40,000 Apple fanbois demand ethical iPhone 5

Ok, let's allow another 10 GBP for transport and the guy in the shop.

40,000 idiots

Apple is at least trying to improve the situation. It is open and transparent about its suppliers and hires companies to find and correct abuses. No other company even lifts a finger to do anything similar, and dozens of U.S. tech companies use the same suppliers Apple does.

So for going out on a limb to make things better, Apple gets punished by 40,000 idiots. Is this what we have come to as a nation? Our education system must have turned the brains of thousands into oatmeal. No thinking. No logic. No reasoning. No gathering of facts. Just lashing out at whomever is available because someone has been depicted as suffering. Please, spare me.

Trolling much?

What has charity got to do with ethical treatment of employees in your supply-chain?

I think the idea is that you might give the employees a bit more than just enough to buy food. Invest in the the Chinese economy so that the people there can do more. Perhaps spend some time educating themselves rather than spending all day every day on the production line. Perhaps they could lend some of the wealth you have allocated to them to a nephew who has a bright idea for a new business in the local community.

Businesses concentrate wealth, they re-allocate it. It is people doing useful work who create it. All those billions apple has represent the work and wealth previously owned by apple customers. If they hadn't bought an iphone, they would probably have spent the cash on something else. Perhaps cinema tickets or fruit and veg. Just because apple has gained a large slice of the pie, doesn't make the pie bigger.

Any wealth apple has created comes from increased productivity of apple-phone users as compared to non-apple-phone users. Undoubtedly this has happened, but probably not to the extent indicated by Apple's bank balance.

Add to that the Western propensity to earn not from creating things, but from stopping people from using ideas or doing things and you have a very shaky economy indeed.

Don't confuse wealth-possession with wealth-creation.

You probably mean...

... assembled in Finland from components made in China. Slightly better than made and assembled in China I suppose. Even if every component was made in Finland, it's more than likely that the raw materials - rare earth metals etc - came from the same war-torn parts of Africa where the mineral rights are literally fought over by opposing armed factions that routinely use mutilation and rape as instruments of war. There are very few - tending towards zero - ethically sound consumer electronics products on the market. What makes Apple's behaviour more obscene than most others is the the 70% profit margin - they really are cashing in on the misery of the workers in their supply-chain...

@Kristian Walsh

Nokia is also a Foxconn customer as well.

No scapegoats

@CollyWolly: "so we just ignore the problem? As one of the richest companies in the world, and highest profit margins per unit sold, Apple make a good place to start."

No - we need to do something that will genuinely improve the situation. What good will it too to take one successful company (and a reasonably ethical one at that) and trash them as a scapegoat? Any number of more ruthless firms will step into its place, and the situation will be worse. I'm amazed at the hypocrisy of the media - they have turned a blind eye to this problem for decades, but drag it out now again to pillory some company almost at random. But he media is locked into the same exploitation - no one is guiltless in this problem.

The truth is, most of our goods are produced by slave labour, and have been for a long time. That needs to end, and it takes *all* of us to do it. The laws that protect workers in the West need to be extended to *all* countries that produce goods for us, including fair wages and work conditions. Unless all countries sign up to this, we will simply enrich the most ruthless.

And at the same time put a great many children on the street.

Gotta be careful when applying western values to poor countries, often the outcry will often do more harm than good.

Nike now uses prison labor earning under $0.5 per hour. Still at least it US prison labor so thats ok.