UN-PC - iPODs, Apple Macs and Sweatshops

UN-PC

The next time you ogle over an iPod, think about who's dainty little hands have put it together: Apple builds them in a mega factory in southern China which employs 200,000 people, crammed 100 at a time into dormitories, eating factory-provided food, for £25 a month. Most workers do over 60 hours a week, including hefty 'voluntary' overtime. The iPod plant, in Longhua, Shenzhen, is run
by Taiwanese company Hon Hai, the world's biggest contract manufacturer (annual turnover- $30 billion) working for companies
including Hewlett-Packard, Nokia and Sony.

Shenzhen has become a city of 12 million, mostly made up of peasant economic migrants. 90% work llegally, which means they don't get any health care, education or social security. Chinese workers are not represented by trade unions and factories clamp down on worker solidarity, sacking 'agitators'.

Workers can be on their feet amidst excessive noise for over 11 hours a day, handling dangerous chemicals, petroleum products, paints and solvents and breathing in metal dust and soldering smoke. They suffer from ailments ranging from rashes to breathing difficulties, bone and spine problems, eye, ear and hand damage.
There is no health & safety, little in the way of protective clothing, masks etc. and jobs are grindingly repetitive - in a keyboard factory a worker will put six keys into a keyboard 300 times an hour for over fifty hours a week. With the pressure to perform, workers are punished, humiliated or fined for production errors. If the workers don't go at it hard enough they are
threatened with globalisation's main weapon - the factory will simply move somewhere cheaper, leaving a trail of displaced and unemployed workers behind them.

ROTTEN APPLE

The production of the silicon chips used in all computery stuff is
extremely resource intensive. While silicon itself is very abundant, it is extracted in destructive sand mining around the world, and the refinement process requires heating to 1900 degrees, then treating with nitric, sulphuric and hydrofluoric
acids and arsenic. And it's thirsty work: a UN study found that the production of a complete computer and monitor takes 240kg of fossil fuels, 22kg of chemicals, 1,500 litres of water - and that's before packaging and long distance distribution.

China has been hit with the environmental costs of such large
scale manufacturing. In November 2005, a chemical accident in Jilin, north east China, saw 100 tonnes of benzene and nitrobenzene spill into the Songhua River, causing an 50 mile carcinogenic slick to flow down the river. Millions were left without drinking water for days with a deadly legacy for generations to come. Meanwhile BASF (the largest chemical company in the world and inheritors of Nazi collaborators IG Farben) has opened a $2.9 billion plant in Jiangsu to produce 600,000 tonnes of ethylene for plastic production annually as well as 1.1 million tonnes of other chemicals, in a country where acid rain falls on 30% of the country, and 70% of its lakes and rivers are polluted.

While the whole computer industry is a million miles from ethical sustainability, some firms are worse than others. Smug Apple Mac users may have to 'Think Different' after a recent Greenpeace report placed Apple amongst the worst anufacturers for their environmental policies, using hazardous substances abandoned by others and strictly keeping to the regulatory minimums.

Dell might have recently committed to a full 'take back' recycling
scheme, and offers to plant a guilt-cleansing tree for customers
paying an extra $2 (How PC!), but these petty gestures of mild corporate green one-up-man-ship do not compute. Hundreds of millions of computers have been chucked out over the last few years - the vast majority of which would have still been in working order - and around 90% of them have gone straight into
landfill. A not insignificant three billion consumer electronic units are expected to become obsolete by 2010.

What do you do about it?
If you have a computer - and even the anarcho-primitivists we know
do - then the best advice from SchNEWS is... Direct Inaction. Do
nothing. Don't upgrade, if it 'aint broke don't fix it and if it is - get it repaired. Windows XP will be updated for several years, and as we said in SchNEWS 560, free 'Open Source' software - headed by the operating system of Linux, Open Office, Firefox and others - offers free, direct equivalents for the
software Microsoft's monopoly rides on. And they are slowly gaining ascendency across the world, particularly in Latin America, Asia and some European countries. As Open Source improves and becomes more common, and M$ anti-piracy software increases, pretty soon it will be the only viable option.

So think about that when yer next sitting with your laptop in a groovy right-on wi-fi cafe sipping a fair trade mochaccino listening to mp3s...

* For advice about Linux see
www.schnews.org.uk/diyguide/howtolinux.htm

* If you are chucking an old PC, donate it to a charity instead of
landfilling it.
Aid Convoy regularly do humanitarian trips to the Ukraine taking computers for schools, as well as other aid to Kosovo and Albania, see www.aidconvoy.net
In Bristol a group is taking computers, digital cameras and other IT gear to Palestine for community use, see www.bristolcomputers4palestine.co.uk

* Read the CAFOD report on working conditions in electronics
factories at
www.cafod.org.uk/policy_and_analysis/public_policy_papers/private_sector

Check out Schnews at
www.schnews.org.u