Apple gets the bigger headline because of their claim to support environmentalism and human rights.
Xbox Series X and S Manufacturer: Flextronics and Foxconn
Nintendo Switch Manufacturer: Foxconn
Sony Manufacturer: PlayStation 5 In-house (my mistake on them). PlayStation 3 and 4 were both made by Foxconn assisting.
But it also applies to others:
Google Pixel 5 Manufacturer: Foxconn
Kindle Manufacturer: Foxconn (Fire Tablets are made in Hong Kong by Quanta due to AOSP Anti-Fork rules)
Nintendo DS Manufacturer: Foxconn
Modern Nokia / HMD Global Devices Manufacturer: Foxconn
Xbox 360 Manufacturer: Foxconn
AMD Threadripper TR4 Socket Manufacturer: Foxconn
And so on. Apple, Foxconn. Because almost everybody uses Foxconn.
So when you see those articles about "Apple factory suicide nets," calling it the whole tech industry's contract manufacturer of choice would have been more apt.
I can’t find how many people worked at Foxconn at the time, but right now it’s employing more than the population of any of the smallest eight US states. Wikipedia’s list of suicide rates by state is from a different year than the population, but it looks like those states are about 5 times the population-adjusted rate that Foxconn had.
Wikipedia also says that China’s national suicide rate is difficult to study due to political concerns, before saying the WHO says it was 9.7/100k in 2016. That would mean you should expect closer to 126 suicides per year (in Foxconn’s current workforce), rather than the 14 in 6 months that made the news.
I read somewhere that 40% of all (consumer) electronic devices worldwide go through Foxconn. Pretty much everyone uses them. Don't see a proud "made in USA" or something like that on the website? Foxconn, most likely.
The thing with games is that the box price is extremely under what consumers value them, so selling consumers small bits of the game as micro transactions is the way games extract their actual market value. It doesn't deliver more value than before, but the current monetization better represents the value it delivers to consumers.
Some whales clearly suffer mental health issues (just from looking at the timing and amount of the transactions). The remainder are almost exclusively money laundering of some sort (usually converting stolen credit cards to game assets that can be sold for real money).
Note: I generally think a distributed ownership model for a company leads to better health and production in the long run, but this is probably a case where it's worse. When incentives are distributed, and those incentives are perverse, you just have everyone bearing the pressure to enact unethical business prectices.
Generally however I think worker-owned companies are unlikely to take risk but value the workplace of current workers over future workers. (i.e. closing a department in order to build a new market will be delayed)
Wikipedia describes it as
> Ocean Spray is an American agricultural cooperative of growers of cranberries and grapefruit headquartered in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. It currently has over 700 member growers (in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, Florida, British Columbia and other parts of Canada, as well as Chile). The cooperative employs about 2,000 people, with sales of $1.2 billion in fiscal year 2013 and accounts for 70% of North American cranberry production.
Profit is what keeps the company going. No company lasts long without some focus on profit.
I think it's because of incentives. For-profit companies are incentivised to maximise profits. There might be resistance against doing so in unethical ways at the start but as the company grows it becomes harder to control until eventually it just does whatever is most profitable, limited only by laws (most of the time). Any CSR or ethical decision becomes a PR stunt to distract from the unethical behaviours.
A lot of not-for-profits also fall into this trap unfortunately as they try to maximise revenue or as they become bloated with administrators.
I think at the founder level - trying to start B-corps, keeping them small-mid and embedding ethics deeply into the culture is the way to go but that is quite different from startup culture.