“In spite of its pretty face and attractive products, Apple has some of most deplorable labor practices of any American multi-national. I wrote earlier that Steve Jobs’ real innovation was in finding a firm – Foxconn – that would build a one-million employee concentration camp where it could manufacture and assemble iphones while the one million young workers were living on the brink of starvation. I noted too that Apple was sitting on a cash pile of $150 billion (then increased to $200 billion), but that entire cash pile was stolen from the workers who made Apple’s products. If Steve Jobs had paid those employees anything resembling a living wage, Apple’s cash pile would be zero. Steve Jobs wanted Apple to be profitable, with a margin of about 40%, but Apple’s profits did not come from designing and selling cool products; they came from the theft of wages from society’s most vulnerable young people who needed a job and a start in life. To succeed in his quest, Jobs first had to ensure they failed in theirs. And he did. Even in an internal company report, Apple admitted the “sweatshop” conditions inside the factories that make and assemble its products, admitting that at least 55 of its 102 factories were making staff work more than 60 hours per week, that only 65% were paying legal minimum wages or statutory benefits and that 24 factories paid nothing near China’s minimum wage. The pressure placed on these young people for higher productivity was truly unconscionable, with dozens of young people committing suicide, a fact which did not escape the attention of either Steve Jobs or Tim Cook but which resulted in no action. A human rights organisation accused Foxconn of having an “inhumane and militant” management, the executives of neither Foxconn nor Apple being available for comment.”
Nations Built On Lies – How the US Became Rich, by Larry Romanov, free download at https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/books/ (and mind blowing btw)
See also his current articles (English) on Apple.
(I think I’m going to start sending this in reply to every email I get that says “Sent from my iPhone”.)