[megaduck]

I know because I've seen it. My wife and I used to live in China, and we did traveling in both the high and the low places.

I can't speak to the particulars in Daisey's story (since I don't know which ones were made up), but the overall picture he painted sounded familiar. It's unquestionable that there are horrible working conditions in Chinese factories.

That's the tragedy here. There's millions of awful wonderful horrible stories you can tell about Chinese factories, and Mike Daisey is obscuring them by making up his own.

[gwright]

And how would you compare the work in the factories to being a Chinese farm worker, for example? Why are millions choosing factories over farms?

I think it is more important that there is a trend towards improved work environments and opportunities than bemoaning the fact that any particular work environment isn't as good as some cushy 1st-world white-collar job.

[pron]

Oh, no. Again with the "choosing". Since I read similar arguments quite often here on HN, I want to give a general, rather than particular answer. The short version is, people under duress can't really "choose" anything, even if it may seem to some free-market capitalists as if they do.

Let me paint a fictional picture for you. Say there's this island that's been ravaged by natural disasters and famine, and its entire population is starving. Rich people from a nearby country realize the islanders are in real distress and will be willing to do a lot for anyone who will save them from certain, horrible death, so they decide to use them as workers. So the rich people set up shop on the island, and the locals start working for them. Some of the rich people pay the workers (each of them producing, say $100's of product a day) with one loaf of bread, oh, and they also rape the women. Some pay their workers $2 a day, and they don't rape the women. Naturally the locals love the latter group, while that group of rich people from the mainland describe how they've saved the poor islanders from certain death and have even treated them rather humanely - well, at least compared to some others. They praise the wisdom of the market who let them gain from the islanders' cheap workforce, while letting the islanders survive.

Now, this (fictional) story is not about China. It's about anywhere an impoverished population, or anyone under extreme duress, lives. Speaking about choice under such conditions is preposterous. People will choose a quick death over slow mutilation. People will choose enslavement over annihilation. Believe me, there's no "free will" at work here, and whether or not the rich people from the mainland have done any good to the island, they certainly have nothing to brag about because they're exploiters who've saved a population merely to enslave it.

My story is extreme and I am not making any direct comparisons. I am saying that poor people are not "free" and they most certainly can't "choose", and if they do have a sliver of choice in their miserable lives (akin to the choice an innocent man might have for his last meal before execution), there is certainly nothing for anyone here to be proud about - certainly not about providing them with "alternatives" (like commuting the innocent's sentence to a life of forced labor).

[Produce]

As another anecdote for the lack of social mobility that the vast majority of people experience, how many people born into wealth has anyone witnessed transition into the working class? What's the ratio of that population to people born into wealth who stay wealthy? Just as it is extremely difficult to be born poor and end up rich, so it is the other way round. People often forget the ever looming hidden factors in these situations; morale and mind-set. From all of the research I've done on what makes people successful, it's all in the mind. From all the research I've done on what makes people change, it's all in the environment. In other words, mindset is intimately linked with the conditions one finds himself in which in turn dictate actions. A nuance of this is that mind-set also modifies environment which, in turn, affects mind-set again. It's a self-modifying system; the feedback loop that is your consciousness.

This is all hardly surprising - just as individual physical particles have inertia, so do we.

[abalone]

Except when cushy 1st world jobs move to high-repression countries with few worker rights, it's trending the other way.

[sans-serif]

Yep, because the job selection used to be so great in high-repression countries with few worker rights.

[batista]

And how would you compare the work in the factories to being a Chinese farm worker, for example? Why are millions choosing factories over farms?

I hear this argument a lot, and I consider it BS. What their original work was has no bearing on whether the conditions in the factories are good or bad. It just tells us that they are better than the alternative.

Working as a human slave in 16 hours shifts for money barely enough to make it day-to-day is still preferable than dying of hunger in a chinese village because of lack of resources. That doesn't mean that it is good in itself, or that it should not change.

Doubly so if the chinese farms and village economies are broken down by pollution, regulations and measures taken to ensure the farm population is driven to work in factories.

You know, like the Stalin-era forced industrialization of USSR (which is not unknown in the West too: that's how most workers where forced to leave previously livable farm work and seek work in industry, starting from the 18th century Manchester (UK) case to the colonies. In most cases it was not a contemplated choice of what is most beneficial to the individual, but a forced decision).

[VMG]

I'm somewhat interested in a curious technical aspect that Daisey put into the story.

He claimed that something to the effect of "nothing there was made by machine, everything tiny little chip is put there by hand" - which I found hard to believe then and even harder now.

To what extent if any is this true?

[DanBC]

If that is what he said; it's ridiculous.

Take a bare PCB, screen print it with solder paste (sometimes glue), run it through a pick and place machine (or a series of machines) then put it through a reflow oven. Once it comes out the oven you give it an auto test, and send it to have the rest of the components put on. (Some things will be damaged by heat, or can't be placed by machine. Examples include connectors on the "wrong side", but I guess massive machines have solved this problem.)

Note that in a huge factory you'd need few people for all the steps until the product finishes testing - most of it is automatic.

Even in tiny factory one person can keep a line running producing a lot of product by pushing a few buttons now and then, and moving boards from one machine to the next.

Having said that, a lot of stuff is done by hand; tiny coil winding and placement is one example.

EDIT: Here's a UK documentary where youth went to a factory in the Philippines. The tech episode is ep5. I don't know if it's available online anywhere.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s6103)

[jonhendry]

I don't know how you'd place some of the tiny surface-mount chips by hand, especially if the neighboring chips weren't already soldered down. Check out the new iPad teardown's photo of the logic board.

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ipad-3...

[nooop]

Small SMD are tricky to solder by hand, especially when nearby component are so close, but it is not impossible.

Now mounting a BGA without a largely automatic machine would be stupid for high volumes (and even for very small one, and maybe even for unitary prototypes), and in this case it would also be stupid to not pick and place all SMD.

Indeed even with very low wages, it would probably be stupid to mount a board manually except for very low volumes and very small boards. Mouting a small SMD can be done quickly with practice, but you are amazed when you count the amount there is (try on an iphone photo or on a random motherboard)

[jonny_eh]

How would he even know? He wasn't allowed into the factories.

[tptacek]

Your story would be a lot more valuable than Daisey's, which is worthless.

[bilbo0s]

His is worthless as well...

Unless you can fact check it.

[CamperBob]

My wife and I used to live in China, and we did traveling in both the high and the low places.

What was your impression of working conditions on the rural farms that are one of the most often-cited alternatives for many of the Foxconn workers?

[batista]

My impression is that you should not just a dire or unfair condition based on the existence of an even more dire or unfair condition.

If there is a famine in an area, and people are dying, is it OK to offer them food and water in exchange for slave labour? No pay, just food and water, and everybody that doesn't like can go and die of hunger. How does this deal sound?

A forced choice is not much of a choice.

Also check how the once substinent farm economy is affected by industrialization, pollution and the state push for ever more production.

[pron]

Hey batista. Good to see you here. Sorry I didn't read your comment before writing a very similar one somewhere else on this thread. Keep fighting the good fight!

[CamperBob]

If there is a famine in an area, and people are dying, is it OK to offer them food and water in exchange for slave labour? No pay, just food and water, and everybody that doesn't like can go and die of hunger. How does this deal sound?

My impression is that like most Westerners living today, you have no earthly idea what the term "slave labor" actually means, so we'll leave it at that. Peace.

[batista]

> My impression is that like most Westerners living today, you have no earthly idea what the term "slave labor" actually means, so we'll leave it at that. Peace.

And my impression is that I very much have an accurate idea, plus I hardly consider myself a "westerner", and not only because I'm some 15,000 miles away from the nearest Walmart. It's not like we grew up with Fox News (or NPR at best) -- we have a penchant for history in these here parts plus we have been living it in the live, frequently (including now).

OTOH, you might be unaware that beside the basic determinant (i.e no choice on the matter), slave labour has had a great variety of working conditions in the past. Some were even better that Foxconn by a lot (say, a black lady cooking and/or taking care of the kids in a huge Southern estate would often be treated quite like family -- or in Ancient Greece slaves were even able to amass their own fortune and run businesses, while remaining legally slaves).