I know this is extremely long, but I strongly encourage everyone to fully read this.
Know what is really going on.
Jews are behind all of this and responsible for it.
Exposing the Jews – Library of Rickandria
Look to the top – the owners and the operators of these factories and corporations, who they are and what they are and with a bit of research, they are all Jews.
Not too many people are fully aware of the extent of the Jewish operated world slave trade.
Not only is this destroying countless lives but is destroying and polluting the environment to where it will affect everyone on this planet.
The Jews, being as cheap as they are do not properly dispose of toxic waste, as this involves putting out a bit more money and also more jobs, even though slave labor is extremely cheap, the Jew looks at the pennies he can save.
Knowing the Jews from their own Writings & Quotes: Deep Dive Version – Library of Rickandria
Given the following facts and plenty more, in addition to the biblical Old Testament, it is glaringly apparent that these Talmudic quotes are legitimate, though many Jews will deny them.
Exposing the Old Testament – Library of Rickandria
The Talmud is a collection of many volumes, almost an encyclopedia, written in Hebrew so that few if any Gentiles can read what is therein.
Gentiles with Hebrew Names – Library of Rickandria
Over the centuries, a few Gentiles with knowledge of Hebrew came forward and revealed this work of trash to the world.
Pagan (Called Satanic, Gentile or Goyim by the Jews) – Library of Rickandria
Schulchan Aruch, Choszen Hamiszpat 348:
“All property of other nations belongs to the Jewish nation, which, consequently, is entitled to seize upon it without any scruples.”
Seph. Jp., 92, 1:
“God has given the Jews power over the possessions and blood of all nations.”
“There were other refugees, including Kazhaks, and German, Austrian, and Hungarian Jews who founded a community in Shanghai.”
‘Down in Hong Kong, Moses Tsang, a partner at Goldman Sachs, was preparing his company to dominate the financing of China’s future.”
[It doesn’t take an IQ much above a total idiot to know “Moses” Tsang is a Chinese Jew and Goldman Sachs is a Jewish monopoly.
From “The China Dream” by Joe Studwell © 2002, 2003
“Mark Schwartz, [Jew – my note] one of Goldman Sachs’ four vice chairmen, has been based in Beijing since his appointment in June as chairman of the Asia-Pacific region.
He is the most senior executive Goldman Sachs has ever posted in the country.“
“Goldman Sachs wants to prioritize the building out of our China business,”
Schwartz said in his first interview since taking up his new position.
“My return has sent a very powerful signal to the entire Goldman Sachs community of 33,000 professionals around the world that China is a very high priority for us.”
“Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs expanded in Asia.
Its workforce in Asia grew significantly and, in 2004, it teamed up with Chinese securities firm Gao Hua Securities to set up a joint venture in China.”
Goldman Sachs has eyes on the prize in China – MarketWatch
The above is only one example.
Nearly all major high-profile corporations are owned and/or run by Jews.
Many people can just pass this off or put their minds and interests to other things, but eventually, what is being done, like I already wrote is going to affect everybody, more than just in the area of employment.
Now, here are some very relevant reasons why Satan advises us against consuming any foods imported from China.
Again, it doesn’t take much common sense to figure out how this affects the crops planted there, the fish and everything else.
The extent of the effects of these toxic wastes obviously can generate a plague.
The USA for one, has been exporting extremely large amounts of fresh water to China, as the water there is so polluted to the point where many are already dead by the thousands.
Now, just how fit are the crops, fish and even meat that is subject to this water, then fed to humans and our pets?
“Years of Damage”
“One of China’s biggest problems: wastewater.
Factories and cities have discharged mostly untreated sewage and pollutants into the country’s rivers and lakes—some 53.7 billion tons in 2006 alone, according to the World Bank.
China’s environmental regulators have designated 48 of China’s major lakes as seriously polluted.
One-fourth of the water sampled along China’s two largest rivers—the Yangtze and Yellow—was found to be too polluted even for farm irrigation.
And tap water isn’t entirely safe, either, with Chinese authorities responding to 48 large-scale environmental emergencies last year.
“Extensive water pollution of course impacts on water scarcity.”
China Faces a Water Crisis – Bloomberg
From the book, “China Shakes the World” by James Kynge © 2006, 2007:
“The problem started in the 1980’s when tens of thousands of small companies, including pulp and paper mills, chemical factories, and dyeing and tanning plants=, sprang up along the river and began dumping their toxic waste into it.
By the early 1990’s there were clear signs of distress.
The water in many areas was unfit to drink, Cancer rates were twice the national average, and, according to one report, for ye
ars none of the boys from certain villages in the Huai River area were healthy enough to pass the physical examination required to enter the armed forces.”“When local authorities were ordered by Beijing to resolve the problem, they released the polluted water that has been building up in the reservoirs and tanks, and in so doing, unleashed a tide of black liquid that killed almost everything it touched as it flowed downstream.
Millions of fish died, and thousands of people were treated for dysentery, diarrhea and vomiting.”
“Several hundred factories were indeed closed, but they opened up again almost as quickly.
By 1998 and 1999, it was clear that the campaign was going to fail; reports of people dying from being exposed to the noxious gases and chemicals in roadside ditches were regularly reported in the newspapers, and in 1999 the Huai ran dry for the first time in twenty years, ruining crops and killing millions of fish.”
“It emerged that the waters of the Huai, far from being clean were so toxic that, by the governments own classification standards, they could not even be used for irrigation.”
“Streams and rivers are drying up all over the northern half of the country, and water tables are falling precipitously as wells, many of them illegally dug, are sunk ever deeper into the dwindling reserves of groundwater.
Altogether some 400 out of 668 large Chinese cities are short of water, and the incidence of rationing is growing.”
‘The factories that multinational companies have set up have turned China into the workshop of the world but have also made it the rubbish tip of the world.”
Slave labor is also very prevalent in other countries in addition to just China.
Sweatshops, with no ventilation, no heating during the winter [the Jews who run these are too cheap], are actual prisons.
Doors are bolted shut and locked down.
Permission must be granted to use the restroom, there are no safety measures taken, hazards are everywhere and only recently, another fire killed hundreds in one of these factories in Bangladesh, as they were unable to escape.
A moderate amount of research will reveal that all of these sweatshops and so-called “factories” are under the control of Jewish owned and operated corporations.
The Jews dictate the conditions.
The manufactured goods are then exported to:
- the USA
- Canada
- Europe
and marked up, often to 1,000% or more of the original cost of the slave labor and materials.
From the book, “Take this Job and Ship It” by Senator Byron L. Dorgan © 2006:
“In 2002, the Los Angeles Times reported: in one sever dust storm in the spring of 1998, particle pollution levels in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia soared.
In Seattle, air quality officials could not identify a local source of the pollution, but measurements showed that 75 percent of it came from China, researchers at the University of Washington found.”
“In April of 2005, police and villagers clashed in Zhejiang Province as citizens occupied an industrial complex blamed for crops ruined by polluted water supplies.
In the village of Huaxi, toxins from manufactures were blamed for a withered cabbage crop. ‘It is rotten from the inside.
It doesn’t grow,’ Li Xian, a local farmer said.”
“Our fields won’t produce grain anymore,”
said a woman who lives near the Jingxin Pharmaceutical Plant.
“We don’t dare to eat food grown from anywhere near here.”
“Her husband added, ‘They are making poisonous chemicals for foreigners that the foreigners don’t dare produce in their own countries.’ “
“The Taiwan News reports, ‘Across China, entire rivers run foul or have dried up altogether.
Nearly a third of the cities don’t treat their sewage, flushing it into waterways.
In rural China, sooty air depresses crop yields.’
An old farmer, who rioted to protest pollution from chemical plants in one coastal village, told the Taiwan News, ‘We just had to do it.
We can’t grow our vegetables here anymore.
Young women are giving birth to stillborn babies.”
“In Indonesia in 2004, police suspended operations at the American owned Newmont Minahasa Raya gold mine for dumping deadly heavy metal mine waste laden with Mercury and arsenic into Buyat Bay – two thousand tons daily.
Locals reported health issues including nervous system disorders, lumps forming under the skin, and other skin ailments.
The fish have fared far worse.
The sea was filled with bloated corpses of fish near the pipe that discharged cyanide, among other waste, into the ocean.
According to the National Newspaper, the fish had hemorrhaging in the liver, diaphragms broken, and eyeballs bulging form the socket.”“Children are easy to control; Children don’t form labor unions.”
The International Labor Union reported in 2005 that at least 12.3 million people work as slaves or in other forms of forced labor.
Other estimates more than double that number.
UNICEF reported in 2005 that one in twelve children in the world is forced into child labor.”“Kevin Bales, antislavery activist and author of the book “Disposable People” says that in 1850, a slave would have cost the equivalent of $40,000 in today’s dollars.
Today, a slave working in the coffee or cocoa plantations on the Ivory Coast – some as young as nine – will set you back as little as $30.00, Bales says.”
“Work them until they drop.”
“They are considered disposable.”“A total of 27 child slaves between the ages of 5 and 12, released with the help of the Bonded Liberation Front, told the following story.
The boys, on the promise of being taken to a film, went with the village barber, Shiv Kumar Thakur.
They did not tell their parents, as the trip was going to be a secret.
It is believed that the barber received 7,000 rupees – he was saving for a motorbike.
The new child slaves were introduced to the intricacies of the trade by being locked up and beaten for the first few days.
Requests for food were met with blows from iron rods and yardsticks and woundings by the sheers [sic] used in carpet making.
Mistakes in weaving or slow work received the same treatment.
The boys’ day began at 4 am., when Panna Lal poured cold water over them to wake them.
They worked until their lunch break of a half an hour at 2 pm.
According to Suraj, who was seven years old when he was rescued, they often worked until midnight and only then received their second inadequate meal of the day.
They were all locked in at night.
When these young boys cried, they were beaten with a stone wrapped in a cloth.
The boys were never paid any wages.
Suraj also said that they were branded with hot irons.
He had bruises on his temple caused by a blow from a bamboo staff – punishment for a weaving mistake.
Many of the children fell ill and were denied medical treatment.
Despair caused seven of the boys to try to run away.
They were caught, slung upside-down from trees and branded.
If they cut their fingers [which happens often on the sharp cutting tools], the loom masters are known to shave match heads into the cut and set the sulphur on fire so that the blood will not stain the carpet.”
“Worked to Death in a Toy Factory”
“On the night she died, Li Chunmei must have been exhausted.
Coworkers said she had been on her feet for nearly 16 hours, running back and forth inside Bainan Toy Factory, carrying toy parts from machine to machine.
When the quitting bell finally rung shortly after midnight, her young face was covered with sweat.
This was the busy season before Christmas, when orders peaked from Japan and the U.S. for the factory’s stuffed animals.
Long hours were mandatory, and at least two months had passed since Li and the other workers had enjoyed a Sunday off.
Lying in her bed that night, staring at the bunk above her, the slight 19-year-old complained she felt worn out, her roommates recalled.
She was massaging her legs, and coughing, and told them she was hungry.
The factory food was so bad, she said, she felt as if she had not eaten at all.
Finally, the lights went out.
Her roommates had already fallen asleep when Li started coughing up blood.
They found her in the bathroom a few hours later, curled up on the floor, moaning softly, bleeding from her nose and mouth.
She died.
The minimum wage for workers like Li is 30 cents an hour.
Workers like Li are forced to work up to sixteen hours a day in polluted plants without air-conditioning and in temperatures reaching near ninety degrees.
Workers are housed in cramped company dormitories, twelve to a room.
And so, a young woman named Li dies.
Worked to death.
But who cares?
The profits on those stuffed toys were great.
I’m sure the stockholders were pleased.”
“The 1998 NLC report discovered that warehouse workers making the handbags marketed by Wal-Mart earned as little as ten cents an hour.
The workweek in the Qin Shi Factory, where Kathie Lee handbags were manufactured, was as long as ninety-eight hours.
The report continued, ‘At the end of the day, the workers return ‘home’ to a cramped dorm room sharing metal bunk beds with 16 other people.
At most, workers are allowed outside the factory for just one and a half hours a day.
Otherwise, they are locked in.
The workers are charged $67.47 for dorm and living expenses, which is an enormous amount given that the highest take-home wage our researchers found in the factory was just 10 cents an hour.
There were others who earned just 36 cents for more than a month’s work, earning just 8/100th of a cent an hour.
Many workers earned nothing and owed money to the company.”
“According to the same 1998 research, workers in K-Mart factories made twenty-eight cents an hour.
Garment makers for JC Penney were paid eighteen cents.
Women making Ralph Lauren blouses, which sold for $88.00 in the United States, pocketed twenty-three cents an hour.
Young women making just fourteen cents an hour sewed two-hundred-dollar Ann Taylor jackets and skirts.
“One of the eyewitnesses was Lydda Eli Gonzales, a young woman from Honduras who testified that she had worked under appalling conditions.
Lydda was seventeen when she was hired, and she worked in the factory for a year before being fired for union activity.
Lydda said workers in the company were forced to work overtime to meet unreasonable quotas.
‘It is forbidden to talk, and you have to get permission to use the bathroom.
We have to get a pass from the supervisor and give it to the guard in front of the bathroom, who searches us before we go in.‘
she said.
They were limited to one bathroom break in the morning and another in the afternoon.
A production line of twenty workers had a quota of 2,288 shirts a day, but it is impossible, she added.
You can’t move or stretch, or even look to the side.
You have to focus and work as fast as you can to complete the production goal, always under pressure.
“The International Labor Organization, the labor arm of the United Nations, estimates there are more than 250 million child laborers in a hundred countries between the ages of five and fourteen.
That number is nearly equal to the population of the United States.”
Transported thousands of miles away to a dimly lit, dangerous factory floor where they will work from dawn to dusk for pennies, often breathing dangerous fumes.
It’s happening to children every day.
“Corporations more powerful than countries.
While a country like America is governed by a Constitution and Bill of Rights, many corporations have but one rule: Profit above all else.
Combined sales of the top two hundred corporations are larger than all the combined economies of all countries, with the exception of the largest nine.
Exxon Mobile reported $10 billion in profits in the second quarter of 2005 alone!
When it finished the year, it reported profits of $36.1 billion, the highest profits ever for a US corporation.
With $258 billion in sales [$10 billion in reported profits] in 2005, Walmart is economically more powerful than 161 countries.
That is an enormous amount of power, and it is wielded every day by shipping jobs overseas.”
The Corporation of the United States of America – Library of Rickandria
The article below is thoroughly appalling.
People need to know what is going on and YES, this has to do with Satanism, in the sense that SLAVERY is the entire message of the Judeo/Christian bible.
The Truth About Satanism – Library of Rickandria
Fear is used, no different from the Jewish invented and enforced program of communism.
It is a vehicle for indoctrination into slavery.
Jew communism is the stepping off point for Christianity and its related programs; all spiritual knowledge is then forcefully removed [which Christianity and related are already well known for], and the Jews at the top who have controlled the world using what we call ‘witchcraft’ are then fully in charge and total control, with the populace at their mercy through spiritual ignorance and total lack of any spiritual power…complete slaves.
The Chinese people are NOT to blame for this.
It is the fucking Chinese JEWS, working in collusion with Jews in the Western world.
Note some of the excerpts in the following article:
‘The company says more than a million-line workers have been informed of their rights, 60,000 have taken advantage of free college-level instruction and they’ve forced shady suppliers to refund workers more than $6 million in illegal fees.’
The paragraph directly above contains 60,000 and $6 million.
The Jews always use this number.
DO NOT confuse this with 666, which has a totally different meaning.
666 Decoded – Library of Rickandria
The Jews always use the number 6. Same with the ‘6 million’ from that phony holohoax.
Watch for this ‘6’ repeated frequently in the mainstream news and such.
It is nearly always related to the Jews and has a strong subliminal link to their magick.
Magic or Magick? – Library of Rickandria
Also, note the supposed compensations with that six.
I doubt if these poor people will ever even receive any, let alone apply.
More excerpts:
‘Just after a horrific rash of worker suicides at the Foxconn factory complex outside of Hong Kong in 2010…’
‘And everywhere you look on every factory and dormitory, in every stairwell and atrium, are suicide nets.’
Certain stores here in the USA, such as what are known as ‘dollar stores’ where nothing is over a dollar in price; near 100% of the items are made in China with slave labor.
The Chinese workers are paid next to nothing for long and brutally hard hours of work at the mercy of their Jewish owned and operated factories.
Most never even really see, let alone have or own the electronics they put together on assembly lines, that have a price mark-up of 1000% or more when these hit the west.
In addition to all of this, try doing some research online.
Type in ‘China Poisoning’ into any google or other search engine.
Here is one excerpt from an article:
‘The news that Chinese toothpaste brands sold in Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Australia contained diethylene glycol, a highly toxic chemical used in engine coolants, came as a shock to U.S. health officials.
It shouldn’t have. ‘
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS ‘ANTI-FREEZE.’
ANTI-FREEZE IS DEADLY.
The Poisoning of America: China’s Food and Drugs are Unsafe at Any Price – PRI (pop.org)
This is just one.
I can’t go into anymore [which I did some of my own research and it is horrifying] because this is long enough already, but I strongly encourage everyone to know what is going on and keep reading.
Just because the label on a product states ‘Made in USA’ or ‘Made in Canada’ whatever…this does not mean ALL of the INGREDIENTS are from the USA, etc.
By law, the label is perfectly legal if the product was put together in the USA, for instance.
Unbeknownst to many, many of the ingredients come from China.
Why? because they are CHEAP and CHEAP is synonymous with the WORLD JEW, and they don’t give a damn how they get it or who has to suffer for it.
The list is extensive and endless.
Vitamins, such as ascorbic acid [Vitamin C], ingredients in pet food [which are bad enough anyway, even here in the USA- ‘rendered is a euphemistic term for euthanized animals ground up from pounds, roadkill, even the collars and all and put into the bulk of pet food.
Truth about Pet Food – Knowing the truth can save your pet’s life
Here is another article with a lot of information:
Yes, and the Jew makes you pay good money for this poison.
Power of the Purse: The Origin of Money – Library of Rickandria
They have always made US GENTILES pay for our own damnation.
Pagan (Called Satanic, Gentile or Goyim by the Jews) – Library of Rickandria
We are being bombarded with tainted food products [some are even deadly], cosmetics are tainted; lead was found in lipstick, formaldehyde [used to embalm corpses], this is another ingredient in some eye makeup products,
‘Recent incidents in which consumers were killed or severely injured have raised serious concern in the United States.’
‘A little over a decade ago in Haiti, the poisonous chemical diethylene glycol was found in cold medicine for children.
The chemical was traced back to a Chinese company that produces intermediate drug ingredients.
This company mislabeled the diethylene glycol as glycerin (a safe pharmaceutical ingredient) and exported it out of the country to be put in pharmaceutical products (Bogdanich, 2007).
The results were devastating.
More than 100 Haitian children were killed, and countless others were injured.
The same situation happened again almost exactly a decade later in Panama.
According to an article in the New York Times, a Chinese chemical company “masqueraded” diethylene glycol as its more expensive chemical cousin, glycerin, and exported it to a pharmaceutical company to use in its product, and over 100 people were killed by the poisonous medicine (Bogdanich, 2007).’
Why isn’t anything being done?
Because the Jews who own these factories and companies work in collusion with the fucking Jews who run the FDA and other watch dog organizations.
Many are paid under the table very well.
‘Due to the ever-increasing number of Chinese companies manufacturing chemicals, China is well on its way to become the world’s premiere supplier of goods, most especially in the pharmaceutical industry.’
[Another excerpt from the above website link]
Do some more research and you will find China also is on its way to being the ‘World supplier of food.’
The following article is appalling and reveals the TRUTH about the Jewish communism program.
In the Dark Ages, when the Christian church ruled over all of Europe and was at the height of its power- same thing…slave labor through what was known as ‘SERFDOM’ widespread ignorance and illiteracy, and the one world order, run from the Christian church.
Communist China [run by Jews] KNOWS that bombs and hard weapons are not needed.
They can and are poisoning the world step by step and of course, the other Jews make a profit off of illness in the way of more drugs, the Jews own and run the medical professions, etc.
And, of course, they always offer THEIR explanations, such as the drastic increase in nearsightedness and bad eyesight [they make a huge profit off of glasses, contact lenses and such] they claim it is because of close up work and all that, but truth be known, a silver nitrate solution is automatically put into the eyes of newborn infants.
This has been going on for a few decades now.
They claim it is a protective measure.
Not so.
Do a little research.
I caught on and one of my kids- I refused this in the hospital and had a decent Gentile doctor who understood [I didn’t go into why, only that I didn’t want this].
He is now an adult and has eyesight that is more than perfect.
My other two wear glasses, like so many other kids [and adults] these days.
A Trip to the iFactory: ‘Nightline’ Gets an Unprecedented Glimpse Inside Apple’s Chinese Core
By BILL WEIR, REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK | ABC News – 16 hrs
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
The voices are robot feminine, and they never shut up, each chirp a surreal announcement that another new iPad is about to be born.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
The factory floor is spotless under the bright fluorescent lights and with hypnotic rhythm, thousands of hands reach into a conveyor belt river, bringing each gliding gadget to life one tiny piece at a time.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
A supervisor will bark the occasional order in Mandarin, but on this line the machines do most of the talking while the people work in silence.
Their faces are blank as they insert a chip or wipe a screen or plug in a diagnostic cable to hear that everything is “Okay.”
And they will repeat that motion and hear that fembot voice a few thousand more times before lunch.
It is just an average day at Foxconn.
Watch “Nightline” anchor Bill Weir’s exclusive full report on a special edition of “Nightline,” “iFactory: Inside Apple,” TUESDAY, Feb. 21 at 11:35 p.m. ET/PT, with a preview on “Good Morning America” and “World News with Diane Sawyer,” all on ABC.
Given the legendary secrecy of the world’s most valuable company, you have to wonder: How am I seeing this?
Well, a few years ago, I sent THIS to Steve Jobs, blatantly stealing the Apple beat from a more able colleague.
I still feel guilty, but I don’t regret it because I was genuinely taken with the second coming of Jobs and was unabashedly fond of Apple’s products.
My hope for a sweeping profile led to my covering a few launches and every six months we pitched them an ABC News special on the inner workings of Apple.
They always politely declined.
But in recent months, the fond memorials for Steve Jobs and the company’s record-breaking profits have been tarnished by some of the worst press in Apple’s history, most of it related to its top Chinese supplier, Foxconn.
Just after a horrific rash of worker suicides at the Foxconn factory complex outside of Hong Kong in 2010, a monologist named Mike Daisey launched a one-man show called “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”
He described travelling to the gates of Foxconn and meeting people coming off 13–15 hour shifts on the Apple lines.
He described a 13-year-old who spent her days cleaning iPhone screens.
Daisey’s show was featured on NPR’s “This American Life” in January and a listener named Mark Shields was so moved, he launched a petition drive online.
Over 250,000 Apple users called on the company to build the first “ethical” iPhone, and protests were planned at Apple stores around the world.
It was around this time when Apple called me.
They wondered if “Nightline” was interested in seeing their iPhone, iPad and MacBook final assembly lines at Foxconn during a first-ever audit by the Fair Labor Association.
I said yes, very much, and immediately started imaging the reasons why they were offering such a scoop to me, of all people.
Among the possibilities:
I’ve said nice things about their products on the air.
ABC News is owned by the Disney Corporation and Disney CEO Bob Iger serves on the Apple Board of Directors.
Disney Bloodline: The Skill of Lying, the Art of Deceit – Library of Rickandria
The Steve Jobs Trust is Disney’s largest shareholder.
They enjoy “Nightline.”
It must be the last one, because the first three would have no bearing on my reporting and I’m pretty sure Apple knows it.
Apple promised complete access, no dog-and-pony, no Potemkin Village, but they denied my repeated requests to interview Apple CEO Tim Cook or the senior vice president of industrial design, Jony Ive.
In a three-golf-cart convoy, both Apple and Foxconn reps took us around to a half dozen production lines in Shenzhen and Chengdu, and there were always five to six people with us as we toured the factories and dorms.
But aside from suggesting a visit to the counseling center or canteen, they never steered us to interviews and never interrupted.
This is some of what we saw.
See it yourself on Tuesday’s “Nightline.”
The pristine white boxes that roll off these lines in Shenzhen, China all carry the words “designed in California.”
But the collective genius of Cupertino would be nothing without the relentless, repetitive work of hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Taiwanese workers like Liang Juan.
Covered head to toe in a dust-free “bunny suit,” the 26-year-old has spent most of the past three years flipping tiny camera lenses with a pair of tweezers.
“What do you think about all day?”
I wonder.
“I don’t think much about other things,”
she says,
“Because the management is strict and we’re busy working and have no time to think about other things.”
But over on another assembly line in Chengdu, Zhou Xiao Ying admits,
“A lot of times I think about how tired I am.”
Around 6,000 times per shift, she grabs an iPad housing and files the aluminum shavings from the iconic Apple silhouette.
And once a month she takes a two-hour bus ride to see her parents and her children.
“I think about resting,”
she says.
For years the world has marveled at a different kind of Apple line, the sort that stretches for city blocks outside stores each time a new product ships.
In a single generation, those lines turned a garage start-up into the most valuable company in the world.
But while Apple fans bought over 17 million computers, 38 million iPods, 40 million iPads and 93 million iPhones last year, no one from the outside has ever seen the production lines that built them.
Until now.
And in a stunning admission, a Foxconn executive, who spent 15 years at Apple, tells me he thinks “Nightline” probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the deadly explosions and suicides.
“You being here is part of the openness, part of the learning, part of the change that Foxconn is undergoing,”
said Louis Woo, a former Apple executive who serves as an advisor to Foxconn CEO, Terry Gou.
“Of course, you can argue that we should have opened up five years ago.
Well five years ago, we are under the radar screen, nobody really knows us, we are doing well.
Why should I open it up?”
I ask if it took such deadly tragedy for Foxconn to rethink the way it treats its workers.
“I think absolutely, absolutely, yeah,”
he says.
“You know, success is the mother of failure.
Because we’ve been so successful, successful in the sense that it seems everybody’s happy.
Right?”
We land in Hong Kong in darkness and after a two-hour drive, arrive in Shenzhen.
This was a tiny fishing village 30 years ago, but after the Chinese declared it a “Special Economic Zone,” there are now more people here than New York City.
At the center is Foxconn City and we pull in at dawn, just in time for first light to reveal mind-blowing scale of the place.
As China’s largest exporter, only the government employs more people than Foxconn, and the company earns more revenue than their next 10 competitors combined.
Apple may be their most famous customer, but Foxconn also churns out products for:
- Sony
- Dell
- Hewlett-Packard
- I.B.M.
- Motorola
- Toshiba
and other major brands, keeping the details of each production line wrapped in total secrecy.
In order to make gadgets like:
- the Xbox
- the PlayStation
- Amazon Kindle
this campus employs 235,000 people, roughly the population of Orlando, Fla.
And everywhere you look on every factory and dormitory, in every stairwell and atrium, are suicide nets.
They went up during a three-month span in the spring of 2010, when nine Foxconn workers jumped to their deaths.
A total of 18 Foxconn employees took their own lives, or tried to, in recent years and given the company’s massive size, it is a suicide rate well below China’s national average.
But when people started jumping in a cluster, Woo tells me that Tim Cook rallied a team of psychiatric experts for advice.
They suggested nets, on the chance it might save impulsive jumpers.
Foxconn also opened a counseling center around this time and there are a few people scattered in the waiting area when I visit.
A counselor tells me that these days they are more likely to deal with lost IDs than bouts of depression.
“So why did the horror happen?”
I ask.
“There are many reasons,”
she says.
“We had many scholars here doing research.
Of course, some (suicide) has to do with the management.
But they had more to do with the new generation of migrant workers from the rural areas, their state of mind and how they cope with society.
Also, it’s hard to make friends here.”
And then came the explosions.
Last year, two blasts at two separate iPad factories injured 77, and four died when combustible dust exploded as iPads were being polished.
“A certain level of the aluminum dust was too high, and this accident happened,”
Woo tells me.
“We learned a lot from it, so we have changed a lot of processes.
So now if you have a chance to go back and see it, you will not see any human being at all.
We replaced the enclosure part with robots.”
But Foxconn wasn’t Apple’s only problem.
The company says they stopped a supplier named Wintek from using a toxic chemical to clean iPhone screens after 137 workers were injured.
And labor rights groups both in and out of China have accused Apple of looking the other way while factories in its massive supply chain allegedly force overtime, ignore health and safety issues and occasionally exploit underage workers.
Both Steve Jobs and new CEO Tim Cook have long insisted that no company in the industry has done more to improve the lives of workers.
The company says more than a million-line workers have been informed of their rights, 60,000 have taken advantage of free college-level instruction and they’ve forced shady suppliers to refund workers more than $6 million in illegal fees.
“We think the use of underage labor is abhorrent,”
Cook told a group of Goldman Sachs investors and analysts last week.
“It’s extremely rare in our supply chain, but our top priority is to eliminate it totally.
If we find a supplier that intentionally hires underage labor, it’s a firing offense.
We don’t let anyone cut corners on safety.
If there’s a production process that can be made safer, we seek out the foremost authorities in the world — the foremost experts — and cut in a new standard, and then take that and apply it to the entire supply chain.”
Apple says they have been ordering audits of its suppliers since 2006, and since 2007 have been publishing the sometimes disturbing results.
After 229 audits last year, Apple reports that at least half of workers in over 90 factories exceeded the 60-hours-a-week work limit or worked more than six days a week.
By last year, Apple claims they inspected nearly 400 facilities around the world, but only 11 suppliers were terminated.
It is easier to help improve the lives of workers by forcing a supplier to reform, Apple reasons, than by firing the supplier outright.
But some activist groups say they could improve conditions faster with a “name and shame” strategy, listing the locations of specific violators.
This is an idea Apple has resisted in the past, and some in the labor-rights field agree that in certain cultures, name-and-shame encourages factory owners to cover up violations instead of working with the customer to fix them.
The young men and women are brought into a dingy room by the dozens, and though some spend 10-hour workdays building iPads, this will be first time many of them actually get to use one.
The Fair Labor Association is using Apple’s fastest-selling gadget to conduct what they say is the biggest audit the industry has ever seen.
35,000 Foxconn workers will be given an anonymous touch-screen questionnaire, with answers instantly uploaded to a server in New Zealand, so the watchdog group can understand the most common grievances.
But given the stoic expressions and terse answers I’ve been getting from workers since I arrived, how honest can they really be?
“Some of them certainly do say what the boss wants them to say,”
auditor Ines Kaempfer tells me,
“But the great thing about this survey is that we have such a big sample that you really always have workers who say what they’re really thinking.
Rather than the more traditional survey, where you ask 15 workers, you ask them face to face; they don’t dare to say anything.
And here, many of them feel quite protected.
Because it’s a big group, there’s no way their boss can know what they were saying.”
Critics of that methodology say interviews should take place outside the factory environment, and honest answers are more likely to come during one-on-one conversations than multiple-choice questionnaires.
Last month, Apple became the first electronics company to join the Fair Labor Association.
The group was founded in 1999 and is funded by corporations as well as major universities hoping to ensure that the t-shirts in the college bookstore aren’t made in sweatshops.
Critics of the F.L.A. say that corporate ties with the likes of Nike and Adidas create a conflict of interest.
Apple will pay the group “well into the six figures” to conduct this audit of Foxconn, in addition to the $250,000 they are paying in dues to the F.L.A.
But F.L.A. President Auret van Heerden insists that while corporate cooperation is essential to get access to factories, member companies have no influence over inspections.
And when the Apple/Foxconn audit is published in early March, he says any whitewash would be painfully obvious.
“That’s very big news,”
he tells me
“Because Apple is the first tech company to join the F.L.A., it’s the biggest and probably most dynamic of the tech companies.
So, it gives us a chance to set the bar for the entire sector.”
While his team will spend most of their time poring over employee records and timecards, I’m with van Heerden as he walks a MacBook production line for the first time, and he notes that the pace of the production is much slower than he’s used to.
In fact, critics of Apple and F.L.A. pounced when van Heerden told Reuters Foxconn’s plants were “first class” and that he was surprised:
“How tranquil it is compared with a garment factory.”
He said something very similar as we strolled around boxes of MacBook pieces.
“In the garment factories, you see a very different work ethic, people are really pushing this stuff up, because they’re paid for their own individual effort, not by group effort.”
When Apple first called, I assumed this audit would include a surprise inspection.
But Foxconn has known for days that we were coming and in fact helped us get Chinese visas.
How can he sure these masters of efficiency haven’t built a model assembly line over the weekend?
“I expect them to put on a show for us,”
van Heerden says.
“That’s normal with every factory you go to, even if it’s just the time that it takes you to get from the gate to the factory floor, there’s always fifteen or twenty minutes of protocol to get in there.
The special equipment comes out, they put the ear plugs in, they put the masks on, and they can transform a factory in twenty minutes, so we expect that.
But our method is such — the bottom-up method — that over the next couple of days, everything will surface.
As we talk to people, discussing how they do their jobs, the dysfunctionality starts to come up.
“Was Apple resistant to this idea when you first approached them?” I ask. “It was a long conversation,” van Heerden smiles. “We’ve been in this conversation for about five years,” he says.
Apple joined the F.L.A. on Jan. 13, eight days before the New York Times ran a series examining the company’s labor practices.
“We call it the ‘Nike moment’ in the industry,” audit inspector Ines Kaempfer adds. “There was a moment for Nike in the ’90s, when they got a lot of publicity, negative publicity.
And they weren’t the worst.
It’s probably like Apple.
They’re not necessarily the worst, it’s just that the publicity is starting to build up.
And there was just this moment when they just started to do something about it.
And I think that’s what happened for Apple.”
As 3,000 applicants rush the Foxconn gates, there is first the squeal of police whistles and then a dizzying wave of body heat as the crowd surges past.
It is a Monday after a Chinese holiday, and since many overworked migrants will just stay home, the people who lined up before dawn know that the chances of getting an assembly line job are better than average.
And in a country of 1.3 billion, where jobs are scarce, getting there first matters; especially for their families back in the village, where most of their paycheck will end up.
The young men and women range from 16 (the legal working age in the province) to their early 20s, and as they finally reach the head of the line, each is asked to wave their national ID card across an electronic reader.
Since Foxconn needs to hire several thousand people today, most hear a satisfying beep and are waved in.
Those with bogus IDs are silently turned away.
As groups of 300 are processed with military precision, an electronic billboard outside the recruitment center tells them what they can expect: starting salary is around $285 a month or $1.78 an hour.
And even with the maximum 80 hours of overtime a month, the Chinese government considers them too poor to withdraw any payroll taxes.
If they want to share a dorm with seven strangers, $17.50 will be deducted from their salary and in the massive Foxconn canteens, a heaping tray of meat, vegetables and rice goes for about $0.80.
After a training period, a new hire can be on an iPhone line in as little as three days, quietly assembling a gadget that would cost him three months’ salary.
“I heard work is hard here,”
says one 17-year-old applicant with a Justin Bieber haircut.
“But I heard they just raised the pay,”
says another.
On February 1, Foxconn began paying more than the minimum wage in Shenzhen by raising the starting salary about $0.25 an hour.
Over three days in two cities, “Nightline” spoke with dozens of Foxconn workers, both on and off the factory campuses, both on and off the record.
We were encouraged to enter any dorm at any time to gather as much insight as any strange Americans with cameras can.
All the while, I kept imagining my own reaction if a Chinese TV crew burst into my home or office and started asking me how much I like my job.
But while we looked hard for the kind of underage and maimed workers we’ve read so much about, but we mostly found people who face their days through soul-crushing boredom and deep fatigue.
Some complained of being overworked, others complained of being under worked and almost all said they were underpaid.
And when I asked, “what would you change?” we heard the kind of complaints you might hear in any factory anywhere.
“Compared with other factories, it’s quite good here, because the benefits are good.
And because a lot of things happened in the past, it’s been improved a lot,”
said 26-year-old Zhang Ruohua after making printer cartridges for about a year.
“But the dorm conditions are not that good.
The rooms are crowded, and we don’t have much space to hang our clothes, and the shower rooms are small.
And there is not much overtime.
Many people come and go because there is not much overtime.”
Is this a typical complaint?
Was Mike Daisey wrong or did Foxconn clean itself up since he was here?
With over one million employees it is impossible to say, and the limits of this method are just one reason Chinese groups like Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) think Apple’s self-imposed audits are largely useless.
Debby Chan of SACOM says Apple’s long history of internal audits proves the company already knows where the problems are.
She says they’ve just been resistant to fixing them.
”There must be a genuine trade union at Apple suppliers so the workers can have a voice for themselves,”
she says.
Chan says Apple’s long history of internal audits proves the company already knows where the problems are.
She says they’ve just been resistant to fixing them.
After reports that union organizers are often fired, arrested or beaten in China, I ask Foxconn executive Louis Woo what would happen if iPhone line workers decided to organize.
“We do have labor unions at Foxconn,”
he says,
“But it’s not a freely elected labor union yet. I expect to see that in the next year or two, they will become more like a collective bargaining union, and they will be freely elected.
In fact, I see that some legislations in more progressive provinces would require labor unions to be sitting on the board of companies.
So, I do see hope of labor unions becoming more powerful but it’s not here yet.”
In the meantime, Zhou Xiao Ying carves another aluminum Apple into the back of another iPad casing, lets her mind wander to her two sons and whether they can ever afford to live in the same city.
I pull out my own iPad to show her a few pictures of my kid and America and her eyes light up when she touches the screen to swipe another photo into view.
She’s never seen a working iPad up close before.
“For all the people in America who buy one of these, what do you want them to know about you?”
I ask.
“I want them to know me,”
she says.
“I want them to know we put a lot of effort in this product, so when they use this, please use it with care.”
Then she goes back to work.
The line is calling.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
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