Workers Poisoned Making Touchscreen Hardware 260
SocResp writes "A chemical called n-hexane has been poisoning the nervous systems of Chinese workers who assemble touchscreen devices for Apple and other companies, an investigative journalist from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. It's scary to think that people are being damaged to pursue high production rates. For companies with soaring profits and share prices, and elaborate product development and marketing, it seems they should be all the more culpable if they fail to take care of the production workers."
Re:It's a WalMart world after all (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Someone mod down this jerk (Score:2, Informative)
The truth is that it is not really any different. The Han race managed to genocide most of the other native Chinese people off the planet.
The Han race is the communist party is China. It is an incredibly racist regime that suppresses any other ethnic minorities into oblivion.
Re:This is part of why offshoring is cheaper: (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is larger than that. In economics, there's the phenomenon of "externalities" -- basically, costs incurred by business operations that aren't paid for by the business itself.
In the United States, for example, companies are generally expected to provide health insurance coverage for their workers. If a lot of workers get sick and file health claims, the employer's insurance rates go up -- so it's in the employer's interests to maintain a healthful work environment. But if the company doesn't provide health coverage, the costs are still caused by the business, but the expenses are picked up by someone else -- either the employees themselves or the taxpayers (because the employees end up getting many of their medical expenses waived, either intentionally or through bankruptcy). That's an externality.
The same is true of many of the environmental factors discussed in TFA. If I run a factory that dumps chemicals into a river, and there's no law that says I have to clean up that waste, then that's an externality -- someone is eventually going to have to do something about it, just not me.
The same with air pollution. If someone notices that the air is getting smoggier, but there's no regulation that says how much particulate matter I'm allowed to release into the atmosphere, then obviously nobody is going to be measuring my emissions and there will be no way to know how much of the smog I'm responsible for. Obviously I won't be factoring that into my balance sheet.
I'm further willing to venture that in a tightly-controlled authoritarian economy, such as China's, government and party officials are likely to have significant stakes in the businesses that are causing the pollution and health problems, and therefore the incentive to legislate those businesses will be low. Maybe it's worth considering how American businesses can be regulated such that they will be required to pick up costs incurred by their suppliers overseas. If those costs can't be properly accounted for, maybe the American companies should be required to take their business elsewhere.
It's scary to think you're so misinformed. (Score:5, Informative)
Why the fuck do you think things are made in China?
Actually, it has a lot to do with convergence, and quality/adaptability of the workforce. You can get cheaper labour elsewhere.
What do I mean about convergence? Well, because all the other tech shit is made in Shenzen, you make your tech shit in Shenzen to reduce shipping cost and time. It's easier to go from prototype to assembly in a city that has all it's factories ready to easily adapt to various different hardware requirements.
The average Chinese high-tech factory worker is a female wanting to save up some money to start a family, she is highly motivated to do a good job. She is very adaptable to the ever changing needs of high tech manufacturing (you can get robots to do the same shit she does... but you have to program the robots a lot due to the constant changing of high-tech).
It's not simply cheap to manufacture high-tech in Shenzen simply because the workers sell themselves cheap, it's cheap in Shenzen because the city is incredibly good at using all of it's varied economies of scale (not just human).
Re:It's a WalMart world after all (Score:5, Informative)
Again, you missed his point. His point is we should consume less. Not that we shouldn't buy anything from China at all.
I disagree with his premise, but at least I understand it. You are just being intentional obtuse.
Nothing he posted way a hypocrisy in any way.
Re:It's a WalMart world after all (Score:3, Informative)
Bah, 54" is for people with normal dicks. Mine's extremely small, and 54" wouldn't even begin to compensate.
Well it's is many American foods (Score:4, Informative)
Hexane is derived from petroleum. It is a colorless, volatile liquid with a mild, gasoline-like odor.
It's used in Electrical contact cleaner, and Computer monitor screen cleaners.
Hexane is the dominate extraction solvent for oil seeds throughout the world, including soybean and other high volume oils used for human and animal consumption. 95% of the world's corn oil is produced from corn germ obtained by wet-milling.
The corn germ is dried, then shipped to hexane extraction facilities to obtain the oil.
Basically corn oil and high fructose corn syrup are contaminated with the stuff in small amounts.
http://www.ehow.com/how-does_5118098_corn-oil-processing.html [ehow.com]
Re:Capitalism (Score:2, Informative)
You're both right. This is a classic negative externality. People who know about economics recognize the importance of regulation (and taxation!) in correcting such "flaws" in the market. But people in politics who shout about "the free market" either don't understand externalities or (far more likely) have a vested interest in protecting the beneficiaries of those externalities. So you've got Rand Paul out there shouting about how it's just totally wrong for the government to ever regulate mountaintop mining.
Re:OSHA's a problem (Score:1, Informative)
Funny, OSHA was one of the central factors in drastically improving workplace safety for many years. Then a bunch of anti-government no-regulation-is-ever-good crazies slashed their budget to the point where my state has TWO inspectors. And we wonder why it doesn't work any more.
Re:Well it's is many American foods (Score:5, Informative)
Be careful with hexane nomenclature. n-hexane is one of the isomers of hexane (there are 5), and by far the most toxic. Claims that hexane is a neurotoxin are misleading - the only hexane isomer that is a neurotoxin is n-hexane as the other hexanes don't produce the nerve damaging metabolite of n-hexane.
Re:It's a WalMart world after all (Score:2, Informative)
n-hexane, that n is actually a Greek character...
No, that n is just an n. It stands for normal. It means it is a straight chain, not branched like isohexane or neohexane would be.
H H H H H H
| | | | | |
H--C--C--C--C--C--C--H is n-hexane.
| | | | | |
H H H H H H
AC because I don't want to undo my mods.
Also can't use monospace font without logging in and can't use enough spaces to align it without triggering the junk character filter, so my diagram is messed up.
Re:Hey China - here's a message from god (Score:4, Informative)
First, people concern themselves with just getting food and water and shelter. Once they have that, they start worrying about the quality of those things. China's making huge strides towards those basics, and much of the population is now starting to look for quality, to the point that organic foods are becoming available in better supermarkets.
It's heading in the right direction... Hopefully they'll tighten things up without going to the extreme we see in the US and the EU, in terms of every little safety requirement and regulation.
Re:Well it's is many American foods (Score:1, Informative)
Everything is toxic. If you decide to avoid item a because you feel it is too toxic, you really have to set the bar so anything more toxic than item a is avoided.
If item a is non-toxic, you basically starve to death. Even plain old water is a known poison in the right quantity.
It's important to realize that the dose makes the poison. Isohexane has an LD50 of over 0.2% of your body weight. Which seems like a low number, but for an average person, that could easily be 120 grams, such a huge amount that I think you'd notice the foul taste before you got through even 10 grams of the stuff. This is close to the LD50 of table salt, BTW.
Compare that to water, which I mentioned is toxic in the right proportion. The LD50 of water is 90 grams, or 4.5% of your body weight. So, drinking 23 times the lethal dose of Isohexane would kill you with the least toxic substance known to mankind.
There's bigger fish to fry here.
Re:Well it's is many American foods (Score:1, Informative)
> Does it really matter?
Yes. There's a vast difference between chlorine or sodium and NaCl (table salt), just as there is between the different types of hexane. I wouldn't eat either element alone, but I certainly do use salt. Most of us might get too much, but we need some in our diet.
There are BILLIONS of chemicals out there. Some of them are even carcinogens. There is NOTHING you can do to avoid them all. Some of them are even natural. So a proper risk analysis is needed. You can't simply avoid things because they have scary names or they look similar to bad chemicals.
If you never ate a chemical you didn't recognize, you wouldn't be able to eat anything. Even fruit is made out of chemcials. Sure, they're "natural" chemicals, but snake venom is just as "natural."
The answer is to learn more science and to study things carefully rather than simply reacting out of fear.
Re:This is part of why offshoring is cheaper: (Score:1, Informative)
Having worked at a plastic factory myself, I can tell you that I was the only one wearing protective clothing. I asked the foreman about it and he told me "Nobody does that here - if you worry about your safety, you probably cannot have a factory job". The air was heavy with solvents and you regularly handled freshly cast plastic and rubber parts. This happened in Sweden - a country with tough worker-safety regulations.