The aftermath of the exposure of Mike Daisey, whose report about conditions at Apple factories in China has been retracted by This American Life, there’s a hell of a lot of relief among Apple supporters. For example, Jon Gruber at Daring Fireball is filling his blog with posts wondering if theaters will cancel Mike Daisey’s one man show, and wondering why the Times still has Daisey’s op-ed on their site. Gruber says his “spidey sense” was tingling over Daisey’s piece, yet he only said that after Daisey was exposed. He spent a tiny fraction of the time and energy covering what Daisey said (one obligatory post) than he’s spending now publicizing Daisey’s lies.
The reason for this is obvious–Daisey lied about details but the basic charges he made about working conditions at Apple factories are true. For example, here’s a New York Times story that hasn’t been questioned or retracted:
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.
More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.
As I noted when I posted about this in January, Apple is probably one of the better companies working in China, and no doubt other electronics companies are worse. Moreover, This American Life made a terrible error treating Daisey’s fiction as fact, and Daisey shouldn’t have pawned off his fiction as fact.
All that said, it’s painfully obvious to anyone who looks at how Apple’s products are made that Apple should work harder to improve the working conditions in their plants. It’s also painfully obvious that Gruber just wants to ignore that–he’d much rather write yet another post about the lifelike appearance of the retina display on the new iPad, or how wonderful it is that Apple is leading the JD Power satisfaction surveys. Here’s one of the most influential writers covering Apple, and if you considered the attention he’s paid to factory conditions in China, you’d come away believing that most of the charges are confabulated and that the whole issue just isn’t worth discussing. He could be leading on this, but instead he’s following at best and throwing up a smokescreen at worst.
Since I don’t read a lot of other Apple-centric sites, for all I know, the rest of the Apple-focused media could be better. Perhaps those of you who do read them could comment on that.
Persia
The problem is that Mike Daisey made himself the issue by lying. “Materially correct” doesn’t cut it. Especially when it’s not a case of one or two factual gaffes but out-and-out lying.
IMO, when you go up against something big, something people believe in, you have to be twice as careful to have your facts straight. Daisey did the opposite.
mistermix
@Persia: I agree with this. Daisey has hurt the cause he wanted to help. I also think Gruber spends a lot more time dissecting Daisey’s lies than he has on the conditions at Apple factories.
Valdivia
James Fallows has some really good posts on this that are worth linking to. Apologies for not linking here, my ipad won’t let me.
paradox
One time I read this rather grandiose political piece with a long view that said focusing on American working conditions, rights and pay while ignoring the global worker environment was defeating, it couldn’t work in our times.
I just put it out there, my reaction was well what the fuck should I do next, learn Mandarin? We can only influence and take part in our local environments, I won’t ever have a clue as to implement good politics here that help workers in China. So don’t give it up here.
Apple has this galactic mountain of cash observed on Mars, seriously, something like $90 billion dollars. How many billions would it take to build a fab or a plant in Silicon Valley, where there is now no silicon at all? (Well, Cisco makes switching chips, but you know what I mean). Really–$5 billon? $10 billion? Even with more money than they could ever dream of doing anything with they won’t produce an American fab job with it. Fairly disgusting.
debit
Why Apple? Is there any computer or smartphone currently manufactured anywhere other than China? I’m honestly curious about this.
Walker
The other issue here is that this is clear that this was a directed attack at Apple. X-Boxes are made at the exact same factory, but no one ever gave Microsoft crap for this. I am not saying that this makes it better, but if you are trying to pressure a change in working conditions, it helps if your motivations do not look like those of an anti-Apple fanboi.
Persia
@debit: I suspect it was because of the popularity of Apple products and how they’re seen culturally. The iPhone is basically the upperclass/hipster product of choice. If you were, for example, trying to make money by selling a one-man show to hipsters, you’d probably aim squarely at Apple.
Walker
@paradox
Apple has that money because they remember the 90s.. The company was near death and they never, ever want to be there again. Much of the comeback was teh Steve. But everyone forgets the firesale shopping that they did when the tech boom collapsed. They bought tech companies left and right. That fire sale happened with the cash reserves that Michael Dell said should have been given to shareholders.
They want to be able to do this again in the future.
Alexandra
Gruber, like Pogue, would become persona non grata, losing the inside skinny and sneak previews if he commits an act of journalism. Reminds me a bit of the media and politics, funnily enough.
Still, I like my Mac and need it for my particular line of work… a personal boycott may be a little awkward.
mistermix
@debit:
@Walker:
The politics of focusing on Apple are simple: they’re the biggest. As I said above, others are probably worse, but for better or worse, when you lead the industry, your practices come under more scrutiny.
What could happen if Gruber and others began to make the working conditions in China an issue is that Apple would address it in a more public and transparent way, and make that part of the appeal of Apple products. Then competitors would have to address it also.
In other words, what’s wrong with pressuring Apple to make humane treatment of workers a feature of the next iPad and iPhone?
clayton
Did Steve Jobs also say that American manufacturing should be more like Chinese manufacturing to be successful or something to that effect? I can’t recall Bill Gates making such a preposterous suggestion.
Baud
I agree generally the one man’s lies shouldn’t overshadow the issue of working conditions in China. But I can’t agree with your post title because it is a big issue when a reporter lies. We rightly make it an issue when Fox News does it, and I don’t see why we should treat other reporters differently.
Soonergrunt
@Persia: And in doing so, he has damaged the people who work to increase accountability by the tech industry for their environmental and labor practices.
@mistermix: There’s also Apple’s corporate image, which is, rightly or wrongly, a progressive corporate image (great place to work, wonderful benefits, etc) that is endangered by these stories, and hence a bigger lever for the reformers.
@clayton: Yes he did. But is that more a function of Jobs being a narcissistic greedy asshole than the fact that his company makes hardware and Microsoft makes software, which doesn’t need cheap manufacturing?
Wag
In a post last night James Fallows had some really good thoughts about this issue, as usual
RareSanity
Because doing that, may cause Apple to view him unfavorably. If Apple views him unfavorably, he might find himself in the unique position of having to actually pay for Apple products.
You don’t want him have to actually pay for this stuff do you?
RossInDetroit
Face it: Americans benefit from the shit working conditions overseas. Unless we’re willing to pay a lot more for our gadgets, people will suffer in crap jobs. China is desperate to grow its exports so they’re not going to change on their own.
I benefit more than most people, being in the electronics tech business. The mailman stuffs a couple of packages from Shenzhen in my mailbox every week and I wonder how they can make this stuff so cheap. If I was honest with myself I’d just admit I was exploiting desperate human beings who are too far away to care about.
Hurling Dervish
The amazing thing is that if they built iPhones in the U.S., with American workers, the iPhone would only cost $10 more, according to This American Life yesterday.
The reason they are in China is not for the cost of the workers. It’s because the other unit factories are all there, so that it is much more flexible to change orders. This is a key thing the U.S. needs to work on.
MikeJ
If Gruber ignored the story about Daisey to the extent the ignored the story about working conditions in Apple plants he’d be able to make the argument that he just covers the tech and everything else was outside of his purview. Instead he covers what he wants to hear and ignores everything he doesn’t want to hear. Like 90% of the bloggers on earth.
Amir Khalid
Looking at what Mike Daisey did, it seems to me that he presented a dramatized version of the situation that altered or made up some pertinent facts. Listeners assumed, because no one advised them to expect otherwise, that they were getting only straight reporting. Daisey was dishonest, or at least negligent, not to warn NPR or its listeners. NPR was lax in doing its own fact-checking.
I don’t see how Daisey will again be able to present any work of his as journalism for some time, if ever. For its part, NPR needs to make changes to improve the rigor of its fact-checking, announce those changes, and maybe provide some transparency into that process from now on.
Apple and other electronics brand owners — Nokia, HP, Dell, whoever — need to put together a process to police how their products get made. Sporting goods brand owners went through something similar in the 1980s, when it was revealed their contract manufacturers were running sweatshops with child labor. Public campaigns in the West had a lot to do with ending such practices. Assuming that iPad fans (among others) have a conscience about the factory hands who make their gadgets, such campaigns could work in this instance as well.
Soonergrunt
@Alexandra: Tech “journalists” are particularly susceptible to subject capture. Without access, they don’t get the sneak peeks at new hardware and software, or the access to the decision makers to float or report on rumors, and so on. It’s a LOT worse than it is for the political press.
There have been several tech journalists lose their jobs over bad reviews of products by major advertisers.
Schlemizel
@debit:
Almost all smart phones are made at Foxconn – but some people have decided to hit Apple first because they are so huge and because they are leaders in many ways.
Gromit
I can’t speak for Gruber, but I have major problems with the way this story is covered generally. It’s always about Apple, or about its spoiled customers, buying iPhones and MacBooks made by “slave” labor. Never mind that pretty much any big name electronics brand uses the same or similar suppliers, with only a fraction of the attention or accountability. And never mind how many more prosaic items in our households, from kids’ toys to kitchen utensils were made in Chinese factories under completely unknown conditions. But how often are the headlines about our lifestyle generally, rather than about this one brand specifically?
So were I a blogger covering technology in general, or Apple in particular, I don’t know that I would jump on the “why doesn’t Apple do more” bandwagon. Remember, before these stories, the (false) narrative about Apple was that their products were overpriced. Now nobody can beat them on price, even Foxconn’s other clients, and now the story is about suicide nets, a story no doubt typed on a laptop manufactured under conditions as bad as or worse than an Apple product.
So yeah, Mike Daisey isn’t the issue, but by the same token neither is anything you’ve mentioned yet.
Schlemizel
The beauty, for the masters, is this story not only negates every charge made about Foxconn, the true and the untrue alike, but it also future charges against abusive employees. While it is possible to understand the guys motivation his actions are going to be used to set back efforts to improve these sorts of shithole factories for years.
kdaug
@RossInDetroit:
Sooner or later, China will have a minimum wage and a 5-day work week.
There will likely be blood before it happens.
But it will happen.
Gromit
@Amir Khalid:
“This American Life” isn’t an NPR production.
Peter J
@mistermix:
Gruber isn’t a writer, he’s a fluffer. An influential fluffer though.
@debit:
Apple are making profits like no other on their smartphones and tablets, they could either make them in the US or radically improve the conditions for those making them in China and it wouldn’t dent their profit.
—
This whole story made me think about Rathergate in some ways. Just because false evidence/facts were introduced doesn’t change the fact that there actually is something here. (And, to make it clear, I’m not saying that Apple gave Daisey false information.)
Soonergrunt
@Gromit, 25–fixed your blockquote
Gromit
Thanks, that was fast.
mistermix
@Gromit: By your reasoning, because one bad thing isn’t the whole issue, criticizing that one bad thing is unfair.
MariedeGournay
I listened to the episode where they went through their journalistic mistakes. Really compelling episode. Glass’s interviews with Daisey are squirm inducing. You hear a man who took a real problem about how we export harsh working conditions to import cheap goods and turned it into ‘hey look at me!’ The final act with the Times reporter is pretty enlightening.
WereBear
@Gromit:
Yes. This.
I’d pay $10 more for my next Apple gadget; most people would. (Provided this assessment is true.) Not only is it unfair to Apple to single them out, it’s even more unfair when you look at how Apple at least tries to mandate better working conditions in their plants; while other electronics giants, don’t.
I seem to recall that it some company estimated it would cost a whole dollar to get a shirt made with union workers in the US. This is not difficult to do… it is only difficult to convince companies to do.
Making up lies about Apple undermines this effort.
scav
Reminding me rather of a possibly less exiguous example of Komy, not that I’m paying close attention to either.
Amir Khalid
@Gromit:
The real issue here is that the products we use should be manufactured without resorting to labor abuses for the sake of quick time to market or profits. Steve Jobs was complicit in those abuses when his impatience to see a product change ASAP meant a few thousand people in China had to work double shifts. We as consumers are likewise complicit if we condone or expect them because we want an iGadget right now, for X dollars less.
It should certainly be about electronics contract manufacturing in general, rather than any one brand owner; Apple is far from the only one caught up in this. What I’d like to see is some process, policed by brand owners, to certify that their products were manufactured under ethical labor practices. It’s going to take customer and shareholder pressure, plenty of both, to make that happen.
What happened with Daisey and NPR was a failure of the journalistic process. Both have lost some of their good name and credibility, which won’t be easily won back. The journalistic process is what we have to watch for these kinds of things, which is why we cannot afford to let it be compromised like this.
WyldPirate
@RossInDetroit:
This. It’s not only true WRT to the electronics industry, but a host of other industries as well.
As painful as it is to face and as much as a certain small segments of Americans rage about the expoilotive tendancies of capitalism, we Americans sure do stoke the evil capitalist empires’ maws with cash.
Karl Mark nailed it with this line:
“ Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer.”
clayton
@Soonergrunt: Just to clarify, I made that comment in response to someone upthread mentioning x-box.
Peter J
@WereBear:
There’s quite a difference between adding $1 to the price of a shirt and $10 to the price of an iphone. You don’t get one iphone for 10 shirts made in China…
RossInDetroit
It’s not just the assembly of finished products that’s the issue here. These things are made in China because the whole supply chain is there, from raw materials to order fulfillment. You can’t move the assembly step to another country without breaking the chain and introducing costly inefficiencies.
ETA: The further you go back in that supply chain the worse things get. High tech electronics devices require rare earth materials. Extracting and processing that stuff creates horrible environmental problems.
MikeJ
@Amir Khalid:
NPR doesn’t produce TAL.
Gromit
@mistermix:
No, my reasoning is that focusing on Apple alone is counter-productive, as if Apple raising factory workers’ wages (how, by giving Foxconn more money than they are contracted for?) will somehow solve the problem of Chinese labor conditions. Focusing all the ire on Apple products allows folks to ignore just how much of their lifestyles, even — especially — those of folks who can’t afford smartphones or high-end laptops, are made possible by those very labor conditions, all while sneering at “hipsters”.
Amir Khalid
@Gromit:
Whoops, sorry. I was assuming that public radio in America means NPR. well, my criticisms should be taken to apply to the producers of This American Life, then.
Soonergrunt
@clayton: And I would buy into the argument that Microsoft has a responsibility to police their hardware supplier as well.
Pressuring Apple, however is a LOT more likely to result in action because Apple is much more dependent upon their hardware suppliers than is Microsoft, and that same supplier is much more dependent upon Apple than it is upon Microsoft.
One could make the argument that you pressure both, and shame the one that doesn’t cave first.
Soonergrunt
@Amir Khalid: This American Life is produced by Public Radio International, but I’ve never heard of a “PRI station.” It’s always carried on NPR. People move back and forth from one organization to the other pretty freely, and they reference each other a lot. It’s very easy to confuse the two.
mistermix
@Gromit: If you think this is motivated by sneering at hipsters, then you need to explain Daisey, who is by his own admission an Apple fanboi and by inspection a hipster. The point of his one-man show was to examine the contradiction between his self-image as a socially conscious “good guy” and the way that the products he loves are made. He’s inside the tent pissing in, not some Apple/hipster hater.
Gromit
Self-hating hipsters are the hippest kind.
El Cid
I don’t get it. This isn’t just changing ‘details’ to make a coherent story. This is lying on just a stupid level.
I wouldn’t cut myself a fucking free pass to do this. Why the hell do people like Daisey think it’s a good idea?
Don’t give me any of this bullshit either about how it’s a piece or it’s fiction blah blah blah. There wouldn’t be any god-damned way I could tell myself, ‘Oh, well, you see, I’m an artist, and it’s an important story, so, you know, lying this way is okay.’
RossInDetroit
@Gromit:
Hipness/sneering is a side issue and a minor one IMO. Plenty of people are aware of bad conditions in China and how manufacturing contributes to them. Pollution. Loss of arable land. Substandard architecture and construction. Low pay. High inflation. Displacement of people for redevelopment. Poor health care. Overburdened civic infrastructure. The Chinese are all paying these costs as the expense of rapid development.
Maude
Foxconn is moving a factory to Turkey because they can get workers at cheaper pay.
Apple has also got a problem with ebook pricing. This may also include the big 6 publishers.
Apple stock hit $600 and then went back down.
@Gromit:
People can’t grasp the entire problem of workers in China. It is huge. They can grasp one US company making a profit off of badly treated workers. It is a start on the concept.
jfutral
@mastermix,
Apple is already doing more than ANY other electronics company having products made in China. It is time to start the bandwagon of “Why won’t the other companies at least do as much if not more?”. Don’t let up on Apple, but certainly, more companies putting pressure on China and Foxconn, especially as both want to be major world economic players, will mean a whole lot more than even the US government can do (who is now solidly in China’s pocket).
As a writer, Gruber isn’t influential. You pretty much already agree with him or you don’t. He doesn’t influence anyone. In terms of shaping the discourse, he mostly comments on stuff others have written, not much of his own material. So I don’t see how him writing about anything will help any cause.
The theatrical problem with Daisey is he wasn’t working on a “deeper truth”, he was working on a specific truth. That’s not theatre nor art, that’s propaganda. As a working theatre artist myself, what he did/does is an insult to the rest of us in the industry, the art form, and to art in general.
There is a huge difference between literary fiction and out right lying. All his choices were to present “facts”. He chose a documentary form, used himself as a real person, and related stories as real. And when asked about his facts before his “facts” aired, he lied to TAL. He didn’t just lie. He lied about lying.
As another commenter pointed out, ALL this made Daisey the issue. Sadly.
Joe
Ben Franklin
Apple not as bad as other Chinese exploiters?
Can I assume this is an open thread?
Kristine
@clayton: I recall an interview with Gates in which he bemoaned the rising living standards of Chinese employees because his labor costs were going up as a result, or would in the future, and that gave him a sad.
The interview was several years ago. I had the link, and damned if I can find it.
pixelpusher
Let those not wearing a piece of apparel not made in China throw the first stone. Because the conditions in Apple factories are heaven next to textile mills or chemical plants. Apple’s actually in the lead of companies trying to monitor and improve work conditions. Twelve hours seems long here, but in China, it’s the norm. And people think factory jobs are cushy next to grinding it out in the fields or rice paddies all day, especially since they make three times as much. The work may seem boring and tough to us, but the Chinese are enriching themselves, one export product at a time.
Mike Daisy went all the way to China to be able to give credence to stuff he made up based on his own prejudices. One thing is sure, though. Mike Daisy wouldn’t last three days doing any kind of hard physical labor. He should stick to donuts and beer instead of making an ass out of himself and the decent people he conned with his prefabricated outrage.
John Gruber is a tech writer who happens to be writing about Apple at a time when that company is schooling the rest of the world on how to innovate by creating superior user experiences. Hard not to be enthusiastic.
And here’s the part of the story that everybody seems to be missing. The iPhone and especially the iPad are incredible breakthroughs in making computing accessible to the computer-challenged. These devices are first and foremost platforms. They’ve simplified the use of software by child-proofing install/deinstall, file management and basic interaction. By providing a curated environment, they’ve ushered in a golden renaissance in software.
Consider the efficiencies created by the App Store. A software developer no longer needs to have his or her wares sitting on a shelf at Best Buy.
No more worrying about inventory, shipping, guessing the correct production runs. No need to design and manufacture tamperproof packaging. No need to pay for a copy-protection solution that will eventually be cracked anyway. And because all these ramp-up costs are gone, a developer no longer needs to sign away the intelectual property rights to a venture capitalist. All he or she has to do is think, code and submit the app to Apple’s curated environment. After that, it’s a straight seventy/thirty split in his or her favor.
Because it has become so cheap to develop and especially distribute software, consumers are paying a fraction of the prices that prevail on the PC/Mac side. The dumbed-down version of Photoshop (elements) is still $60. Photoshop Touch for the iPad is $10, and it’s better than Elements in some respects. In general, most apps sell between ten and zero dollars. The App Store is already a multi-billion dollar business, and it’s early days.
Wireless technology has enabled many poor and remote places to connect to the rest of the world without a costly investment in infrastructure. Think of tablets and smart phones as the new infrastructure. Computing power of all kinds is going to be more evenly distributed as these devices inevitably go down in cost and reach commodity pricing. This is what can bridge the computational divide. These tools will take us away from dead trees, power-hungry monitors, expensive tech support and much more.
A set of Encyclopedia Britannica will run you $1,400 if you can get one of the last editions. How much would Wikipedia cost if it were developed the same way, assuming anyone had enough room for it? This is the new wealth of our times, and the price is only determined by access.
Same goes for Balloon Juice. Freedom of the press no longer belongs exclusively to those who can afford one. Personally, I’m grateful to the Chinese for helping bring that price of access down.
Ben Franklin
Graven images for sale…
Steve Jobs deluxe faux-marble statuette; best seller….cheaper than Bill Gates model.
Corpsicle
@Hurling Dervish: $10 more to build an iPhone in the States? That sounds a lot like complete bullshit, need a much more reliable source than This American Life to believe it.
clayton
@Kristine: I’d think that more than just you would remember that if true. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation doesn’t seem to match up to the attitude you attribute to Gates.
@pixelpusher: We’ve had that discussion before. You can buy American clothing at comparable prices. No need to buy Chinese in that particular market — you can easily avoid it. Consumer electronics is a whole other issue. Recently it took me a while, but I finally found a tv made in Mexico — not China. With small electronics it’s almost impossible or complete impossible.
Mnemosyne (iTouch)
G has been following this whole story closely and apparently Daisey’s previous show focused on serial fabulists like Stephen Glass and James Frye, who insisted that their tales were really true.
Psychologically, it’s fascinating that Daisey has done the exact same thing he spent a whole show criticizing them for doing.
Corner Stone
@Maude:
If this is accurate, then doesn’t it kind of negate the whole “supply chain flexibility” argument I see Martin make in every Apple thread?
Amir Khalid
@pixelpusher:
What you’re offering has been the standard justification for industrial exploitation of labor since the dawn of the industrial Revolution in the 19th century. What remains true after Daisey’s theatrical exaggerations is that workers at Foxconn and similar companies need a much better deal in terms of working conditions than they have now. I’d argue that the consumer benefits you extol don’t have much, if anything, to do with how the devices in question are made. And that China, having the benefit of other nations’ experience, shouldn’t have to recapitulate the massive fucking over that working people got during the original Industrial Revolution.
gaz
Thanks Daisy, you fucking douchebag lying asshole.
Basically, you made it possible for Apple to now ACTUALLY DO THE THINGS YOU LIED ABOUT with no accountability.
Now if anyone decides to question Apple’s business/labor practices, they’ll just point to your punk ass – and say “SEE, this is a bunch of BS!! LOL”, you lying fuck.
Robert Hennecke
Mike Daisey set back the sacred cause of reforming labour practices in the PR China and developing countries generally and that in reality is the real tragedy. It’s beyond the pale that a company such as Apple has it’s products made under such horrendous conditions indirectly propping up a regime that has murdered between 34 and 76 million of it’s own citizens since 1949. Wither the hand of those who import from the PR China as it’s all fruit from a poisoned tree. These gadgets are not as vital to the their customers as they’ve been brainwashed into believing and to have them made in oppressive conditions is unconscionable, Mike Daisey be damned. I don’t see why there can’t be two types of products of the exact same design, one ethically produced in the west and the other an econo brand made in the cheapest way possible. The ethcial one can have a different colour to send out the signal to others that it was an ethcially produced item.
jheartney
@pixelpusher:
All true, but then what about all the local people who would have been hired to staff the local retail that is no longer needed to sell this stuff? Or to transport it? Manufacture it? Sucks to be them, right?
I get that this new world of tablet software produces plenty of benefits to those who use it. What’s missing is a vision of how we build a whole, livable society rather than just an opportunity for a few robber tech-barons to create hoards of corporate cash.
jehrler
@paradox:
It is about the supply chain, not the individual fabs. In fact, Samsung has built a fab in Austin, TX that is used exclusively for Apple chips.
To have ipad/iphones made here you need the fabs, the metal works, the screen makers, etc. Much like why not bailing out GM and Chrysler would have devastated Ford, one needs healthy ancillary suppliers to make manufacturing (not just assembly of parts shipped in) cost effective.
AxelFoley
@Persia:
This.
jheartney
@Amir Khalid:
Yes, exactly.
AxelFoley
@Valdivia:
I see what you did there.
Bruce S
This is interesting to me because I remember Mike Daisey on Chris Hayes stating explicitly that what he does is different than journalism and that he tells a “story” in a way that journalist could not. I thought at the time, “Cool.” Now watching the details being picked apart – and this is pretty much about details and not the core of the story, which has been documented elsewhere – it devalues his work in my mind. I wonder if I was fooling myself when I enthusiastically assented to Daisey’s assertion that he told a different form of “truth” than journalists and had a right to license, or if I’m just being a chickenshit now, with Daisey squirming and having obviously misled a major “presenter” of his performance piece. Oddly, the biggest revelation here for me is that stuff on This American Life is fact-checked. I thought at least half of what I heard on that show was made up. Never had a clue it was “journalism.”
Crusty Dem
@Corpsicle:
The number I’ve heard is $120/iPhone. Maybe this takes into account shipping of parts, etc. but it sure as hell ain’t $10.
This post is ludicrous. It shouldn’t be about Daisey? Seriously? In the absence of other quality reporting, Daisey has been THE voice of criticism of Apple (and by extension, Foxconn). The This American Life piece only works as an emotional experience based on the awful treatment of the individual workers he met, and those meetings were fabricated. Listen to it again, without those, it’s just a business piece about how big the factories are. I suspect it will be nearly impossible to report mistreatment by Chinese manufacturers for years, and Daisey’s fabrications will significantly damage attempts to improve conditions for Chinese workers.
Bruce S
Pixelpuser — “Personally, I’m grateful to the Chinese for helping bring that price of access down.”
You’re a childish douche-bag drinking digital Kool-Aid and that may be the stupidest sentence I’ve heard since…the last GOP primary debate.
If it has to be explained to you why you sound like a total idiot, it’s because you’re a total fucking idiot.
jehrler
@mistermix:
Funny, I think you, more than Gruber, are the one on a high horse.
This is bigger than even Apple can fix. Given the supply chain, there is basically no where else on earth these products can be manufactured. As the NYT points out, it is the grouping of these skills that is essential.
Now, maybe we should be pushing to develop this supply chain in the U.S. like we have for aircraft/military goods, but that is not something that Apple can do on its own. It would require a logical government/industry industrial planning process that is simply not in the cards given the current political environment.
Absent that, what we can do (and should and which Gruber agrees with) is push all electronics companies (including Apple) to improve the work conditions.
BTW, it is not just electronics. You have lead paint issues (bad for the kids, bad for the workers), heavy metal works (fallows points out the boiling of a bunch of workers by spilled molten steel) and, of course, mining.
All of these other sectors of the Chinese economy are providing a slew of consumer goods that you are buying at your local WalMart, Sears or Home Depot and have just as much, or more, blood on them.
Yes, please, let’s push Apple but let’s not delude ourselves that Apple alone can make the change we want.
Mnemosyne (iTouch)
Also, too, the reporting has not been entirely clear, but it looks as though Daisey’s main source for his heart-rending accounts of worker exploitation that Apple doesn’t want you to know about came directly from — wait for it — Apple’s publicly available reports from Apple inspectors.
So he was taking information released to the public by Apple and claiming it was secret information that he himself had gathered. That’s just shitty, frankly.
WaterGirl
@Bruce S: I Having seen Mike Daisey on Up with Chris Hayes, I have been going through the exact process you described. (Except for the last 2 sentences, since I have never seen This American Life.)
I had been looking forward to a discussion of this on Up this weekend, but Ezra hosted the show so we will have to wait until next week, I guess. I don’t know if Ezra discussed it. I wasn’t impressed with the first 30 minutes of Ezra, so I turned it off. But Up is my favorite show, when it’s actually Up with Chris Hayes.
Bruce S
Just to clarify my comment at #66 – we have an issue on the table of working conditions in an anti-democratic state that has well-documented systemic exploitation, and I’m getting treated to a treatise on the virtues of the fucking Apple app-store. This so obviously mixing Apples and some very sour lemons, that it leaves one totally unable to take the exercise seriously.
gaz
@jheartney:
Full of stupid.
Speaking as a software developer – we have this little thing called the Internet, where we can, you know, post software for sale. It’s been around for a bit longer than the apple store. And it has the luxurious advantage of not forcing us to strangle and gut a chicken over the corpse of steve jobs to get our app “approved”.
Apple became the villain in their own 1984 commercial
Bruce S
Watergirl – yeah. Ezra mentioned it and said Chris would be back next week with his response. I can’t wait.
“I wasn’t impressed with the first 30 minutes of Ezra” – yeah, Saturday’s show was a dud, but check out the Sunday show if you’ve got it recorded or online. Alexis from Occupy the SEC, Jared Bernstein, a guy who used to work for Goldman and a very good discussion of Wall Street, Dodd Frank, Obama’s recovery strategy/politics, etc. Highly recommended. But Ezra isn’t as good as Chris. Frankly, while I’m glad he’s got the WaPo platform, I think it’s diluted his politics just a bit.
Srv
Wow, that digital kookaide douche line was exactly what a transient on haight was saying to the tourists Friday. While shaking a cup for his cause, of course. Good things aren’t worth having unless others have had to suffer.
pixelpusher
@jheartney: True, the workers that supported the old model are in trouble. But so are those who helped manufacture, distribute and sell music on CDs and tape. Should we go back to that? Delivering software without using diesel, paper or plastics has to be a win for the environment, no? My main point though is that the cost of access to good software is dropping like a stone. That’s a fantastic benefit for the population at large.
jfutral
I don’t know how many of you were ever into Christian comedy and remember from the late 70’s a comedian named Mike Warnke. Same story, different content.
Joe
gaz
@gaz: my #71 was intended for pixelpusher, not jheartney.
Mea Culpa
jheartney
@gaz: Yes, I’m well aware of online software distribution, having perhaps done it myself a few thousand times. (Believe it or not, I even was involved in a software company back during the dial-up era.) Which doesn’t tell us anything about how we now employ the folks who used to do all that distributing stuff.
My other dead/dying professional field, commercial printing, has been similarly devastated. No one is bothering to think of how all those people are going to earn a living now either. Too bad they weren’t at Goldman Sachs, where they could have been made whole at taxpayer expense.
Amir Khalid
Mike Daisey presented a partly fictionalized work about labor conditions at a contract manufacturer in such a way that his audience took it for straight-up journalism. Bad; when you present fiction rather than news, you absolutely must make sure your audience is aware of that. He held off attempts to fact-check that work by resorting to lies and evasions. Very bad; this would be a firing offense for a journalist, or indeed any media presenter. Daisey deserves to be made persona non grata in the media.
This American Life did not persist in fact-checking Daisey as thoroughly as they should have, but let him fob them off. Bad. But at least they can say they were to some extent victims of his deception.
trollhattan
I compare what Daisey does WRT his stage act to what Spalding Gray once did. As far as his stage act goes, I feel it can be defended.
Pivoting to the TAL piece, I get the sense TAL and Daisey communicated poorly and from the followup piece, Daisey tacitly allowed TAL to convert his act into reporting. He should have cleared up the ambiguity and TAL should have run down the details to a higher level of confidence. That that didn’t happen was a failure on both parties.
As the last segment of the latest show detailed, Apple stands apart from other gadget makers because companies doing work for them them use that fact as a mantle of respectability, lending prestige and leading to more business. Apple counts more by the very act of being Apple–which is also how they harvest those eye-watering margins into their products. No other company has as much power and influence that can be directed to change the current conditions. IMO they are not doing enough, and prevaricate with their consumers.
What remains after the dust settles from this blows over–and it will soon enough–is Chinese workers will still be building our gadgets in crappy conditions. We can ignore that fact, but it will stubbornly remain.
CDWard
I see the Apple cultists have come out in force-F**k them and the company they worship. I have never bought an Apple product and after these latest reveIations I never will.
jheartney
@pixelpusher: I agree with all that; I benefit myself from this shift every time I watch Netflix. I just don’t see any effort being made to deal with all the lives turned upside down by the loss of livelihoods.
Ben Franklin
I’m certainly happy no one missed this point…..
jheartney
@CDWard:
Displaying the thoughtful, rigorous analysis Apple users have long found amongst our detractors.
Persia
@jehrler: I really hope this doesn’t become a test about whether high exposures to lead really does affect crime rates. China’s a big country.
CDWard
@jheartney:
Shorter jheartney: I’ve got my IPad 3 and I don’t give a f**k about the conditions it was made in and the people who made it.
different-church-lady
Daisey’s big mistake is that he tried to have it both ways: he wanted his audience to believe every word was true, while simultaneously making a claim of “artistic license.” You can’t have it both ways, Mike.
BTW, for what it’s worth, in the late 70s and early 80s my father worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, here in America. Voluntarily. I was young and don’t know the exact circumstances of it, but my theory is that he was having a better time at work than he was at home.
different-church-lady
@CDWard: Shorter CDWard: I got my agenda and my righteous rage and I don’t give a f**k about the truth, nor about how my own bullshit will hurt my agenda, because justifying my rage is more important.
(Hmmm… come to think of it, that’s not actually shorter…)
Gromit
@CDWard:
See? Chinese labor problem solved!
Brachiator
@mistermix: I think that Gruber is often the biggest voluntary shill in the world for Apple products. He is sometimes smug and dishonest.
That said, I have heard him on one of the main podcasts he appears on, the Talk Show, state firmly and plainly about Apple’s responsibilities. If you think he has not done enough, you haven’t done your homework.
And the last time I checked, China was still a communist country, worker’s paradise and all that. And although I understand why people want to focus on Apple, the plain fact is that China manufactures the majority of the developed world’s shit, and doesn’t seem consistently concerned about worker’s rights, human rights, or much else besides profits and productivity.
And I don’t know who is more deluded. The people in this thread bragging about how the do not buy Apple products, as though this means anything, or the people who think that even mighty Apple can dictate to China with regard to their manufacturing policy. Shouldn’t this be a job for governments, the US and the European Union?
By the way Aplle now has manufacturing operations in Brazil. Are workers there being exploited?
Oh yeah, and Mike Daisey and his lies in service to a larger truth makes the problem worse. The little shit should be kicked off the stage.
Srv
We give as much a fuck as that apple fanboy obama
jheartney
@CDWard: BTW, if you’re going to do a “shorter” paraphrase of me you might want to actually have it be shorter. 24 words in yours vs. 12 in mine.
Brachiator
@jheartney:
What industries should be protected and how do you propose preserving them?
Should we perhaps consider banning the Internet, and maybe all computers as well. We could bring back old fashioned newspapers and magazines, more brick and mortar stores would flourish. And instead of comments in blog threads, we could all write letters to one another, creating more work for the postal service.
When the Britannica people talked about stopping printing of the encyclopedia, I thought about all the jobs related to printing and distribution and sales and marketing that have gone as the company shifted from physical to digital publishing. But the company endures, jobs remain, and hopefully new opportunities will arise.
Martin
These are things that Apple can fix, but slowly, because Apple doesn’t fully control the situation – apart from saying ‘fuck it, we’ll just stop building products’. In order for Apple to change the industry, they need to push HP, and Dell and Sony and Samsung and Nokia and everyone else. Until about a year ago, Apple just wasn’t big enough to force HP and the others to accept these changes.
And the problem nobody wants to tackle head- on in this debate is that none of the others can do this change without raising prices – and US consumers largely are intolerant of that. Apple can and will absorb these costs, but the others don’t have the ability to do that. So are you willing to pay Apple prices for your HP?
Ben Franklin
I sense of lot of IP addresses in Cupertino.
jheartney
@different-church-lady: Ah, I see you beat me to it on the “shorter” angle.
Comrade Carter
Yeah, it’s all about Apple.
Even if (as is true) that Apple is one of the best in China.
It is, nonetheless, about Apple.
And if I was Apple, I’d be thinking about my support for the Democratic Party, which is near (or at) 100%.
The it would be even more all about Apple.
jheartney
@Brachiator: I wouldn’t propose protecting dying industries. I’m proposing we think about either growing the economy enough, in sustainable ways, that we can employ people aside form programmers and/or finance shysters, or that we come to terms with the fact that the new economy won’t provide nonspecialist jobs, and think of something to do about non-specialists that isn’t just feeding them to the sharks.
Martin
@pixelpusher: Not just for the environment, but also for workers. By cutting out all of those physical costs it has allowed app prices to drop and volumes to increase. Instead of consumers sending their entire $100 to Microsoft, etc. they now send $100 to 100 different developers. 15 billion or so paid apps in 4 years just through Apples store. Billions more through Android. Microsoft never got that kind of volume because it had to be physically stamped, boxed, warehoused, distributed, and resold. There’s a lot of waste in that system, and I’d rather see the money go to the folks actually building the software than the truck drivers who add no value to the product.
Srv
For those interested in reality, American jobs, and China, I suggest reading Rick Bookstaber. He will hook you up on how fucked your dead-trees businesses are.
Brachiator
@Martin:
I am pretty sure that the people who worked in the warehouse and the truck drivers saw value in the jobs they had. Obviously, we are not going back to old ways of doing things, but I don’t see how narrowing economic activity to a transaction between a software developer and Apple or Microsoft (who take a cut for doing nothing but making the software available) is a huge improvement.
Peter J
@Martin:
So, I guess you’re not a fan of Apple’s physical stores and their website then? Since instead of sending a number of retailers (and Apple) money, consumers are now sending Apple all the money.
different-church-lady
I think 101 and 102 do quite a nice job of pointing out the hazards of putting too much faith in amature theoretical economic models.
Peter J
@Martin:
And actually, people bought software before the Apple’s app store. And developers made billions from it. What’s changed is that Microsoft never got 30% from all sales made on Windows machines, nor did they dictate what you would be allowed to install.
Not sure if I would call what Apple did progress…
Martin
@Brachiator:
How did the truck driver make my software better? Why should I want to put some of the cost of the product into his pocket if it can be eliminated? Wouldn’t I prefer to take that money and give it to another developer for another product that helps me?
All non-value-add jobs are eventually automated/eliminated. ALL of them. The truck drivers and the warehouse workers are useful and necessary only in that they physically move something from one place to another so that I don’t have to. But eliminate that need, or find a way to automate it, and those jobs will go away. That’s how it’s always worked. We no longer have switchboard operators or elevator operators and nobody should cry because those jobs vanished.
In place of the truck drivers several hundred thousand developer jobs were created just in the last few years, and we have more and better products to buy now as a result. The demand has always been there, but the money went into the wrong supply – instead of programming it went into shipping and useless retail and that money delivered nothing. Now it delivers something. Is it easy for those truck drivers to become software programmers? Well, no. But long-term, they’re going to have to. We narrowed the economic activity, but we also broadened the demand as a result, and that’s been a net driver of jobs – and much better jobs, I would add.
Comrade Mary
@trollhattan:
Nope. Daisey flat out LIED about his translator so they couldn’t track her down. That wasn’t tacit: that was an active choice to lie and cover his tracks.
TAL got its start doing storytelling/memoirs. I don’t care at all if David Sedaris plays fast and loose with the truth in the service of a good story, because when I read or listen to him, I want to know about him or his stories. I don’t care if actual people are re-imagined or combined into a single composite character by Sedaris. It’s not the focus.
But when Daisey present a play about an important issue like this, when he says this is based on his own research in China, when he sits up on stage and does nothing but read from a script, I expect what he says to be substantially true. Facts come first, not Daisey’s artistic decisions. And I say this as someone who has been a fan of Daisey’s for years. Once he starts styling himself as a social crusader instead of a playwright, he has different standards to live up to.
The TAL transcript is here. Read through it. Count how often Daisey transposes real events (like hexane poisoning that happened at one plant many kilometers distant from the plant he actually visited: see pages 6-8), assumes facts without verification (claiming that he ran across a small group of underage workers at his plant, leading to the assumption that underage workers is a large problem when it may actually be something that Apple and Foxconn are actively trying to fight: see pages 5-6), and just plain makes shit up, like security guards with guns (page 3).
I’m not excusing Foxconn and Apple. There are real ongoing abuses there. They seem to be taking some steps toward fixing some (pay raises), but I’m not going to play cheerleader for them.
The cost of making an iPhone in China versus the US: the last part of the transcript touches on this.
Point One: Apple keeps margins very, very thin for Chinese suppliers, which is an obvious motivation for Foxconn and others to cut corners and abuse their workers wherever possible. They could be a force for good, and while I appreciate that they do audits on the factories, their business practices seem to have set up conditions in which workers always get the short end of the stick.
Point Two: It’s not just the labour costs that make a difference in the price. The supply chain counts, too.
So putting this all together, it would be possible for Apple to pay its suppliers more to give them bigger margins, while requiring a certain standard for treating their workers. And/or some or all construction could be done Stateside, but labour costs AND the supply chain would come into play, and that would come up to substantially more than $10 per phone. And if the iPhone cost $100 or $200 more than it already does, how many people would buy it?
Apple could take smaller profits, and/or they could use up some of their reserves of cash, to keep prices level or to keep the price increase to an amount the market would accept. I’m just not very optimistic that they will ever do so.
different-church-lady
@Martin:
Well, la de freakin’ dah. But hey, as long as your software is “better” then I suppose the mechanism under which they can make the switch can remain undiscovered, right?
Martin
@Peter J: To the contrary. Apple provides value through their retail stores, which is why they have the strongest retail operations out there. You can use the products, ask questions and get good answers and so on. Their employees have value, unlike a place like Costco where the employees only exist to stock shelves and check you out. If Costco could eliminate those job function, they would in a second and not suffer from it. Take out the Apple retail employees and the retail stores would collapse.
Martin
@Peter J: Wait, you think that Microsoft paid out 70% of gross revenues to workers? Seriously? The billions that users paid, only half even made it to Microsoft. A big chunk of it went for CompUSA rent. A lot went into fuel. Plastic wrap. Cardboard. CD costs. 45% of what Microsoft received was profit. Maybe 15% of what consumers paid went to programmer wages.
Today a single person can easily make a living as an indie programmer. That was relatively hard to do just 4 years ago.
Brachiator
@Martin: @Martin:
Wow. Several hundred thousand developers. And millions of jobs being shed. What’s the point of more and better products if there is no one to buy them?
And it is inaccurate to say that switchboard operators added no value. It is more accurate to say that automation resulted in the value that these workers provided being built into the telephone system. But there was still a human cost.
And it is just laughable to suggest that in the future, truck drivers (and what, all of us) should look to become software programmers. And in addition, programmers won’t continue to be outsourced?
Martin
@different-church-lady: I don’t understand your objection. Economies change. Often for the better. You think we should still have 75% of the population picking cotton and growing beets? I don’t. I’m not suggesting we not have job retraining and expanded education opportunities – we don’t have enough of those. But I don’t see the merit in demanding that outmoded, inefficient, and frankly useless and damaging industries be defended over better ones. And half of those jobs being replaced were in China, where the CDs were stamped and packaged, and replaced with developer jobs that are predominantly in California and New York. So your actually making an argument in favor of shitty Chinese jobs over good, well paying US jobs in a thread complaining about how shitty the Chinese jobs are.
different-church-lady
FREBERG: You didn’t let me get to the sheep.
PRODUCER: I really don’t think that matters.
FREBERG: Well, it matters to the sheep.
Yeah dude, we get it: if you’re not part of the high tech elite then you’re deadwood. We get it. The world’s gonna be so much better when we’re a work-skill monoculutre. All we have to do is figure out a way to take all that annoying variation out of the human species and we can have utopia.
Gromit
@Martin:
Actually, Apple is starting to automate some of the functions of retail employees. You can now check yourself out using the Apple Store app when buying accessories and such. The employees aren’t going anywhere any time soon, though.
Chet
Yawn. Good ol’ American deep-sea fishing kills 400 people every year per every 100,000 so employed, but you’re not going to go see Mike Daisey’s new one-man-show “The Agony and Ecstasy of Mrs. Paul.” Hell, you’re not even going to put down that lobster roll.
All economies develop exactly like this – backbreaking, immiserating agricultural employment (the reason why the Chinese life expectancy is so short), to “sweatshop” manufacturing viewed as manifestly better and healthier by the workers, and finally the worker-protecting environments we’ve come to expect. China is getting there. I don’t see why people should have a hard-on about the fact that Apple hasn’t been able to force a nation of a billion people to completely skip a stage in economic development. There continue to be much more dangerous jobs than working in a Foxconn factory, and the workers themselves overwhelmingly seem to think so. Use your iPad with a clear conscience and trust that the same development that happened in the US will happen in China.
Gromit
@different-church-lady:
Aren’t those truck drivers with their big diesel rigs taking precious jobs away from mule-train drivers? Seriously, what alternative are you suggesting?
Martin
@Comrade Mary: Apple could pay more, and likely will pay more. But Apple won’t do it and allow HP to keep paying the lower wages and undercut them in the market. Thats why putting all the focus on Apple isn’t helpful – because Apple can’t be asked to effectively subsidize their competitors on this issue. And saying that Apple should do more because they have the margin headroom is disingenuous. The only reason HP doesn’t have the margin headroom is because HPs consumers won’t similarly pay up. If Foxconns margins are to be taken as a reflection of Apple’s greed, then everyone but Apple’s margins have to taken as reflection of our greed.
Apple has always protected their margins because they know these days eventually come. They know that wages need to rise. Further, they know that eventually (possibly soon) these assembly jobs will be eliminated through a massive investment in robotics, as so many similar jobs have done – and Apple is prepared for that.
Apple won’t raise prices to do this. It fundamentally goes against how the run the company. Products are priced on what the are worth to consumers, not what they cost to make. Unless the cost rises to make them unprofitable, they won’t change it. So, adding pressure to Apple is good, and necessary, but the real place the pressure needs to be applied to make the situation change in a big way is on everyone else. Truth is that Apple would love to see wages go up, because they know that makes their products more competitive as everyone else will need to start raising prices. That $199 Kindle costs $200 to make. If their labor goes up ( Foxconn makes all of the Kindles, so same labor as Apple) then they’re going to have to raise prices. Apple won’t. So really, the pressure is in the wrong place.
And Apple will be the first to automate. Will the issue go away? No. But then who do you pressure? Amazon? Nintendo? HP? Sony? Why not start to do that now?
different-church-lady
@Gromit: I ain’t suggesting any alternative. I’m suggesting that viewing non-high-tech jobs as useless (a) is cavalier and (b) creates negative side effects which have no solutions as long as we view the people who do those jobs as either useless or pawns on an economic playing board.
I mean, ain’t it great to smugly say, “Wow, look at how great our high tech world is!” while blowing off the reality of the low tech side of it. I mean, why do you actually have to find these displaced workers anything to do when you can just kinda… marvel at how wonderful it is that we don’t need them anymore.
Martin
@Brachiator: Wait – are you suggesting that the death of shrink wrap software has caused the loss of millions of jobs? Or is Apple now responsible for replacing the 2 million construction jobs lost since 2008 now?
Do I think that truck drivers will individually become programmers? No. Do I think that as they retire and change into more suitable jobs that more people entering he workforce will be able to get hired as programmers? Certainly.
And workers don’t outsource themselves. Democratizing the software industry will keep more jobs in the US. Without question. And we’ve already seen that.s
immovableobject
Among all the companies using contract manufacturing in China, Apple is apparently doing the most to actually improve worker conditions. If people really cared about the plight of the Chinese worker, they’d be calling on Apple’s competitors to surpass (or at least match) Apple’s efforts.
jheartney
@Gromit: This is a point I was trying to get at earlier. As microchips and programming get better, they automate more and more of what used to be done by humans. Eventually they will likely be good enough that a substantial subset of humans won’t be in a position to compete with them for viable employment (only a minority have the cognitive ability to be programmers, and even then, we’re not going to ever need 80%, or 50%, or even 20% of the population doing the kind of high-level work that is beyond microchips and programming).
Once that happens, what to do with all these now-surplus folks? Shoot them?
The old argument here was always that new types of employment would take up the slack (manufacturing replaced agriculture, services replaced manufacturing, etc.). My sense of it is that IT may make this no longer happen. Even many those chinese sweatshop workers could theoretically be replaced with an automated system, properly designed. What then?
Peter J
@Martin:
It’s good to know what is enough for you to justify Apple bringing home 100%. Being able to use the products. Ask questions. Get good answers. Not very much…
@Martin:
Developers developing for Windows didn’t have to share their profit with Microsoft.
@Martin:
The programmers developing ios are getting 70% of gross revenues? That’s news too me.
For some reason you’re mixing those developing the OS with those developing programs for the OS.
And for those that made money shipping Microsoft products, selling PC systems, etc. I’d call that revenue sharing, and a good thing. Quite different from the Apple model.
If I recall correctly the median ios developer income is quite small. And there were developers made a living before ios too. ios didn’t transform things quite as much as you seem to think.
Martin
@Gromit: Yeah, but Apple doesn’t want to do that. They’re doing out on necessity – most of their stores now regularly run into fire code congestion issues. They’re forced to look at throughput solutions (getting customers out fast so another can get in) as a bridge until they can get larger stores built. Its a weird problem to have. But getting rid of registers, doing reservation systems, etc are all part of the same effort.
different-church-lady
@Gromit: Additionally:
I understand that this was snark in the service of a point, and I do take that point. But when examined further, it also helps clarify the point I was driving at.
Yes, mechanization drove out more “biological” businesses (for lack of a better description). And people who had invested in mules got hit. But in the end the people who drove mules can make the transition to diesel trucks more easily because you’re not changing the nature of the work so much as you’re swapping one tool for another. In the end both jobs are still about getting objects from one place to another safely. A person with the aptitude for animal powered delivery is much more likely to also have the aptitude for fossil-fuel powered delivery than they are to also have the aptitude for code crunching.
But, you know, code crunching is the future™, so dammit Mr. Mule Team, either you come up with aptitude or we’re just gonna end-life you as an economic product.
different-church-lady
@jheartney:
Soylent Green: it ain’t root vegetables.
slag
@Wag: What Fallows said. Just frustrating. Mike Daisey may not be the issue, but he is the asshole.
Martin
@jheartney:
Well, a century and a half ago, 75% of US workers were in agriculture. Today it’s 5%. Did we shoot them? Or did we open up new industries?
Further, we narrowed the labor pool and increased it’s earning power. Rather than working from the age of 12 to 80, 60 hours per week, we narrowed it to 16-70, 40 hours and raised wages. We narrowed it further to effectively 22-62, and raised wages more. The better the jobs we create, the more education needed, displacing worker productivity. Wages go up, people retire earlier.
I’ve said it repeatedly – there’s nothing magical about the 40hr/wk number. If we’re getting so productive that those hours can be shifted to automation, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t reduce to a 35 hr week with an 8% wage increase. Europe gave everyone a month’s vacation to address this problem. I wouldn’t mind that either.
Dealing with surplus labor has never been a terribly difficult problem to solve. Hell, just raising wages such that single income households could become reasonable again would go a long way.
Martin
@Peter J:
Never suggested that. You said: “What’s changed is that Microsoft never got 30% from all sales made on Windows machines,”
But developers never got 70% of what users paid. CompUSA kept a lot of that. So did the trucking industry. And quite a lot went into piracy, which is a much smaller problem with Apple’s model – not because they lock you in, but because they made it easier to be a consumer than a pirate. I just bought a piece of software a few hours ago for my Mac and the purchase took 2 hours. The ‘type in credit card stuff’ was 10 minutes and then I had to wait for an email to arrive. It would have been vastly easier to just pirate it. There’s no way you can steal software faster than you can buy it on the iPad. But developers never got 70% of what users wanted to pay because it was such a fucking hassle that users didn’t buy software as freely as they do under these new models.
So a lot more than 30% of what developers should have gotten under the pre-Apple model was lost. Lost to retailers. Lost to distribution. Packaging. Handling. Warehousing. Lawyers to negotiate distribution contracts. All of that overhead. Plus the pretty huge issue of shrinkage – all of that software that should have been bought but wasn’t. I don’t think you’re going to find many developers that are going to side with you, mainly because you’re inserting this freetard argument in there, which is irrelevant and mostly just you being pissed: “nor did they dictate what you would be allowed to install.” Apple didn’t dictate that you buy their product, either, nor has Apple undermined the industry in any way. You want the freedom to install your shrink-wrap app on your phone, go buy Android and deal with their retail setup and quit whining. But my parents LOVE Apple’s system because they got the freedom to install software without me having to look over their shoulder, or the risk of getting a virus, or breaking their system or whatever. You seem to think that only your freedom is valuable.
And if the shrink-wrap system was better, it wouldn’t be dying – not just with Apple, but with everyone else as well. Google is going the same way, the consoles increasingly are, Windows is as well. Get over it.
different-church-lady
@Martin:
Oh you’re just precious.
Peter J
@Martin:
But that wasn’t my point. My point still is that Microsoft never demanded 30% from sales of software used on their OS.
Nice anecdote. But then that is all it is.
Instant purchases is yet another thing that Apple didn’t bring us with ios.
Ouch. Did I hurt you?
Bruce S
“Their employees have value, unlike a place like Costco where the employees only exist to stock shelves and check you out. If Costco could eliminate those job function, they would in a second and not suffer from it. Take out the Apple retail employees and the retail stores would collapse.”
All retail stores would collapse if you took out the retail employees. The notion that a worker in Costco doesn’t add value to the enterprise because he’s not self-satisfied like so many Apple Store employees is crap. I’ve had some pretty mediocre-at-best experiences at Apple Stores with employees who are, for all intents and purposes, brainwashed into the geek culture. At least Costco employees have a gram of humility. Someone actually stocks the shelves at Apple stores. Also my guess is that the guys who deliver product don’t have college degrees. The elitism reeks.
Peter J
@Gromit:
The reason for that is the Apple store.
While Apple sells them, mostly, through their own stores, the competition has to share their revenue with others.
Which some would argue is a good thing.
Martin
@Peter J:
You think the software you buy in the Microsoft store at the mall is an act of charity on the part of MS? Apple is the retailer. They take a portion of the sales to do all of the retail bits.
And before Apple opened the store, they provided developers a means to put software on iOS and run their own retail efforts. Developers didn’t use it and still largely don’t use it – and they demanded the store. You can use almost any retail channel to buy music and put it on your iPod, but Apple remains the largest music retailer and continues to grow. That’s not because of exclusivity, but because they made it easier to buy music than anyone else. Hell, they’re not even cheapest, and yet they’re still growing.
Martin
@Bruce S:
Self-satisfied? Who said that. Costco employees, at least in retail worker surveys, seem to be very satisfied. And I think Costco does a pretty good job as a retailer. But the Costco employee doesn’t do anything to help me understand how to use my 10 pound sack of flower or how to choose what bottle of wine to buy.
Costco employees are non-value add. They don’t interact with the customers except to help you pay. If they could automate that function, they would. If they automate filling the shelves, they would. Your experience as a customer wouldn’t change. What you emerge from the store with wouldn’t be any different than if you want to an identical store with employees in it. Amazon proves the market for that. What was the last time anyone talked to an Amazon employee in the role of a consumer? I never have, and I’ve bought hundreds of things from them.
If you want an Apple doodad, the most expensive place you can buy it is at the Apple store. And yet they get a million customers per day. Their sales (as a percentage of total sales) through their stores increase each year. Why do people buy there if they know going in that it will cost more? They do because they identify some other value in going there. If you want to test drive the new iPad, nobody else is likely to have one out where you can play with it, and have it in working order. That’s not Apple’s fault. Target could do that. Best Buy could. But they don’t. And if you have questions, you’re going to get better answers from Apple than almost anywhere else. Yeah, I’ve gotten some pretty mediocre answers too. I’m stunned if I can get a mediocre answer at Target. Or at Lowes. Or at Costco. The staff there are so clueless about what they sell and about what their products might be used for that everyone treats them as glorified warehouses – and for Costco, that’s what they are by design.
That’s a measure of you, not them. I’m sorry, but when I’m buying a computer and want to solve a particular problem, I want someone smart enough to help me. And I’m willing to pay for that. Apparently so are a few hundred million other people. You’ve tagged a solid ⅓ of the population as both brainwashed and elitist. I used to shop at Home Depot, back when they hired folks that knew what the fuck they were doing. They weren’t always cheapest, but if I wasn’t sure what parts I needed to fix the sink, they did. Always. And they’d take the time to show me. And I was happy to pay extra for that. And then they chased price with Lowes, and their staff stopped knowing what they were doing because they were getting paid $8 instead of $20/hr and the ex-contractors found work elsewhere, I stopped expecting answers to questions. I stopped being willing to pay extra. They turned into yet another warehouse, no different to me than Amazon.
It’s kind of astonishing that the answer to why Apple is the most valuable corporation in the world is reduced to magical thinking. And people think that’s a reasonable explanation. It’s not. It’s no more reasonable than thinking that Katrina was New Orleans punishment for having too many gays. Maybe you should consider that Apple is doing well because Apple is doing something right that other companies aren’t. And instead of decrying that as ‘elitist’, maybe you should consider that it’s something the public values and is happy is finally being delivered.
Peter J
@Martin:
Do Microsoft force people to buy the software the use on Microsoft’s OS from the Microsoft store at the mall?
No.
Does Apple force people to buy the software they want to install on ios through them?
Yes.
You can look forward to Apple doing the same with os x and the mac app store.
It’s about exclusivity.
If a company wants to sell music from an ios app, then they have to pay 30% to Apple, even if Apple does nothing. They can’t link from the app to a site where people can buy music if they aren’t paying 30% to Apple.
Here’s the thing. Microsoft don’t care if people install itunes on windows and then buy music from Apple through it. And they aren’t trying to fleece users who do so.
Apple on the other hand, don’t allow people to buy directly from the Kindle app unless Amazon pays the 30%. For doing nothing.
Martin
@Peter J:
That’s the stupidest fucking explanation I’ve ever heard. Dell historically NEVER sold through any other outlet than their own. And at the very moment that Apple was opening their stores, Gateway was closing theirs because they were unprofitable. If running your own retail was the key distinction, Gateway and Dell should be killing everyone.
Gwangung
@Peter J: You may care about this.
Many other people don’t, as long as the product works well.
Ignoring that second factor is a mistake when considering things Apple,
Martin
@Peter J:
No, they don’t. The Apple store didn’t open until a year after the iPhone came out. Apple provided a different mechanism to put software on the phone, one that developers largely rejected. Apple had (and has) no control over that mechanism. They could run any store they wanted. Generally speaking it didn’t fly. But it’s still there and still works and apps are still distributed that way.
It wasn’t until Apple went with the current model that it took off. Google is finding that the diversity of stores isn’t working either. Microsoft has decided that they need to go the same route as well. The problems that consumers had are threefold:
1) Discovery. When apps are spread out over multiple stores, you don’t know where you need to shop. Retail stores have the same problem, which is why Amazon is popular. If I need a tool, how many stores will I need to visit before I find the make/model I want? With Amazon I don’t have that problem.
2) Ease of purchase. When things are cheap, we expect to be able to buy them quickly and easily. That’s a hard problem to solve, but Apple has solved it. And they licensed at least some of that from Amazon.
3) Security. Software distribution has always been a problem. It’s hard to install for regular people. People lose their CDs. The CDs scratch and then won’t work. And online distribution risks viruses and whatnot – which you might say aren’t a real problem, but most people still believe are a real problem. So easing the barrier to purchase required building trust – and Apple did that.
None of these are problems that others couldn’t have solved, yet nobody did. If you’re pissed about the result, ask why the entire industry was derelict at solving the problems consumers had. It’s not like consumers haven’t been screaming about this for ages. But nobody cared. Nobody did anything. Apple did, and consumers flocked to them. Gee, how evil of them.
Peter J
@Martin:
Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?
Apple already had a huge margin, something that neither Gateway or Dell had. The Apple stores meant that they can keep even more of it, add to that retailers that sell ipads and iphones only get 3% off what Apple sell them for.
Read this. There’s a follow-up too at the bottom.
It would be great if you would be able to keep your language a bit more civilized.
Bruce S
Martin – sorry, but I was referring to your attitude toward Costco employees not “adding value” to your experience because they merely put things where you can find them. That’s the Costco business model. Of course the employees add value or they wouldn’t be paid for their labor. Your privileging the Apple employees “value” because you identify with what they do is kind of creepy IMHO. Frankly, I mostly go to the Apple store because it’s nearby, it’s small and nice, and because there’s no discount at Best Buy on Apple products worth speaking of. If there was, you can bet your ass I’d buy an iPad at Best Buy. I don’t really need to converse with anyone to buy most of the stuff I buy at Apple stores. Maybe some folks do. I ask concrete questions based on specific needs and have found that, yes, at Best Buy one can find employees who can answer direct questions about differing products. Also who can tell you the difference among competing products, which is an issue Apple employees don’t have to deal with, perhaps to the shopper’s detriment in many cases. Apple Stores are boutiques. It’s really that simple. The point, however, was that I don’t get this notion of “value added” as being solely based on the special qualities of Apple employees. In fact, Apple Stores are able to provide “customer experience added” at their stores because they rigidly control their products’ pricing. My guess is, however, that if they actually sold most of their products in that environment, they would raise their prices. I see Apple Stores as evidence of Apple’s willingness to spend capital on marketing, not that they truly want to deal with the bulk of their customers in a retail environment. I don’t know the percentage of Apple products sold through their stores, but my guess is that it’s small.
Peter J
@Martin:
As I recall it there was no way to install apps in the first version of ios. Other than jailbreaking. What is this different mechanism you’re talking about?
And wasn’t there something in the Jobs biography about him not wanting to allow people to install software?
Discovery? How many apps are there in the app store? How do people discover your app when it’s one of thousands that do the same thing?
Ease of Purchase? You do know that you could buy software online before the app store? And it wasn’t that much harder.
Security? There are still apps that are found out to steal information. Apps that doesn’t follow the guidelines. And apps that are infringing other apps for that matter.
Peter J
@Bruce S:
Considering that Best Buy is only getting 3% off, I doubt you’ll ever see any discounts.
Martin
@Peter J:
In 2001 when they opened the stores? Apple was slightly better than break-even in 2001. The stores were break-even thorough 2005.
The reason iPad competitors has nothing to do with margins. Apple’s ASP for iPads is higher than any competitors price. People are paying extra for iPads because their get more for the money. The Playbook couldn’t even do email until a few months ago. There are almost no tablet Android apps out there – in part because of the diversity of form factors, and in part because it’s a pain in the ass to support the platform. Here’s one developer.
Here’s another:
And even if it was a retail issue, why is that Apple’s fault? When Apple opened their retail stores, everyone was bigger and more profitable than them. There’s no reason why Samsung, Sony (who have recently), Microsoft (who have recently), HP, Dell, ASUS, RIMM, and so on can’t do the same thing. Seriously, opening and running a store is so fucking straightforward that people have been doing it for thousands of years. So if the problem is that Samsung has to sell through Best Buy, then stop. Open Samsung stores. Problem solved! Are they doing that? Nope. Either that’s not the problem, or Samsung is really fucking stupid. I don’t think Samsung is stupid, so I don’t think that’s the problem.
Brachiator
@Martin:
No. I clearly said that the thousands of new programming jobs is far outweighed by the loss of millions of jobs resulting from the overall onslaught of technological change. And I certainly never wrote anything that holds Apple responsible for this. To the contrary, I defended Apple here. Are you on their PR team?
We have not seen that at all. I know that in my own industry (tax and finance) outsourcing pushed productive workers out of the industry in their prime. And yeah, there are new jobs in the US, but without actual US workers (born or naturalized citizens).
Some Loser
I don’t even like Apple or their products, but I don’t understand people who are so eager to shit on the company.
Martin
@Bruce S:
They add value to Costco, not to me. That means that if Costco can find a way to replace that value, eventually they will.
Apple’s employees (and employees at many other places as well) add value to the consumer. Eliminating them is counterproductive, because part of the reason I go to the store is to talk to them – not unlike part of the reason I go to a sit-down restaurant is to not have to bus my own table, and why I shop at somewhat more upscale clothing stores is to actually have a tailor alter my clothes or help me pick something out. Home Depots employees used to add value to me, but they don’t now, and my attitude toward shopping there changed as a result.
If the employee doesn’t add value to the person creating the demand, they’re going to get replaced eventually. Supply side NEVER works, not even in this case.
Peter J
@Martin:
Read the link, it’s not about 2001 or 2005. It’s about 2011, and it’s about ipads and iphones.
Nice anecdotes. I could easily find two ios delevopers arguing that Apple are really, really bad. But that would be nothing more than two more anecdotes. And they would prove nothing.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
When have I argued that it’s Apple’s fault?
Jason
I think I may have posted this in another thread, but here’s a recent Dan Gillmor piece in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/mar/02/apples-over-compliant-media
…about just that.
jheartney
@Martin:
Too bad the actual labor market out here in the real world are going in the opposite direction from that. Workers are often asked to work longer hours for less pay, and if they won’t do it, their jobs are outsourced to countries where labor conditions are worse.
I suspect you’ll have a hard time convincing employers to voluntarily reduce hours. Each unit of the company’s headcount has fixed costs (insurance, administrative etc.) Reducing hours and increasing headcount will cost more per man hour, even above and beyond the straight compensation increases you are contemplating.
B schools have long taught that “increasing shareholder value” is the be-all end-all of management’s responsibility. In practice this means screwing both the customers and the labor force as much as possible. So that’s what they’ve been doing.
PanurgeATL
@Amir Khalid:
China, having the benefit of other nations’ experience, shouldn’t have to recapitulate the massive fucking over that working people got during the original Industrial Revolution.
Need I mention that Marxism purported to be a response to that very fucking over? Not only is China repeating the mistakes of early capitalism and Marxism, they’re doing it in reverse.
PanurgeATL
@jheartney:
That’s why national health care is so important. Why people don’t understand its benefits for business continues to perplex me.
The work week wasn’t reduced by voluntary action by businesses; it was reduced by law. When the GOP argues that the government, in doing so, would somehow be exerting more power than before (as they will, should it come to that), there’ll be no better example of whose interests they’re really standing up for.
PatrickG
@Martin:
How does Costco possibly add value to itself by hiring people without in any way benefiting its customers? Should they just have a giant truck-dumping spot where products come in, and then customers root through the pile for what they want?
Do you really think that Costco’s model of hiring people to put stuff on a shelf so that you can find it easily and have a pleasant shopping experience is materially different than Apple hiring people to provide you information? Both add value. Both would be eliminated in an instant if the companies could do it and keep customers.
I get that you like Apple people smiling at you, but value isn’t strictly measured by whether or not you feel emotionally validated every time you go shopping.
Bruce S
Incidentally, Apple recently told professional video editors, who helped keep the brand alive during the worst of its times, to go fuck themselves, thank you very much, by introducing a radically inferior product as an alleged “upgrade.” Sad to see. Chinese children aside, that was a big factor in my recognizing Apple to be just another shit corporation that has more than a little “Goldman Sachs” in it’s heart and mind.
Gromit
@Bruce S:
You know who else left multicam and XML support out of the long-awaited overhaul of his popular NLE? Hitler, that’s who.
Bruce S
It’s worse than that. The entire thing is a mess. And a predictable mess. Or editors and production companies wouldn’t be fleeing FCP in droves. “long-awaited overhaul?” No “overhaul” like this is “long-awaited” by anyone who actually works with this stuff for a living. Upgrade isn’t the same as “overhaul.” Avid went from 32 to 64 bit without alienating users. Everyone I know – who went FCP because of the cost factor and Avid’s arrogance as a would-be monopoly back in the day – is going back. FCP was never as good – just cheaper.