NPR did a story yesterday about the environmental pollution created by Apple product manufactures in China. One of their reporters visited a town that had been complaining of mass sickness caused by one of the plants. One the first day of his visit the town folk told him their stories. When he came back the next day things had changed. The Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs released a report. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/31/us-apple-china-idUSTRE77U4M620110831 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2011/11/concerns-grow-over-environmental-costs-of-apple-products/
imo I see this as a much larger issue with the entity at fault being china. they really could give 2 shits about their citizens. you can even feel the effect over here due to their quality control of things. my mom is scared of buying anything Chinese as far as food related products. she only buys Korean or Japanese ingredients for cooking now. that's pretty fucking sad.
These kinds of stories completely ignore the fact that technology companies like Apple tend to buy components from suppliers that sell to companies worldwide, not just Apple. That doesn't mean that Apple doesn't have responsibility for who it chooses to do business with, but the reality is that manufacturers in China have poor environmental and worker track records regardless of what giant electronics corporations they're doing business with. Remember the stories about Foxconn and worker conditions? The media had the tendency to focus on Apple's involvement with Foxconn, while ignoring the fact that Foxconn was basically one of the largest electronics manufacturing concerns on the planet and supplied companies like Acer, Amazon, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo etc.
I won’t disagree with that. Apple is a big company so they make an easy target. But they are also a target because they are one of a few companies that can be a force of change. There was some criticism of Jobs after he died because he never used his influence to make a difference. Apple is just another cog in the consumerism machine that constantly violates human right.
No, they're not. Apple is a tiny drop in the bucket when it comes to the overall market of consumer electronics. People just have a convenient double-standard when it comes to Apple. And it isn't really consumerism that is the root cause. You can sell consumer products that are environmentally sustainable and respect workers. It's the obsession with profit maximization, which drives companies to outsource jobs and exploit countries with cheap labor and lax oversight. They could still make a profit with higher paid workers in the U.S., but it just wouldn't be as high. Apple is guilty of that just like the rest of the world corporate community.
It’s not a double standard at all. If I told people that Company A was killing workers in China would those people care? Probably but they would have no idea who Company A is. Pretty much everyone is familiar with the Apple brand name. Google got negative publicity too when they chose to censor the Internet. A smaller company would have gone under the radar but that wouldn't have meant that people didn't care.
You just proved that it is. Microsoft? Amazon? Nintendo? Dell? HP? Nokia? Those aren't small companies and they're well known public brands that do business in China with the same suppliers as Apple. The idea that the component industry in China exists mainly to serve Apple and the rest are a bunch of small, unknown companies isn't even close to the truth.
The Chinese have no regard for human life. They simply don't care about quality or safety or the conditions for their workers. These are the same people who make lead toys, poisoned baby formula and pet food, cooking oil made of raw sewage, and cars that fold up like accordions. This is also the same country where no one stopped to help a little girl who had been run over by a truck.
...said the man who lives in a country where a woman pepper sprayed people just to get to an Xbox that she could from anywhere at anytime lol. To be sure though China seems like such a shit hole in general.