Ghastly working conditions in a Chinese keyboard factory

[bobodod]

From BoingBoing on February 9th:

The National Labor Council's investigation into the working conditions at the Meitai keyboard factory in Dongguan City is just ghastly, a stinging indictment of the South China economic miracle. The workers are underpaid, cheated out of their wages, forced into overtime, subjected to brainwashing, and subjected to unsafe working conditions and denied medical assistance when they're injured. Meitai makes keyboards for Lenovo, Microsoft, HP and others.

More here http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/09/ghastly-working-cond.html including an astounding list of "infractions" & their punishments.

~ ~ ~

Unfortunately, this is my first post.  So...  Hi everybody!  : P

I promise my next one won't be such a downer.  I've been lurking around learning about switches & boards, trying to make a decision on my first Keyboard.  My palm reader tells me there're some brown Cherrys, Topres & a Unicomp SpaceSaver in my future.  I hope she's right.

[bobodod]

Wow, fantastic.  Even though I searched the forums for "keyboard factory" & "factory" before writing that post, I didn't catch these threads:

http://geekhack.org/showthread.php?t=1541
http://geekhack.org/showthread.php?t=1517

I should have searched for the factory name to begin with.

*palm to forehead*

Sorry for the redundant clutter, folks.  This concludes my embarrassing head-dive into geekhack.org.  Don't forget to tip your waitress.

[Hak Foo]

Perhaps this is a new marketing plan:

Instead of a buckling spring, the click is from the buckling body of an innocent person being beaten.  The BOFH Keyboard.  For people who are just fed up with other humans.

[wellington1869]

Perhaps this is a new marketing plan:

Instead of a buckling spring, the click is from the buckling body of an innocent person being beaten.  The BOFH Keyboard.  For people who are just fed up with other humans.

how about every time you buckle a spring a worker in china gets beaten? It can be hooked up thru the internet into an automatic beating machine.

[bobodod]

Hi and welcome!

Thanks a lot, webwit.

Of course, nothing has changed over the years... USA companies use Mexico among others. See here for example.

Another example is Maxi Switch (Lite-On), see this article. Why am I mentioning Maxi Switch? Because Lexmark sold them the patents and machines for a certain keyboard called the M15

That's exactly the kind of info I'm curious about.

[bhtooefr]

The patents? And the machines? For the M15?

KeyOvation has the M15 patents, and I believe IBM has the M13 patents. Well, probably now Lenovo has them.

Maxi Switch did get the M13 tooling, though.