Comment on How fair is a Fairphone? (Or, how much of the sticker price does Fairphone spend on fair/eco?)
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 1 day agoI know a lot of people who buy a fairphone
A lot? Lucky you. I know one.
they want to save the planet, and that’s really not what this phone is doing
It’s not an on/off either/or thing; every little bit helps.
This is exactly it. Running a tiny company with nothing in-house making a custom phone with custom hardware is expensive.
Are you expecting a Fairphone to be only as much more expensive as the extra (“fair”) wages paid would cost? But your own quote above proves why that cannot be.
The rest of your comment is much the same; you seem to get too hung up on comparing prices to mainstream devices/parts. If it’s too expensive for you, don’t buy it. You can also do your part in saving the planet by using an older phone for longer with, say, Lineage OS or Sailfish OS.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s too simplistic. We don’t have unlimited resources, so if you want to help with something it’s very helpful to know how much what you do helps and if there’s better ways.
For example, since Fairphone is mostly using credits, you can just directly donate to the right organisations and have the same result. So if you buy a regular phone and donate €5, you will have done more than if you spend an extra €200-€300 for getting a Fairphone over a mainstream phone. And you will have done much, much more if you buy a mainstream phone and donate the €200-300 directly.
That is true, Fairphone wouldn’t be able to do much more with what they got, but at that point it becomes misleading marketing.
It doesn’t make sense to make a product that is 7% “fair” sourced and make “fair” so much core of the branding that it’s right there in the company name.
It’s like rebranding Coca Cola to “Recycling bottle cola” if they include 7% recycling plastic in the bottles. Even if they really can’t do better than 7%, that’s ok, but then you can’t use that as THE main marketing point.
If their brand name was “Repairablephone” I wouldn’t have said anything.
But at that point “Fairphone” is as much fair as the “Trumpphone” is “100% made in USA”.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 1 day ago
I question if donations work that way. And you still bought one more device that’s made on the backs of disenfranchised people. (Again, not saying that a Fairphone eliminates that 100%, but a little)
In the end you are annoyed at the brand name plus the higher price evoking larger excpectations in some of your friends. Join the club. But that’s a far cry from your original statement. Glad we could clear that up.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Well, that’s exactly what they are doing. That’s literally what these “fairness compensation credits” are that Fairphone is using.
They can’t (or don’t want to) source their materials from sources that actually employ people fairly. So they buy regular stuff made on the backs of disenfranchised people and donate some money to some random third-party organizations, that use the money to make sure some other people somewhere else are are employed more fairly.
Guess what: You can cut the middle man and do the same thing yourself.
And they aren’t even doing that for their whole supply chain. They are only doing that for the mining of some very specific minerals, specifically cobalt, gold and silver. They don’t do that for all the other materials in their phones. They don’t do that for any of the work that goes into processing these materials. They don’t do that for the people who transform these minerals into components. And at the end of that chain they do pay a very small amount to the people who do the final assembly.
Yes, I am annoyed that Fairphone does incredibly false advertising. Take away the “Fair” part, how many sales do you think they’d lose? Look at Shiftphone if you want to see a Fairphone competitor that doesn’t have the “Fair” branding, and guess how many devices they have sold.
People need to know that the higher price stems from Fairphone being a boutique manufacturer, not from Fairphone actually spending a lot of money on Fair/eco things. That’s really important for a phone like this.
It’s pretty much equivalent to hypothetically finding out that the Fairtrade seal doesn’t actually mean that the banana farmers are paid fairly, but that the price markup actually stems from the ink being used in the Fairtrade seal is incredibly expensive to make.