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Only 50% of iPhone Casings Made in India Meet Apple's Quality Standards
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Was thinking EXACTLY this… extrapolating to anything else: “airbags deploy 50% of the time”, “brakes fail 50% of the time”, “landing gear lowers completely 50% of the time”.
One commenter said that there are actually good hand picked examples, however, just a handful of very bad ones is enough to lose all trust (in any country, in any domain, in any activity).
Didn’t know about this part of the show… thought it was a happy fancy correct one. Now will watch it, I hate corruption (reason: coming from one of the worst countries ever)
I can't get to the paywalled FT article, but the MR summary is pretty clear that what you're describing isn't the case:
The bad parts don't make it to final assembly. Airbags, breaks and landing gear have upstream defects as well, but they're stopped at test and inspection before final assembly to avoid failures in the field as are the iPhone parts.
If you think Apple should reduce its profit margins to increase its market share, It might make for an interesting experiment. But in the history of capitalism, most outfits charge whatever the market will bear. If enough Apple customers feel as you do, Apple will have to adjust its offerings or lose market share. If Apple's hardware products continue to be objects of desire for millions around the world, maybe not so much.
Disclaimer: I own a small number of Apple shares. I do not demand that Apple make an "ever increasing profit," nor do I recognize any long-term trend that would indicate it does so by raising the prices of like products, instead amortizing R&D by charging more for the first few years of new technologies (e.g. Apple Silicon-powered Macs) and then powering the price in succeeding years to keep sales up. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Fair enough, true that.
And the cases themselves not making to the end user could range from completely non functioning (unlikely?) to just Apple ensuring very tight manufacturing tolerances (no idea what but like snapping a case from one to the next feels close to perfectly the same, temperature tests thresholds if any, etc).
So I'm arguing from a set of observed facts--any time there are large numbers of young people, statistically some portion will attempt suicide. You are I guess disputing this relationship because you have never attempted suicide. Who's the emotional one?
If you don't see that you have a characterized view of China, I don't think there is much I can do to help you. People travel long distances within China for the OPPORTUNITY to work in iPhone assembly. It's a desirable job there. Yes, those workers prefer to work long hours for additional pay and yes, they work quickly so they can keep the job, as your opportunity for the next contract depends on your productivity during the first one. Among the tens of thousands of workers in a contract cycle at any given time some will be dissatisfied and voice their dissatisfaction, but I don't see why any of this is fundamentally different from anywhere else and it's certainly not slavery.
Thanks for relaying her irrelevant anecdote.
Spoken like someone who has never done supply chain in China or has even been to China. I’m not going to claim labor standards aren’t lax there but to say that the government will kill workers if they don’t work themselves to death for a Taiwanese company is extremely laughable.
To prevent/reduce suicides.
I just walked across a bridge on my way to work with suicide nets, as I do every day here in the EU. Must be because all the pedestrians here are slaves.
Not day one. whatever. point stands, doesn't detract from the argument.
U.S. reinstates 352 product exclusions from China tariffs
The U.S. Trade Representative's office said on Wednesday it has reinstated 352 expired product exclusions from U.S. "Section 301" tariffs on Chinese imports, well short of the 549 exclusions that it was previously considering.www.reuters.com
You may want to reread what you just used as proving your argument. The article said nothing about Biden rescinding all of the Trump era tariffs. in fact, it’s saying quite the opposite. Per the article, Trump granted 2,200 exclusion to his tariffs, of which 549 were reinstated while he was still in office. Of those 549, 352 has been renewed by Biden. Since the article mentions nothing about tariffs themselves being rescinded, this means there are now more products from China being tariffed than previously.
Not so long ago any village would have had a working blacksmith who was among the highest paid and most respected occupants of the village. Is it bad that we don't anymore?
Every unit of labor that can be replaced by machines and shifted to more interesting/valuable work is a win--the world to strive for is one where everyone is a scientist, in some broad sense.
Just want to say that I enjoy reading your balanced and logical responses here.
You mean factory work for a very specific golden two decades after WW2. Before the productive capacity of all of the world but the US was destroyed, factory work was pretty grim.
Yeah it was pretty good to be a worker for a monopolist producer in an environment of incredibly high demand, but the means of getting there is something no one wants to repeat.
There are about half a million licensed plumbers in the US. If we assume the typical career is 30 years, that means we need 500,000 * (1/30) = 16.6K plumbers entering the profession each year to maintain the current population. The US graduates ~4 million college graduates each year. The issues are on different scales. We in fact need more educated people, educated at a higher level, to drive innovation. The biggest problem in our society is the slow growth of innovation, which leads to the biggest improvements in productivity. We should be aiming to graduate university students who design robots or other systems that reduce the need for plumbers to as close to zero as possible. I strongly agree with you that US universities are misplaced in treating their product as a workplace credential.
I'm not an expert on the plumping industry, but I'll point out that as in almost all skilled trades, improvements in technology (PVC piping, quick-join fasteners, etc.) and training (the plumbing layout in most modern homes is designed at-scale within corporations by college educated experts vs. by the high-school local guy in the 1940s) have made plumbing work both more routinized and in less demand than previously, just as how new cars require vastly less maintenance and hence working auto mechanics, than previous generations. This is offset to some degree by the number of bathrooms in new homes (bizarre American pattern IMO) and the increased complexity of plumbing projects in more numerous multi-family structures.
Slavery by definition means a worker is owned by someone else as property and is forced to work without pay or the choice of other jobs. While the labor conditions in these factories is not the best, the fact that you think it equates to slavery likely deeply offensive to people who have experienced actual modern day slavery, such as the Kafala system.
I have no idea who she is, but she sounds ridiculous, precious and narrow-minded. Did she not know anything about where she was going? I have been lucky enough to travel to half of the countries on earth, and I have loved my three trips to India. If you want to go to other countries, take the rough with the smooth... Robin Quivers sounds like she should stay at home. Anyway, as someone else said, Rome was not built in a day, and no doubt there were similar issues when production started in China.
Imagine her disgust at having to look at poverty. It’s how most people in the world live.
Agreed. I took a trip to Latin America and saw some banana plantations in a remote region.
Whilst the workers there weren’t slaves in the strictest sense, they were paid hardly anything, just enough to live.
Certainly not enough to improve their situation in any meaningful way.
I don't really care what the definition of slavery is, to be honest. It might need redefining for modern times, then. Because if you go into these factories, learn about how these people are pretty much owned by the Chinese regime, and you STILL think these people are not like slaves, then that's incredibly sad as well.
Let's not get lost in definitions, let's look at how these humans are being treated and let's agree that they're being exploited. That's good enough for me to call them slaves. If you can't do that, I don't want to have this discussion anymore.
Sorry, but I'm going to stick with definitions. That's how we make rational arguments and come to reasonable conclusions with consensus.
I've been to factories like this in China for weeks, months at a time. I've befriended managers and employees there. You haven't.
China specifically has seen the greatest increase in human wellbeing in human history since embracing state-led capitalism. They have an illegal immigration problem from bordering countries like Laos and Vietnam--people who would love to work in iPhone factories for the same wages you call slavery.
If you think all people on earth should have the same standard of living as middle class Americans, fine. I agree and that's a great starting goal, but you're talking about changing much more than phone supply chains to achieve that, and it certainly takes more than jingoistic criticism of specific countries and accusing all business owners of being exploitative.
We haven't withered. Manufacturing output as a share of GDP in the USA has stayed constant at ~12% since the 1950s. The change is the share of employment in manufacturing, which has declined from 30% to 10%. Thus, we are making more with less, which is exactly the goal. We want to be a country of intellectual workers, not manual laborers, and eventually we want to be a world of intellectual workers. The most valuable thing we have as a species is our intelligence and the larger the share of time we are using our minds vs our muscles, the faster we will eliminate worldwide poverty and ensure every human on earth lives "their best life".
In these discussions about fair pay and such, I think people need to keep in mind that that the cost of living can vary quite a bit from country to country and within countries. That's even true state to state in the U.S.
According to statistics and surveys, most people in the U.S. live pay check to pay check which means they are only being paid "just enough to live" too although obviously the standard of living in the U.S. is much higher than various other countries.
If not for Apple and some other companies, opportunities for workers in countries like China could be a lot worse. Apple has actually helped to elevate the standard of living there. That’s not to say Apple shouldn’t try to step in more and seek better working conditions at factories but overall they have helped more than hurt.
According to statistics and surveys, most people in the U.S. live pay check to pay check which means they are only being paid "just enough to live" too although obviously the standard of living in the U.S. is much higher than various other countries.
If not for Apple and some other companies, opportunities for workers in countries like China could be a lot worse. Apple has actually helped to elevate the standard of living there. That’s not to say Apple shouldn’t try to step in more and seek better working conditions at factories but overall they have helped more than hurt.
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You are correct in that the problem is not "Rihanna" specifically. But it's not that college is expensive. Pop culture is more influential than ever before. While it has always been around, people now make real money on TikTok, YouTube, etc. Every kid is the next "star". Looking to do the next stupid thing to get views. Interest in "how the world works" is at a low and interest in what {TikTok star} is doing now is at an all-time high.
College has become loaded down with unnecessary courses which would never succeed on their own, so in effect they are subsidized from the traditional core courses, increasing the $ per credit. You rarely hear about how expensive college has become. Sure we all heard about Biden's plan to cover student debt, but nothing on how it got there in the first place or what we need to do to stop it. That's like getting the mop out to clean the water on the floor but ignoring the running faucet and overflowing sink.
To succeed in manufacturing you don't need a college education, but you need to have an understand of how something as simple as a pencil is made, or at least the interest to want to know how it is made. Yes, you can like pop culture (I grew up on Godzilla, Star Wars, and punk rock) and be successful in math, science, industry, but it's getting harder and harder because of the "Kardashian's" of the world, of which everyone now carries with them in their pocket.
You learn from your mistakes. India had never been an hub for manufacturing until few years back. Assembling and manufacturing differs a lot. They need to bring a lot of changes in industrial education to prepare the workforce.