FYS Digital Media Posts
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Monday, December 2, 2013
For my digital story, I am going to start by giving the
basic information on my topic, which is the suicides at Foxconn. I plan to talk
about the factors leading up to the suicides and the deaths in general. I would
also like to elaborate on how the materials that the workers are dealing with
are dangerous. From there, I am going to insert pictures and a video of the
conditions at Foxconn such as the images that follow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tus3SBlI4XM
Next, I plan to talk about the steps that Apple took to
eliminate the problems and the viewers will see that Foxconn did not do much.
From there, I plan to include pictures of the dorms and more pictures of the
factories. I will close my digital story with a video of testimonials from
Foxconn employees as seen in the link that follows.
I would like to end my digital story by leaving it open
ended and make the viewers think about other steps that Foxconn can make to
improve their working conditions.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/26/edward-snowden-hero-traitor-debate
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/edward-snowden-poll_n_4175089.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet-security/10162351/Edward-Snowden-is-a-traitor-just-as-surely-as-George-Blake-was.html
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/06/edward-snowden-treason.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/edward-snowden-poll_n_4175089.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet-security/10162351/Edward-Snowden-is-a-traitor-just-as-surely-as-George-Blake-was.html
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/06/edward-snowden-treason.html
Monday, November 18, 2013
Digital Story Annotated Bibliography
Lindsay Georger
November 16, 2013
Digital Story Annotated Bibliography
Lucas, Kristen. "Workplace
Dignity in a Total Institution: Examining the Experiences of Foxconn's
Migrant Workforce."
Journal of Business Ethics 114.1 (2013): 91-106.
On top of my research of the
horrible conditions that Foxconn employees endure, a source in this essay says
that the factories work under mismanagement and abuse. Employees have expressed
their dissatisfaction with their place of employment. One worker even states
that the factory employees are not human beings but treated more as machines.
This evidence backs up the portion of my digital story that states that
Foxconn’s employees are not treated fairly.
Rasmussen, R. "Another Bad PR
Month for Foxconn." SMT Surface Mount Technology
Magazine Apr. 2012: Print.
This article that comes from a
magazine argues that even though it may seem like the media is targeting
Foxconn, they are the ones putting a target on their own back. The CEO of
Foxconn was just caught referring to his employees as animals. This caused much
controversy and brought Foxconn into the spotlight even though they are trying
to lay low. Why would they try to lay low? It is because they are not doing
anything to fix their working conditions. The people at Foxconn are essentially
just hoping that this blows over instead of facing the problems head on. My
goal with my digital story is to bring the problem back to light and think of
some simple yet effective solutions.
Q, Cheng. "The Foxconn Suicides
and Their Media Prominence: Is the Werther Effect
Applicable
in China?" BMC Public Health 11 (2011): 841. Print.
This article refers to the suicides
that occurred at Foxconn as a temporal cluster of suicides. It also talks about
how the media contributed to the controversy. The article says that if people
had not killed themselves, no one would have known or cared about the
conditions at Foxconn. It also states that if the media had not talked about it
so much then it would have seemed like a coincidence. We have talked about the
media being involved in everything we do and in this case, it is good that the
media was involved. My goal with this article is to relate it to inquiring how
we can use media to spread the message even more and I intend to use my digital
story to do so.
Xu, Kaibin, and Wenqing Li.
"An Ethical Stakeholder Approach to Crisis
Communication:
A Case Study of Foxconn's 2010 Employee Suicide Crisis."Journal of
Business Ethics
117.2 (2013): 371-86.
This article focuses on the efforts
made by Foxconn as a result of the suicides that I describe in my digital
story. The authors of the article say that the executives at Foxconn reached
out to the valuable stockholders who were bringing in a lot of money for their
company to answer their questions and addressing their concerns instead of
worrying about the other workers. Foxconn neglected to realize their employees
as important stockholders as well and they would not take responsibility for
the suicides. This article supports my idea that Foxconn is not doing enough
for their employees to prevent future suicides from happening.
Friday, November 15, 2013
Friday, November 8, 2013
Digital Story Proposal
Workers at Foxconn have endured
less than ideal conditions in the Apple factories. Foxconn supports Apple,
Sony, HP, Dell, Nintendo, Motorola, and Nokia. Mainly in the Apple factories,
the workers put up with low wages and long hours under an inhumane and abusive
management system. For my digital story, I will start by talking about the
harsh realities that are Foxconn factories.
The employees are being driven towards suicide
so I will explain the reasons behind the suicides. First and foremost, the “employees
are paid only $1.78 per hour.” (Mashable.com) While working they must have some
place to live so they can rent out dorms for $17 a month. These are not your
average double rooms however. The employees share the rooms with seven
roommates. While on the job, the work is lengthy and difficult making the low
wages not even comparable to what they deserve. To assemble a single iPad, it
takes five days and three hundred seventy five pairs of hands. Employees are
using chemicals and materials that may be harmful to be around such as raw
aluminum amongst other metals. In one shift, an employee can carve the apple
logo into aluminum three thousand times or make 150,000 iPad cameras. They do
this by taking very short breaks or no breaks at all in their already long
workday. Their shifts are twelve hours and they get two meal breaks. The meals
are seventy cents for cafeteria-style meat and rice. Despite these horrible
conditions, thousands of people line up for the job because they need some sort
of income. Of the people that want the job, Foxconn hires eighty percent of
those people, some of which are as young as thirteen.
Due
to all of the previous conditions, between 2010 and 2013, twenty-four people tried
to kill themselves because of the circumstances. In that time period, there
were three suicide attempts in three days all of which ended with death. All of
the people who attempted suicide were under the age of twenty-six. One specific
instance was a seventeen-year-old girl who attempted suicide in 2010. She is
now paralyzed from the waist down. Another circumstance falls on July 16, 2009,
which is the date of one of the very first suicides. A man lost an iPhone so
employees with seniority beat him and searched his room. He jumped from his
apartment building the next day. Clearly, this is not right and there is no
coincidence in this situation. Next in my digital story, I am going to try to
collect some footage from the actual factory workers or stories about them in
order to portray to my audience the type of people that are working in the
factories and the type of people that are ending their lives all for a job. By
putting in little clips of the factory workers, it will strike the viewers
heartstrings hopefully because it’s hard to watch something and think that the
person in the video is so unhappy.
Following
the clips of real life Foxconn employees, I plan to elaborate on the
improvements that Foxconn has made even though very little progress has been
made. However, small changes have been made to alter the once unimaginable work
place that was Foxconn. First, they announced, “No employee could work more
than 49 hours a week”. (NY Times) Also, people working for Foxconn who were
sixteen and seventeen have to work lighter jobs and cannot work at night.
Regarding the suicides, all Foxconn has done is put a suicide net around the
perimeter of their factories and dorm buildings. People consider this to be
putting a bandage on the issue. I intend for my digital story to make people
think about what else could be done to make working at Foxconn less miserable.
The
style of my digital story is going to be set up like a power point but the
pictures are going to play as videos as a means of transitioning from topic to
topic. My digital story will start with the horrible things that have happened
to the employees at Foxconn then transition into what the employees did because
of their circumstances at the factories. From there, I will talk about what
Foxconn did to improve how the employees felt about the company. At the end, I
plan to leave it somewhat open-ended in hopes that the audience can join in and
offer some better solutions to help the employees at Foxconn.
Works Cited
"Improving Working Conditions at Foxconn." New
York Times. New York Times
Company, 26
Dec. 2012. Web. 7 Nov. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com>
Kelly, Samantha Murphy. 10 Staggering Facts behind Apple's
Foxconn Factory.
Mashable.
N.p., 22 Feb. 2012. Web. 7 Nov. 2013. <http://mashable.com>.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
In doing our social action project, it has gotten me thinking about the suicides at Foxconn. It poses a lot of questions. Does employees losing their lives not strike a cord with the owners? Do the other employees try to stop the suicides? How could they not try to stop the suicides sooner? Why did it take eighteen attempted suicides for it to get people's attention? The answer to these questions are anything but simple. The owners definitely could have done something to prevent the suicides. After the second person that should have triggered something and made them investigate and wonder. Didn't they think of the worker's families? Or the lives that they were leaving behind because of their working conditions. Why did it have to take multiple suicides for them to even put up nets? The people at Foxconn are selfish and apparently heartless. To know that eighteen people wanted their lives to end because of the working conditions that the owners lay out for them is disheartening and needs to change. Hopefully our social action project can have some effect on the situation. Even though we are only six people in a school of less than four thousand, we are hoping that through the student body and the power of the internet that we can make a change or at least make some steps towards a change.
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