of living for anyone, and doing just that. Pretty shitty of a thing to do for billionaire and trillionaire corporations if you ask me, but at least it's adding jobs to the pool I guess. But what is really happening there is that Apple is entering these countries explicitly to exploit workers using international name and clout for the worst labor practices ever, and coming out scot free from it because they relegated all responsibilities to local administrators and 3rd parties. Oh, we didn't know these things happened, we will monitor our partners better from now on. BULLSHIT. This has been happening for decades. Nothing ever changes because it's part of how these companies get rich. This will never be ok no matter how many jobs you are supposedly opening up in a region, because you are not opening up jobs, you are willingly supporting slave labor and worker exploitation there. You are lowering the bar. You are creating a culture of exploitation and poverty. You are holding the country down. You are perpetuating the problem. The people who rightfully destroyed the place there would likely get better opportunities locally or by themselves. You used your name and their goodwill to destroy their lives. This is modern colonization. And so, hitching a hike on this to make people understand China, some other poor asian countries, and India better: Do understand that China went through repated multiple situations like this through several decades on the hands of big tech companies. The endless list of big tech companies that are costumers for Foxconn, they all made their millions, billions and trillions by exploiting chinese workers, exploiting vietnamese workers, exploiting indonesian workers, exploiting phillipines workers, exploiting brazilian workers, exploiting african workers, exploiting workers of all countries where Foxconn has a presence. So understand that when american, european, and other developed nation's people and politicians start complaining about technology stealing, copyright infringement, copying american products, etc etc etc - it's as f*cked up as you can imagine, in context. Do people realize how much these american and european countries exploited China and other developing or poor nations, to now complain that these nations are "stealing" tech by using what they've learned to prop themselves up and cut off ties with their exploiters? Several if not all of the companies that developed most modern technologies people enjoy cheaply in developed nations were done at the cost of blood and slave labor in the countries that are manufacturing the actual stuff. That they managed to overcome the situation, learn how to it by themselves, and then started getting better at the trade than their own abusers is just poetic justice, and sort of a miracle. I've said this in the past and I'll say it again. These decades of abuse are coming byte back developed countries responsible for it one way or another. And when it happens, people will cry foul because they are missing the bigger picture. I'm saying all this because you better be aware of the reality of things. People think the way these countries work, oppressive regimes, human rights violations, surveillance state, lax regulations, zero welfare... lots of people think it has nothing to do with them. But actually, it has all to do with us. These are systems propped up to support late stage capitalism and insane consumism of developed nations at the cost of other nations. It might not have been a concerted effort, done directly by tech companies themselves, but the result is the same, and responsibilities will be assumed. And the more you understand how these dynamics work, the more you see how pervasive it is, and how f*cked we are if global justice prevails. And obviously, it's not only the tech sector. Fast fashion, the eWaste global route, weapons trading... it's all similar or basically the same. Be aware of it so you at least understand the perspective of other countries when they come at us.
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