Why Apple? Foxconn makes _everything_. Yet it’s always ”iPhone maker”, never ”xbox maker” or ”Hamilton Beach toaster maker”

Because the story is about assembling iPhones.

Hang on. It’s not just racist hiring policies. We have companies here that are doing business in a country that is putting millions of people of a certain ethnicity in concentration camps. That really is not being talked about enough.

Entirely wrong : that's not Apple doing that, and, having spent years as an engineer at Apple, it's a huge priority to be ethical and good. i'm serious.

Why not move elsewhere? The only factories able to produce the required volumes are, by virtue of great planning by China, there, and perform work on a contract basis for many companies, Apple included, Dell, and so on.

I realize it's a complicated subject, but if ethics was as high a priority as you were saying why wouldn't they simply move those jobs somewhere else with lower margins?

EDIT: Since you edited your comment instead of responding to mine, yes China is the only country that can currently support Apple's manufacturing needs. But if Apple actually felt it was unethical to work with China for whatever reason they could begin the process to have factories set up elsewhere, even in the United States or Mexico, within a few years. It would obviously impact their profit margins, but you are arguing that ethics is a "huge priority" while providing nothing substantive to back up that claim.

Not sure why, but it wouldn't let me reply to your post earlier. (?). Now it does. Apple has been building Mac Pros in a factory in Texas; i'm not aware what is produced where though for a couple years.

All right, rather than discuss Apple potentially moving manufacturing operations overseas, let me ask another question. What are some concrete examples of Apple putting a lot of value in ethics?

> The only factories able to produce the required volumes are, by virtue of great planning by China, there

I take a nuanced view of these things. I understand that in vast swathes of rural China job opportunities like this were until recently the only way to make a decent living for many people (most of my family is Asian, and I have investments there). And I also know that most companies could not in fact replicate that technology.

But Apple is rubbing everyone’s nose in their social virtue. If they really believed what they were saying they could definitely replicate a factory like Foxconn’s in Texas for, say, $100 billion. Dell couldn’t, HP probably couldn’t, but they aren’t telling me how to live my life either.

Beyond that, you could definitely migrate iPhone production to, say, Foxconn’s production facilities in Guadalajara with appropriate production guarantees from Apple and satellite investments from other entities to replicate the PRC supply chain advantages. Not tomorrow, not even in the next few years, but the opportunity to reshore high-tech manufacturing is completely attainable.

That’s a great idea. I had no knowledge of the Guadalajara location.

This.

Probably does demand a response, but this doesn't seem to be an "official" Foxconn policy:

> These conditions on ethnicity do not appear on the Foxconn website, but do adorn the walls of private job agencies hiring directly for the technology giant

Wouldn't be such a big deal if the Chinese weren't literally interning and exterminating Uyghurs. Calling this stuff racism is like calling Nazi Germany Alt-Right... Stops WAAAY short of framing the problem.

It's surprising that they don't have enough workers and are still racist.

See: all of American history.

If you don't mind me pointing out the irony here: this is the epitome of "woke capital" - the issue isn't the inhumanly low wages, it's that the company policy is discriminatory towards who it will pay those wages...

It would be.. if I hadn’t said there are a lot of other damning things in the report.

I don't think that is racism per se, that just proves what everyone already knows, that Tibet and Xinjiang are occupied territories/colonies and not really part of China.

No, it’s racism. Excluding Puerto Ricans from American job sites would be straight up racist.

I believe you missed my primary point.

Hey China...hire them, just make them a yellow star, or a red one.

isn't it cute that FoxConn doesn't make that as a policy but subcontractors do?

While I as European fully agree with your point of view, I think that projecting our world perspective on other countries is just bs.

Fight with racism is purely white peoples concept. Racism is a term usually doesn't even exist outside of Europe/North America. So we shouldn't try to put our mentality on top of China, as we are not the sole source of truth in this world.

I'll bite, if racism is so accepted in other places doesn't that just make them all wrong? Or are you contending that racism has value?

I personally think that racism is very wrong and needs to be left in the past. It has no value in current world.

But me, an European, saying to Chinese how they must live and behave - this is just neo colonialism. They should figure this out on their own.

I mean, they can figure this out on their own but in the meanwhile we don’t have to trade with them and give them money to essentially violate our ethics at arms length distance.

What makes our trade with them different than our trade with Saudi/Israel/etc?

Nothing. Personally, I am against trade with Saudi Arabia.

As for Israel, I am sympathetic to a small, democratic nation populated by the descendants of a western genocide, which is surrounded by hostile autocratic or theocratic neighbors. However that’s my opinion. If Israel’s existence is somehow against your ethics, I won’t force you to trade with them. I would just criticize you more directly.

Imposing our views is colonialism. Encouraging justice through soft power is laudable.

> I personally think that racism is very wrong

The production of intelligence in this thread :)

We don't have to fund it, though.

This is insane. Oppression and killing of one group by another is a problem I don’t care what your culture is.

This is normal in a lot of places. Even much of first-world Asia allows for racial discrimination.

There is a lot of pretty horrible stuff that is “normal in a lot of places.” It doesn’t excuse it. Racism is not something Apple stands for and so it has leverage to stop this practice in its suppliers.

Nope.

> racism demands a firm response from Apple.

Board: Will that make us more profitable?

Tim: We will become less profitable, but in the long term, people will see that we-

Board: No.

Tim Cook is the architect of the Apple supply chain, and that's why he is the CEO instead of a product person. He is not innocent and has to have read the Foxconn job requirements of age between 16 and 40, ninth-grade diploma, no Tibetan and Uygur ethnicities. He knows what he is doing, and blaming just the board is a cop-out.

Why would it? Tim supports Saudi Arabia and their oppressive apps in the app store.