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 agoif you buy a regular phone and donate €5, you will have done more
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.