Apple is the market leader in consumer electronics "mind-share" (even if they aren't necessarily market leaders sales-wise). Consequently, they get targeted when issues like this come up. Fair or not, that comes with the territory (ask Nike, Cadbury, Nestle etc etc etc). Apple sells more than mere products, they sell a lifestyle. And the message of that lifestyle gets harmed with reports of unethical labor practices. Fair or not, this comes with the territory (again, ask Nike). If you are in the image-management business, as Apple is, then if people think it's your problem... it is your problem. Trying to counter with statistics will only sink you (ask BP). saidi On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 4:02 PM, <ashok+skunkworks@parliaments.info<ashok%2Bskunkworks@parliaments.info>
wrote:
The story of course is not as simple as a "iphone causative death" as being reported in the popular media. (Is it ever ?). You ought to read deeper into the news.
See this story from Chinese media sources :
< http://www.chinasmack.com/2010/stories/more-foxconn-suicide-news-reports.htm...
<quote> Some reporters suspect Foxconn having given the families of suicide victims 400,000 [RMB] plus a 30,000 [RMB] yearly pension to the parents have led to these poverty-stricken workers to copy each other willing to use their deaths to exchange financial security for their families. This view is indeed cold-blooded, but if it is true then that is our entire society’s responsibility and tragedy. If their deaths are for the compensation, then it should be treated differently. </quote>
Also see : "Suicide is now the biggest single killer among young Chinese people" <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2526079.stm>
"Markets in everything - China (suicide) edition" < http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/05/markets_in_everything_ch...
On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 1:11 PM, aki <aki275@googlemail.com> wrote:
As the iPad is launched in Britain, a special investigation now reveals the full shocking toll of suicides at its Chinese factory. A once pretty 17-year-old lies crippled in a hospital bed two miles from the factory where she worked long, tedious hours checking the screens of Apple iPads for tiny flaws. Her parents brood silently at her bedside. At 8am one morning in March - just 40 days after she began her first job at Apple's main supplier, Foxconn, in southern China - Tian Yu took the decision to leap from her fourth-floor dormitory rather than take her place on the production line. Tian survived but must wonder if she would not have been better off dead.
After two weeks in a coma, she woke to find herself paralysed from the waist down, unable to sit up by herself and suffering from fractures and liver and spleen damage....
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1282481/iPad-factory-suici... _______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks ------------ Skunkworks Server donations spreadsheet
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