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Tim Cook Responds to Report on Working Conditions at Suppliers' Factories
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War with china? Really for what reason? Taiwan? We should remove our jobs and if china want war for that, it would be worth to stop them. Americans can also close the wallet and maybe war will still possible, again for that reason it would be worth if to protect what is ours.
When people say "Apple isn't doing anything," they mean that Apple hasn't doing all it can based on the resources it has. As stupid as I think it is, Apple has reached a point where when it comes to this kind of stuff, anything that Apple does short of announcing tomorrow that they're opening factories in the US is termed nothing more than a token effort.
"Embrace your hypocrisy."
Apple's response accounts to "nothing." What can apple do to solve this situation? Stop using Foxcon, build factories and start manufacturing in the US where human and labor rights are somewhat protected. But that'll dramatically cut production and profits. And what's apple if they can't make 50% or 60% profit on an iPad?
Tim Cook can save his insincere outrage. And apple users who are so upset about such abuses - well - stop using apple. and Dell, and HP, and Nike, etc, etc, etc - basically every other major brand you use when it comes to "everything."
Stop defending apple, and yourself as a buyer. The world is what the world is. These people are working in "prisons" surrounded by nets to catch them from "escaping." Why not care about the illegal mexican picking your apples for $3/hour? Maybe we can do something about that.
Apple's response accounts to "nothing." What can apple do to solve this situation? Stop using Foxcon, build factories and start manufacturing in the US where human and labor rights are somewhat protected. But that'll dramatically cut production and profits. And what's apple if they can't make 50% or 60% profit on an iPad?
Tim Cook can save his insincere outrage. And apple users who are so upset about such abuses - well - stop using apple. and Dell, and HP, and Nike, etc, etc, etc - basically every other major brand you use when it comes to "everything."
Stop defending apple, and yourself as a buyer. The world is what the world is. These people are working in "prisons" surrounded by nets to catch them from "escaping." Why not care about the illegal mexican picking your apples for $3/hour? Maybe we can do something about that.
Tim Cook is an idiot.
He should keep his mouth shut. It's slave labor and he knows it.
All the "We are looking into it" BS ain't going to fly in this situation.
Everyone knows what is going on and we like our toys more then we care about the working conditions of slaves we have never met.
The only thing he is doing is shooting himself in the foot.
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I imagine this is what he looks like when he claims disgust in the accusations
He should keep his mouth shut. It's slave labor and he knows it.
All the "We are looking into it" BS ain't going to fly in this situation.
Everyone knows what is going on and we like our toys more then we care about the working conditions of slaves we have never met.
The only thing he is doing is shooting himself in the foot.
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I imagine this is what he looks like when he claims disgust in the accusations
I always find it fascinating how people take it as evidence of evildoing and admitting guilt when someone acts in a way that does actually help.
Fact is that some people killed themselves by jumping off roofs. Fact is that the number was actually smalled, compared to the number of people working there. Fact is that Fact 1 comes up again and again totally exagerrated, while Fact 2 is conveniently ignored. Fact is also that employers should take action when there are problems, and Apple and Foxconn _did_ take action.
Now Jesse, if you stood on top of a roof ready to jump, and you see they put up a net, would you (a) jump into the net and feel like a prick, (b) try to run very very fast and jump over the net, or (c) climb down, find the person who put up the net and try to punch them very hard? The intended effect of the net is that choose (c), which then saved your life. You can only see that putting up these nets is very annoying. Yes, that is _exactly_ the intent. Foxconn and Apple didn't do this to please you. They did it to save lives.
I followed the Microsoft link. It basically says nothing. It doesn't say anything about the result of audits, it doesn't say anything about working conditions, it doesn't say anything about what Microsoft does. They are very proud that somehow the risk of "corruption" is quite low at the suppliers they are using. But corruption has very little to do with working conditions. Apple on the other hand has a very detailed report that says where they are auditing, what they are auditing, what problems were found, what Apple is doing about it, and how they have been doing more and more every year. Maybe if Microsoft has a similar report instead of half a page of PR how good they are, you can find it and I'd sure be interested in reading it, but what you posted is not it.
Now I have no reason to believe that Microsoft would be guilty of any wrongdoing, but fact is that there was a headline of "340 workers at Apple plant threaten suicide" when the workers' complaint was that they were losing or were in danger of losing their job building products for Microsoft.
By the way: According to Microsoft, "Vendors are expected to self-monitor and demonstrate their compliance with this Code of Conduct". I would laugh if it wasn't so sad.
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So you stopped buying Apple products, right?
You know there is a difference between slavery and crappy jobs in a poor country?
I LIVE IN ZAMBIA! And it does seem capable of building it! The corrupt president left, the roads are mostly good, and the industrial estates do have good roads. And I don't see anyone collect tithes, while there is a 16% VAT. Also, the government is knocking off three zeros. People here are also very strong, and they always eat nshima and dried sardines, gravy, or with other things. It is very cheap. They can provide jobs. Apple products will be cheaper here and they can really present them. There is a mostly empty airport with a 2.5-3KM runway, that handles 747s. Pellets can be transported to Durban or other nearby places for shipping. This can work. I am confident
True, but if Apple stopped making hardware in China (while Dell and others continue), the consumers would complain about expensive hardware. I highly doubt this letter means anything.
it's official steve said amercian workers cannot cut it
well, even the great roman empire collapse, not to say USA. I being to asia for work and once came to amercia and witness first hand the safety culture and work culture, not competitive with costs and flexibility. Delays, strange safety tool, which no one use in the world except in usa, and it cost 10k each, hundreds in amercia, where everyone else in the world use the hand for free.
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How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work
By CHARLES DUHIGG and KEITH BRADSHER
When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.
But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.
Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.
However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.
Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.
“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.
“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.
But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.
“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”
Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.
To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.
Apple was provided with extensive summaries of The New York Times’s reporting for this article, but the company, which has a reputation for secrecy, declined to comment.
This article is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors — many of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs — as well as economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple’s suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.
Privately, Apple executives say the world is now such a changed place that it is a mistake to measure a company’s contribution simply by tallying its employees — though they note that Apple employs more workers in the United States than ever before.
They say Apple’s success has benefited the economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products. And, ultimately, they say curing unemployment is not their job.
“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
‘I Want a Glass Screen’
In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.
People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”
After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.
For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?
The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States. Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad.
Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.
In its early days, Apple usually didn’t look beyond its own backyard for manufacturing solutions. A few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, for instance, Mr. Jobs bragged that it was “a machine that is made in America.” In 1990, while Mr. Jobs was running NeXT, which was eventually bought by Apple, the executive told a reporter that “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.” As late as 2002, top Apple executives occasionally drove two hours northeast of their headquarters to visit the company’s iMac plant in Elk Grove, Calif.
But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.
In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.
http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/e...e-products-made-us-instead-china-3586310.html
well, even the great roman empire collapse, not to say USA. I being to asia for work and once came to amercia and witness first hand the safety culture and work culture, not competitive with costs and flexibility. Delays, strange safety tool, which no one use in the world except in usa, and it cost 10k each, hundreds in amercia, where everyone else in the world use the hand for free.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work
By CHARLES DUHIGG and KEITH BRADSHER
When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.
But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.
Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.
However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.
Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.
“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.
“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.
But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.
“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”
Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.
To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.
Apple was provided with extensive summaries of The New York Times’s reporting for this article, but the company, which has a reputation for secrecy, declined to comment.
This article is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors — many of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs — as well as economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple’s suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.
Privately, Apple executives say the world is now such a changed place that it is a mistake to measure a company’s contribution simply by tallying its employees — though they note that Apple employs more workers in the United States than ever before.
They say Apple’s success has benefited the economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products. And, ultimately, they say curing unemployment is not their job.
“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
‘I Want a Glass Screen’
In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.
People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”
After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.
For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?
The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States. Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad.
Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.
In its early days, Apple usually didn’t look beyond its own backyard for manufacturing solutions. A few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, for instance, Mr. Jobs bragged that it was “a machine that is made in America.” In 1990, while Mr. Jobs was running NeXT, which was eventually bought by Apple, the executive told a reporter that “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.” As late as 2002, top Apple executives occasionally drove two hours northeast of their headquarters to visit the company’s iMac plant in Elk Grove, Calif.
But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.
In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.
http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/e...e-products-made-us-instead-china-3586310.html
Hell no !
I'm saying I don't care.
All this talk is pointless. We will all still buy the stuff and nobody really cares.
And to call it a "crappy job" proves how delusional you are. Go ahead, tell yourself whatever you think you need to hear.
A personally don't give a crap about the working conditions in a country that has crippled the US economy. This is part of the deal for them. Screw um.
China is eating our lunch....
All of China is just a sweat shop.......unless your in control of the slaves. Don't think for a minute there are better places......not in China.
Interesting comment from Apple: We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries, We dont have an obligation to solve Americas problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.
Some day not that long from now the products they use in China might just say Made in America by hard working Americans for minimum wages what goes around comes around.
Just my take...........
All of China is just a sweat shop.......unless your in control of the slaves. Don't think for a minute there are better places......not in China.
Interesting comment from Apple: We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries, We dont have an obligation to solve Americas problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.
Some day not that long from now the products they use in China might just say Made in America by hard working Americans for minimum wages what goes around comes around.
Just my take...........
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You would have to have a manufacturing coalition here to keep cost down and a good DC lobby.
Apple's home town daily - "Tarnished Apple"
The front page headline and picture on today's Mercury News business section was:
One of the stories was Confronted by the ugliness of tech manufacturing with stories focusing on Apple, what's a consumer to do?.
The damage control seems not to be working very well.
The front page headline and picture on today's Mercury News business section was:
Tarnished Apple
One of the stories was Confronted by the ugliness of tech manufacturing with stories focusing on Apple, what's a consumer to do?.
The damage control seems not to be working very well.
I actually dislike that Apple gets all of the focus here. The focus needs to be on the tech industry as a whole. Yeah prices "could" go up, but these companies won't price themselves out of the market.
Apple has been incredibly lucky in recent years. They've gone quite some time without the slightest bump in the road. The darling of the media, with legions of followers ready to buy, its been easy street.
Now in the face of growing attention to this debacle at Foxconn, Apples preference to hide in denial is not so easy to pull off. Damage control is not their forte.
Tim Cook is but the unfortunate recipient, having inherited this problem. Groomed by Jobs, suffice to say Cook can't hide in Steves reality distortion field. It's the mans worst nightmare. Just months into his stint at the top, what a dreadful position to be in.
Now in the face of growing attention to this debacle at Foxconn, Apples preference to hide in denial is not so easy to pull off. Damage control is not their forte.
Tim Cook is but the unfortunate recipient, having inherited this problem. Groomed by Jobs, suffice to say Cook can't hide in Steves reality distortion field. It's the mans worst nightmare. Just months into his stint at the top, what a dreadful position to be in.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timwors...pouting-nonsense-about-chinese-manufacturing/
please think long and hard before you get on your soapbox and cry about apple's working conditions.
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Just because Apples not the only one using Foxconn doesn't mitigate the fact that they are the biggest contributor to the problem.
With a horde of cash stashed offshore, they are in a better position than any other company to do something about it.
Always ready to brag about their brilliant superiority, it's time they put their money where their mouth is.
With a horde of cash stashed offshore, they are in a better position than any other company to do something about it.
Always ready to brag about their brilliant superiority, it's time they put their money where their mouth is.
Wasn't Tim Cook the one who convinced Steve to send the manufacturing there? Other oems sent everything to China long before that.
When did Apple brag about their brilliant superiority? Is saying that they had a good quarter bragging?
You can't create a massive workforce that simply doesn't exist in the US.
To get everyone Apple gear and even come close to meeting demand, all the great Apple devices we love to preach from *have to* be made in China. There's no way around this.
All CEO's Have Ugly Faces!!
That includes Tim. You ever noticed how all politicians and CEO's and very rich people are very ugly physically?
I guess you can't have it all huh?
Tim cares about as much as Steve did in this matter,, NONE. They just know
what words to use to make us say " OH, Well he is nice" BS.
That includes Tim. You ever noticed how all politicians and CEO's and very rich people are very ugly physically?
I guess you can't have it all huh?
Tim cares about as much as Steve did in this matter,, NONE. They just know
what words to use to make us say " OH, Well he is nice" BS.