How Socially Responsible Are Computer Companies?

mlc asks: "I'm involved in some projects for social justice, et al., and I'm also a geek. But I've never really given much thought to reconciling the two. How ethical are computer companies, especially hardware companies? Do semiconductor factories in Taiwan treat their workers better than any other factories in Taiwan? Does Dell donate any of its profits to charity? Are there any other tips for the socially responsible computer buyer?"

Permatemps

Speaking as a student who knows many Microsoft employees and temps, I can tell you that the vast majority of their permatemps remained hourly employees by their own choice.

Good temps are usually offered a fulltime position after about 6 months of work. This has happened for countless of my friends. Those who don't care about overtime usually take the position. However, I know many, many workaholics that plan to spend at least 60 hours a week at work and want to get paid for the time. These people usually refuse fulltime work, choosing instead to make massive amounts of up-front cash through overtime.

Yes, they are denied benefits and stock options this way. However, their base pay works out to be up to double what a fulltime employee makes, especially if they have been around for a year or two. Many of my temp friends choose this route because it gives them a lot of freedom if they decide to leave the company. Options are great if you plan to stay around for 5 or 10 years, but if you leave after only a couple of years then you can only cash in a very small fraction of your options.

In short, I know a lot of people at Microsoft and cannot think of a single temp who has been abused by the company. They voluntarily trade benefits and options for immediate cash. It's hard to argue that you are an exploited temp when Microsoft repeatedly offers you a fulltime position and you turn it down! However, this option will soon be denied to them because of the greed of a few contractors who want to have their cake and eat it, too.

People love to compare the plight of the MS contractors to that of sweatshop workers. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are talking about wages that start at $20/hour and go up from there, with time-and-a-half overtime. These people are hardly starving. If MS has committed ethical violations, it is not with their work force.

Re:Depends on the company, mostly

What are you smoking, and where do I get some? Really, have you already forgotten the efforts of Microsoft to abolish time and a half overtime for their hourly contract employees? When they tried to get the state of Washington to exclude "information tech" workers wholesale from that particular benefit?

Try going there yourself before shooting off like that.

Contract workers are one thing, employees are another. I've been to Microsoft's campus for interop meetings they've hosted, and it's quite a nice place to work. Every employee has an office, every building has a cafeteria, there are break rooms on every floor with racks of free soft drinks. From a visitor's perspective I'll say that they cater very well. People who work at Microsoft spend a great deal of time there, and the company makes an effort to ensure that these employees don't mind being there. The department I dealt with has meetings one Friday afternoon each month where beer is served. No one complains about their salary, or the stock options, etc.

The point is, certainly from a physical comfort standpoint it's quite a nice place to be an employee. The culture is weird and ethically I could never work there, but that doesn't mean its an unpleasant place to spend half a week.

All charities are not created equal...

Giving $100,000 to United Way isn't the same as...
giving $100,000 to the ACLU which isn't the same as...
giving $100,000 to PETA which isn't the same as...
giving $100,000 to GreenPeace which isn't the same as...
giving $100,000 to the Sisters of Charity...
giving $100,000 to the Sierra Club...

I doubt people can come to an agreement on a valid comparison as to the social-environmental
benefits vs the dollars contributed...

I'd rather see companies spend less on charity so that we can spend more (and get the results we
want instead of what the sleazy charity fundraisers can trick a company into giving)...

Personally I think most of these "charties" spend too much of thier money on themselves rather than
the causes they champion. United way for example, is one of the lower-return-per-dollar charaties.

Environmental contributions aren't much better...

One of the current hot debate topics is the issue of destroying dams in the columbia basin
(NW united states) to restore the original river flow...

The destroy/restore side:

http://www.removedams.org/index.cfm

One would think this is a no-brainer, but more in-depth analysis indicates there's another side
to this debate:

http://www.buchal.com/links/links.htm

Which is right? I won't give my opinion here, but suffice it to say, I don't want any company that
delegates the task of figuring out which one is right to somebody who "unfortunatly, doesn't have
any time to do the legwork today" (to quote a poor unfortuante soul) attempting to figure this one
out for me...

More than just relative

In another life, I worked for a contruction consulting/management company. Our customers included Intel, AMD, Fujitsu, & Cypress.

I remember one of the engineers referring to the hazardous chemicals used by these companies as the ``Oh" gasses. ``Oh" as in if you smelled one of these hazardous materials, you'd be dead before you could say the second syllable of ``Oh shit."

The smarter companies that handled these things took extreme care in keeping them under control: they knew that if an accident happened with one of these chemicals, it would make Bhopal look as serioius as a fart in church.

However, I know of one company that has been playing loose with the laws -- not one I mentioned above. This company has several buildings constructed that were never approved by the county inspectors, wherein they store this nasty stuff -- at least when I heard about it around 1990. And if they never bothered to clear it with the county, I wonder if they bothered to verify that the construction was right, & the buildings *are* safe enough to store the stuff in. Unofrtuantley, there is only one way we'll ever find out . . .

I wonder when the day will come that a disgruntled employee -- or ex-employee -- of this copany takes a map of the campus, checks the building records at the county against it, & blows the whistle.

It would be a lot more fun as payback than suing for harassment or lost wages.

Geoff

Re:Independantly?

Pardon me, but you ignored a critical part of his point:

Using the company as a social proxy is in-efficient compared to making a

normal buying decision...

In my mind, a "normal buying decision" includes things like, oh, does this company exploit third-world child labor? Do they try to legally abuse their employees, or use the law to silence critics? Have I ever heard of them being entangled with violations of environmental laws - and if I did, was it a real violation, or some tin-pot beaureaucrat making political hay?

In other words, someone making a "normal buying decision" wouldn't think your murderer's offer of a Rolex for $10 was a good deal. They might end up looking at the same Rolex from a bunch of different companies, none of which was obviously more "socially conscious" than the others, and end up deciding none of them are either socially conscious or socially corrupt, and that saving $10 and giving it to the Little Sisters of the Poor is more worthwhile than spending 3 weeks researching Rolex resellers to determine which one was more worthy of your money.

It's all about the Benjamins - follow the $$$

Here is a general rule of thumb, that someone still has to disprove:

Quality costs money. If something is being done in a way that doesn't make sense, figure out who stands to profit from this, and it will make sense.

Quality parts are more expensive to make than shoddy and unreliable parts.

Workers who make quality parts have to work more slowly/carefully, and CARE about what they make. To care about one's job, one has to enjoy it (at least somewhat). Further, to care about one's job, the job must be worth holding on to.

For a job to be worth holding on to, it must be more qualifiably/quantitatively better (lucrative/interesting/...) than the alternative.

High-tech production facilities can not exist in a vacuum, and so are in competition with other industries for workers (even in the Far East, a chip fab must be close to a dock, and Nike factories).

Conclusion: The cheaper the parts, the less a company pays it's workers, the more poorly treated the company's workers are. We can be reasonably sure that workers in hard-disk plants are paid and treated better than those in Kathie Lee's sweat-shops, but I'm sure that people working for Western Digital are treated better than those in the employ of Maxtor.

Re:It's not their *job*!

Perhaps not, but investors are under no obligation to invest in companies that maximize efficiency by breaking the law, or even obeying the law in less-than-admirable ways, such as paying workers too little, working them too hard, hiring them too young, dumping pollutants in rivers, creating products that are dangerous, bribing and stealing, and so forth.

Unocal says in all innocence they have no idea that <a href="http://jinx.sistm.unsw.edu.au/~greenlft/1995 /187/187p21b.htm">the Burmese government is forcing villagers at gunpoint to clear the way for their new pipeline</a>. Yet they have every incentive to look the other way on a deal literally decades in the making. Is that what an investor likes to hear, that they are making profit on the backs of slaves?

Investors who stick with companies that are socially <b>irresponsible</b> deserve criticism.
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Ayn Rand novels

Ayn Rand was an egomaniac cult leader who could barely support herself selling her books that had one dimensional unrealistic characters to further her black and white self-fulfilling prophecy to simple minds who can barely understand the meaning of shades of gray

I don't know much about her so-called cult, and I'll agree that her novels and characters were terribly unrealistic. But she was right about some important things.

I don't know how it happened, but somehow, by the late 80s, I was a bleeding heart liberal. Too much "We are the World, We are the Children" and "Hands Across America" type mentality exposure, I guess. (Damn, I feel nauseous just thinking about certain aspects of the 80s.) I just couldn't stand the thought of anyone acting purely out of self-interest, and I thought it was the government's job to somehow force a certain set of values (arrived through some sort of democratic concensus, I guess?) upon the economy through the means of taxes and subsidies. Taxes and subsidies -- that was my answer to everything.

Ayn Rand woke me up. And not a minute too soon, IMHO, before I threw my life away on the ridiculous premise that I'm suppose to live for the sake of others, and assume that others will help me if I screw things up.

Ignore the laughable attempt at science fiction through John Galt's magic generator, and the wacky high-handed way that she preaches (the part where she explains how a bunch of train wreck victims deserved to die being the most ridiculous), and the incredible coincidence that Reardon Steel just happened to really live up to its hype, thanks to Reardon's almost mystic insight into metallurgy. Yeah, it was a bad novel. But the message that she preached was a good one: that we're responsible for ourselves and shouldn't depend on "society" to take care of things for us. Now what the hell is wrong with that?

Ayn Rand's dogma is so contrary to what the media tries to pound into us, day after day, that the shock of it makes you (well, it made me) question everything. And skepticism is a damn fine thing. I'll trade you ten zombies for one Rand cultist any day!

---

Socially responsible?

I generally hope to buy from companies that are doing their best to be as efficient as possible. I'd rather spend 5% less, and buy something from a company that gives nothing to charity, then buy something from a company that makes a big deal about giving to charities. I'd rather pick my own charities, and I'd rather not support yet another layer of people who get paid to come between me and the recipients.

This doesn't mean I don't mind companies dumping toxic wastes...

Still, I find the most socially responsible thing I can think of is for a company to do its best to produce a good product, handle it efficiently, and not waste resources. If they do this, I am likely to end up with more time and money to spend doing the socially responsible things *I* care about.

Open Source?

Clearly Open Source software is awfull for the workers. Think about it now, most work for what? NOTHING! Most of these poor people work at awfull hours, sacrificing their nights, weekends and their sleep, and social lives. Open Source Software is clearly a socially unacceptable industry that must be stoped at all costs. Help the poor programers. They may say that they do it for fun but don't be fooled!

Re:Depends on the company, mostly

How would you like to spend all day lining up the same two pins on a resistor to the same two holes on your board. How would you like to spend all week at it?

I spent 4 years doing it at AT&T (later called Lucent) and it beats the hell out of construction work or being on a road crew. The nature of electronics requires a controlled environment. Sweat on a circuit board before solder is applied will play havoc with your quality control. I wouldn't bet that foreign high tech factories are as nice as those in the US, but I can almost guarantee that they are better than sweat shop conditions in textile factories.

Re:Seagate and Toxic chemicals

I can also tell you that, especially in California, many of these laws are completely ridiculous, and the "toxic chemicals" may not be toxic, or even "chemicals" at all.

Case in point: my first job out of college was at an aerospace company in southern California that built carbon fiber composites. These are inspected using an ultrasonic imaging technique in which two robot arms squirt a stream of water at opposing sides of the part and the ultrasonic "beam" is propagated through the water. Regular lab-grade deionized water was used in this procedure since you wanted good clean water and didn't want to have to worry about scale buildup, etc.

CA law says, though, that because the deionized water had been "used in an industrial process" (which amounted to nothing more than pumping it through some tubing for a couple of weeks) it was now "hazardous waste" which had to be disposed of at great trouble and expense.

Some of this "hazardous waste" found its way into the drains, as it should have. However - and this is an important caveat - if they had been caught, they could have been charged with "dumping hazardous waste". What a complete and utter racket. I have *no* respect for the enviros and their govenmental thugs after seeing things like this happen in the real world.

Believe it or not, oil companies are among the most ecologically conscious companies on the planet. I worked on an emergency oil spill response network a few years back, and the oil company environmental guys take their jobs *very* seriously. I assure you that at least for the companies I worked with, they will take literally heroic, life-threatening measures to mitigate any damage - like boating into a river of fire in a combined flood/pipeline rupture near Houston a few years back to determine the correct location of the break when all the landmarks were underwater. (This rupture later proved to be due to natural causes from the 1000-year flood scouring the dirt from a few hundred yards of now unsupported pipeline, which finally couldn't stand the strain: it actually broke almost 1/2 mile from the normal river channel.)

Make sure you have some experience with the folks responsible for environmental activities at a company befoer making your decision based solely on the rants of some whiner with a website. This was a company that many people love to hate, and I came away convinced they cared more about the environment where they operated than *anyone* else, including the enviros and especially the gov't flacks.

Sony:hardware::Microsoft:software
CompactFlash: IBM Microdrive, Flash, Ether, Modem, etc.

Re:It's not their *job*!

However, some decisions can be financially correct but morally wrong. For instance exploiting child labor in a third world country and paying them dirt, or dumping hazardous waste somewhere legal but still dangerous, may be the 'best' deal they can make. Donating the resultant profits to charity is not a reasonable substitute for making consciencious decisions in the first place. (Only partially because it's ALWAYS easier and cheaper to break things than to fix them)

Re:Ayn Rand novels

Please allow me to elucidate plainly upon my original point without the weighted "cult" rhetoric which bears an extremely negative connotation:

If you look further into various philosophies, manifesto's, movements, et al, you will find they most always bring one to question their current perceived reality. This applies across to pseudo-religion, cults, racist groups, some political movements, ad infinitum (e.g., environmentalism, punk rockers, liberalism, communism, nazism, freemasons, scientologists, *gasp* even some religions, et al etc etc). For example, if you go call up the local American communist party - do you think they will tell you that they didn't employ skepticism in shaping their idealogy? I thought not.

You have to make the distinction between that and the thoughts elucidated heretofore in the objectivist philosophy. You might then say: "Why do you feel so strongly about such things as political manifesto's? They are harmless.." Well, I have to admit - I too, had fell in a terrible ism pothole many years ago. I too had found that this had opened me up into a world of skeptical thinking. What I later found at the help of another is replacement dogma based on the seeds of that particular belief system presented.

And that is why I despise those wearing things such as objectivism, or environmentalism etc on their belt. Saying such things are harmless and only books flies in the face of those who are dedicated to these philosophies. Even in situations where the progenitors were revealed as complete frauds who managed to elucidate only one single, clear thought in their entire lives, people have still insisted on turning the happenstance into religions, cults, brotherhoods, movements, and so on. People will be people, no doubt.

Anyway, when glazing over the works of philosophers such as Russell, Godel, Nietzsche, Descartes, etc - do you see them concocting rigid belief systems? I thought not. Bertrand Russell even jokes as to how one would easily herd sheep with simple grains of truth. In Ayn Rand's case, she could barely conceal the fact that her books are really a manifesto. In contrast, Orwell actually wrote books based on the merit of his ideas alone - not some cultish ism manifesto philosophy.

Still, one asks what's wrong [geocities.com] with the objectivist system. Well, as I said in my other post, it's mostly feel-good self-fulfilling blabble. Subjectivity [deja.com] seems to be lost in all this to "objective" selfishness. It's basically a simplistic look at the complex system we call human life. Black and whites are just so conveniently manipulative. If Ayn Rand really wanted you to think for yourself, she wouldn't have built such a rigid philosophy based on interesting grains of truth, but riddled with logical fallacies. "Objectivism"? Give me a break.

Note that my original response didn't say not to read Ayn Rand's books. It was only a warning to the possibly destructive thought systems she is trying to plant in the readers mind. Just take it with a grain of salt like one should take any other manifesto. Belief systems denying the intellectual evolution of the reader are for wussies :-).

Depends

FWIW, (I'm a consultant and have worked for everything from Fortune 500 companies to internet start-ups) I think smaller companies tend towards being more ethical than larger companies. Big companies usually talk a nice line about their social responsibility, but ultimately they are beholden to the stockholders and the bottom-line is paramount. Small companies, especially ones that are privately held, are more tied to an individual's conscience. They're more human.

actually not that silly of an example,

considering that the first rocket engines (super high quality German suckers designed by none othe rthan the Edision of rocketry, Wernher von Braun [britannica.com]) were built by concentration camp slave labor. It was certainly the best product of its kind availible, so . . .

Slashdot Employs Illegal Migrant Workers

for $2.20 an hour. These poor illegal aliens transmit TCP/IP by hand, via telegraph and are forced to learn PHP by gunpoint. In many South American communities, slashdot is a word uttered with great fear. The 'slash' in slashdot means and entirely different thing to these people.

If nothing else, please post responsibly people- remember there may be a human beinging grueling over the ip header of the packet containing your ill-mannered post. And no, they don't have moderator access either.

Seagate and Toxic chemicals

I'm not sure if your interest specifically constrained to social issues, but I'd recommend not buying Seagate. Many, many years ago, in the days of MFM hard drives, they were charged and fined for dumping toxic chemicals into a river. As a whole, the computer industry creates a lot of extremely toxic waste. Hard drive and microprocessor manufacturing both produce large volumes of highly toxic "stuff". Hopefully someone on Slashdot who knows more about how the biz handles this. It should definetly factor into any responsibly motivated purchasing decision.

It was Ceridian, not Seagate

Seeagate didn't exist until the 80's ( founded 1979, IPO ?1985?), so I presume you mean the toxic dumping done by Ceridian, but paid for by Seagate. Assuming we are discussing the same matter, let me explain.

Ceridian was the the disk-drive subsidiary of Control Data Corp - the place where Seymour Cray got rolling( I still remember working on the 6 bit byte, 10 byte word of the CDC cyber ) Eventually, Ceridian got bought by Seagate, making Seagate liable (under Superfund laws) for Ceridian's pollution. Thus Seagate got the cleanup tab and the publicity, even though most (or all) of the dumping occurred before Seagate even existed.

I was a Seagate shareholder at the time, and I still remember the pain 8)

High Tech = high toxic

Something that often gets glossed over when talking about the tech industry is it's impact on the environment. A large part of being socially responsible is being environmentally responsible (Venn diagram guy, chime in [here] please). The fact is, tech industry turns the landscape into a filthy pit.

In Santa Clara county alone, there are 23 EPA superfund cleanup sites -- making it one of the dirtiest counties in America, and number one in superfund in California. In South Dakota and North Dakota combined, there is one superfund site.

As ranked by the EPA, here's the high tech contribution to the superfund sites:

2. FAIRCHILD SEMICONDUCTOR CORP. (SOUTH SAN JOSE PLANT)
4. SPECTRA-PHYSICS, INC.
5. ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES, INC.
6. NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR CORP
8. TELEDYNE SEMICONDUCTOR
11. TRW MICROWAVE, INC (BUILDING 82)
11. INTEL MAGNETICS
11. FAIRCHILD SEMICONDUCTOR CORP (MT VIEW)
11. ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES, INC. (BLDG. 915)
11. INTEL CORP. (SANTA CLARA III)
12. HEWLETT-PACKARD (620-640 PAGE MILL ROAD)
12. RAYTHEON CORP
12. INTEL CORP. (MOUNTAIN VIEW PLANT

Notice how AMD and Intel appear multiple times. They make fast chips, but they make a damn mess.

So is the tech industry socially responsible? Not if you care about the environment.

The Santa Clara county data was taken from Scorecard [scorecard.org].

Economist Paul Krugman has a relevant column

At In praise of cheap labor [mit.edu], MIT Economist Paul Krugman [mit.edu] argues, "Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all..."

Bill Gates

As we all know, Bill Gates is the devil.

However, he's certainly a generous devil. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has repeatedly received donations from Gates (and other benefactors), towards advancement in many medicinal and health fields - including hunger, cancer, and others.

Recently, Gates has donated:

• March, 2000 - $133 million towards people being able to receive health benefits of the advancements in pharmaceuticals
  
• October, 1999 - $7.7 million towards New York State public libraries for internet access and technical training/information
  
• September, 1999 - $1 billion for the Gates Millenium Scholarships to pay for 1,000 college students' tuition, room, and board
  

I could go further back, but you can look it all up for yourself at New.C om [cnet.com]

support your local mom&pop shop

Keep the money local to your area, and out of the pockets of the big corporation CEOs, whenever possible. There are a few local people I buy parts from, and I've assembled all my machines from their available supplies. It costs a little more if you build something from scratch, but for upgrading it's usually a good deal. Their prices are pretty low, and if something breaks, I can yell at someone's face if I need to. Never underestimate the power of face-to-face contact when dealing with product returns.

Re:Depends on the company, mostly

Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft is probably actualy nice to many of its employees. It is under such scrutiny that it can't
afford not to. However, some of the less popular hardware companies (AOPen, and the other really small and unheard of ones
that you can't find at Best Buy) probably aren't as benevolent.

What are you smoking, and where do I get some? Really, have you already forgotten the efforts of Microsoft to abolish time and a half overtime for their hourly contract employees? When they tried to get the state of Washington to exclude "information tech" workers wholesale from that particular benefit?

Please read a little from http://www.vcnet.com/bms/ before attempting to pass this off again.

Re:Social responsibilty

And, of course, Windows 2000 will include real-time disk defragging purchased from Diskeeper, which is one of the many Scientologist "front" organizations that contribute their earnings directly back to the mother cult.

Novell is heavily, though only quasi-officially, involved with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints - but the Mormons, unlike the Scientologists, are not considered to be dangerous criminal organizations by several nations.

Do a search at your favorite engine for "dianetics+scientology+criminal". On Alta Vista [altavista.com], you'll get 114 web pages devoted to slamming Scientology and their practices. Look for German language sites and you'll probably find even more!

"Social Responsibility" implies not supporting terrorists or exclusionist religions, in my book.

--Charlie
"I think I should GAIN karma for baiting Xians"

Re:Bill Gates

However, he's certainly a generous devil.

Recently, Gates has donated:

• 
  
• March, 2000 - $133 million towards people being able to receive health benefits of the advancements in pharmaceuticals
• October, 1999 - $7.7 million towards New York State public libraries for internet access and technical training/information
• September, 1999 - $1 billion for the Gates Millenium Scholarships to pay for 1,000 college students' tuition, room, and board

And at an estimated $85 billion [forbes.com] this means:

• Phamaseuticals = 0.15 %
• Libraries = 0.009 %
• Scholarships = 1.17%

To put this in perspective, that like me giving

• Phamaseuticals = $75
• Libraries = $4.50
• Scholarships = $588

Hardly "Giving till it hurts". Hell, lil' ol' ladies give more money to their church.

Read Cypress CEO's Position

It's old (1996) but still worth reading the response of outspoken Cypress Semi CEO T.J. Rodgers to The Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia after they criticized the company for lack of minority representation on its board. Here is the link. [cypress.com]

Re:Independantly?

In my mind, a "normal buying decision" includes things like, oh, does this company exploit third-world child labor? Do they try to legally abuse their employees, or use the law to silence critics? Have I ever heard of them being entangled with violations of environmental laws - and if I did, was it a real violation, or some tin-pot beaureaucrat making political hay?

If these are the things you think of when making your normal buying decisions, we are in perfect agreement. However, that isn't what the person I responded to said. What I quoted was :

Make the best deal you can, for the best price that you can, and donate your 'extra' money to the charity or cause of your choice. Using the company as a social proxy is in-efficient compared to making a normal buying decision and having your personal causes a separate and distinct thing.

This was after focusing on the job of companies being to make money and nothing else. "A normal buying decision" here is defined as paying attention only to the product and the price.

Now in a shopping moment, I look at where something is made and if its a company I actually know something about already. I agree you can't be an expert on every company. If I was buying stock in a company, or planning to open a business that would be buying 100 computers, I would look more in depth.

Nutshell, I agree with you pretty much, but I don't think the person I was responding to did.

-Kahuna Burger

Well, after reading the first 75 posts or so...

There's a whole lot of words up there. They can be boiled down, I think, to just three: "we don't know." Lots of opinion and bombast, but very few facts.

Okay: we don't know, but surely SOMEONE does. Doesn't anyone have links to related info? Does the United Way have any information about computer company donations? I don't, unfortunately, have time to do the legwork today. :(

Despite the protestations of the A/C above, claiming that any such thinking is a threat to freedom, etc. etc, this stuff matters . Much of the code you write will be thrown away -- the environmental damage you do while writing it will last forever.

One thing we're realizing, in our search of the cosmos with the Hubble, is that planets like Earth may be impossibly rare; there might not be five planets like this in the whole Galaxy. We are probably sitting atop a treasure trove of literally Galactic proportions and using it as a toilet... in fact, we're actively painting the treasure room with feces.

So, again, this stuff matters a lot. Pay attention. Pick this out over the background noise; most other concerns are less important, even if they are more urgent.

Re:Who Really Cares??

It doesnt matter.Im not going to buy a Pentium III instead of an Athlon because intel uses a less polutive fab or something.Is it fast?Stable?The epitome of PC power?Thats why I buy a product.

Ah, nothing like short-term short-sighted thinking.

Tell me, how much good does having the epitome of PC power do you when you're dying of cancer caused by the toxins released during fabrication of your CPU?

I like powerful CPUs. I also like being able to breathe the atmosphere. So if manufacturer A is doing a better job of keeping his toxins to himself than manufacturer B, it's in my selfish best interest to purchase from A.

If you don't like to think of it as "social responsibility", think of it as "long term global thinking".

Re:Social responsibilty

A follow up on Apple:

Apple also makes its iMac line of computers with polycarbonate plastic. This plastic contains bisphenol A.

Apple acknologies the plastic outgasses enough for people to notice the smell.

A list of links from 'it causes testicles to shrink' to 'everything is ok'
http://www.wwfcanada.org/red uce-risk/questionable.html [wwfcanada.org]
http://www.sciencedai ly.com/releases/1999/10/991021075812.htm [sciencedaily.com]
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/oc/news/seala nt.htm [nih.gov]
http://www.doh.gov.uk/hef/bisphena.htm [doh.gov.uk]
The Pro BPA page telling you everything is Ok, nothign to see here...http://www.bisphenol-a.org/ [bisphenol-a.org]

Now the question:
Is it socially responsible to
1) be making this kind of machine covering
2) have these computers in schools, where endocrine disruption has more of an effect.

Keep in mind that the Good Design (tm) award given out in Japan was NOT given to the iMac. Why? Because of the use of bisphenol-A. (this is how I found out in fact....)

Social responsibilty

Depends on the metrics you use.

Apple has had issues in the past WRT the number of african americans in management

Here on /., Micro$oft is disliked for the quality of the code they sell. (think if the stuff worked.)

Digital (now part of Compaq) is rarely given credit for their creation and then NOT getting patents on the citrus replacement for freon solvents.

And Ray Norda gets no credit for his settling the BSD/AT&T lawsuit. (a social issue of importance to the BSD community/OpenSource software)

The simplest metric would be to get the finationals from the companies and see what they list as charties, then do a %age. But what is important to you, say a greenpeace donation, is not important to others (say replacing freon)

Independantly?

Make the best deal you can, for the best price that you can, and donate your 'extra' money to the charity or cause of your choice. Using the company as a social proxy is in-efficient compared to making a normal buying decision and having your personal causes a separate and distinct thing.

Hey, that gives me a great idea! If I started working as a pimp for underage crack whores, I would make a lot more money and could finally have enough disposable cash to donate to the Home for Little Wanderers!

Ehem. To talk about keeping your personal causes (what we sometimes call "ethics") a "seperate and distinct thing" indicates that you may not understand why the poster was asking the question. As a person who also cares about social justice, i can tell you that part of it is personally making an impact, and another just as important part is living your life in an ethical fashion. Part of that, for me, is trying not to participate in injustice.

To put it in simple terms, if a businessman was murdered right in front of you, then the murderer turned to you and said "hey, I don't really want to fence this rolex, You wanna buy it for 10 bucks?" Would you feel ethically comfortable about getting a deal under those circumstances? If not, why should someone who cares about human rights feel comfortable buying a less expensive keyboard that is cheap because of the use of slave labor?

So no, you can't always just buy whatever's cheap then use the money you save to be nice, anymore than I could run a slave brothel and give the money to charity. Everything you do is a choice, and some of us try to make ethical choices part of our daily life, not just a once a year check.

PS I consider part of the job of every human being to be acting decently. Corporate officers who can't do that part of their job won't get my money for the rest of it.

-Kahuna Burger

Depends on the company, mostly

Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft is probably actualy nice to many of its employees. It is under such scrutiny that it can't afford not to. However, some of the less popular hardware companies (AOPen, and the other really small and unheard of ones that you can't find at Best Buy) probably aren't as benevolent.

As software programmers go, they have to be nice or they'll all leave, due to the fact that the demand for software programmers is higher than the supply.

The point being, overseas labor allows you to disregard your employees more than if the labor was here. Also, the jobs that require a computer are also going to require an employer to be more benevolent. Oddly enough, there are probably more problems with Asian physical labor than American programming jobs. How would you like to spend all day lining up the same two pins on a resistor to the same two holes on your board. How would you like to spend all week at it? Aren't you glad you get to use a computer at work/school?

"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"