It was something everyone knew all along, but the story about the
Foxconn workers was the wake up call for me.
It was just too much to ignore it.
I'm a geek and as such I LOVE gadgets but it's just impossible to ignore the conditions of the workers that actually make them. It's just plain slavery, to anyone's standards. Incredible long hours, barely legal wages, almost no rights for the employees...
Ok, so what could I do? Turns out, not a lot.
Shortly after
Sole tried to find out one single hardware manufacturer with factories anywhere outside the far East.... without luck. So even if you want to look for hardware produced in the "first world" where you somehow assume the conditions for the workers would be better, you won't find any.
And we are not talking about an industry where margins are really low.
In one side you have a bunch of
arseholes geeks queuing for days to buy an iPad (so surely money can't be much of an issue) and on the other side you have companies such Apple, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, etc. making shit loads of money, so why don't we spread the wealth a little bit, shall we?
Comes in the
Fair Trade Hardware manifesto:
* We are willing to pay some extra money as long as that money goes to the people working in the factories.
* Companies cannot excuse themselves arguing that they comply with local laws, because some of those laws are unjust.
* Companies should also help by reducing their margins and passing those savings on to their workforce.
C'mon. If you are working in the IT industry, you can't be doing that bad, money-wise. Even if we are not in the DotCom days any more, you still have Xboxes, PS3, iPads, iPods, digital cameras, laptops, flat HD TVs, smart phones... I'm sure you can pay a little extra. And same goes for the companies making them, they are big enough to be able to reduce their fat 6-figure bonuses by 10% and pass that on to the people that are responsible in the first place for those bonuses.
So, if you give a shit about any of that, just go to
Fair Trade Hardware and leave a comment, post about it, tweet it, facebook it, let other people know. Who knows, we might get even heard somewhere and make a difference.