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Foxconn's Brazil Plan Stalled
hackingbear writes with an article from Reuters about Foxconn's plans to move iPad production to Brazil. From the article: "A much-hyped $12 billion plan for Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn to produce iPads in Brazil, announced in April by President Dilma Rousseff during an official visit to China, is 'in doubt' due to stagnant negotiations over tax breaks and Brazil's own deep structural problems such as a lack of skilled labor and bad infrastructure, government sources tell Reuters. '(Foxconn) is making crazy demands' for tax breaks and other special treatment, the official added. Local media have reported that Foxconn is also seeking priority treatment at Brazilian customs, which is notoriously slow even by the standards of emerging markets."
Let us get this out of the way, since there is bound to have lots of posts similar to mine. I will make it short:
I am a Brazilian living in Brazil and it sucks...it really really sucks over here.
Why should the company have all the fun?
How about targeting incentives for the potential workers (that is, you target the people that would work there) instead of letting Foxconn make another hellhole?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
This is the oldest story in the multinationalist's book.
It happens with every industry. If it's not physically restricted to a particular chunk of land like mining or timber, corporations will shop jurisdictions, wringing tax and legal concessions out of every potential home. It's why banks incorporate in Delaware who don't even have branches or clients there, why Microsoft does a suspiciously large amount of business in Ireland, etc.
By the time they're done shopping their future home has agreed that they'll be exempt from environmental laws or that they'll never pay taxes if they'll please just give a few thousand people a job. It's just another problem with the kind of pathetic regulation that allows a corporation to declare their profit in one nation, their liabilities in another, their employees in a third, etc. to the effect that they're no longer just people (which is bad enough) but highly privileged citizens of a dozen countries at once. Yet with so few of those pesky liabilities other citizens must endure.
I know slashdot has a large contingent of social darwinists and let-it-all-burn libertarians and I'll get modded down for this, but I have to say that I'm sure Marx is laughing in his grave watching us fulfill his nightmares.
Fix the corruption, keep the tariffs, and keep the taxes from being passed down to regular people over there.
Giving in to a company that wants to export Chinese thuggery isn't going to improve things.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
In all seriousness: I have a close friend with family in Brazil. Last time he was there, one of his uncles was talking about his job: he mines gold. I am not entirely familiar with the process, but he mixes mercury with water and ore with his bare hands to do... I am not sure what.
When my friend's jaw dropped and told his uncle that he was killing himself, his uncle just told him, in less polite words "you are a real pu$$y boy, aren't you?"
Point? I am sure as stressful as the conditions in a Foxconn facility may resemble slavery, it can't be worse than what many are doing to "stay alive" already.
Well, this kind of gold mining is not a common activity in Brazil. It's actually downright illegal but you can find a few miners doing this in remote areas, specially in the North, near the Guyana borders. I don't think the country is as bad as you seems to think it is. For sure, there's a lot of people living in the most abject condition, specially in North and Northeastern Brazil, but for most, it's just a normal country although a poor one. As a software developer I make more or less the same I'd make working in Southern Europe, for example.
Most of large electronics equipment manufacturers are located in the Manaus Industrial Park. I've had the chance to tour some facilities - both here and abroad - and safety conditions in most large Manaus employers are equivalent to what you expect elsewhere. Salaries are low, both so is the living cost. Work week is 44 hours and this is usually respected in industrial companies (overtime is common for professionals, almost everywhere in the world as far as I know). 30 paid vacation days per year, which is actually better than some other places.
The biggest problem, labor wise, in Brazil is law enforcement. The country is downright unable to enforce labor laws through the country. If you're working in a company that respects the law you're in a rather fine situation. If you don't have a job or have one outside "the legal economy" (like your friend family doing gold mining), then you're downright screwed.
Even then, there's universal health care and free public education everywhere. Quality is not that good, most middle or upper classes will have private insurance and schooling, but it's there including for everyone even expensive therapies (like HIV, or cancer, and so on) are included in the universal coverage.
In the end, I'm pretty sure that there are way better places to be. But it is not bad like you seem to think, and most people have way better conditions than being an almost slave in a Foxconn factory.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Maybe because the SC state government is about as fucked up as the one in Brazil and can't be trusted to honor the agreements they've signed? Like the one with Amazon?
Not to mention our 3rd world education system. The football coach at my son's high school makes twice what the teachers make. Five of the kids in my son's homeroom can't sign their own names. Some of that good Brazilian run would be nice right about now.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
The main problem I'd that Brazil is missing the boat here big time. Apple wants Foxconn in Brazil so they can sell iThings IN BRAZIL for reasonable prices... That's the whole point of the extortionist tariffs and customs process... And their government is screwing up the deal.
I mean iPads, in the western hemisphere again... That's a big industrial coup even if it is Brazil.
I suggest you read the book The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. It goes into detail about how globalization takes a tolerable socialist cesspool for the population and turns it into a horribly miserable crony capitalist cesspool for the starving and unemployed population. It goes into detail about how they claim the investment and jobs will create wealth and rise the nation out of poverty, however they open the doors for foreign competition, infrastructure is built to the sole benefit of the foreign corporations, subsidies are forced to be removed for local industries making them unable to compete and laying off huge swaths of the workforce, and then corporations hire some of them back for pennies on the dollar while paying little taxes. It is not like this is a big secret though that people are just figuring out. It is just that the people who know this are powerless to stop it from happening. Governments that are non-compliant with free market reforms are generally punished on the currency exchange by large investors and they are not subject to international aid and loans from the IMF and World Bank. Governments quickly become insolvent and buckle at the international pressure to open borders and then that is how it all happens in a nutshell. I highly suggest picking up the book, you will look at the world in a much different light.
The US has the ability to enforce near-infinite jurisdiction, try using it on multinationals for once.
First, a counter question, why isn't the US already doing that? The answer to that question explains why your entire post is utterly futile.
I am not entirely familiar with the process, but he mixes mercury with water and ore with his bare hands to do... I am not sure what.
Gold and mercury form an amalgam. The idea is to crush the ore, which is something like 0.001% gold, then mix it with mercury. The gold dissolves into the mercury and the rock doesn't. After you've run enough ore through the mercury you drain it out and heat it to boil off the mercury, leaving only the gold.
And yeah, he's killing himself. When you boil off the mercury it turns into vapor and does Very Bad Things to anyone who breathes it and also pollutes the hell out of the countryside. There are 150 year old mining sites in the western US that still have unsafe levels of mercury.
Brazil's own deep structural problems such as a lack of skilled labor and bad infrastructure
I assure you, bad infrastructure is something we don't lack.
Circumcision is child abuse.