before we take a break i do want to follow up on a story we've been talking
about since really the death of steve jobs even before on the last show we
talked about
suicides and aluminum dust explosions and labor problems at foxconn one of
apple's main manufacturers and louis in what seemed to be a very callous out of
control uh... vindictive ran said that he doesn't care about the chinese people
and that he will continue to buy apple products no matter what is that of rough
summary as a very uh... it's a
the piss poor summary ok uh...
in in any event it turns out that uh... upon doing more research
there is some nonsense circulating about
outpour
and foxconn in chinese manufacturing and i got and email saying
uh... from an audience member saying they heard me grilling lewis about
being keep feeling guilty about buying a foxconn product and then it turns out
that foxconn has all lower suicide rate
than many other chinese companies and that even
lower than the chinese national average employed or not
which is definitely a mitigating statistic i have to admit rival when
you've got
you know it's a watchdog groups com
who are they looking after looking at the huge companies they're looking at
apple they're going to go after where they can and i mean it's it's kind of
like uh... snowball effect you know once these suicides start happening
this cos like the apple
it just keeps growing and will it will be before you know they are well i think
about how many
electronics how much electronics are actually manufactured in in china yeah
it's staggering and foxconn is such a tiny tiny percentage of that'll here's
the other thing the suicide rate box connors also lower
then the average united states company
suicide rate according to new reports that have looked at and the accident
rate
turns out to also be lower than many other chinese and american companies
uh... so
you know i i think that may be what what is happening here i'm not saying we
shouldn't care about what's happening there could be some some statistics
askew in here that
i'd from the evidence i've seen and i know i will get emails now counter
balancing in pushing to the other direction it seems i may have been a
little bit of line in my criticism of apples sourcing and
uh... foxconn in chinese manufacturing which by the way lewis now is glad
because he was right about something but you look for opportunities all the time
to criticize china for their practices and this actually doesn't seem to be one
of the times you can do that
uh... does that make you upset
now and i'm sure there are plenty of things we can find here that we can
still criticize china about
but um...
in particular with foxconn i guess things aren't as bad as as we might have
thought the other question is the one of wage right and the question
whether seventeen dollars a day is a low-wage or not
is really not be most relevant question if we have to look at is that low
relative to what right and first start
people are are making about six thousand dollars a year working the six day weeks
at a company like foxconn
it is certainly not a great riches by our standards but in china it is
considered of appropriate average
wage i mean it's roundabout that the per capita g_d_p_
for the whole country it's not
higher than average wage but it really doesn't seem to be lower and so again
when we look at that is the problems that one
company or factory or is it more of a company of a countrywide problem and we
could say well apple and companies like apple continue to put downward pressure
on a lot of these companies to keeping the g_d_p_ that low uh... it's a it's
complicated we can't really say uh...
but which way is a trickle
right but uh... i mean going back a little bit of the suicides
one of the major things that i don't think we've ever talked about uh... with
regard to the suicides is that
the vast majority of these people are migrant workers and migrant workers are
almost everywhere in china and they travel hundreds of miles to go
or more maybe thousands to go work in places like this because it's the only
place they can
their way from their families their way from their home or away from everything
incredibly long periods of time for and now has got to add to some of the
depression the suicides i don't think it's already just to work conditions at
fox com no no question about it and then that brings us back to the country is it
is a problem
what what to the contrary doing that make it so people don't have to travel
hundreds of miles
to be away from their families for months in order to even make an average
which right
uh... and then let's also be clear that we just have been growing in china
pretty strongly recently i mean since the late nineties they've been growing
at about fourteen percent per year after inflation is accounted for
and it's even been accelerating last couple of years
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break
we have to talk about what's going on with planned parenthood
and the susan g common foundations favorable and sickening
and we'll talk about that next
david natasha
heidi detachment dot com