Justified?

Regular readers here may remember my recent rant about the newspaper that would have been pleased for us all to live in a Nazi state.

Well, yesterday, Apple published the results of it's internal investigation into Foxconn.

You can read it yourself. You may of course choose to disbelieve it, or you may choose to decide that the failings identified were indeed very serious and that the article was justified. I've already seen the BBC's choice of headline on the story "Apple admits excessive iPod hours".

And that is about the worst of it, really. No child labour, no enforced working, generally good conditions, and generally happy workers. Excessive hours maybe a problem, though it seems this country of ours took until just a few years ago to adopt a working time directive measure - a law that really was about worker safety and public safety. But, let's just put the "excessive hours" in a different context. What was the single biggest complaint from the workers?

It was that there was not enough overtime available at non-peak periods! While Western minds may think that a successful outcome is that the excessive hours will be reduced, I guarantee that will not be the same mindset amongst the Chinese.

So, essentially (if we are to believe Apple's report - and they have a lot to lose if it's not true), the substantive claims behind the Mail on Sunday's article were not true. But without them, let's face it, the story would have been MUCH less interesting and barely publishable.

I wonder if the workers the Mail on Sunday SHOULD have focussed on were those working at the Chinese Sony/Dell battery-manufacturing facility?

Tags: iPod, Apple, Daily Mail, Foxconn