Comment Articles

Profits at any cost?

Tags:
China

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 29 Jan 2004 16:17 GMT

It's not been a great week for IT companies. While the whole financial landscape may be looking more fecund, the moral topography of some companies is appearing distinctly barren.

The week began with a damning report from the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) highlighting sweatshop conditions in the factories that produce components for several leading PC manufacturers, including IBM, Dell and HP. The agency claimed to have uncovered "dire working conditions" at production sites in Mexico, Thailand and China. The wider implications of the report have already been touched on but basically CAFOD claims that these "appallingly low" conditions are a direct result of extreme pressures within the IT industry to cut costs.

While unsafe working practices and human-rights abuses are wholly unacceptable, previous cases such as Nike's mean that manufacturers treating factory staff in developing countries poorly is sadly neither new nor particularly shocking. But a report issued yesterday by human-rights campaign group Amnesty indicates that moral bankruptcy in the IT industry is not limited to the relatively low-margin, commoditised PC market. It seems some of the industries biggest software or "solution" providers could have also been driven onto equally shaky moral ground by financial pressure.

In the report, China: Controls tighten as Internet activism grows, Amnesty claims there has been a dramatic rise in the number of people detained or sentenced for expressing their opinions online or for downloading information from the Internet. Up to and including January 2004, 54 people had been detained or imprisoned for "Internet activism" in China -- a 60 per cent increase on November 2002 figures, according to Amnesty.

And where does China get the technology to monitor and restrict access to the Internet? From Microsoft, Sun, Cisco and Nortel, among others, claims Amnesty. According to the report: "Amnesty International remains concerned that in the pursuit of new and lucrative markets, foreign corporations may be indirectly contributing to human-rights violations or at, the very least, failing to give consideration to the human-rights implications of their investments."