Ethics of Electronics

I read an article on CNET written in September 2012 about the working conditions at Foxconn, the manufacturer of the iPhones for Apple, in their many factories in China. Foxconn has been under a lot of scrutiny over the treatment of their employees, with many reports and instances of harsh working conditions, employee suicides, riots, and even explosions at two of their plants. This raises the issue of the ethical stance of Apple in regards to one of its major suppliers, Foxconn, and if Apple should be taking more action to make sure the people who are making their iPhones and other products are being treated with the dignity and respect any human deserves.

It's pretty common knowledge that working conditions in China and other parts of Asia are not too great or held to high standards legally like in Western countries. Foxconn is no exception. In one of their factories in a highly populated region of China, they were employing over 190,000 workers in 2012 with projections of that number growing to over 300,000 workers in the future. It's pretty easy to imagine how the conditions would be with that many people working in a plant that covers approximately 2.2 square miles. Long shifts with forced, unpaid overtime involving meticulous and repetitive tasks is a norm for most employees. Once they finally get to rest, they retire to their dormitories provided by Foxconn, in which one employee reported she had a bunk bed in a room that was shared with seven other workers. At the time of the article the average employee was earning $244 a month, which barely covered rent for the dormitory and food that would be bought from Foxconn canteens. Managers are also ruthless to employees, harshly punishing employees for mistakes for all of their coworkers to witness. Also around the time of the article it had gotten so bad at the Taiyun factory that a violent riot involving 2,000 workers broke out. Some employees even went so far as to have the mindset that suicide was a better option for them. In response, Foxconn has installed nettings around some of the facilities to prevent any further attempts.

Source:http://www.wired.com/2010/11/thomas-lee-foxconn/

Although these conditions appear brutal, they may not be all that surprising to some. There are factories and firms with far worse conditions in Asia. The issue here is if Apple is doing enough to prevent these issues and help put the people who make their products into a better condition. Apple has stated that they are deeply concerned with the conditions and any accusations otherwise are false and offensive to them. This may be true, but these conditions are still occurring, and I assume Apple has the power to apply a lot of pressure to Foxconn to change these conditions, otherwise they could take their manufacturing contracts to a different firm. Foxconn also says that they are doing everything in their power to improve conditions for their workers, but it wouldn't be a very pressing issue to you to make things better for existing employees that are complaining when there are hundreds of thousands of people banging on your doors begging for work. 

While the conditions are bad, the employee pay for the work they do is the real downfall here. They go through all of these hardships to try to provide for their loved ones and at the end of the month have barely anything left over to send to family. One of the ways that Apple could make an impact into the issue would be to pay Foxconn more for their contracts to allow for higher employee wages. The article reported that in June of 2012, Apple had $117 billion IN CASH. I think they could afford to pay the people who make their shiny products a little more dough. Or, if profits are really the only thing they care about, they should take their contracts to other firms that are committed to treating their employees better. If people are choosing suicide over working in these conditions, there is something inherently wrong that needs to be changed, and the entity that is ultimately responsible in these situations is at the top of the tree. In this case, an Apple tree. 

Source: http://www.cnet.com/news/riots-suicides-and-other-issues-in-foxconns-iphone-factories/

New Manufacturing Process for Toyota

Source: http://wemakeitsafer.com/vehicle-recall/Toyota-Camry-Recall-7123626

Toyota Motor Corp., one of the forerunners for lean manufacturing and a innovator in industrial engineering techniques, has been the benchmark for automobile manufacturers for a long time. But now the best-selling car maker in the world is looking to Volkawagen AG for a crazy new idea: modular manufacturing.

Modular manufacturing is a manufacturing process that shares components across different products, slashing production costs greatly. A large portion of Toyota's cars in the future will share many identical or similar components, making it easier to produce a variety of vehicles in the same facility. The old way of automobile manufacturing used to be one facility, one line, one vehicle model, but under this new process of modular manufacturing it will allow Toyota to produce a variety of models with flexibility and ease all on one line in one facility.

It can easily be seen how this process could reduce manufacturing costs. With the smaller manufacturing lines that the modular process allows, initial plant investment costs are expected to significantly decrease, up to 40% according to Toyota. With the implementation of similar components across a variety of models, plants will be able to order parts in bulk and cut costs with a greater scale of economics. Consumers should be able to expect to see these savings on their end of the bargain as well.

Toyota has been seen as the gold standard for automobile manufacturing for the past few decades in terms of its production system. They've introduced many industrial and manufacturing engineering concepts, such as "continuous improvement" and "just-in-time inventory," which I actually discussed a little in my first blog post. Most importantly, Toyota has been know for their extremely high standard that they hold themselves to in quality control. One of the concerns that arises with this modular manufacturing process is that quality control could suffer significantly. When you have many models of cars that share similar components, you will find systemic issues that will show up across the board with your brand, which will raise the number of recalls you have to perform and will raise your quality control costs greatly. Also, with the greater variety and flexibility that will be present in the manufacturing lines, inspection and tests will be more difficult to conduct or will not be as effective as in the previous process. With a focused line that only produced one model all the time, Toyota knew exactly what to look for at want point in the process to make sure their quality was top notch; with the modular method, that's going to be more difficult.

This is an exciting path that the largest automobile manufacturing firm is choosing to take, for better or worse. Toyota has been the manufacturer to watch and learn from for a long time, so it will be interesting to see how they handle this transition. While the modular manufacturing process will cut costs greatly for the producer and consumer, it may increase the number of defects and recalls that will occur as well. We'll just see where this road takes us.



Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-unveils-revamped-manufacturing-process-1427371432