To paraphrase
Otto von Bismarck, "iPads are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." It's an
ugly story. Over a hundred employees "injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis" because its use "meant workers could clean more screens each minute." Other workers killed or injured by explosions. All so that iPads can be built as cheaply as possible, so that Apple can maintain its
44.7% gross margins. Isn't that awful? Yes, of course -- but let's try to maintain a nuanced perspective here. This is hardly a new story, and it's hardly unique to the tech industry. Think of the exploitation of child labor to harvest
Egyptian cotton and
Cote d'Ivoire cocoa. Plus ?a change; a decade ago it was
Indonesian sweatshops and
Indian fireworks exciting outrage. Think of the
exploitation of Congolese workers to mine coltan, used in electronics everywhere. Show me a country with a large population of desperately poor people, and I'll show you horrific exploitation of impoverished workers. Please note, though, that the latter is an inevitable
symptom of the former; and again, let's please try to maintain a sense of perspective. It's awful that a dozen Chinese workers were killed and hundreds injured building iPads--but at the same time, coal mining kills
more than two thousand Chinese workers a year (down from almost 7000 ten years ago) and nobody's suddenly outraged about
them. We in the West don't really seem to care that Chinese employees work under awful conditions and die in appalling numbers -- unless they make shiny things that we use. We claim we don't want people to suffer, but in fact we just don't want our iProducts tainted by that suffering. Isn't that more than a little hypocritical?
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/LPewG8--NOU/
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