Korean Job Discussion Forums

[cj1976]

..and nobody has mentioned the slave-labour employed by that knob Steve Jobs. 13 suicides in Foxconn factories so far. Nice going, Stevie.

[Gnawbert]

13 out of 400'000 ain't bad. It's less than the U.S. Rate and far less than S Korea.

Foxconn also builds Intel motherboards and boards for Sony and Microsoft, all of whom are probably much larger clients than Apple.

[oskinny1]

They also make products for Nintendo, Dell, Sony, Motorola, HP and many others. China's suicide rate per 100,000 people is around 28 (link), though is is data from 10 years ago. Now consider that just one Foxconn plant in China has 420,000 workers, 13 is below average.

Are these suicides at just the one plant or is it a combination of all the plants? In that case it's only 13 out of 800,000. I bet the suicide rate for foreign teachers in Korea is higher!

edit: damn! Too slow!

[Senior]

Don't be ridiculous. It's not slave labor. They are paid at the market wage, and are there by choice.

[eamo]

I think the salient point here is that these Foxconn workers seem to be jumping off buildings because of their work conditions.

People in the general population kill themselves for a myriad of reasons. In this case it would seem they were all driven to it by pressures of work.

But, I suspect most of these cases were copycat suicides. Someone with more knowledge of suicidal urges might want to chip in with why copycat suicides happen, but they do.


Anyway, now that Apple has passed Microsoft in revenue, and that strange case of the guy who got hold of the new iphone being busted at his house like he was some kind of Al Qaeda operative, and the spate of suicides at Foxconn...........

It's adding up to an inevitable conclusion......Apple's 'cool' and 'alternative' image is diminishing.......listen to an Apple fan himself talk about it...

http://www.thedailyshow.com/collection/309080/the-daily-show-s-best-apple-moments/307953

Is Apple becoming what their marketing dept always tried us to convince they weren't? "The Man".


Meanwhile the Bill Gates Foundation carries on with giving away billions of dollars a year and really helping people around the world.......

[cj1976]

For years, Apple and the fanboys railed against Microsoft for being some kind of evil tyranny intent on taking over the world. It seems now that Apple are becoming their own worst nightmare.
At least Bill Gates seems like a fairly self-effacing man, unlike the smugness that is Steve Jobs.

[crescent]

[BringTheRain]

I just want a link to the Iphone 4 release date in Korea

[cj1976]

I think that if Apple had a different boss, I'd actually want to buy their products. There's something about Jobs that makes me want to slap him around the head.

[Bloopity Bloop]

[cj1976]

[darkjedidave]

[hanguker]

I try to avoid any thread that mentions "Apple, i-whatever" Almost always leads to a flame-war...but hey this is the intertubes:

I don't like the exclusivity and feigned eliteness of Apple. Steve Jobs embodies everything Apple is; douche consumerist snobbery. The products cater to weak individuals with little sense of identity and a line of credit.

I don't buy into the hype, but it's a well-made product. However, there are equally good, open-sourced, less-douche rivals.

[cj1976]

[buildbyflying]

branding sucks. all of it.
to the point where we shrug at suicides, justify it by saying its normal and going about our business.
If you use computers, and we all do, then we ahve to accept that there are going to be consequences. One of the world's most uninhabitable cities is where out tech junk goes to die.
My rule for computers is the same as for cars. Buy what you need, not what they want to sell you. And then use it for as long as you can. And considering Apple's are fairly well-made (comparatively) and that the company is held to a more liberal standard of corporate ethics I'd be more inclined to support them vs a random chinese brand.