I don't know many people who got upset about this who actually stopped buying tech products. It'd be pretty hard to get by without buying anything that was made by Foxconn...

Teaspoon of cement anyone?

Its easy to get angry at apple and MS when you hear stories like this, but really it's on all of us. I don't know many people who got upset about this who actually stopped buying tech products. It'd be pretty hard to get by without buying anything that was made by Foxconn...

Yes i said my piece thinking to troll or be edgy. My view is my view. If you think its because i am racist

I get that they are low paid workers, but wouldn't it be more a successful approach to make these low paid workers like there jobs. I mean little incentives and rewards that would cost a multi-billion dollar company a negligible amount but make a whole lot of difference to these people.

In return for some pocket change, you get a happy and motivated workforce who want to work for you and no PR disasters that just seem to happen time and time again.

Last i checked i was allowed to voice that.

This is China we're talking about, not Google Headquarters in California.

Yes i said my piece thinking to troll or be edgy. My view is my view. If you think its because i am racist, well id say it to a white person. Just. My. 2. Cents.Last i checked i was allowed to voice that.

Some of them [the workers] are in groups. There's a group that's talking about hexane. N-hexane is an I-phone screen cleaner. It's great because it evaporates a little bit faster than alcohol does, which means you can run the production line even faster and try to keep up with the quotas. The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them can't even pick up a glass.

I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It's like carpel tunnel on a scale that we can scarcely imagine. You need to know that this is imminently avoidable. If these people were rotated, monthly, on their jobs this would not happen. But, that would require someone to care. That would require someone at Foxconn and the other suppliers to care. That would require someone at Apple and Dell and the other customers to care. Currently, no one in the ecosystem cares enough to even enforce that. And so, when you start working at 15 or 16, by the time you are 26, 27... your hands are ruined. And when they are truly ruined, once they will not do anything further, you know what we do with a defective part in a machine that makes machines. We throw it away...

I talk to an old man with leathery skin. His right hand is twisted up into a claw. It was crushed in a metal press at Foxcon. He says he didn't receive any medical attention and that it healed this way. And then, when he was too slow, they fired him.

Today he works at a woodworking plant. He says he likes it better. He says the people are nicer and the hours are more reasonable. He works about 70 hours a week. And I ask him what he did when he was at Foxconn. And he says he worked on the metal enclosures for the laptops and he worked on the Ipad. And when he says this, I reach into my satchel and I take out my Ipad. And when he sees it, he sees it his eyes widen because one of the ultimate ironies of globalism: at this point there are no iPads in China. Even though, every last one of them was made at factories in China, they have all been packaged up in perfectly miminalist Apple packaging and then shipped across the seas, but we can all enjoy them.

[sidenote: I question the veracity here. My simple google-fu shows that iPads can be bought in China. However, Mr. Daisey's statement may as well be true, because for the whole of mainland China, there are only 5 Apple stores. That would be like the U.S. having roughly 1 Apple store in the entire country.][/end derail]

He's never actually seen one on; this thing that took his hand. I turn it on, unlock the screen and pass it to him. He takes it. The icons flare into view and he strokes the screen with his ruined hand. And he icons slide back and forth. And he says something to Cathy [his translator] and Cathy says, "He says 'it's a kind of magic.'"