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Apple Sued For Turning Workers Into Slaves
SwiftyNifty writes "Apple employees are putting together a class action lawsuit for not receiving overtime pay. A Lawsuit filed Monday in California seeks class action status alleging that Apple denied technical staffers required overtime pay and meal compensation in violation of state law.
Filed in the US District Court for Southern California, the complaint claims that many Apple employees are routinely subjected to working conditions resembling indentured servitude, or 'modern day slaves,' for lack of better words."
So how does this compare, to BMW for example, where their German workforce is also highly unionized? Have they essentially done the same thing as the U.S. automakers, essentially shipping jobs away from heavy regulations in favor of lighter ones?
I don't think it's so much the strength of the labor regulations - though if you're going to move, choosing less restrictive countries makes sense. But I think it's more of a "do-over". Once your workforce has gone union in a particular country, it's pretty much impossible to un-unionize it, so you basically have to move it overseas somewhere and fight the unionization move there if you want to survive. So Japanese and German companies can make cars in the US, the US companies can make cars in Mexico, etc.
If the foreign manufacturers can find ways to keep health care costs under control they will continue to have a serious advantage over GM and Ford...
My brother works for a Toyota plant. They have a pharmacy on site where employees can get over the counter medicine for free. Toyota pays 100% of his monthly premium and his coverage is significantly better than any I've had anywhere I've worked. They already absorb much more of their employees' health care costs than most corporations, which they can do thanks to little retiree benefit costs right now.
...and be able to keep the "built in the USA" perception.
Perception? Their vehicles are "built in the USA" more so than the so-called American car companies.
I worked as a contractor at Chrysler and maintained their driving simulator. There was a union guy in the lab that was responsible for moving stuff around (I'd get fired if I moved a PC, I had to ask him to do it). Since we weren't moving stuff around much, he spent most of the day sleeping. Every once and a while the mock-up shop needed him to build a 1-1 scale car out of wood. It would take him a few days to build an exact replica of a new vehicle. The work he did (does?) was amazing.
Long story short: people with great potential and skills are sitting around doing nothing.
Unions will negotiate a "quota" for each job. I worked in a union shop, and was moved into another persons position for a day. The job was to program EPROMs (remember those?). The quota was obviously set when it was done using a slow, single chip programmer, as the quota was about 2 per hour. The hardware did 16 at a time in less than 2 minutes. Unions don't like workers to bust the quota. I had to run around and look for a corner to hide in for most of the day.
That is just ONE of the specific ways that unions add overhead. I could list many more:
- 'senior' employees being promoted over 'experienced' ones.
- job division. Person A can't pick up a wrench (it's a mechanics job). Person B can't flip a switch (it's the electrician's job). Neither can turn on the water (it's the plumber's job).
- I had an engineer come to me one day and ask that I take a box to the other building. I put the empty box on a cart and start down the hall with it. He walked beside me. When I asked what the hell he was doing, he said that he had to go there anyway. !!!???!!! He wasn't allowed to push a cart with an empty box on it. That was a UNION job.
After a while, it just gets boring listing all the ways that a union can fubar a company.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba