The dark side of the technology | Part 3

The raw materials used to make the iPhone cause all manner of human suffering.

Can you name all the different materials in an iPhone? Most people wouldn’t even know where to start. And the list is pretty long, with at least 30 materials, including aluminum, iron, copper and even a bit of tin.

That tin most likely comes from the mines of Cerro Rico, right outside the Bolivian city of Potosí. After being mined, the tin is sent to smelters, usually EM Vinto or Operaciones Metalúrgicas, before being shipped to, among other firms, the manufacturers of Apple products. In iPhones, this tin is usually used in the form of solder, a tin-based alloy that connects the various components within the device.

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This tin from Cerro Rico comes with costs. For instance, since mining began there in the mid-sixteenth century, between four and eight million people have died there from starvation, freezing temperatures and cave ins. As a result, Cerro Rico has earned the morbid nickname “The Mountain That Eats Men.”

To this day, around 15,000 people work there, several thousand children among them, and fatality rates are still out of control. In fact, in a recent incident, two kids died while working in a mine. To cope with the brutal conditions of their work, they had gotten drunk and lost their way in the labyrinthine mine, eventually freezing to death. To make matters more frightening, geologists are now warning that the mountain is on the verge of collapse because of centuries of hollowing it out.

So mining the tin for the iPhone causes tremendous human suffering, but that’s not the only negative impact of this product. More than half of the tin smelters used by Apple reside on Bangka Island in Indonesia, another site of deadly mines. On this island, the mining overseers randomly, and often illegally, dig pits with tractors, leaving behind unstable walls. These precarious walls often crash down, killing miners in the process. As a result, in 2014, every week a miner died there.

The parts that make up your iPhone are manufactured by exploited workers.

In China, just outside of Shenzhen, there sits a massive Foxconn factory that manufactures and assembles the iPhone. Foxconn is the largest employer in mainland China; it employs some 1.3 million people globally, a number only topped by McDonald’s and Walmart.
The company’s Longhua plant in Shenzhen is roughly 1.4 square miles in size and at one point it housed some 450,000 workers. Today, while fewer people work in the plant, it’s still one of the largest in the world.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the working conditions in this factory are abhorrent. In 2010 alone, 14 workers took their own lives by jumping off the tall factory buildings; another four workers attempted to do the same, but didn’t succeed; and another 20 were stopped by officials before they could try.

Each suicide attempt is known to have been motivated by the insufferable conditions of the work, which includes long hours, repressive managers and a common system of unjustified and humiliating fines for even the simplest mistakes.

The response of Foxconn CEO, Terry Gou?

Rather than improve working conditions, Gou had nets erected around the building to block the free fall of workers. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs was entirely dismissive, citing statistics about comparable suicide rates at your average university.

In other words, neither Apple nor its contractors seem to care about worker safety – but they do care about the security of their facilities. In fact, when the author visited the Apple suppliers in Shanghai, he found them highly secured. He wasn’t allowed inside the facility and was even prohibited from taking pictures of it from the outside. There were large numbers of guards and cameras, and it was entirely surrounded by barbed wire.

Pegatron, one of the major Shanghai-based suppliers of Apple parts, even makes workers swipe cards and look into cameras that use facial-recognition software before they can enter buildings. While the company claims that such measures are to protect intellectual property, it’s clear that this high security also insulates the company from the bad press that the factory working conditions would doubtless generate.

Conclusion

While the iPhone may embody the pinnacle of modern technology, it’s actually based on centuries of experimentation and innovation. Though this technological wonder has revolutionized modern life, its production has a number of negative effects on the people who assemble the iPhone as well as the workers who mine the metals from which it’s made.