On the other hand, the Wintek eventreferenced in the Telegraph article seems much more serious. I have not heard of anyone investigating Wintek, but I have not asked around or looked at local news either. Would have been cool to see the 2000 person protest (not far from where I live) too.

FYI, I really don’t have any reason to believe that Apple’s production is any more or less EHS compliant than any other company which manufactures…in low-cost Taiwanese-run contract manufacturers.

A couple of smaller points…

1. I really don’t believe that Foxconn is causing employees to commit suicide. I really think that would be unfair to say. Yet… Its not like they are going to do much for the mental health of their employees either.

2. About 8 years ago, when I lived in Silicon Valley, a headhunter called me and asked me if I was interested in working for Foxconn ( I had experience managing a sales channel selling connectors…and that time Foxconn was known as a low-end PC connector manufacturer). The recruiter emailed me and said “By-the-way, you are a white guy, right? No offence, but this is a sales position, and my client does not think a black man or woman can do this job”. I went on the interview just to ascertain who the client was. Point is… this company has a historical “values problem”.

3. Does not surprise me that Motorola’s vendors don’t use Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a fad. Its basically scientific method combined with some statistical analysis tools. Very helpful for large, complicated problems with lots of data points. Most companies would do better investing in leadership training, or improving their hiring practices than investing in Six Sigma training projects.

See the news that another Foxconn employee jumped out the window yesterday?

What amazes me about the entire brewhaha, and why I largely gave up posting, is that the journalists with traction are jsut happy with Apple’s sexed up glossy report and cannot even read the thing in a manner that one would consider sofisticated.

Me.. when I read the report, and read “our suppliers tell us we are the only ones who have inspected”, I nearly laughed. Everything was set up from the start to favor their own reports. they relied on suppliers to provide the data, and thrid party contractors, rather than their own people and common sense.. and not that that is necessarily a crime, but when you have had as many social/ environmental failures as they have had with Foxconn and Wintech, they certainly have shown little real interest in fixing the problems.

They are just checking boxes for the sake of checking boxes.