Results tagged “china”

Apple announced yesterday that a nonprofit group it partly finances, the Fair Labor Association, would begin inspections at supplier factories in China, most notably Foxconn. This follows a string of horrific stories coming out about Foxconn in recent months, some detailing suicides by workers protesting draconian working conditions. Apple's moves are an important first step, one that other technology companies that use Chinese labor are sure to follow. What is confounding is how any tale of woe involving China's labor force is a surprise at this point.

China has little more than token labor laws, and unions are outlawed. There is, and has been, little recourse for the worker to demand better working conditions, shorter hours, better pay, or benefits. The decades-long fight for workers' rights that took place here in the United States and other western nations beginning in the late 1800s has never taken place in China. Little things that American workers expect as a condition of employment, like the 40-hour work week, weekends, living wages, health and retirement plans, a ban on child labor, and workplace safety, are of little concern to the powers that be in China.

And this extends beyond electronics manufacturing. As another example, conditions are so horrendous in Chinese coal mines that thousands of miners die yearly in mining accidents, far and above the worst death rate for coal miners in the world.

Chinese laborers face some of the harshest working conditions on the planet, but it's not because they're Chinese.

Once upon a time, it was a risk to life and limb for American workers to simply get out of bed and go to work. Mills and mines exploited labor in ways just as terrible as in China today, but American workers began to fight back against their employers. Changes did not take place overnight. It took decades, and thousands of deaths (both work-related and protest-related) for American workers to get the protections that we have. This led to the costs of American labor rising for American companies. Their solution, in turn, was to shift that labor to countries where the long fight for fair labor practices had yet to be fought, and labor was cheap.

The out of sight, out of mind attitude of American companies, including Apple, followed by their shock once overseas working conditions come to light, is wholly disingenuous. It costs money to be fair to your workers. Sending work to a place where labor is not costly is more than mere indication that workers are being exploited. Rather, it is a virtual guarantee.

From Electronista:

The iPhone 4S sold out in Hong Kong even faster than previously thought, a memo from Ticonderoga Securities' Brian White indicates. The analyst claims that both the city's Apple Store and all authorized resellers sold out within a space of three hours; Apple's local online store states that there is "no supply" of the phone left. Earlier accounts had just the Apple Store selling out by lunchtime.

China isn't just going to be a huge market for Apple, but for every big company.

People who have been saying the mobile battle between Android and iOS is going to be like desktop battle between the Mac and Windows — and that Apple is going to lose again — have it all wrong.

So many variables have changed since then, it's a completely different game.

Word.

Slate: The Highest Form of Flattery

When most people think about the effect of counterfeits on legitimate brands--and when brands themselves litigate against counterfeiters--they focus on the "business stealing" effect: Every fake Prada handbag represents a lost sale for Prada. But a dirty little secret is that Prada rip-offs can also function as free advertising for real Prada handbags--partly by signaling the brand's popularity, but, less obviously, by creating what MIT marketing professor Renee Richardson Gosline has described as a "gateway" product. For her doctoral thesis, Gosline immersed herself in the counterfeit "purse parties" of upper-middle-class moms. She found that her subjects formed attachments to their phony Vuittons and came to crave the real thing when, inevitably, they found the stitches falling apart on their cheap knockoffs. Within a couple of years, more than half of the women--many of whom had never fancied themselves consumers of $1,300 purses--abandoned their counterfeits for authentic items.