Apple: Good or Bad?

A lot of people don’t see the whole picture from the outside of an organization. You may hear some good things about how a company is trying to promote sustainability within their company but do you know what is really going on? A company like Apple has many loyal customers and many are known as Apple Fanboys or Apple Geeks because there so into the products that Apple produces. Apple is one of the top brands out there and with programs like their recycling fee that you pay when you buy their phone; people think that they are trying to become a greener company. When you take a look at it in-depth, you see a bigger problem. This problem stems from not only there product but also problems within the workplace. The iPhones that you purchase that are recycled after, only have so few parts that can be reused. The rest of it gets melted down because of the plastics and it will be hard to get rid of. So is the company really greener, when they can’t salvage that much from the phone. People also don’t know that the Apple Foxconn factories in Shenzhen, China are seriously systematically undermining the capacity for people to meet their needs. Workers are being worked so hard and paid so little that it becomes hard for them to support their families. In the past half-decade 17 workers have killed themselves. The electronics industry is so big that workers have to continue to work to supply the demand for each product. Many buildings now have netting skirted around them so that people can’t jump because it was becoming an alarming situation that not many people knew about. The nets have carried a message: You can throw yourself off any building you like, as long as it isn’t one of ours. Is that a good message? Probably not because people will find ways around it because they are just so fed up working for so little while doing so much. Companies need to take a look at what there workers are worth and define that because they will not be able to sustain their workers committing suicide. People need to look at the whole picture overall before they define their impression of any company because externalities may distort and change your perception on the good-looking companies to the bad looking ones.

Read more on this issue here:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1

Brendan Carpenter