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Apple Admits to Occasional Excessive Work Hours
rev_media writes "After Apple's release of a report on the labor conditions in their Chinese factories, many took issue with the deliberately vague wording used in the statement. The BBC is now reporting that Apple has admitted to 'excessive' working hours in some locations, and they would be ensuring that a 'normal' 60-hour work week will be adhered to from now on." From that article: "'We found no instances of forced overtime and employees confirmed in interviews that they could decline overtime requests without penalty,' said Apple in a statement. The firm said there were 'overtime limit exceptions in unusual circumstances' and that it supported a healthy work-life balance. But it did not specify what the triggers for 'unusual circumstances' were and what upper limit it set on working hours. Mr Kuczkiewicz said Apple had not asked workers what they preferred - a decent wage or minimum wage and overtime."
Holy crap. Apple consider 60 hours a week normal?
Companies are pushing the human rights back into the dark ages. Where will it end?
While it's true that there is a certain cultural bias to work harder in many Asian cultures, one has to question whether it's an inherent trait, or if it's the result of living in a part of the world that is often exploited for the good of wealthier nations.
Do Asian people work harder because they have a much higher work ethic than Westerners, or do they have a much higher work ethic because the only jobs available for them are ones in which they have to work insane amounts of hours with little pay in order to provide Americans with luxury items (such as iPods)?
If instead your number one concern is that your family doesn't starve, or making enough money to emmigrate from the oppressive regime in which you live, and the amount of money you make is proportionate to the number of hours you work, you would generally like to work as many hours as humanly possible. I knew at least one guy (in America) who used pull over a hundred hours a week working at an oil rig. It was quite dangerous to boot, but his reason for doing it was just the extra padding in his bank account, not because he had an emaciated wife and toddler back at home.
The last thing people in developing nations need is you telling them that they can't have a job except at 10 bucks an hour, or that they can't work for more than 40 hours a week, or that it's only legal for companies to come in and provide them with a way of obtaining food, medicine, and education (i.e. money) if they also provide full health care, dental, and college tuition for the kids.
I'm not saying to give companies free reign. Some things are clearly morally despicable. But frankly speaking, you are not helping these people by being indignant when they are not afforded the same accomodations that you are. That is the one asset they have that allows them to compete for jobs against Joe Westerner (whose parents could afford to get him quality education and is the preferable employee at comparable wages).
Don't let corporations get away with complete crap, but please don't have people starve for the sake of your armchair idealism either.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Is it moral? No.
What is immoral about survival?
KFG
Considering that many other products that people purchase from china are made from labour which has not be placed under the same workers-rights rigor that apple outlays in their vendor contract, this is a good case of a global company doing what they can to ensure adequet working standards in a country that is rife with human exploitation. You can almost decide with certainty that something you own has been produced as a result of human labour exploitation, occurances often go by without the knowledge of the even the staff member; There is a lot of difficulty in ensuring proper work practices in these mega factories (many staff demand excessive overtime hours to get ahead of the rat race.) Take for example that this factory assembles iPods, there is no way of knowing, without investigation, if the screens being used in the assembly of the iPods are made in another factory where labour issues are more common.
So while others may pick at Apple's summary report for leaving areas grey, I still feel this is by far a more advanced effort in ensuring factory workers rights than what many other companies do. (Particularly the fashion and small parts industries.)
working hard != superior life
Most people intuitively know this. Working *too* much is a personality disorder. The fact that you see it in
Chinese-American culture does not necessarily mean it is inborn in the Chinese race.
What I am getting at is that you are racist (even if it's your own race) if you think this is OK due to the fact that they are Chinese. The fact that people work this hard should not be something to be proud of, and should not have to be justified.
I just want to point out that you're offering a misleading frame of two alternatives -- strong work ethic as innate character or third-world conditions. It's actually more like the asian culture, or the asian spirit that forges this sort of hard working mentality. However, it's probably true that the poverty, massive lower-class (farmer population) and the dire living conditions select for the dilligent. Then, that sort of mentality is drilled into descendants.
An example of cultural effect would be Japan: Japanese salary men don't live in conditions anywhere near third-world nations; nor are they exploited by first-world nations. Their working hours are legendary, just like their suicide rates. I've heard that it comes from their historical roots in the samurai, always chasing for perfection..
The hard-working stereotype of oriental asians in the West is also explainable by the fact that immigrants or visitors (like students) to the West are only a specific subset of the asian population. Immigrants are usually middle-class or higher, with well-educated parents who likely came through with solid work ethics in their earlier life. Foreign asian students who go over to Canadian/US universities are usually rather bright (or very rich). As a result, the stereotype conceived is probably not at all a close representative of the general asian population.
While I agree that this is an issue, I can only wonder about whether Dell, Gateway, and every other PC manufacturer is guilty of the same. I can't imagine the motherboard factories, hard drive factories, video card factories, RAM factories, case factories, and sound card factories don't use some kind of extraordinarily cheap and exploitive work force at at least one of their plants or offices. I'm against it anywhere, and against not staying competitive in the local labor market with healthy work environments as well. I'm all about philanthropy, but singling out one of probably thousands of manufacturies guilty of this seems wierd.
"I mean, how far the rabbit hole do you wanna go here?"*
rhY
*Quote stolen shamelessly from: http://www.myspace.com/wtc_7
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
How many of you have played an RTS game?
No one gets to start off with a modern industrial complex and a space program. You start out with a few poor villagers. Then, those villagers work at building up a Civilization, stopping at points which involve a fair amount of labor.
There was a time when the USA was also a dumping ground for cheap labor. Our grandparents through great-great-grandparents worked very hard at dirty jobs for long hours.
Then someone got the "Organized Labor", "Industrial Revolution", "Clean Air Act" upgrades. Those laid the groundwork for the "40-hr Work Week", "Military-Industrial Complex" and "Civic Green Space" upgrades. That, in turn, unlocked "Space Program", which allowed us to advance our Civilization to the Information Age.
The US has managed to do a pretty good job assembling a Rush strategy to catch up to civs that got a headstart on us.
China is turtling right now....give it time, it'll get its upgrades.
Any Chinese here except me?
... long working hours, bad working environment, salary below living standard, lack of proper training ... as I know the recent years some improvements were made, but far behind the western standard.
... etc. Which one have the right to stone Apple?
Everybody knows the China law "usually" doesn't mean anything, the Capitalist around the world build factories to torture the China workers
Someone want Apple in trouble so they magnified Apple, but not only Apple did this, why not stop all the factories but only picky at Apple? Just like bible story in John 8-7: Whichever one of you has committed no sin may throw the first stone at her.
Hypocritical is the word to describe the man releasing this, if he got so much free time, take a look at the Lenovo, Dell, Acer, Asus
Hong Kong - International Joke Center (after 1997-06-30)
I'm confused. Guy wants to work more and make more money, when he's currently dirt poor. Apple is (you allege) circumventing a tyrannical system that doesn't let the guy do it... but it's Apple that's being exploitative? What about the Chinese government? They're being humane by preventing the guy from working overtime? Gee, thanks.
Ok, perhaps a better example of what you're getting at:
I'm confused. Black guy has no education and can't find anybody willing to pay him even minimum wages. His poor family is starving, and he feels like he is no use to them at all. One day a white guy walks up to him and sees that he looks reasonably strong, and that with a little training he might pay off as a construction worker. However, he doesn't want to invest all kinds of money in training just to have the guy get a job somewhere else. So, he makes the black guy an offer written up on a contract - he will be paid $40,000 in cash in exchange for ownership of his body/mind/labor/etc. He explains that the black guy shouldn't worry about harsh working conditions - it is in the interest of his owner to protect his investment. And, the money would fix his family's problems - $40k is probably more money than the guy would bring home in his entire life the way things are currently going.
But then some oppressive federal agent comes in and says that the 13th amendment prevents this poor black entrepreneur from selling the one asset he has, and solving his family's problems...
Maybe the 13th amendment was passed because allowing people to enter into unrestricted labor contracts had been tried before, and it didn't work.
Except for the factory part, it kind of reminds me of the Army.
His daughter is lucky, he's probably already lined up several hard-working men to marry her to.
I, on the other hand worked one job through highschool, two jobs through fulltime college, and all I got from it was a degree, a 50-hour-a-week job and two discoveries:
1) women look at you funny when your idea of a romantic date is a moonlit stroll through the park at 3AM since everything is closed when you get out of work.
2) now that I'm out of college, the only women I can find to date are the local drunks hanging out at the bar.
Leisure time is more than just world of warcraft, it's having a life.
America, a first-world country where many of us realize that slaving your life away at a menial job is not the end all and be all of existence.
Or conversely, America, a first-world country where many of us don't believe that any job is worth putting serious effort and time into and no one has any pride in the work they do any more because their material toys have become the end all and be all of existance.
Did it ever occur to you that 8 hours of work per day might be affecting her performance at school? That they might be tranding off her long-term success and happiness for a short term financial gain?
Without knowing any more of the situation, but knowing similar people I would lay very good odds that no only is she at the top of her class but she will be far more wildly succesful by the time she graduates college (assuming she goes) than 85% of her class mates.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
You can only get ripped off by companies so much before you start doing the minimum necessary to keep the job.
Agreed. -- WTF!
I have often worked 60 hours a week - and I'm not paid ANY overtime! Yes, I have the choice to NOT work extra hours, but then my job would not get done. And I don't want to hear about "working smarter" or "hiring more people". I'm working as smart as I can and my staff keeps getting cut. We have a 1000+ to 1 computer to technician ratio and "management" thinks that's fine (as long as *they* get fast response). It's bullshit and everyone knows it, but it's reality and it's the job I get paid to do. I could easily get another job, but I like what I'm doing and have decided to stay where I am. I'd be REALLY pissed it some fsking do-gooder tried to tell my employer that I'd be forced to stop working after 40 hours (although overtime would be nice but exempt employees don't get that).
My daughter is saving for college. She works 2, back-to-back, full-time jobs during the summer so that she doesn't have to borrow money to pay for tuition. That's way more than 60 hours a week with NO overtime. She's only 17. I'm not sure if that is legal in my state for someone her age, but they can piss off. It's her choice. She bought her own car, pays her own insurance and manages her social life around her responsibilities. She'd be crushed if she was forced to back off on her hours because some lazy, loser bureaucrat told her she was working too hard. She'd love to be making twice what she's making, but she's only 17 and they don't pay "kids" with few skills much more than minimum wage. So she does what she can and sacrifices her social time to reach her goals. We've talked about what happens when classes starts and she's agreed that studies come first, so she'll quit one of her jobs.
If the workers in China are being mistreated and are FORCED (by their employer) to work more than 40 hours then, yes, I have a problem with that. But if they truly have the option to work AND they get paid overtime for it, let them have it! Has anyone compared their (the "abused Chinese") annual incomes against the other incomes and work hours for others in that area? I'd really like to know. Because if they are working more hours and still making less then there is a problem. However, if they are making proportionally more then SHUT THE FUCK UP and let them work!
I didn't grow up in America. I grew up in a 3rd-world country. The whole mind-set of society there was different back then (and admittedly, much more "primitive"). Where I grew up, you started working in the fields for several hours a day when you turned 7! When you turned 12 you were expected to look for a wife and be working full-time. Turning 12 was the rite-of-passage to adulthood and you got all the responsibilities AND privileges of adulthood. We kids didn't know any different. We looked forward to each phase of life with anticipation. We weren't brought up to expect to "play" until we were 18 and then start our adult life.
Looking back on it from the perspective of a parent raising kids in America, I can see that that culture and those attitudes would never fly here. But I don't see use as being "abused" as kids. I received my first weapon (modified and "safed") when I was 6. I went on my first "hunt" with the men when I was 7 (mostly along to do the "women's work" (read grunt-work) and to learn the ropes) - kind of like an apprenticeship, I guess. When I was 12, I went along as a full-fledged member of the group. There was no "screwing around". I'd been raised my whole life to be responsible. Today, I can't imagine trusting a 12 year old with that kind of responsibility. Of course we don't raise them to be responsible. We raise them to never take responsibility and to expect to have fun until they're "adults".
My point in all this is that it's easy to judge one culture from the perspective of another, and in doing so do great harm to their way of life. There are cases where abuse is really taking place and, when found, it must be dealt with. But c'mon. A 60-hour week, with overtime? I'd take that. At least give me the option.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
The 13th amendment also bans indentured servitude - which was entered into on a contract basis. The effects were similar to slavery even if there was technically a difference.