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How the US Lost Out On iPhone Work
Hugh Pickens writes "Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year are manufactured overseas. 'It isn't just that workers are cheaper abroad,' write Charles Duhig and Keith Bradsher. 'Rather, Apple's executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have outpaced their American counterparts so much that "Made in the U.S.A." is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.' Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option and recount the time Apple redesigned the iPhone's screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, and then each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. 'The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,' says one Apple executive. 'There's no American plant that can match that.' Apple's success has benefited the U.S. economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products. But ultimately, Apple executives say curing unemployment is not Apple's job. 'We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
The only reason they dislike the US so much is that workers have too much freedom versus the slave-labor countries that Apple uses.
If Apple really wanted to invest in the US, and not have contempt for worker freedoms, it would find that there would be no shortage or issue with getting the job done.
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and then each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea
I see now, using these overseas better manufacturing plants allows Apple to meet their demand at product launch and overcome poor design choices. Way to go!
"l. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, and then each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames"
Of course having next to no labour laws or enforced practices, combined with a workforce housed on site results in amazing results when last minute changes (or ramp ups in production) need to happen.
I'm sure there are many areas of expertise and scale where overseas factories outperform their American counterparts, but is this really the best example to use?
But ultimately, Apple executives say curing unemployment is not Apple's job. 'We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
If Apple had no other option, they would still be able to make high-quality products with large-scale US labor. A tariff based on worker freedom that punishes the practices of China et al while it rewards the practices of the US and EU with tax deals would go a long way.
The only good thing to do is to make it not only Apple's obligation, but everyone's obligation that sells in the US.
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Looking at the things that enabled the production flexibility, I imagined what would happen if an American company sought those abilities, and to each one, either the government or a union would have not only said "no" but "Hell no."
As to the logistics of mega factories and mega industrial zones with hundreds of other related manufacturing facilities located close together .... environmentalists and, again, the government would be saying "Hell no."
It's funny. Communists in China get it done, while Communists in America prevent it from being done.
Don't even try! We need to perfect our laser powered reductive fabrication technology. Fully Integrate robotics into the assembly line and hook it all up to renewable energy sources. The whole plant will would probably employ a few dozen people, but at least they would be made locally and sustainably.
Wait, but I thought corporate 'persons' are job creators, whose taxes must be cut for the benefit of jobless Americans! If these "people" aren't willing to lose a little money to create jobs in America, then I may start to consider the possibility the trickle-down conservatives *may* have been wrong, all along!
It is a viable option, just not the option that maximizes their hell of excessively huge margin on device prices. They have the viable option of producing in the US, loose few bucks of margin on each device and still be very profitable. They might be right this is not the best option for shareholders, but this is in all cases a viable option, especially because money they loose in paying more expensive workforce comes back when the employees and their families purchase more gadgets from the company that gives them bread and butter.
'We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
Correct, you don't have an obligation to solve America's problems, you do however have an obligation to ensure fair working conditions and above-starvation wages for your workers. I wonder whether those 8000 workers who were raised from the company dormitories were paid overtime rates? And how much of their wage is docked for the "privelege" of living in said dormitories. Globalisation of manufacturing is a necessary and logical step forward, but it does need to be accompanied by fair working conditions, a matter on which Apple's manufacturers have a poor record.
Laughter is the best medicine, except if you have a broken rib.
Slave labor doesn't sound so bad when you call it a sweat shop and do it overseas.
Workers in dormitories
24/7 uncompensated on-call
12-hour shifts
Not mentioned:
worker safety
Triangle Shirtwaist Company
Shorter summary:
All the USA needs to be a better place for companies like Apple is to repeal the last 120 years.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I would be very interested in seeing photos of those dormitories, to compare them to the dormitories that Apple supplies to their workforce in the USA. Then they would be in a position to say that offshoring the work was beyond the matter of costs.
The only skill that the US doesn't have that these workers have is being overly pliant. Businesses hate freedom unless it is solely in the hands of business.
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Yeah... because when you are unemployed and have no money (and the housing market sucks) it's so SUPER easy to move to a place with jobs! Gosh, why didn't people think of that. We could have solved this problem years ago and have a 0% unemployment rate!
We don't care if we screw up or change our mind at the last minute. We expect others to work slavish hours to compensate for our mistakes, because of our fickleness or just on our whim. We can't make the American worker do this anymore because, even as bad as the economy is, many of them have other options or have unions to protect them from this. Even if the American worker didn't have other options once word got out Apple would get a bad rap. We don't have to worry about that when our factories are in a place where the workers don't speak English and our treating them like serfs will unlikely get back to the US press for a long time. And rather than admit we are selfish assholes who feel entitled to get what we want when we want it we are going to call the American worker lazy, call the US manufacturing base lazy or come up with any other excuse we can that allows us to feel OK about how we treat these uneducated, poor workers.
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option
It is a self-fulfilling prophesy. The jobs were initially shipped overseas due to the cheap workforce. Then the overseas workforce built up their skills because those skills were in demand and being used, meanwhile the skills of American workers atrophied because no company wanted to use them. The overseas manufacturing facilities were heavily invested in because that is where the cheap sweat-shop labor was, and still is. Do you know the working conditions at these factories are so bad that the companies install suicide nets around the building to catch the workers trying to commit suicide by jumping off the roof? Do you know that the workers in those factories are required to sleep 8 to 10 people in a dorm room, and they are not allowed to talk or socialize with their roommates?
Now it is at the point that manufacturing in the US has been neglected for so long, that to catchup and compete is a daunting task. And no company wants to make the investment in American people and manufacturing infrastructure anymore.
The Apple execs are being very self-serving in their rationalizations for abandoning the American worker. They are just trying to paint a smiley face on a sad situation.
In reality it is the American companies that neglected the American workforce and manufacturing infrastructure for cheap overseas labor. Then the American companies invested in the overseas workforce.
Then they should follow their own HR tactics. If you don't like it here, then leave. I'm certain China will accept their corporate HQ. And, based on their own example, it should be up and running is less than 48 hours.
This is the same rhetoric that is under cutting the US competitiveness. Companies DO have a social responsibility to the country from which they gain many benefits.
How about some social responsibility?
If 25% of the world population would help others more, I think that most problems would be solved.
Too bad greed is inherent to humanity and not enough people rise about that basic level.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
or kept in the dark?
"guided to a workstation"
A surprise, onsite inspection would be far better. Otherwise you just get a Potemkin Village demonstration that things are cleaner than they actually are.
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As bad as it may be in a factory, it's better than staying in the village with no electricity or running water and trying to eek out an existence as a subsistence farmer.
What's the problem really? You don't need to buy a house just to move somewhere. If Asian people can do it, why can't US people? It's just a matter of not wanting to do it and general laziness.
the time Apple redesigned the iPhone's screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, and then each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
How is this anecdote NOT just about "workers [being] cheaper abroad"?
"Foreign workers are cheaper. WAY WAY WAYYYYYYYYY cheaper. And they accept tea and a biscuit in return for a 12 hour shift of mindless drudgery."
Shame on us for rejecting those terms! Every loyal American should be willing to bend over and take it up the rump repeatedly for their corporate overlord!
Didn't you people get the memo? The U$ isn't for us anymore, corporations are the new citizen! We're just the proles.
American companies don't usually have dormitories and everyone is up to their eyes in mortgage because for the past few decades having a big mortgage was the thing to do.
Employees at Foxconn who put together iPhones earn 31 cents an hour. Clearly anyone who isn't willing to fly to China to get a 31 cent/hour job is too lazy to be employed.
The executive class of these companies have been farming out more and more work to China. They do so under the arrogant premise that the manufacturing can be done without learning the original design work. Already fair parts of the design work have been taken over by Chinese companies.
The arrogant part is in thinking that we are the only ones that can come up with a good design, that we can create 'intellectual property' and make profits solely off of that. Nature grants no exclusive rights to creativity or intelligence. There is no inherent reason that the creative minds in China can't take over the one piece we think we can exclusively own. This is why American companies are so big on intellectual property. They think they are the only ones that can do high profit design work and that this is the only thing worth doing.
One day these companies will wake up and realize that Apple etc need the ODM's far more than they need the brand names. They will simply refuse more contracts and start manufacturing their own original work. Apple etc will have no place to build or design their hardware and Foxconn etc will become the next Apple.
I give at most five years before we see Chinese brand names taking the place of our familiar brand names on our store shelves. By the time this happens there won't be a damn thing we can do about it in less than two decades.
The reason manufacturing left the US is money. Loose, if any, environmental standards and dirt cheap labor. there was an abundance of skilled labor in the US up until about the mid 90s when offshoring caught on like wildfire. companies left the workforce hanging as design, engineering and manufacturing jobs left for china, india and korea. people holding those positions had to look for work elsewhere and in different fields.
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...instead of coming up with something nobody would pay.
Instead of $499, you'd get something more like $519-529.
Instead of $699, you'd get something more like $729-749.
The US is more than capable of the volume, just that business has to be given no alternative.
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Yeah... because when you are unemployed and have no money (and the housing market sucks) it's so SUPER easy to move to a place with jobs! Gosh, why didn't people think of that. We could have solved this problem years ago and have a 0% unemployment rate!
I am Filipino Systems Engineer, over the last decade I have moved within 4 european countries, and 6 different cities because that is where the job is, so when I hear statement like this, i laugh at your first world problems and excuses.
Luckily thru a combination of ageism and contract law, those problems are almost gone already. Lets say you've got a decade window of productivity between "too young and inexperienced" and "too old". If housing prices have been in a freefall for "around 5 years" we're already halfway thru that crisis.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
They should take the filthy billions they have in the bank to BUILD a fucking factory that rivals the overseas shit and make USA # 1 again, ut nooooooo they just care about making a buck. Fuck Apple.
"Given a biscuit and tea and led to a workstation" Sounds like a fucking slave camp. Do tose workers actually sign up for that or does their government FORCE them to work there? I wonder..
Maybe the same people saying that corporations should just hand over their wealth should be less of a bunch of dicks themselves by not eating up shit made in China and sold at WalMart? Maybe these same people can refuse to buy non-essential items made elsewhere and force companies to ship jobs back home? But, oh no, they're Americans, goddamnit! And if they need to buy every Pixar film they will even if it's made in China! Forget the mortgage, forget the unemployed. We need more smartphones and blu-ray players!
Which places are those?
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Wait.. there are American companies with dormitories???
With the US, there is plenty of room for various industries of differing scales, instead of having to specialize in supplying labor for other countries. What is it with your home country that makes it ill-suited for people to remain in it?
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Yeah....the reason that "no company in America can match that" is that any company that tried to would be facing legal prosecution with regards to indentured servitude, a human rights violation which is outlawed in the U.S. as far as I can tell. Nice omission there Apple.....
I recently (2 months ago) moved cross country. Sold ALL of my furniture and probably 90% of my personal possessions. Everything I now own fit into the back of a Chevy S-10 pickup. I used the money earned from my yard/ebay sales to pay for gas and 1st month's rent/deposit on a cheap apartment and utils. Total cost to move = $0. Sure, I still have to sit/sleep/eat on the floor and will for the next couple months, but at least I have a job.
...and all the freedoms for which it has?
I did IT work in the Philippines over a decade ago, exported from the UK when you kids needed external talent for almost anything computer-related.
Just because one in a thousand people in that country has the talent and the contacts to be able to move around the world finding jobs, it doesn't mean the lorry-loads of kids coming in from the villages just for the opportunity to work 12-14 hours a day in a nicely ventilated office/factory will be able to do the same. I imagine the same is true in China scaled up by over an order of magnitude.
Apple have just publicly stated, "The problem with the US workforce is that we don't have an underclass of residential workers in a jurisdiction which denies basic human and labour rights who dedicate their whole lives to building toys for an ever-shrinking middle class." Anyone who defends Apple after this is inhuman evil.
FYI - American workers are the most productive workers in the world. You have no argument for laziness.
Wtf? Do you really believe that? Perhaps in a study from 1942.
c++;
No true. Millions of Mexicans come here illegally every year and do just this. It's not a problem with western people, it's a problem with entitled Americans and our keeping-up-with-the-Jonses cultural mindset.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, and then each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames.
I consider it a perk, not a problem, to reserve the right to work only 8 hours a day not having to answer my phone if work calls after-hours.
As for you, the European companies hire you because you're cheap, not because you're smart.
by not being prepared to work for the same wages and the same conditions as the Chinese.
Free trade floats the boat-holding business owners, but drowns the boatless individuals that are not business owners.
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Paying rent AND a mortgage.
Paying for the move itself ($thousands minimum, all up).
Uprooting your spouse and children from their jobs, school, social circles, etc.
If you buy an iphone, you approve of slavery and the destruction of America.
Which is just about everyone at this point
The fact that they were able to find 8000 biscuits and cups of tea is astonishing in itself!
I will not buy an Apple product. Their arguments are pure bovine effluent. You could do the same in the U.S. But the thing they leave out is a huge environmental cost. And sooner than later, they're going to face the exact same thing in China and the rest of Asia.
FYI - American workers are the most productive workers in the world. You have no argument for laziness.
LOL!
No sig today...
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, and then each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the having to add 'no mass suicide packs' into their contracts?
Oh please... "general laziness and not wanting to do it", way to make broad generalizations. As if every Asian person in the world would up and leave where they grew up or have family to go find a job as well.
I would love to see you just pack up and leave to go somewhere where "jobs exists". Especially when you don't already have a job there already. That's quite a risky proposition and it's always easier said then done.
Actually, many Asians do. On top of that, I have relocated to Asia because the living costs are cheaper (and it's nicer there) while my pay is still the same. Of course there is some risk involved, but usually things just work out if you aren't so strict about everything. People have done this from the beginning of time. Why do you think Rome spread, and why you do you think we as humans are living around the world and not just everyone in a single place we grow up at?
So whipping the slaves into the fields is still very viable..
'There's no American plant that can match that.'
And that's because the US and most (all?) civilized countries have labour laws that are in place to provide certain minimum standards as far as health and safety goes... so your average US and European worker don't have to sleep in factory provided dormitories (and most likely pay a fair chunk of their paycheck for the privilege) and be forced to work 12 hour shifts.
Off course, labour laws in the west was prompted by things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire - in China such incidents are considered part of doing business.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Calling the US worker "lazy" because they don't want to live in a dormitory where they are forced to work 12 hour shifts, sleep 8-10 per room, and are literally prevented from suicide by nets surrounding buildings... is like saying that a slave from 1812 was "ungrateful" for the minimal food, clothing and shelter he received.
Those who call the US worker lazy are looking at this problem wrong, mostly because they have never BEEN a worker like that. The fact is, the "problem" is NOT with the US worker, the problem is with the Chinese worker and Chinese civilization. Those poor people are so destitute that they're willing to become virtual slaves for some meager earnings. They give up living an independent life and exist in a factory like some sort of a flesh-robot, and they all want one thing which is to LEAVE that factory.
It's not right. People should not forced to spend years/decades of their short lives toiling in what amounts to a form of constant punishment.
I am eastern european, I moved to 3 european countries for jobs. it does not make me happy at all. So no, excuses can be done. i dont like idea of living in rented houses. i dont get any money with paying for property, i do, but with this rate i wont be able to have my own. with way it goes, i just get enough money to survive, and spend them on services and things which i need to adapt in country of residence. moving is also big pain in the ass. Moving is like little death. And dont tell me its not. I moved more times in my life than you ever did.
That sounds too much like socialism for America. Will never happen.
Wait.. there are American companies with dormitories???
No, so you should all move to Asia so you can have a job and live in a dormitory.
One of my customers provides a chip used several of apple's products as well as other phones and products. They were a spin off of TI engineers and products that TI did not want anymore. They designed the chip had the chip manufactured overseas and tested them here.
We built 3 testers for them to final test and package the chips, which we build in less than 3 months the first one. Then we not only built it but ran the production on that machine for 6 months 24 hours a day seven days a week. While we built two additional machines. There are only two of us in our company. I think Americans can step up, in fact I know they can.
After our customer was firmly entrenched with apple due to our support, they needed to start shipping millions of chips per month. They also had a new management team, who did not care if we helped get them off the ground, and did not even let us bid on the equipment and they intended to do the testing in Korea due to being closer to the final product. They also said the new vendor could build the machines for 1/3 the price. I told them bull shit. I have spend quite a bit of time in asia and while it could be made cheaper if they would be buying in larger volume something was wrong with what they were quoted.
Well after about a year we found out it cost just as much for each machine as we had been quoting, but they were buying 20 of them at a time. We would have loved and been able to hire at least 10 people if we had been able to compete. Then we found out not only were they building the machines, they were running the machines and getting paid per part for the testing. Wow, we could have had at least 20 more jobs there, and I would have matched the Korean price too.
What It real truth is, that companies like Apple, and my customer supplying parts to apple like, is they don't have to directly supervise people. It is so much easier for them just to be a engineering and marketing company and not worry at all about any "Production" at all. They feel that they are supporting "Talented Engineers" here.
The other problem is for companies like our small company cant compete with Asian companies as they have a better infrastructure for expansion. Here we have venture capitalist who are looking for the quick buck. Just try and go out and get say 10 million to expand your operation even if you have a contract in your hand for 20 million per year. Just the blood suckers who want it all back within two years AND own half your company will be interested. Pretty darn sad it really is that way.
Apple is an evil company who feels that abusing their employees is justified if it raises their stock price by an eighth of a point.
I give at most five years before we see Chinese brand names taking the place of our familiar brand names on our store shelves.
Let me guess: these brands will sound something like Acer, AOpen, ASUS, BenQ, CyberLink, Gigabyte, GWS, Haier, HTC, Huawei, Lenovo, LiteOn, Realtek, Thermaltake, Transcend, VIA, and Vtech. All these companies are based in PRC or ROC.
So, as a result of poor planning on Apple's part 8000 people living in company housing, possibly virtual slaves, had their lives severely disrupted. And Apple is proud of the ability to do this? That company has no ethics.
Eventually the third world countries will catch up to the developed countries. After a bit of yo yoing things will sort themselves out. May take a generation or two though.
We'll never make it.......oh! we made it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&list=FL7kKrE4eTs17mQl7eyvJIOg
If you had to sell something to pay for the move than the cost was greater than $0 dollars.
In terms of economic output per worker, American workers really are the most productive in the world (even the TFA cites $400,000/y/worker at Apple). See http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/fortune/1109/gallery.america_economic_strengths.fortune/2.html, which also notes that part of this is due to US worker's long hours - Norway has the most productive workers per hours worked.
I know a few amusement parks that have dorms for workers. Cedar Point in Sandusky is one of them.
So, getting woken up at midnight, having a sip of tea and a cookie then 12 hours of work for little pay? Maybe Apple should set some hire standards for their employees! I'm sure if one of the employees just rolled over on is company provided bunk he would be quickly escorted off the premises.
"We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible."
Seems they misspelled "cheap".
(then again, according to the Thesaurus of American Executives, "best" is listed as a perfectly acceptable alternative, along with "super" and "most awesome-est")
Actually I believe Rome expanded spread because of greed and its legions (Earth was unpopulated by today's standards but they had to fight their way around the Mediterranean sea), nevertheless I think I understood your main point: if live gets shitty at home it puts a pressure on people to migrate. If that's it, I agree.
Total cost in dollars might be zero, but there you are paying a price. You now separated from your friends and family, presumably you had at least one of those groups before. You now how no possessions, most of have a few things we like and derive please from which we would not want to part with. I would call those things costs. Finally I find it unlikely you can replace the furniture and other items you will eventually need for less than you sold it for, so the dollar cost is actually non zero as well long term.
Don't misunderstand. You did the right thing, you needed a job and you took personal responsibility and did what you had to do to get one. We all play the hand we are dealt. You are a better person and a better citizen than most, who would have sat on their ass and collected unemployment when as you have proven they really could go get a job. Still you should recognize the price was actually high and pat yourself on the back.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
"..each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames."
Well, there's something the elitists at Apple (and their monied, snobby, mostly white customers) can be oh so proud of.
Throw the world a biscuit.
May the world throw it back.
Just a nit pick. The roman empire spread because of long, nearly perpetual, and quite bloody campaign of conquest.
grape - the GNU free, open source rape
IF we keep putting politicians beholden to the Unions in power (in all levels), this problem will continue. Case in point: Politicians and 'Card Check' laws--where all votes for a union in a company are wide open and everyone knows how another votes. How about the 'right to work law' in Indiana (which is designed to eliminated 'closed shops'--where every eligible employee is required to be a union member if there is a union) and the fact that the Democrats have walked out of the open House session until that is off the table; thereby negating the ability of the Indiana House to do ANY work.
Democratic Leader Bauer said, “Working families want good-paying jobs, not lower paychecks. Their response to the Governor is simple - Don’t Touch My Paycheck. Instead of playing partisan, political games, let’s work together to boost our small businesses, support our workers, and create jobs right here in Indiana.”
Living costs are also much lower in China.
This is true. Now, the following...
And are you saying that there isn't a single job available in the US, not even in industries that aren't directly what you want to do or that require lots of manual hard work? People just don't want to do them if it doesn't interest them, isn't available where they happen to live or there's prejudices and "I'm too good for that job" against the work (ie., working as a burger flipper or a stripper).
... that's one hell of a strawman. How the hell did you get there from the post you were replying to.
For starters, are you suggesting that being a stripper is a viable job alternative? What kind of mind could possibly suggest that as an example?
Also, from your posts it is obvious that you have never worked a burger flipping job and have to depend on it completely. I worked minimum wage jobs when I came to America, and I've climbed, by studying and hard work, to where I am now (pretty at the upper middle class bracket.) I can tell you that you simply cannot live at a hamburger flipping salary. How? You cannot even pay rent with that. People who have those jobs (and I know because I've been there) have to lump themselves together with relatives or friends and edge a meager existence.
The greatest insult of all is that in this great country so many people cannot afford the most basic of medical care. Jesus Christ, my country of origin is the second poorest in the western hemisphere, and the average city dweller has basic medical access more readily available and affordable than his/her American counterpart. How can we explain that????
That is the greatest flaw and immorality of all the ones we have to deal with nowadays. I couldn't afford medical care when I worked at McDonald's and Home Depot (not if I wanted to pay the rent or have more than a pair of underwear, or, you know, eat... even when I was at McDonald's ), and that was a while ago when cost of life was less.
TODAY, there are simply no jobs out there, even if you are looking for a flipping burger job. I mean, c'mon, even places like McDonald's and Starbucks you see franchises cutting people off and/or telling them "sorry guys, we can't keep you full time anymore, all we can do is give you 30-35 hours." That's how bad it is right now.
To suggest to tell people "go get a burger flipping" job indicates you are completely detached to the current realities, or you simply do not give a fuck and prefer to make shit up just to create an argument to fight for on the interweebz.
they arent american workers though.
<sarcasm><irony>Cause there's no way that analogy couldn't be so appropriate it actually defeats your argument.</irony></sarcasm>
Those are for the college students that work there over the summer, and they have to pay a certain amount for rent. Sandusky doesn't have much of a housing market for college kids.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Many of the people don't want to leave the factories. They have it better there than working in some farm or really poor areas. Suicide nets and people are only talking about them because it feels like they're there just because so many workers are unhappy. In reality, when you have so many people working in these factories (it's almost a mid-sized country), there are going to be suicides, just like there is in the US, other countries and cities. Since the people are living there, the suicides also happen at the work place. Suicide nets are only used because it generated so much bad PR because people couldn't think about the real reason.
The best solution is to stop purchasing so many gadgets. Purchase healthy local food for your kids instead.
The "need" to have those gadgets for whatever reason.
Slave labor or close enough and no safety or environmental safeguards. Excuse me, I have to go. The sound of folks sharpening those guillotines is getting too loud.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
As bad as it may be in a factory, it's better than staying in the village with no electricity or running water and trying to eek out an existence as a subsistence farmer.
We'll have to fix that, too.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Did you ever read the reason Chinese goods are cheap because China manipulates their currency? I'm sure you all have. But have you ever though about what that really means? For instance why don't we just manipulate our currency more and make our good cheaper? And what does manipulate even mean?
The manipulation they are talking about is inflation. The Chinese government creates money faster than we do. But what is the effect of this? When governments create money they rarely hand it out equally to all of their citizens. They create money in order to pay for things or reward their political friends with free loans, grants, or bailouts. But where does the wealth go? Since no wealth is generated by inflation it transfers wealth from those that create real wealth to those that get the inflated money. So what the Chinese government does is impoverish it's people by stealing their wealth in the form of inflation at a much higher rate than the US government does.
What is the solution? A tariff doesn't work. All it does it tax the US consumers and gives that money to the government. With more tax revenue the US government has to borrow and print less which creates a stronger dollar. This makes Chinese goods even cheaper. No the only solution is to embrace it. Let the US consumers keep buying Chinese until the people there get a clue and overthrow their government. Think about it why should the Chinese people work so hard for so many hours for so little reward? They will wake up eventually and you will see China fall apart like the Soviets.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
when majority of US people are rather unemployed than move to places with jobs
It is something I thought about while looking for work. I even did some searches on the idea. I didn't find much information. I did find jobs for teaching english as a second language. However, those required that you speak the native language fluently. I also found advice that I should become employed in the USA with an international company and after working there for some time, get transfered overseas. But then, that still requires employment in the USA. You are asking why the unemployed in the USA do not just jump on a boat and start working overseas. I'd be very interested in any information you have on how to accomplish this. It is not like I can just drive 50 miles and do an interview.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
When companies can move production anywhere, they'll always use workers in one location as bargaining chips to get an even better deal for their next plant, so it becomes a race to the bottom for wages.
The old deal was "you want to sell to our people, either open a plant here or be prepared to pay duties."
Real wages haven't risen in 30 years. NAFTA was a mistake, not because the US and Canada and Mexico are "enemies", but because a healthy trade relationship involves give and take between all participants - and companies are no longer required to "give" in order to take.
Look at Caterpillar's latest move - record profits, they buy a locomotive engine manufacturer, get government grants, then tell the employees - take a 50% wage cut and also roll back all those benefits, or we're closing shop - we've got another place that is giving us money right now to train workers to do your jobs for $12 an hour in Muncie.
The NAFTA legislation only requires a 6-month notice to pull out. If multi-nationals won't play fair under the new rules, let them live with the old rules.
Not me..I don't own anything made by Apple...or even a smartphone. Work offered me an iPhone..I opted to keep the blackberry. None of us needs to be able to answer email after work---unless we're on-call; and then a phone call is probably more suited to the issue at hand.
No one *needs* a smartphone. Hopefully, when I retire, I can even dump the cell phones.
Is it? My grandparents were subsistence farmers living in China who never had more than $25 USD, now they live in an apartment. My grandfather says he was much happier living of the land. Now he is just waiting to die.
Im a dual citizen USA & China living in the USA.
I hope I had mod points for you. I just saw 'Last Train Home' last night, by Lixin Fan. It shows exactly what you describe: a subsistence level in the countryside, but an independent life for people living in small communities, rather isolated but often in beautiful surroundings. Then the brutish city life of the factory worker, which is indeed a form of indented servitude, and widespread desperation among those who have hoped to better their life in that way.
Well, I applied for a customer service job in Vegas about 4 years ago through an ad in the paper. They were looking for females only, between 18 & 25, with big tits. Seems that 'customer service job' was with an escort service. And in Vegas, 'escort' means hooker. Prob is, I'm a male, at the time I was in my mid-50's, & haddn't started growin my mantits yet.
ATM, I'm back in Ohio, getting close to 60 again, and pounding the pavement one more time. A McJob here pays about 9 bucks an hour and it's maybe 25 hrs a week. You can get it only if you're in high school or retired already, no middle agers need apply. Oh, and they're not hiring atm.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
The absolutely last thing I want in my life is my boss waking me up in the middle of the night to give me a fucking biscuit and force me to start a 12 hour shift.
How much more expensive would it be to manufacture an iPhone in the USA? It's hard to believe it'd add more than say, 10% to the cost, and would that really make or break the product?
Apple have explicitly said the reason they get people in the far east to make their stuff is because they can be exploited!?
I agree. We need jobs.
Why not just hire people to dig holes of arbitrary size in the ground using only spoons? The holes will be useless, but... jobs! Useless jobs everywhere! Social responsibility and all that.
Sometimes there's just nothing that you can do.
People who have those jobs (and I know because I've been there) have to lump themselves together with relatives or friends and edge a meager existence.
This is one of the big differences between East and West.
We in the West see this a s a negative - can't live on my own.
Those in the East see this as living - part of being a family, helping younger & older generations. With the bonus of a cheaper cost of living per person.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Thirty years ago it was somewhere around 25%, now it's pretty close to twice that. What that means is that for about half of the working population of the United States, it takes about half a month's work to pay the rent. Back when I was starting my career, you could count on having somewhere around three-quarters of your pay left over after paying the rent; now, half or less.
I'm sure that the failure of the median household to save for things like medical emergencies is just due to lack of character and work ethic, though.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Indeed, do you think these countries would have a problem with a massive influx of Americans seeking employment over their own countrymen looking for work? Can we say that the problem is with them and their countrymen instead of "ill thought out internet advice isn't worth the electrons used"?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
1. Apple doesn't owe you [presuming you are US American] anything and doesn't care to help.
2. Apple believes US American laborers are sub-par and unqualified.
This, from the mouths of Apple people.
Hey man it's not that bad, looking at plane tickets you can get a one-way ticket for only $550, such an awesome deal that you'll break even after only 4 months of 7-day-a-week 12-hour shifts! That means by the 5th month you'll be able to start earning that full $3.72/day right into your pocket!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
They do. Apple and others are helping less developed countries and poring money into their industry. Give it 20 or 30 years and those countries will be much better off. After that some companies will probably move to another less developed country and cycle continues.
QFT
GP obviously has no idea how much it takes to pay rent and put food on the table. Not to mention the other expenses of life.
He's likely a college kid still having his meals and boarding paid by mommy and daddy. Either that or he's never had to actually work flipping burgers to pay his own rent.
Whoever apple employee made that comment about the 8,000 workers...shame on you. How is that NOT slavery? And you're fucking proud of it?!?!?
Second off...you can do the same thing in less time by reprogramming a machine.
You don't need dormitories. Over the last 6 years, I've lived in 4 different countries. I owned a home, but I sold it. I didn't live above my means, and I save my money. My wife and I have seen cities all around the world, and don't get tied to a single place.
I've worked 12 hours a day when required, and combined with a good education, and I get paid very well for it.
The fundamental thing that these guys say, is that IT is not a 9 to 5 job. Why? They deal in projects, not operations. Projects need to be agile, and hit the problems hard and fast and get the goods to market.
At the end of the day, you go contract, you hit it hard when you're off, and then you spend some time off between contracts. And before people say "oh, but everyone pays minimum wage, and outsourcing is a race to the bottom," sure, some companies do operate like that. But they can rarely boast a true modicum of success. The smart companies out there pay top dollar for their secret weapons. If they can find one.
The bottom line is that the USA used to do this. Old school Americans who still posess the American spirit do things bigger, better, faster, stronger. There is no room here for "work life balance", there is no room for a giant party at every turn. Do that on your own time, when you're not on contract, and your life is yours.
American's did not land a man on the moon from a group of employees who worked 9AM to 5PM, with a 2 hour lunch break involving beer. They did it through blood, sweat, tears and the efforts of titans.
The times where you can make a million by selling sub prime mortgages to yourself are over. The times where you can believe that you can make a million by being good at poker are over. Bring back the engineers and scientists, bring back a solid work ethic, and the USA can rise again to its former glory.
Funnily enough, modern people don't generally wnat to do that, but it is what is necessary. The world has opened up, and there is no longer a cartel of employees with a long list of stipulations are no longer the only option. We need to pay back the effort that was "borrowed" through quantative easing, establishing a new slave class overseas through outsourcing and a government that has spent $5 for each $3 that was gathered and a president who had started numerous wars for the benefit of his family's empire.
It's a highly unpalletable bitter and jagged pill to swallow, but it's time to pay for the reality check that has bounced. When it's paid back, hopefully we'll have remembered the lessons learned from these trying times, but I doubt we will.
Long live the American spirit of MAKING money, and here's to the death of the culture of theft and deception that has replaced it with insidious graduality over the last 50 years.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
That comment just proved the point of this article and all the comments about entitled American work ethics.
America wont stop it, cant stop it, and will ultimately destroy itself for a few rich multi national corporations who have no interest in America, other than benefiting off our high dollar value.
This is the world economy folks. America gets fucked to death, while the rich benefit.
So keep talking.. none of it matters. The articles dont matter, the government doesnt matter, the poverty level doenst matter, wages dont matter, nothing matters. You are being sold out, and thats the way it is.
Enjoy the blood bath thats coming, buy your guns, stock up on ammo, medicine, food, and water... then head for the mountains. You can leave your iphone behind. It wont be worth shit.
And as CEO of Apple what would you do differently?
You are a chartered corporation in the US, so you do have some obligations to benefit the US for what you get for that. Oh wait, I guess not.
In this rate, the iPhones will be obsolete, disphased out, and ridiculous priced as the Brazilian coffe 100 years ago.
JCPM
Nice strawman there mate. I see what you did there.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Minimum wage in Shenzhen is 1500 RMB per month, or about $1.20 per hour. In terms of purchase power, it's about the same as $9/hour in the US.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I mean, as long as we're going for Medieval labor practices and all. I'd rather not, thank you.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Yep, we were brought up being told that if we go to school and work hard, we will move up. It's just not true anymore.
Another concern for professionals is that if you accept a job outside your field for a few years just to pay the rent, it will not look good on your résumé. You may find yourself unable to find work in your field ever again. If you compromise and take a survival-level job that makes all your previous efforts for naught, then what's the point of surviving?
What I find most striking about American manufacturing is how labour-intensive it is. So many American businesses employ far more staff to do a job than what other first-world countries world, or more often they have people doing things by hand that anywhere else would have a machine doing the job. Then there is the issue of how many Americans are obese and eat terrible food; this genuinely lowers physical and intellectual productivity.
Entitled? Hell yes! The question is not whether you feel that you are entitled not to work like a slave, it's whether you feel that this entitlement should also extend to the workers in China.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm sure they could reduce that 96 hours even further under a feudal system. And dormitories? Why not simply chain employees to their workstations, as was frequently done before "safety standards" and "workers' rights" became de rigueur? This would reduce transit time and increase productivity significantly. Further, some sort of stimulus, an electrical shock, for example, could be used as an incentive for those employees whose productivity drops below a set standard. And while we're at it, why not have an on-site abattoir to dispose of employee corpses quickly and efficiently? This extra protein might be turned into a slurry, which could then become a dietary supplement that would help keep employees in good working order. And, of course, there's the added benefit of vertical integration in all of this. Seriously, what are we waiting for?
It's true in 1982 Mac's and APPLE's were made in the U.S.
The issue is that Western manufacturers need to find a way to be as flexible as the Chinese competition while providing an acceptable lifestyle
for their staff. Automation might be a way. If this change had required just one employee to be roused from sleep (or possibly just phoned in his/her office in New Zealand where it's daytime) to reprogram the machines in the factory start fitting glass screens into beveled frames, that would work. More realistically, it would still work if it needed 10 employees or maybe 50. They can be paid enough to compensate for the out-of-hours callout (or telecommute from somewhere where it's in hours).
Of course there are several challenges in this approach: you need the capital investment to build the automated factory; you need the education levels to train your population for a world where half the jobs are sophisticated technical problem-solving jobs; you need a LOT of factories like this to keep your whole population employed; and, for now, you need to compete with countries still developing who have workers willing to work for a few bowls of rice per hour. This last problem will go away in due course.
Slave labour is profitable.
It's not that the workers did volunteer or something, there was no free will involved, and they didn't get a nice bonus for it. They live on campus in a virtual prison. I wonder how Apple sees this as a positive story.
Two points:
Why so upset about slave labor in Asia? It is not as if (mainly black) people aren't forced to work at slave wages in the US.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TpFlOioXys
(mainly in the second half of the clip)
If the price of iPhones wasn't reduced by manufacturing at reduced cost, less money would come to the US from sales abroad. Basically it is money that Americans didn't have to work for.
Bert
Western workers have those too, it's just that, since we're not starving to death we're not willing to work 80 hour weeks for a pittance and accept orders unquestioningly.
We like to have a decent standard of living, to work on interesting things, to have our expert scientific and engineering judgment respected by our managers, to take pride in our work, to make quality products that people want to buy and to be able to learn and grow.
FTFA: A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the companyâ(TM)s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames.
I have a wife, a son and a life. You will not catch me living in a company dormitory at some PHB's beck and call 24hours a day just to be able to make some VP in the USA another bonus this quarter. These Chinese people are only doing this because they have to, for now. In a few more years as their standard of living goes up, and they realise how badly they are being exploited, it will stop.
I've just left HCL having been transferred there from Xerox last year as part of a global outsourcing deal where Ursula, Wim and Mark did a "partnership" with HCL to "leverage" there huge global talent pool or something. 600 out of the 3600 permanent engineers were transferred (the rest may follow soon). We were told it wasn't about outsourcing and that we'd have thousands of extra motivated and empowered people to help us accelerate the delivery of our projects, so we all went home and put our updated CVs on the job boards.
It was just as well, because what really happened was that much of the existing work was taken away to us with very little time and resource being put into Knowledge Transfer. Lo and behold, these "passionate and empowered" super-humans from the sub-continent are struggling to deliver anything.
The outsourcing companies run on this hubris-fueled delusion that they sell to western CEOs that western staff are fat, lazy and stupid and that their staff are intelligent and "motivated." What they actually do is to employ vast armies of fresh graduates (with absolutely no professional experience) at rock-bottom salaries and ship a few them over for a few months at a time (as long as they can get away with on the cheapest work permit) to "acquire knowledge." Of course, these poor young people are under enormous pressure to take on years of knowledge in a few weeks. Then they often go back to India (or wherever) with that knowledge and get put on a different project. The original project gets shipped offshore and work stops because no one knows how to do it.
This is why outsourcing to places like India gets a bad name: the Indians (or wherever) aren't stupid or lazy, they're just young, inexperienced and being badly exploited. 25-year-old guys are being given the work of mature teams with decades of experience.
Stick Men
You sound like you're endorsing living a life with no roots, no community involvement, and no long-term commitments. Seeing the world and its cities and cultures is a really cool experience, but eventually most people like to settle down and do things like have families, hobbies, and own possessions that don't have to fit in a suitcase.
The career-long road warrior mentality directly contradicts with the need most folks have for being close with extended family, laying down roots in a community, or having long-term friendships with close physical proximity.
Working hard may give you a sense of purpose, but trivializing work-life balance will only isolate you.
-- lk t lv ll th vwls t f wrds. T svs lts f tm t wrt bt ts pn n th ss t rd nd mks m lk lk cmplt dpsht.
Maybe Apple prefers workers who can use the metric system. That is, everyone in the rest of the world that's not the USA. Not sure there's much need for workers fluent in shit like "miles", "sixteenths-of-an-inch", "stones", "quarts", or whatever other 16th-century measurements Americans still use.
It is true that it is not Apple's job to cure America's ills. But, if you could use some of that famed 'war chest' of cash to at least try, it would make you less of a bunch of dicks.
I believe the term for what Apple is doing is called "Playing both ends against the middle"
On one hand, they have slave labor hidden from the public eye, which gives them cheap products and "clean" hands.
And on the other, they can sit on their couches in the US and not have to worry about some local Party Official or Warlord coming in to their office with a gun saying "No, you do this our way now. We own you."
So my response to Apple is, if you really don't think you owe this country anything, then Get The Fuck Out. Now.
They'd better start treating their foreign workers better, because Steve Jobs might just have been reincarnated as a Foxconn drone.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
You don't understand: Americans need their own house with home theater, man cave, and 10,000 feet for all their electrical appliances and weekend parties. And a triple garage for their cars/ATVs.
And they need it all from working a few hours a day without getting their hands dirty.
No sig today...
We used to have workers like that in the South before the civil war. They were called slaves, and boy were they ever the backbone of the cotton economy!
But obviously its Apple's job to promote China's ills instead.
From TFS:
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, and then each slave was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift
fixed that for them.
The Apple execs are akin to the 1800s plantation owners in that they claim without slavery they can't produce the products the market demands. How many of these dormitory workers are able to afford any of Apple's products? Whenever workers are unable to afford the products they produce themselves it leads to an unsustainable economy. Our country learned that during the Great Depression but our generation has forgotten all the lessons from that experience. Of course the global economy has been floated some time by currency manipulation by both China and the US but once those parlor games no longer work the reality of the true economy will reveal itself.
China is still a communist nation; what would happen to Apple if some sort of conflict erupts between the US and China and China either implements a US embargo or nationalizes Apples manufactures for the good of the Chinese party? Certainly the Apple execs have thought about this and have made certain that they get compensated regardless.
The ironic thing is that Apple claims they have no responsibility to help solve the US economic and unemployment problems while at the same time they donate millions to candidates and lobbyists to protect and promote their own special interests, drowning out the voice of everyday Americans. This is like when the Madoffs of the corporate world who spend their whole lives combating regulations and "government interference" are interviewed after a huge fraud is exposed and the first words out of their mouths are "It may be unethical but it is not illegal".
As Socrates wrote long ago:
"I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good, public and private."
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
how about slave camps? Definitely not "dormitories". A Foreman? It's either that or what be shot and have your organs sold? Or get carved up, preserved and displayed at the "Bodies" "art" exhibit. What a fucking world eh?
Just show them old pictures of Willow Run. A B-24 every 30 minutes. 50,000 workers and 13 megawatts of electricity to run the place.
And then there was Oak Ridge. So big they ran out of copper and had to borrow 14,000 tons of silver from the Treasury. 75,000 workers + absolute SOTA nuclear tech at the same time.
For aluminum and Oak Ridge the TVA had 12 hydroelectric plants under construction at the same time. Bigger total capacity than Three Gorges and built 70 years ago in 1/5 the time it took to build Three Gorges. It is the development model the Chinese used for the Three Gorges project.
Boeing's Everett WA aircraft assembly plant is the largest building in the world. 400 million cu ft. I guess somebody forgot to tell them that you can't do that in America.
America can't do it = stupid. America is still the largest manufacturing nation on the planet. And it uses only 8% of it's work force to do it.
Caterpillar has been doing exactly that for 21 years. Their latest move - buying a locomotive assembly plant and then locking out the workers and telling them to either take a 50% paycut or they'll move to Muncie, where they can pay people $480 a week for the same job.
Want to raise a family on $24,000 a year?
You're a shill or part of the problem. Please DIAF - we need the extra heat to stay warm.
Try moving even within the same country when you barely have enough money to make it the next two weeks with a roof over your head, and nobody wants to buy your house because they don't want to move to a place with no jobs either. THAT is the kind of difficulty we're talking about, asshole.
I'd rather not have to pay $50k for basic tech. It may make me evil but shit happens and I don't care.
>>I did IT work in the Philippines over a decade ago, exported from the UK when you kids needed external talent for almost anything computer-related.
"You kids" and "talent"... Now I know where the "IT PRICK" rep comes from...
iSlaves are still far cheaper. Also, human labor is surprisingly flexible, because people are smart.
Although the chinese workers might not exactly fit the definition of slaves, their price is right compared to foreign workers.
Yay dictatorships for keeping iphones cheap!
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Chinese are ahead of you: Foxconn is moving to automation.
I am John Hurt.
And typical from Pickens. Every cell phone used in the US is made overseas. As are most electronics. Look around your own house and count them up. If you're adamant for labor and environmental laws and against low wages, then you're a hypocrite if you own any of these items. Therefore this was simply an attack on Apple and not on labor practices.
Apple makes gobs of money by owning the high-value part of the product - the design, engineering, and final sales. There's virtually no profit in actually manufacturing the product. So as a result, companies have emerged like Foxconn (the biggest) that specialize in the manufacturing process. And they make money by doing a _lot_ of manufacturing, for a lot of different vendors. They set up shop in mainland China for easy access to workers - and for most of those workers the crappy pay they get is better than they could earn elsewhere.
And because of that, a whole supply chain rose around those companies to keep them freshly supplied with components. There's an entire infrastructure in and around China specialized in low-cost electronics manufacturing. That's not the only place Foxconn makes stuff (they have factories in Eastern Europe, Brazil, and India - all places where they can get relatively cheap access to an educated workforce). And also, Foxconn doesn't just make products for Apple - nor are they Apple's only manufacturing vendor.
Also worth noting again is that the manufacturing is a low-margin business. Based on their 2010 numbers, they had about $59 billion in sales. Sounds like a lot, but less than 2/3 of Apple's numbers alone. Again, in profit they did $2.2 billion - but that's a low percentage of sales, and that's after supporting nearly a million employees.
The only other thing I'd mention here is that there are companies manufacturing products in higher-wage places, and there are products better-suited to manufacturing here in the US. Precision electronics, low-volume, high-price items, and goods where the manufacturing cost is lower than the shipping costs from overseas would be - these are all good candidates for onshore manufacturing. iPhones, PCs, gaming consoles - those are gone, and they're not coming back. But the jobs they create are crappy ones anyways. And they'll always be chasing the lowest cost somewhere in the world.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
and the average city dweller has basic medical access more readily available and affordable than his/her American counterpart. How can we explain that????
Greed.
When people talk about China in this context they mean the People's Republic of China, 2011 GDP (PPP) per capita estimate $8,394, not Taiwan, 2011 GDP (PPP) per capita estimate $39,245. The two countries are in different leagues so far as personal earnings are concerned. It's China which is really on the way up on this stuff - and I don't think it's just going to be fairly obscure pieces of hardware.
Taiwanese headquartered: Acer, AOpen, ASUS, BenQ, CyberLink, Gigabyte, GWS, HTC, LiteOn, Realtek, Thermaltake, Transcend, VIA.
Chinese headquartered: Haier, Huawei, Lenovo and Vtech (which is Hong Kong-based anyway).
Apart from Lenovo I wouldn't say those other three Chinese brands are particularly well-recognised among the Western public at large (though I don't pay much attention to refrigerator/comms hardware/educational toys brands).
I do not feel that employees are responsible for the incompetence at the executive and managerial levels. I will help you fix your failure, but it is not unreasonable to expect to be paid for it. More than eight hours is overtime. More than time than that agreed to by my union is double-time.
I like double-time. Screw up more often. My union and I are glad to help out.
Sandusky prefers little boys, not college kids.
Many of the people don't want to leave the factories. They have it better there than working in some farm or really poor areas
Endentured Servitude is still slavery, with a slightly different shit smell to it.
They had to wake some workers up? Oh the shock!
I'm an IT technician for a big europe-based company and i'm on call 24 hours a day.
Not only are American workers the most productive in the world, but the US is still the world's largest manufacturing nation based on economic output. And to top it off we do it with only 8% of the workforce. Crank that up to 25% or so and the US would out produce the rest of the world combined. Like it did during WWII.
Norway? You have got to be kidding me. The entire country of Norway has the population of Minnesota, one of the smaller US states.
To get that level of productivity a US manufacturing job has a skill level requirement far greater than in China. And heavy automation. In China automation has far less impact mostly because of the low wages it doesn't pay. So they have to have 8000 to glue on faceplates. In the US that would be about a 100 person operation.
single player healthcare will help in the USA so that jobs don't have to pay for workers healthcare but that is only part of the costs and still it's hard to keep up with factory's where the workers safety is not there.
"We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'" --- FTS
And we, as Americans, have no obligation to purchase your frivolous Chinese junk. We've all got plenty of frivolous junk already. We can always spend our money on some other companies products and not feel like we just did something wrong to ourselves and our neighbours. If the only jobs Apple thinks Americans are worthy to have, are retail jobs selling their Chinese made goods, then fuck Apple. Seriously.
This is like Reed Hastings' comments from the Netflix price-hike all over again. Why not just come out and say, "Sorry, lazy Americans, it sucks to be you. Just keep giving us billions and we'll keep shitting in your hat and shoes." At least that would've been a little bit comical at the same time. These comments are just saddening.
And so... without further ado...
Moving into my #2 spot, right behind Sony, and sending EA down to #3 on my "Never-buy-anything-ever-again-from" list... Apple.
Let's hope the rest of the sheep come along and decide to dump their billions of excess dollars into someone that doesn't have 100% proprietary, DRM'ed, walled-garden, products in every single aspect of their sales. Surely, someone else does this, and with less spite for the people paying them.
North Korea has had that condition for over 60 years.
Before that, the Soviet Union was that way for almost 100 years.
So, history is against you on that one.
Shut up, Mitt.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIfu2A0ezq0
And Apple has the gall to claim they don't use slave labor?
This is not story about manufacturing agility - this is a story about oppression and exploitation.
Damn and to think I was going to get an iPhone.
However I doubt that my Droid is innocent either.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
This isn't just Apple, it is every manufacturer of almost everything you own.
There is an excellent documentary called "China Blue" that follows a young girl from her village, to a work dormitory producing jeans.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1488092077/
In a world of economic, regulatory and political disparity, this is what Global Capitalism generates. The locations willing to offer the lowest wages and the least protection to workers, get the work.
It the the golden times, from the late 1940's into the 1950's America enjoyed a massive competitive head start with most of the rest of the world being bombed into oblivion, and needing to rebuild. This was sustained for some time longer by staying ahead of the technology curve, and only outsourcing lower tech commodity work.
But the world has shifted. There will be no golden times for the USA in our lifetimes. Our competition is no longer recovering, we are no longer ahead of the technology curve. We outsourced the technology and the engineering. It doesn't take long for our contractors to become our competition when they are the ones designing to hardware and software anyway. Did we think them reliant on our brilliant executive management?
People can point fingers at "evil" right wing politicians, "evil" left wing politicians, "evil" corporations or "evil" unions. But in the end, that is trivia to occupy us while Rome burns.
We are in a race to the bottom and it has significant momentum, so you better get used to it.
Now go away or he shall taunt you a second time.
Bark less. Wag more.
Yeah, well, the specific example with last minute spec changing to hardware is rather telling. That is a piss-poor design process by apple and they still expect results and find that's only achievable by what I call slave labour.
Using this as a reason why factories in the US can't compete is despicable and IMHO grounds to heavily agitate against Apple if one is so inclined. For me the piss-poor design process described is reason enough not to by Apple. Well, that and their tendency to sell you their own iCash registers.
The really funny part is that every bit of cash that flows into cheaply producing countries has over the last 20 years or so resulted in the People demanding more pay and more benefits and them getting both. So those jobs might come back and Apple will have to deal with real people having real lives and not living on their whim and changing hardware specs at the very last moment will cause more faulty and sub-par iStuff making headlines.
THAT'S PEOPLE JUMPING OFF THE ROOVES OF THE FACTORY BUILDING FOR $DEITY'S SAKE!
If slave labour is what keeps you afloat you deserve to go down like a lead zeppelin.
20 minutes into the future
Had to come down the page this far to find a reference to slave labor? Wow.
In China, workers are permitted to sleep a couple hours a day. It's no big deal to wake up 8000 workers in the middle of the night, make them skip breakfast, and to sit them down at work stations, for a 12 hour shift of last-minute fixits.
Can't wait for the day that we become like China. Good bye personal property, personal relations, time off, and "home, sweet home".
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Uh...does he realize how BAD that syoryabout forcing 8000 workers to work an unannounced 12 hour shift with a biscuit and tea as compensation makes them sound? Way to promote swet shops guys!
Poor fool - I can work with metric measurements, and I can work with imperial units. Poor you, you're not smart enough to do both? How the hell do you call yourself a "techie"?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Apple has demonstrated that it is a traitor to America, the American Way of Life, and the American People. It should be treated as such.
The statements from their management demonstrates their commitment to providing comfort and support to America's enemies.
I vote we outlaw Apple and all those companies who are aiding and abetting the enemies of the American People, and arrest them. The company resources can be deconstructed and handed off to their America competitors so that American employees of Apple do not lose work or income.
Since corporations now enjoy "Personhood", we can apply or local laws and arrest them accordingly. Think about it. :)
Does Apple not see that, if fewer people can afford its products, it will do poorly? Is the lesson of Henry Ford and the $5 a day wage lost on contemporary American management?
"Our only obligation is making the best product possible."
Yeah, simply sue everyone that dares to make a better one...
So some dickhead designer decides at the last second to retool an assembly line because either he made the wrong decision or is just a douche, 8000 people get woken up and shoved on a 12 hour shift and that's a good thing? We're applauding the fact that the Chinese are treated like slave labor now?
I'm not saying that the west hasn't gotten a little soft on entitlement lately, but really? We're going to applaud 12 hour shifts and zero work life balance as a great thing and we're going to call companies that want to operate like that great because they created a couple of entry level support positions at Telcos?
Apple make their products in Asia because their workers in Asia will work for almost nothing even taking into account cost of living differences. They treat those workers like machines which can be turned on and off at will and have no right to any kind of life outside of work(or even the ability to actually live away from work). They then sell those products to western consumers at western prices and pocket the difference, which given they're the most valuable company on earth must be a pretty big difference. They're assholes plain and simple, and when the Chinese workers get too up themselves and start asking for basic things like not working 12 hour shifts 7 days a week, or being able to get a good nights sleep, they'll move somewhere else.
Saying no to working 12 hours a day isn't lazy, it's being human, it's seeing your wife or husband and spending time with your kids, it's being involved in community activities. It's all the things we used to value in the US, but now consider to be lazy. Chinese workers don't do that because they want to or because they have some massive work ethic, they do it because they have no choice.
Living in a right-to-work state... well, let's say there's a reason those laws are colloquially known as "right to fire".
I'm not saying that the all-employment-is-at-will approach is wrong, necessarily, but it certainly has side effects that your blurb above skips over.
I kind of doubt that you've moved more times in your life than I have. Even if I'm wrong, you seem to make assumptions that you are special, and no one has it as hard as you, or some damned thing.
Moving? The worst part of moving is, I've always lost something of moderate value in every move. You'd think a guy would learn how to avoid that, but I never have.
Moving is a little death? Geeez. That speaks about your personality and psychology, not about the hardship or the adventure of moving.
Oh yeah. It takes all your pay to pay the rent, buy food, and take advantages of services. Welcome to the club. It's called "life". In the wealthiest of countries, only a small percentage of the population actually owns their own home, automobile, a summer home, a yacht, blah blah blah. Most of us work because we HAVE TO! Here in America, for the past 50 years or more, the banks actually own most homes, most cars, even the kitchen appliances.
In short, I feel so sorry for you - let me play a nice weepy song on the world's smallest violin for you!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
In a nutshell it s not only that workers are cheaper. It s also the lack of rights the workers have and the possibility to exploit this via worse working conditions.
But yeah.. it shouldnt be left to the companies and let alone the enterprise to solve these kind of problems. They're highly profit-driven and that s what their decisions will always will be aswell.
I long for the days when such brash statements would constitute business suicide. But Americans don't give a shit about annything any more. Any company that takes advantage of despotism and calls it "breathtaking" has some real, deep-seated, sociopathic issues. I would say "everybody" knows these "dormitories" are actually like imprisonment, that many workers aren't allowed to leave, that toothpaste can cost a month's wages and that the cost of living there ensures the employees become deeply indebted to the crime-syndicate family Tongs that run the businesses amd local governments, but, not only do I realize most Americans seriously don't give a shit, I also realize that Apple is probably rightly betting that most people have no idea about any of that. I can see Apple, as a large and influential corporation, having a vested interest in cutting costs even more by instituting similar practices here in America (less shipping). People don't need rights to be Apple customers any more than they do to be Apple workers. Apple doesn't even need Americans to have te ability to pay for their devices. Since the damn things are basically tracking devices and electronic snitches and spies anyways, the government would be happy to pay Apple to provide them free of charge to uplift our productivity in some destitute and Orwellian future. Besides, the real money is in weaponization and Apple only needs governments and nations as clients to maintain their wealth and power brokering.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
How many times have you been 60?
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
If it's any consolation, the country feels the same way about you.
I love how you exaggerate the hell out of the position you don't like until it's so fucking silly it is irrelevant. This is called making up a strawman and then burning him down with a fucking nuclear bomb. But it doesn't convince me that shit-ass McJobs are an acceptable employment solution for Americans, nor that we should be happy with what we have.
I think the most pathetic thing any American can say is "well, just be thankful you have a job." Really, that's not exactly a ringing fucking endorsement of the American way of life.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
And that's according to the "job creators." How many more hugely expensive tax breaks do they deserve?
Sub-Zero/Wolf Appliance here in Wisconsin did similar. A few years ago, the owner called a company-wide meeting and told everyone they could either take a 20% pay cut or they would get laid off. When the employees balked, the owner told them he would just fire them all and move the plant to Kentucky. Understandably, this scared people to death, what with mortgages and all. When employees started looking for ways to cut costs without having to cut their salaries that much (and found some) and presented them to the owner, he basically said "This isn't about money; the economy is soft right now, and I'm going to use this opportunity to increase my profit margin by cutting your wages. Don't like it, there's the door."
There have been some businesses that truly have been hit hard by this economy, but there are some real slimeball fuckheads that are basically just extorting the fact that people are desperate for work and will do almost anything to keep their jobs. If the minimum wage were gone tomorrow, we'd all be making illegal immigrant strawberry-picking slave wages, and we're supposed to cut taxes on "the job creators"? Please.
Dear Lord. "Suicide nets aren't all that bad, mmmkay?"
It is mind-boggling the depths to which people will delve to excuse bullshit like this. MIND BOGGLING.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
The New York Times shared drafts of their article with Apple before it was published. In addition, Apple just recently joined the Fair Labor Association. I wonder if the former prompted or accelerated the later.
For the children.
There are no individuals, no people. Only workers and management.
What is breathtaking is the irony.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
Deleted
I'm a Colombian, I need visa to enter almost any country in the world. Not to say an extra hassle to get a work permit. The minimum wage is about 3000 US dollars... A year. And just a plane ticket to almost anywhere in europe is about half of it. Can you do your math, and tell me what is it that you laugh about? Particularly after finishing studying and having to pay a loan for your studies?
psa airlines in dayton, oh is hiring flight attendants. if you are in the area, check 'em out. pays something like $16.75/hr - 75 hours a month guaranteed.
Regarding Foxconn...
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-16-2012/fear-factory
How can they use that cash when majority of US people are rather unemployed than move to places with jobs
Have you ever moved? Moving's expensive. First month / last month's rent, means to move your stuff, electricity hookup fees, gas fees etc. After Katrina, lots 'working poor' were moved to Houston on the govt's dime. Most of them stayed. They would have moved to Houston before, but they couldn't afford to...
The gig is up, though. Don't the last twenty years of closed door "summits" and other shady shit tell you anything? America silently became just as despotic and uncaring a government as the Chinese or North Koreans, and it was only recentlyrevealed how truly sick things have gotten when the Occupy movement pulled back the curtain and got pistol whipped by the wizard. It is not in the best interests of America to do what you're suggesting because we no longer even HAVE enemies. Our government LOVES China because they represent the possibility of total domination and control, the dream of every last cabinet member, congressman, and executive. All government leaders, globally, are currently concerned only with how to take away rights and how to put people to work building their dream projects, which are usually grandiose schemes involving either adventures in space, immortalized wealth for their progeny, murdering lots of people, and having a stronger selection of higher quality sexual partners. Government, everywhere, has become materialistic and evil, and I'll be lucky if work conditions in America aren't exactly as in China by the time I'm out of college.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I'm mixed on this: but it's capitalism as usual. My knee jerk reaction was the workers are being treated like shit, and "how can Apple get away with this?" But, many police officers and firemen essentially have the same work on the drop of a hat mentality, and we don't disrespect them as subserviant slaves; rather we thank them for their sacrifice and service.
The flip side of labor laws is that they inhibit an individual's ability to go above and beyond, to earn wage or recognition.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
And what the heck are these "engineer" jobs that have more education than high school and less than college that are referred to in the column? What, the US doesn't have enough Engineering school drop-outs? The fact I don't have an engineering degree makes me ineligible for anything related to manufacturing in the US, but I guess that wouldn't be the case there. Because they hire people without education, yet all the politicians in the US talk about companies complaining about not having enough trained employees.
pull ALL manuf out of china. apple is big enough (and bad-ass enough, with attitude to match) to pull it off. it could be a 'shiny' (sic) example to the world.
apple has enough money to lose money on iProducts. they could re-hire all the out of work bay area engineers and manufacturers, for a start. I drive around the bay area and see so many empty buildings and 'for lease' signs. those could be light to medium manufacturing! it could all be done here. at higher cost, but apple can afford it.
starting out, they could not. so they got market demand fo their products and NOW can name any price they want for iThis or iThat and some fool will buy it. they can now afford to pull out of china, lock stock and barrel, and do ALL work here.
it would take time but if you never start, you never get there.
other companies could join in, too.
if we had federal leadership (real leaders) they would incentivize this with money (tax breaks, whatever). just like its more beneficial to do business overseas, it could be reversed if we just wanted to.
call it the 'put america back to work' set of bills and efforts. make it a major focus and gain huge PR benefits from this (not to mention the side benefit of regaining our skills in more things than making movies and suing people).
apple and other huge companies could pull back and re-invest in the US. they simply choose NOT TO. realize, that, people. the companies you buy from are selling you out. its their choice and they made it. do you see any sign of it going back? I don't.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Where are our priorities? I`d give 15 hours for only a half-eaten doughnut and the glory of making toys for American hipsters.
I explain it as you lived in a socialist nation. Myself i will give up health care in exchange for freedom.
Also, you are incorrect since anyone can get care in this nation if they need to. Just drive down to the hospital and they WILL treat you, regardless of your ability to pay.
Then I suggest strongly that you give up your medical insurance until you've made 3 trips to said hospital and experienced the lack of health care you get via that route.
You obviously need a major dose of reality, and experiencing it is going to be the only way your eyes will be opened.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
to corporate thinking like this. We need sizeable tariffs on imported manufactured goods. The tariff should be assessed based on the estimated man-hours of labor in the product and set nullify any difference in wage, environmental and working condition standards between the country of origin and your country, e.g. the USA, Germany, Italy, etc. Exceptions could be made for things that can't be manufactured in your country for reasons other than labor costs or if the unemployment rate goes too low.
I'm afraid that your tale of road warrior machismo has nothing to do with the original story, nor the claim that "you don't need dormitories". To house 8000 manufacturing workers within a half hour commute of the manufacturing facility, if you don't use dormitories, your costs will be ludicrously high in salaries or other support of housing costs. And dormitories effectively divorce the employees from day-to-day family and household maintenance requirements, allowing the 8000 employees to work that shift and still get a meal during and after the shift so they're productive the _next_ day.
Short term contract workers wouldn't normally be capable of this kind of goal. To put in a sudden 12-hour shift on unfamiliar equipment with a changed procedure is to encourage very expensive mistakes, such as injuries and ruining the manufacturing equipment itself. Longer term contract workers or employees can do this and do it well: take a look in any US based auto manufacturing plant for constantly handling last minute revisions as the next model year is built.
The political diatribe is also fascinating. The idea that American spirit is allbout "MAKING money" is lethal to quality engineering and research, because both involve longer term projects that need experienced and educated staff who've really learned their way around a field and can integrate with that knowledge. Factors other than money are vital.
But the $400K is based on Apple making huge margins by manufacturing their product in China, rather than the US.
If you added in the Chinese workforce on which the profit is based, the sums wouldn't look so good.
Based on productivity per worker, Bernie Madoff was a fucking God, until the accounting came.
You could work two burger flipping jobs. The work is easy, and you really don't need much sleep.
21st Century Renaissance Man
"I can tell you that you simply cannot live at a hamburger flipping salary. How? You cannot even pay rent with that."
Sure one could. Last year, a university (University of Missisippi?, cannot find link) released a study comparing a single parent that held minimum wage jobs vs a single parent that had a degree and a professional job. 15K vs 68K respectively.
Since the "burger flipper" is considered "poor", they qualified for many government programs. Rent subsistence, food stamps, health care, utility assistance, Earned Income Credit, etc. The result was that this class of worker had 38,000 USD of disposable income each year.
Since the professional at 68K does not qualify for any of these programs, their disposable income each year is 34K.
If someone knows the study, please correct my mistakes as I am going from memory.
The western world has been taking the products built in china, paying by printing dollars/euros they didn't intend to back with value. This is highly unethical and a bad strategy for the long term, but that is what has allowed the current consumerism society and citizens expect it to keep going.
Now this globalization tactic has killed their local economies, ability to produce stuff and turned them into parasites. The only option forward is trying to produce stuff like the Chinese, erect commerce barriers, or wait until the Chinese standard of life grows enough so we don't have to compete with slaves.
I think the strategy taken is #3. Problem is, this is economic suicide.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
let me play a nice weepy song on the world's smallest violin for you!
Too bad this is the internet. I could have done that in stereo. ;-)
American corporations, by and large, never have felt much responsibility toward the people whose money they take. "Caveat emptor" is what they give, while unquestioning customer loyalty is what they hope to demand. Apple has been unusually successful in obtaining the latter, but that has no reflection on how they address the former. For most corporations, any demonstration of loyalty to a customer is only a means to an end, with few exceptions. If the board has any loyalty at all, it's to their quarterly bonus and, hence, to a display of loyalty to the shareholders. At every level, it's just hired guns ready to wash their hands to line their pockets.
There's laissez faire capitalism, but what we get is generally laissez unfair.
The NYT story does not square at all with this recent CNN Money piece, which, among much else, describes how the Reality Distortion Field was being applied six months before product release to turn Gorilla Glass from a discarded research project into a mass-produced product.
As a matter of fact, the suicide rate at the factory was lower than the average in China even before the nets were installed.
Again with that stupid "We'll never be able to afford it if Americans make it!!!!" argument.
Back when we made shit here, there was actual demand for labor, and people made a decent wage for the time doing even the most menial of jobs because employers actually had to compete for workers. Consequently, the buying power of the dollar was enormous compared to where it is today.
My grandfather came back from Korea and got a job as a truck driver, and that earned him enough money to buy (and pay off) a modest home in Philadelphia; support himself, his wife, and their four children; buy a new car every few years; pile the family in the car and drag them all over the country every summer on vacation; put something away for his children's college educations and his retirement. All on single salary earned with a fucking high school diploma. And to top it off, he was actually treated like a fucking human being by his boss! He regularly had the boss and his family over for dinner, and when there were problems in my grandfather's personal life, like when my grandmother got cancer the first time and had to be hospitalized, not only did his boss give him as much time as he needed to deal with it, no questions asked, he came and visited them in the fucking hospital. The guy ran a trucking company, and my grandfather being gone effected his bottom line, but that wasn't nearly as important to him as the fact that one of his valued employees was in trouble.
Contrast that to the average job a high school graduate can get these days. Hell, contrast that to most any job these days. I've had jobs where you can't even get sick without the threat of losing your job, or at the very least, getting put right to the top of a "layoff" list. Look at all the fucking huge retail chains that deliberately hire two part-time employees instead of one full-time one just to get around having to offer them insurance or any benefits of any kind. There are whole towns in this country now where the only major employer is Walmart, a huge proponent of doing that shit.
People talk about class warfare like it's something new, but the fact is, the war's been raging since fucking 1980, they just called it "trickle-down economics" and "globalization". Now that the other side is finally waking up to that fact and starting to resist in earnest, now come the threats about moving overseas or "competitiveness" or "incentive to hire Americans" and "American labor is too expensive!" and all the other bullshit.
This country was at it's strongest economically when the middle-class was at it's strongest economically. Cutting their tax rate a few percentage points isn't going to turn the U.S.A. into fucking Xanadu. We need to make it financially untenable for a manufacturer to base 95% of production in foreign slave markets and bring the shit here and sell it for premium prices, but those manufacturers spend their hard earned profits making sure that will never, ever happen by lobbying the fuck out of our government.
Um, I can, and do, use metric all the time, as well as standard English measurements. I haven't met anyone educated that wasn't familiar with metric and completely capable of working in it as well.
The reason China workers can/will work for so little is because they "need" less. Most everyone in the US need that $100 phone (maybe free) with a $50-100 a month plan, feel the need to spend hundreds on shoes and cloths, and every other luxury. Where in China they do not "need" these things. And guess what, it was after Obama was elected that Apple moved to China, why? Obama promised higher taxes, which made moving to China a smart move to save money. The reason they could move and say what they said in this article is because its not going to stop people from buying apple. And yea, apple has no obligation to creating jobs, they have obligation for making money for share holders. Its taxes and regulations that prevent job creating. And we would have have to tax so much if the government was not giving money away. We barrow money from China just to give it back to help them build stuff. Or give billions to Europe to give to their people that don't work. First step is to kick out a President that is anti-business, and put in someone who has had a job at least once in his life.
An employee dormitory with forced wake-up and 12-hour mandatory work shifts? Sounds like any number of dystopian science fiction scenarios I've read or seen. Elois and Morlocks spring to mind...
Welcome to the future.
Then I must not be working for a business.
I have a union. I have 30+ days of payed holidays. I have a 13th and 14th month. When I get sick I get payed for. And if I try to do overtime, by boss sends me home.
Also I am not the only one, nor is it the only company. They still make a very good profit.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Apple is incredibly arrogant and offensive, but I have to admit they are quite frank about their contempt for American workers and for worker rights elsewhere. China would be the first country to outright demand they erect the factories that will sell Apple products right on their own soil (which they have done), then turn around and seize/shut down Apple's retail outlets over there due to some bullshit trumped up charges, again to lean on them for bribes and hit them up for / extort even more money from them.
The Chinese aren't fooling around and I can promise that if Apple thinks it can stay ahead of the curve on this forever, they are sorely mistaken. China will not allow Apple goods to be sold there unless the production remains situated there, and they get a handsome cut of the profits. Very likely, the Chinese will completely steal all the technology and produce knockoff products to flood the world's markets, as they have already done in endless permutations, at far lower prices.
I think the American Govt seriously needs to reign in all this misguided arrogance, and I think American workers must begin to demand that these factories be brought back to the states in the grounds that they cannot be sold here without a majority of the construction be built here. These occupy Wall St kids should rally and begin to organize for Worker Rights and demand these companies begin to redeem their arrogant selves by building right here, under penalty of MAJOR long-term-endurance organized Boycotts against Apple and others. Apple and other corporations need to get this forceful message loud and clear.
These kids that are whining about lack of job opportunities haven't made the connection yet that those opportunities will never present themselves again until they take some radical sweeping measures, the silver lining of which will simultaneously address the ruthless mistreatment of foreign workers. If foreign workers see a strong and powerful backlash against all of this evil in America, maybe it will embolden them to finally do serious Labor Organizing as well.
Has anyone seen what's possible with modern robotics? The only reason the Chinese employ people in their factories is because the robots are still expensive. Already robots are starting to displace workers .. and the pace of that is increasing .. google Hon Hai robots .. you'll find the story of how one Chinese factory plans to introduce about 1,000,000 (yes .. one million robots to improve its manufacturing capability). Jobs of the future will be in maintaining, programming, and arranging these industrial robots. And they are so reliable they wont require that many maintenance workers. Also the robots will be cheap enough that they can merely be swapped rather than repaired .. so special skills won't even be required. In the not too distant future (2025) .. the total number of workers needed per million iPhones will be very low.
Here's what was possible 15 years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb7foG1rtlA (fast forward to 1:35 to avoid the text crap.
The only reason so many Chinese are in manufacturing jobs is because robots are currently expensive. Eventually about 90% of them will be replaced by robotics .. and those robots will likely be made by FANUC in Japan.
Fourth.
Of course there's a lot to it, but consider how many tools the American worker has to be productive.
Um, I can, and do, use metric all the time, as well as standard English measurements.
By "English" you mean "American", right?
It seems to me that the West really needs to force the issue of Chinese human rights and do it now. For our own self interest, if nothing else. Only by enforcing human rights on the Chinese government (and making it easier for workers to protest) can we make these factories less economically competitive. Otherwise their slave labour will outcompete our mostly decent working conditions, and it will be a race to the bottom.
Ah, the free market at work. Remember, don't try to stop him, or he'll move the jobs to China. We have to keep our workforce equally defenseless and exploitable.... uh, I mean "attractive", in order to remain the greatest nation on earth!
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
This.
People often ask me why I will not buy Apple products. It is precisely this kind of anti-americanism that their own execs are now publicly admitting.
I'll never buy one of their products again.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Thanks for being moderate on this topic - it seems more and more people are at one extreme or another when it comes to these things. I can't see how you can be "anti-union" after learning about the history of labor in the US, and at the same time I can't see how modern labor's protection of it's weakest members does them any good. The laws probably do need to be revised, but scrapping organized labor altogether won't suddenly make US manufacturing competitive with China.
It WOULD weaken the Democratic party, though - which is why I suspect people get so wound up about it. I do have to say that it seems wrong to let the labor unions both "close" a shop and then use the mandatory dues to back politicians. That definitely is depriving people of their voice in a roundabout way.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Their what were made in the US? And should t that be U'S?
You can get apartments.
You don't need to live in a house. That was one of the key problems with our current bust, A lot of people who couldn't afford houses got them. Then they couldn't pay for them.
There are solutions available. The problem is these solutions are below them. Oddly enough now in America it is more prideful to be out of work and blame someone else for your misfortunes. Then taking your current misfortune and strive and work to get past it. Sometimes getting past this means you will need a different quality of life that you had before.
Sure bad stuff happens and it isn't always your fault... However blaming people but doing noting will overall ruin you life more. Wouldn't it make more sense to take a step back and build a new life then trying to regain a life that may not come back.
Back in the 1990's Web Developers who only skill was using Front Page were making big bucks putting together crappy website, made a good living. Then around 2003 they demand dropped. Now to make it you either needed to do more then websites or what a lot of people did was get a different career (Unfortunatly a lot of those slobs went to real-estate)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If you don't like the way Apple manufactures their products, then don't buy their products.
Why is it that all these "Free Market" GOP candidates never seem to point out that all the manufacturing jobs are going to the dreaded communist countries (or other totalitarian regimes)?
Maybe, just maybe, there's a link between between being obscenely profitable and using labor that has no rights whatsoever?
This article and the subsequent arguments about it are based on a false premise. Since the suicide rate is lower in these factories than it is in the United States (according to Steve Jobs and backed by real stats), obviously the workers must have a higher quality of life and must be content. So the question is not whether conditions are worse and Apple hates the freedom of workers but instead why is life so difficult in America and why is it so expensive considering how poorly Americans live in relation to Chinese factory workers?
Globalisation of manufacturing is a necessary and logical step forward, but it does need to be accompanied by fair working conditions, a matter on which Apple's manufacturers have a poor record.
Could you please tell me which electronics manufacturers have a good record?
This concept of 'we need those manufacturing jobs' needs to stop. The fact is that if we had them we probably couldn't accommodate the entire demand of Apple let alone the entire industry. The fact is those products are made abroad for a good reason ranging from our economic policy and workforce to those of other countries. Just as a business can freely move from state to state for more favorable legislation, business can also do the same on the national level. Unions are demanding ridiculous pension plans that can't pay out - cya latter.
The bottom line is that yes apple may outsource the manufacturing job, but so what? We lose out on blue collar jobs that are soon to be replaced by robots. They are low paying, unskilled labor jobs that are a dying bread. Apple is still doing the higher level skilled jobs in the U.S., marketing, designing, creating, testing. I was looking at a box that had the install discs and software that came with the mac desktop. It didn't say made in China it said Designed in California.
You know this isn't the norm everywhere, right? A number of American cities have a lot more of a European feel than the stereotypical "American" style of housing. I'm talking about relatively small floor plans, multi-use rooms out of necessity, and little or no dedicated space for automobiles.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
No, the management is ashamed: they could have saved 8,000 biscuits and cups of tea !
What's the benifit to being able to start work in a half hour, if it'll take at least half a day to ship the result to this side of the planet?
Unless iPhone launched in asian markets first?
Are you the Flying Dutchman? http://www.flyingdutchman.co/
So essentially Apple is saying, "We can't have these jobs in the US because the Standard Of Living in the US is too high, and we want to profit from a lower SOL."
Seriously, the workers are woken up in the middle of the night from their dormitories, given "a biscuit and a cup of tea" (as though this is some magnificent reward), then faced a 12 hour shift, before being overworked for a week straight. All because Apple made a bad design decision, and obviously their product's street date is more important than the health and well-being of 8,000 workers.
This is sweat-shop mentality. Apple shouldn't be boasting about this, they should be apologizing.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Funny how no one on this thread has said anything about deciding not to buy Apple products because of this situation.
No, actually, I mean English measurements.
That's where they originated, and that's what they're called. The fact that England uses metric now is besides the point.
It is the truth.
Also, it is easy to use the proverbial consumer to justify harm against our own - while suggesting that those that would not cause harm as those that would cause harm.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You won't get healthcare or freedom. You'll be crushed under the jackboots of capitalist thugs. Just like those iPhone workers who aren't allowed to talk among themselves.
Oh, as for treatment: that works great for a broken bone. Try getting Chemotherapy so that your cancer goes into remission. Or try getting dental care so that your tooth infection doesn't spread to your brain and kill you. In America, if you get sick, better die quick.
And they're working on that whole 'Just drive down to the hospital and they WILL treat you' stuff anyway. Public emergency rooms are massively overcrowded. Instead of building more or expanding the current ones I'm seeing privately run urgent care centers crop up. They're private. They WON'T treat you. They'll tell you to go to the overcrowded public ones. The 1% are way ahead of you.
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You forget these routinely charge much more than your local grocery store that may be closer. In this case you might pay more because you're already there and just remembered you need it. Or you hate going to crowded grocery stores. Or you hate dealing with the idiots that work at your local grocery store.
They pay the same generally, there may be a slightly higher wholesale cost for the convenience store if they are buying from a 3rd party distributor instead of the same place the grocery is buying from. But the convenience store without fail charges more, and sells enough to keep restocking the items. So the one charging more is not getting screwed, and is actually thriving in a market with intense competition even though they charge more for the exact same items.
Capitalism is far more than paying the lowest cost for goods. I don't know why everyone is suddenly saying that, its not true now and has never been true. Capitalism is letting the market set the prices for their own goods and sinking or swimming by them. Its charging what the market will bear, and the market is very very complex with many different ways to approach it successfully.
Posted AC cause I deleted my /. account long ago.
That makes Apple's US workers more productive than Foxconn's Chinese laborers. I think you may be conflating productivity and employment. Apple's model (of doing the design and marketing themselves, and farming out the manufacturing to lower-margin contractors) just doesn't require that many workers, leading to low unemployment in Shenzhen and high unemployment in Detroit (and the US manufacturing sector in general).
Whether we could duplicate the manufacturing supply chain in the US is another matter, even if we could convince US workers to work (and live) under conditions like those at Foxconn. (Foxconn chairman compares his workforce to ‘animals’ .)
Multiplying by 5 just makes a politically defensible number while ignoring the ways value is added. $30-50 is more likely given how various inputs are used, currency differences, and how one must account for the costs of using various despotic and knockoff-prone countries.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
This brings up a very good point - to have a truly free market you need to have free movement of goods, free movement of capital, and free movement of labor.
Until Chinese peasants are allowed to travel freely to the US to find employment, we're fooling ourselves with the idea that trade can be "free".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"Capitalism means to exploit the workers for the least amount possible"
NO. That is Greed.
Apple has a premium product and charges a premium price. Service, support, ergonomics, ease of use, Apple has all of these and a cult like following. Apple does not need to compete on price. And the huge hoard of cash proves Apple does not need a huge cash flow to maintain it;s tech or marketing lead, nor is Apple re-investing it's huge cash hoard to conquer new spaces in the new markets, nor is Apple dividending out it's huge profits. Simple GREED, my friends, GREED. It is a deadly sin. It has consequences.
At the beginning of the industrial revolution, the workers were exploited. But wages and conditions improved. This is an unstoppable social force. Exploiting the workers was and still is an injustice. Polluting the environment is wrong. Lawyers and Unions will spring up. Unlawful death. The Green army that shut down the XL pipeline can and will be redeployed to Foxconn, when it serves an agenda.
Apple is currently on the wrong side of this inevitable tsunami. And despite all the chattering and twittering and spinning, nobody, can change this. Steve is dead, the suits are in charge, and all that apple will have left after the 5S is good will.
If apple moved production to the USA, it would get a following like Harley Davidson has.
It's fairly unusual to be in a situation to leave the USA for a cheap part of Asia, but still get the same salary (assuming that's what you meant). Most of the time if you do that you'll end up being paid equivalent to the local living wage, which totally screws your savings account if your goal is to ever come back.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I do not know how to manufacture an iPhone, but I have the right to force Apple to make iPhone like I want them to.
In poorer countries, the elderly also have the good grace to die early, allowing a tight knit family to accumulate wealth. In the West people live longer and get lingering lifestyle diseases, which not only erase their stored capital, but drag on the accumulation of wealth by their children. It's a downward spiral. Want things to get better? Lower life expectancy.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Sigh. Right-to-work isn't at all the same as at-will. My state -- Michigan -- is a union-shop state, but also an at-will state. They have no bearing on each other, and have nothing at all common in law.
Right-to-work means (only) that non-members don't have to pay union dues. In a union-shop state, you *still* have the right not to join a union -- you're still stuck paying union dues (actually, an "agency fee" which is slightly less than the union dues). Unions can still thrive and prosper and protect their works in right-to-work states, and a lot of them do so.
At-will only applies to non-contract employment in at-will states. If you have a union and you have a contract with the appropriate language, then you're not an at-will employee, even in at at-will state.
--Jim (me)
Wah wah wah.
Quick, name one non-US based tech company started in the past 10 years with at least 500 employees.
Can you think of one? I can't.
Now let's try US tech companies. Since 2001 right off the top of my head there are Facebook and Twitter. I think Youtube was also in that timeframe, but they're kind of gray area since Google bought them before they got really massive.
Microsoft still has something like 50k employees in the States, if they could get better technical staff by outsourcing to India why would they care about H1Bs? Why not just open an India office?
Face it, the best place in the world to be in high tech is still Silicon Valley. Close runners up are still Seattle and New York. You would have to look pretty hard to see any indication that America isn't the place to be for high tech.
Oddly enough mother-in-laws are still a pain in your ass regardless of your east/west affiliation.
"We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
What a fascist statement. It's sickening. Thanks to who was Apple able to grow and blossom? Which infrastructure it used?
We can build nukes but not phones? Fuck you Apple.
You just endorse Communism for your own greed. Here is what a fair split would look like. 400,000 per employee 100,000 per year for Apple 300,000 per year for the employee. You know the one who does the fucking work.
If you buy Apple products you too endorse communism over your way of life. And you too will one day be communist or starve.
Think about how you own purchase can fuck yourself. They should be hung for treason.
I'm guessing you are young, healthy, and single with no strong ties to your family. Otherwise, cutting all ties and moving hundreds of miles every year or so becomes...more difficult to say the least.
Or the people on the design end could fix their damn process. Changing a fundamental part of the assembly line after it was already set up and tested (which the OP appears to be implying) doesn't HAVE to be done in a 12 hour turnaround. The bosses like it, because it lets them save their ass by covering the fact that they screwed up the original design. One or two guys at headquarters probably avoided getting fired by making 8000 slaves jump for them.
If this had been a US plant, assume it takes a week to retool, instead of 12 hours. You push your product launch back by a week. A couple guys at HQ learn to check their work a little more thoroughly for next time. The product still sells millions of units, and the entire incident becomes a blip that nobody remembers in 3 months.
Whenever anybody in management says "flexibility", you should be very, very skeptical. Management shouldn't get to be flexible at the end of the process. It's almost always code for covering up bad decisions or bad process.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
> It's true in 1982 Mac's and APPLE's were made in the U.S.
Of course, in 1982 the only Macs that existed were prototypes. So it wouldn't make much sense to send them overseas to be fabbed.
What I don't get is how this is an Apple problem. People have been forever whining about how Apple PC's were too expensive when compared to WIndow's PC's. Then, when the Window's PC manufacturers took their manufacturing overseas to places like Taiwan and then China, the gap in prices started to accelerate. Apple was one of the last major PC manufacturer's to take their manufacturing overseas. Do you think any of the other PC (or other electronics) company exec's don't have the view "Apple doesn't owe you [presuming you are US American] anything and doesn't care to help" or "Apple believes US American laborers are sub-par and unqualified", hell they are the ones who originated that viewpoint!
All of us would benefit from listening to this episode of This American Life, which is really even-handed (listen to the WHOLE story) and entertaining in its treatment of the problem/benefits of sweat shops and in particular those that assemble Apple products (along with everybody else's).
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory
You sir, are a moron.
Hospitals are collapsing due to being *REQUIRED* to treat patents regardless of ability to pay. And once treatment starts the doctors don't have any clue if you can pay or not, so you get the same exact treatment as a 'payer' gets.
For YOUR dose of reality you can visit most any large city ER on the weekends and you will quickly loose track of how many people who cant pay are shuffled thru the system.
Unless you were implying hospitals cant give out quality care to anyone?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wow, wish I had 38k disposable per year. WTF, a burger flipping single mom makes 160 x 12 x 9.04 = $17,356.80 /year (I'm using Washington because they're the highest, it's $13k where I live). And don't pull out that 'but she works overtime' crap. Businesses don't give overtime anymore, they just hire more workers. Hell, she's lucky if she gets 40/week.
So what you're saying is, according to his Missisippi study not only is she getting ALL living expenses paid in full (food, shelter, helathcare) but she's getting 21k/year cash on top of that. I call bull shit.
Hell, I call bull shit on the entire "study". Since Clinton you're limited to 4 years max for public cash assistance. Utility assistance is generally 50% max unless you're over 65). Oh, at federal minimum wage you're bumping up against the poverty line ($14k). Once you cross that you'll find lots and lots of those programs cutting you off. In Arizona 130% of poverty level 18/k per year) disqualifies you for food stamps. Cash assistance is even harder to get. And our local free health care gets cut off at $17k/year. I hear Mississippi (and all of the south) is worse. So I say again, I call bullshit.
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Apple is wrong. Instead of investing in USA factory's and training workers here to build their products they tapped the cheap labor market overseas. Now that cheap labor market has a head start on the labor knowledge curve and Apple isn't looking back.
ANYONE WHO HAS WORKED AT ANYTHING IN THEIR LIFES KNOWS YOU GET BETTER THE MORE YOU WORK ON THE SAME THING, ITS NOT HARD TO UNDERSTAND.
"'We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
Let's assume that's a perfectly fair position and take everything else they said at face value just to avoid the argument.
Did anybody else notice that absolutely nothing they said was an advantage of foreign workers has anything to do with a better product and everything to do with what they are denying--namely, that it is all about the money? Diligence and industrial skills? These are essentially assembly line workers, give me a break. Even if they were somehow superior at putting Widget A into Slot A, all that affects is the number of returns Apple would have to deal with. Annoying, yes. Costly, yes. A better product? No. Everybody receiving a properly-assembled product would receive a product of identical quality either way.
Flexibility, and their little story? Cute I guess, if you think a society where workers sleep at their jobs and are at their boss' beck and call literally 24/7 is something to be proud of. Still, again, nothing about quality. With American workers Apple would have had to... what? Wait until morning? Hell, let's call it significantly worse and say they would have had to wait for re-training or something and it would have taken a month. Better product? Again, no. Just better timing -- for Apple.
None of their comments are about a better product, but all of them, even just at a cursory examination, are very much about money. Returns and defective products hurt the bottom line. Delays hurt the bottom line, especially if it causes them to miss an event like Christmas or their little Apple love-fest get-togethers. Paying more for workers obviously hurts the bottom line. And that is, of course, just setting aside the question of whether anything they said is actually true.
Maybe that's good enough. I'm not here to argue it. I simply don't enjoy being lied to by corporate shills. Of course it's about the money. If you care nothing about American workers and just maximizing your profits, fine -- but have the fucking balls to say so. Don't spew some bullshit and hope you fool people who aren't paying attention.
"The bottom line is that the USA used to do this." The typical American used to live, work, and die in the community (notice I used the word community not location because it is more than just a location) that they and their ancestors were born and died in. Your family-less, baggage-less, community-less jet-setting from country to country in search of jobs cannot be described as historically typical in any fashion.
"Apple redesigned the iPhone's screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, and then each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames AT THE POINT OF A GUN". Wonder why they left that part out? Now obviously, they probably didn't have a gun pointed at their heads, but, when you have a population of people, who, for the most part, have NO OPTIONS, live their lives according to what the STATE tells them, and have no other options to make some sort of money, you can do what you want. Waking people up, escorting them to work on a TWELVE HOUR shift (most likely with few breaks) is just flat wrong. Is the American worker lazy? LOL, you bet! Apple made a business decision that it would be easier to move overseas, than deal with the over regulated environment in the USA. Dealing with the labor unions would have just be the tip of the iceberg to deal with. There has to be a balance, one that is missing in the USA. From businesses who want to exploit the labor for profit, and unions who want to exploit the businesses for profit.
Your argument, and the argument the article makes, held more weight before we found out the A5 was being manufactured in Texas...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First, Apple is only a case study in this story. The facts apply to just about all electronics products. Further, Apple doesn't boast about this. They audit the suppliers and factories that do work for them and publish their results, with goals for how to improve. They are now a member of the Fair Labor Association. Finally, the article doesn't say that US jobs are lost due to standard of living. Paying Chinese workers American wages would raise the cost of goods only about 25%, according to the article. The situation is far more grim than this. Rather, the U.S. no longer has the dense congregation of many places of manufacture that all tie together into a big supply chain web. The construction of manufacturing capacity sometimes begins even before a contract is actually awarded, just in case, and is subsidized by the government. Further, the U.S. lacks the numbers of workers with the engineering skill that these factories tend to employ: somewhat higher than high school but not a full four-year B.S. degree. We therefore can't easily mobilize and structure a sufficient (in both numbers and skillsets) labor force on short notice. The article states that China could amass the required talent for a job in 15 days that would take 9 *months* in the U.S.
started a 12-hour shift
So, they're only working half days?
Have gnu, will travel.
Blagoevitch and his fellow prisoners are getting 12 cents per hour, and would work their arses hard for a mare promise of their prison term cut.
America _is_ competitive as far as prison pay is concerned. And with a monopoly price of prison store, you can take it all back.
Indian prison labor would cost many times as much and it is not anywhere as numerous.
The Green army that shut down the XL pipeline can and will be redeployed to Foxconn
The Green Army, this destroyers of the environment, will be tossed out on their asses in November.
Do you realize how much damage you idiots have done? Rather than having oil used in America be transported from a nearby source, through a pipeline we can monitor over the whole of the U.S., instead now the EXACT SAME amount of oil (meaning NO impact to the environment from blocking Keystone on the Canada end) will be transported by ship (which tends to leak more than pipelines, or could crash at sea) over to China, while the oil we could have got from Canada will instead come over from Sadia Arabia - further funding the oppression of women and AGAIN being transported in leaky ships.
I am a TRUE environmentalist. I do what is best for the environment by considering ALL costs, not just my own convenience or wish to not have a bulky looking pipeline somewhere close by where I can see it. You assholes have caused untold damage and although I am not religious I hope there is a Hell so that you can be slathered in burning oil and exist in torment for a thousands years after you die, with all the sea life you have condemned to an oily death pecking at your eyes.
Just thought you should know.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah... because when you are unemployed and have no money (and the housing market sucks) it's so SUPER easy to move to a place with jobs! Gosh, why didn't people think of that. We could have solved this problem years ago and have a 0% unemployment rate!
Don't even think of doing anything that isn't super easy.
I gotta think that it's mainly due to aircraft manufacturing that the GDP is so high. Used to be that it changed by a few tenths by the delivery of a unit or two.
It's also all those pesky environmental laws in other countries.
"China’s Pollution Is So Insane You Can See It From Space" http://gizmo.do/zkiOIG
Actually, I'm glad Steve Jobs is dead. Fuck him for betraying the country that made him rich and famous.
He did what he had to.
He's not a better person than most, he's the same as most. He accepts his position, a slave to capital. Family and friends take a back seat to a wage.
I'm not saying it was a bad decision or he shouldn't have done it. It does however prove that the squeeze on the working man has worked as so many of us are willing to leave friends and family behind for temporary economic stability.
I'm guilty of it too. I'm looking for a job all over my country (and the world), I will have to leave my friends and family too if a job comes up. Not because i'm a better person, because i'm desperate. I don't have kids, i'm not on the council waiting list, i've never claimed benefits before. I'm not eligible for financial support as a result of the aforementioned.
My bank balance is near 0, I could sell what little stuff I have left but all that would do is hinder my efforts. Sell my car, tools and other equipment, to be even more unemployable. That is what I will be facing soon.
The ability to go to a job interview or a meal a day.
I however have been extremely fortunate so far to have friends and family who are willing to supply a floor, couch or other to sleep on in these hard times. Other people are not so fortunate.
tldr: Moving across country away from where you want to be for a job isn't a noble thing, it's desperation and the only option so many.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, and then each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
So basically Apple has moved factories to china where it can exploit the fact that the population is so poor they have to live at work to have a "decent" job. A job where you can be awakened in the middle of the night and forced to work long shifts with only a biscuit and tea in order to meet the quota.
Brilliant.
Need slave labor? It's cool, bro - China's got you covered like a jimmy hat.
I work to live, I don't live to work.
I've seen friends and family members die too soon. My father passed away while I was in college. He did not get to see his kids marry and start their own families, he did not get to meet his grandchildren.
He worked though. He worked 9-5 and overtime whenever he could get it. He put away a nice nest-egg and paid off the house that my mother lives in. He put off vacations and told my mother "we'll travel when I retire".
Well that day never came. 10 years of battling cancer finally killed him. What do you think his family remembers? His career or his ability to balance work and his life as a father?
It is your right to work to live. It is not your right to expect that all of society should place work above all else.
I've only got one life to live on this planet - I'm not going to spend it making someone else rich. I've seen too many people do that, and I can say it is not worth the opportunity cost of your LIFE.
-ted
The speed and efficiency of human slavery is breathtaking, indeed. I saw not one reason they couldn't be building these things in America, besides corporate greed, and a mindset that views humans as livestock.
Apple made no promise to "Do no evil."
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
perhaps, if they were allowed treatment before it escalated into 'bad-enough-for-the-ER', costs wouldn't be nearly so high. does upfront preventive care reduce costs in the long term? if so, offer that instead.
Businesses hate freedoms...
No. A business is motivated by profit, period. Freedom and hate have nothing to do with it. If supporting workers' rights helped to maximize profits, then you'd find the just the opposite - businesses would go out of their way to support their workers.
I would say Capitalism probably more likely means your workers, customers, and competitors (if possible) get screwed.
But why is this so shocking? They are trying to get the most return for the least expenditure. You do the same. When you, as an individual go shopping, especially for high value goods like cars, you try to find deals or get discounts, etc.
Now do it with kids.
Not that it should deter one from work, but to put that $16.75 in perspective:
That's roughly the same amount as federal assistance if calculated to 12 months and no taxes, ~$15k/year.
While it might get to be a bit OT, here's the link for the benefit of the parent poster:
PSA Airlines - Flight Attendant
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
you're both and idiot and a moron. (Gee, that really helps make a point!)
If you're not dying or at risk of dying, then you get to sit and sit and sit among other sick people that aren't high enough on the "risk" list yet until a slot opens up that they can be helped in. Not only that, people have died in those ER waiting rooms that you describe waiting on care.
Still want to make the argument that without health insurance you get the same care?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Corporate Responsibility is to make profit for its stock holders. Yes, in regulated countries, corporations must also comply with whatever regulations ---> which usually increase corporate costs and decrease corp. profit. So, in a world-economy that DOES offer exponentially lower costs to the corporation in other countries that have fewer, if any, regulations (which means much higher profit for the corporation), the corporate personnel who do not 'make it happen' that the corporation shifts its manufacturing OVER TO the lower costs\more profit location, lose their (usually high-paying) jobs to someone who will 'make it happen'. --- That is simple business according to the business models used in the USA. . . . . Now, in our country where worker's-rights are established and where human rights are demanded, yes, a company that is 'associated' with places that are not in our country (which we have no control over) that DO NOT have workers' rights and that DO NOT honor human rights, etc., etc, to the same degree that we do here in this country, well, yes, here in this country our citizens see that as "bad" (which 'humanly', it is bad). In the current world situation, we cannot 'do' anything 'to' the company or to the country where these issues are generated, so, we can only turn towards the American company we buy the products from. We can demand that they stop being associated with those things that bother us (or, what?, somehow, someone orchestrates a large-enough movement\group of people who will stop buying the products, so that it hurts the American company?), and that is all we can do. The American company can, and may, "shop around" over in that or those countries where the costs are lower and the profits are higher, to find a company\country where the offenses are less offensive to Americans, but as long as its costs are higher and its profits are lower by coming back to the US, they will stay over there. If Americans can really make it hard on the American corporations, well, it makes sense to realize that the corporation may stop being an American Corporation (b.t.w., America is losing its position of being the largest purchaser of consumer products.). HOPEFULLY the situations in those other countries concerning worker's rights and human rights will improve FAST enough for those workers\people. - But in a world driven by profit, the leaders over there have no incentive to 'give up' their profit, and the leaders of American corporations who are profiting by the current situations also have no incentive to change. So what do we do? (just to make it clear, I personally advocate human rights and workers' rights.) cjacobs001
Ultimately, cheap energy is at the foundation of prosperity. While the US is wasting trillions on wars to keep the oil flowing, and inviting terrorism which we must then defend against, China is investing heavily in securing a cheap source of energy. Not only are they building out conventional nuclear as fast as they can, they are also investing heavily in next generation reactors. Before long, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors will provide them with a rapidly scalable energy source that is cheaper than coal, and allow the massive Chinese population a true chance at prosperity.
While it is only a hope for the Chinese, the possibilities are endless. Meanwhile, the US is truly headed right off the cliff, and before long we will probably be looking upon the now pitiable working class in China with envy. Even our vaunted freedoms and liberties are disappearing rapidly, and it looks like we have a 1984-esque security any surveillance state to look forward to. With a prison state producing slave labor, populated by infractions of laws which shouldn't exist, such as growing a plant or sharing a file.
The lives of most Chinese today may be miserable, but they will have a hope for their children. Our leaders have staked our entire future on intellectual monopoly and war, and there is no hope there whatsoever. The US cannot survive on litigation and banking alone; we desperately need to be investing in a manufacturing base and energy supply. In critical infrastructure, such as transportation and networking. In the people themselves through education. Together we could prosper, but individually the greedy sociopaths running our nation have resorted to cannibalizing the shrinking wealth, rather than investing in the future.
Our government has been complicit, but large corporations like Apple are at fault. They have pushed nearly everything of value out of the country in pursuit of obscene profits, and actively lobby at every turn to thwart any meaningful progress.
I've been to the Philippines. I've seen the plywood and corrugated steel shanty towns stretching out as far as the eye can see. I know what most people there live like.
So if it's so easy for the poor and unemployed to move to find work, and lack of will to do so is just a "first world problem", then why is your country such a hell hole? Why don't all those people in the shanty towns just up and move somewhere better?
You're one of the lucky ones. Most people don't get the chance to do what you've done. The fact that you don't realize that is sickening.
I have a union
Well there you go. You actually have someone looking out for your interests. Without unions, most businesses shit on their workers.
The typical American used to live, work, and die in the community... that they and their ancestors were born and died in.
What Americans are these? Because - last I checked - this is a country composed almost entirely of immigrants and their descendants. None of my family has ever died in the town they were born in, and it's often been a different state. Maybe in parts of New England or the tidewater South this happens, but not for most of us.
"....and recount the time Apple redesigned the iPhone's screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, and then each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day."
Try walking into an Americans house at 11:45 at night, just walk into his house.... walk in through the door. Then tell the whole family
to wake the fu%^ up, turn on the coffee maker then get the whole family back to the factory for some last minute 12 hour workload
WITH NO OVERTIME OBVIOUSLY, no benefits of anykind.
try that.....
You will become a human sieve....
covered in holes.
GOD DAMN apple products, and GOD DAMN foxconn.....
Specifically foxconn...
"Those who must compete against slave labour must adopt the practices of slave labour"
In the west it's very possible to travel a lot to find work, in the US I'm sure there are families scattered all over the country. In Europe, there are a lot of people who work not only in various corners of their country, but outside the border as well.
For the poorer countries, it's not about mentality, but facts, you can't travel to find another job in another city if you don't have money to pay for it. Immigration to other richer countries is greatly restricted. Simply put, they live together like that because of a lack of choice.
There's also the matter of keeping contact, in the US you take for granted the fact that you can fly anywhere in a matter of hours, you have freeways reaching everywhere, gas is cheap and everyone old enough to drive has a license. Phones, again are simply so common, you don't even give it a thought, internet is very close to being called a necessity instead of luxury. You don't have these things in a poorer country, and leaving for a job in another place, would usually mean an almost complete cut-off.
It is not discriminating. It is onlyabout money. Not human rights, not environmental sustainability. Nothing but money. However, most of Apples products could not even been designed in the US alone, as they do not develop all the components required. The same applies to all other smartphone and modern gadgets.
once treatment starts the doctors don't have any clue if you can pay or not
Actually, we do. But the fastest way to get a non-paying patient out of the hospital is to treat them, so they get treatment.
Want to raise a family on $24,000 a year?
What if I can't do any work that's worth more than $24,000 a year? What does "want" have to do with it then? People with very low skills, and people who have very little value to offer anyone, can't expect to always get what they want.
If we don't allow low wage jobs, then low skilled people can't get work at all.
And for some other people, an entry level job is an opportunity for them to learn new skills, to increase their value, and eventually get a higher paying job. Prohibiting low wage jobs is a way to stop this before it can even get started.
The Chinese have an edge here because their workers live like a scene out of 1984. Of course they are going to have an advantage over any other country that has something resembling work-life balance. Although it's not like the US is great in that respect anyways. The fact that there's somehwere someplace else that's even worse is just sad.
Hardly something to emulate.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And the moment you did this and reduced profit at all you would be sued by stock holders and fired by the board.
Apple sells products all over the world, why do they have any obligation to americans?
Cedar Point is on a small island in Lake Erie next to a dinky small town. They may need dormitories just so that the labor they probably ship in has some place to stay.
Probably don't need that sort of thing even at Kings Island.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A big part of the problem isn't working conditions. It's loss of supplier infrastructure. The article mentions "The screw factory is down the street". That's typical of major manufacturing centers. Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Trenton ("Trenton makes, the world takes") used to be like that - if you needed some part for your product, there was a local supplier.
The US is no longer set up like that. With good roads and reliable delivery, manufacturing of parts was consolidated. You can order screws from Amazon's "small parts" unit and resistors from Digi-Key, and get them in a day. But that's for prototyping. If you need to talk to the suppliers about a production item, they're all over the country, and often too big to talk to you about a custom item. This matters for consumer electronics, where cost reduction involves using the minimal custom part for the job, not the off-the-shelf part which costs more.
The Internet has had an effect on this - companies don't answer the phone any more. Many don't answer e-mails. You can order stock items on line, and fill out forms.
Ok, I've been against the idea of putting tariffs on foreign jobs because it would drastically increase the price of goods we can buy here at home. Anytime someone argues for tariffs I tell them it would hurt us the most and it's a bad idea. But, now, having heard Apple say that they don't give two shits whether or not we have jobs here at home, I think I may be wrong after all. The ONLY way to solve this kind of attitude is to impose hefty tariffs on foreign goods. That will force consumers to start buying American manufactured goods and bring us back as a world manufacturing power again, bringing with it jobs for the poor and middle class. Jobs they sorely need right now. Apple has officially changed my mind on this. If you agree with me, contact your representatives. This needs to happen. The fact that a company like Apple can boast about their slave labor overseas with impunity is proof that this has gone too far. I'd gladly pay a higher price for an iPad or iPhone if I knew it was creating jobs here at home.
Another imbecilic drone who parrots the "entitled" phrase. Christ, you guys are like the "noob, lol, epic fail, pwned" crowd. Come up with something original for a change, ok?
You and everyone else here who says we should give up our way of live just because it's shittier elsewhere are contributing to the problem. Stop comparing everything with the lowest common denominator. We're not talking about McMansions, 3 SUVs, and a boat here. We're talking basic employment that can afford to put a modest roof over your head and feed your family. This ability is quickly slipping away because all the jobs are going to a country with a far lower standard of living who don't care about their people or polluting their environment. US workers can NOT compete with this on price. Can't be done, unless all rights here are stripped from people and you're forced to work for pennies an hour. Is that what you want this country to become? As time goes by, technology gets better and production increases, we're supposed to INCREASE our standard of living, not reduce it to third-world hellhole status just so some rich pricks whose income already exceeds that of the GDP of small countries can get an even bigger share of the pie.
I could just see you as a manager at one of these Chinese sweatshops, telling a complaining employee that he has it good because at least he's not being taken out and shot, or his family butchered in the night like some African village being invaded by a neighboring warlord.
You have some high standards.. High standards indeed...
Have you read the rhetoric in your own country's press about unions lately? I agree that you're in a good position. Sadly, it's a declining good position - union membership and unionized jobs are both declining - and the corporate interests have successfully convinced *even the American working class* that unions are evil and damaging to them. It's a hell of a rhetorical trick. Be glad you have your union job, but do note the likelihood of many others having such jobs in future...
Wah wah wah.
Quick, name one non-US based tech company started in the past 10 years with at least 500 employees.
Can you think of one? I can't.
Now let's try US tech companies. Since 2001 right off the top of my head there are Facebook and Twitter. I think Youtube was also in that timeframe, but they're kind of gray area since Google bought them before they got really massive.
Sinoval Wind systems group (China ) founded 2005, one of the top 5 wind turbine producers in the world. >1000 employees.
Quick name one US based technology company started in the past 10 years, with at least 500 employees, that actually manufacturers something.
Twitter and Facebook aren't going to save the US economy.
Wow you sound like an old European! I remember that in the past America used to be the land where people would just pick up and move from one place to another. Granted it was in the US, but now that the Americans might have to get out of their comfort zone and all hell breaks out. Sorry, but American's have become too laid back, too much resting on their laurels!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Saw a parallel issue a while back... the Atlantic had a feature showing some images of the US in the 70's. Lots of pollution porn, but the part that gets left out is... that's what working steel towns look like. (Check out the third image.) As dirty as they were, they were cleaner than the places where steel is being made in China today. I'd rather live in a cleaner country... but then again I'm not an average guy who's working for peanuts because all the manufacturing jobs are gone.
It would be easier to move if U.S. government policies did not encourage home ownership among people who can't afford it without assistance. Before gov't intervention in the mortgage market, 60% of Americans rented. Now 60% own. That sounds great and humanitarian, until you come up against one of the unintended consequences of this gov't intervention: homeowners who are underwater in their mortgages and who cannot afford to move to follow the jobs.
100? I'll guess it more like 5 once the robots are built to automate the line. We'll need an engineer to service the robots, a logistics person to schedule incoming and outgoing, two people to run the fork lifts at either end, and an MBA to twiddle his dick and wonder how to move it all to China.
Most of them.
Sure people would immigrate, but they would settle and stay in one place for awhile. They might "move west" for greater opportunity at some point but even that would lead to people putting down new roots.
This idea that you are some sort of corporate nomad that moves every 3 years at the behest of your employer is a very new thing.
Society simply didn't have the means to be that nomadic. Moving was no trivial matter. You might not even survive the process.
Despite trying to resist the whole corporate nomad thing, I have still managed to live and work in more places than the previous 10 generations of my American ancestors combined.
The tech simply did not support those kinds of shenanigans.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You know that they divided the GDP by work force to get to their figures. The US GDP has a large amount which is based on money trading similar to the UK. To get better figures you would have to compare production output (-imported products used in that output) divided by work force. The problem of the US is that most of the computer technologies for modern gadgets are not developed and produced in the US at all (same applies to Europe).
thats why I do not buy any Apple products period
Sounds just like what Xerox started last year.
Despite making a profit and slightly increasing market share, Ursula (who is trying to encourage young Americans to become scientists and engineers) decided to transfer 600 of her 3600 permanent engineering staff to HCL (of India). Then she tried to cut the wages of the manufacturing staff in Wilsonville.
Meanwhile, HCL is shipping all the Xerox engineering off to India (minus the knowledge of how to do it) and the transferred staff are being given bitty contract work (a few weeks here and there) hundreds of miles away from home for other customers for which they are completely inexperienced and unqualified.
Things are bad in Rochester NY because the economy is so depressed there, but in Wilsonville, where the market is better, staff (and know-how) are leaving in droves. Some teams have lost >80% of their experience.
Xerox doesn't make A3 mono office products any more. It's all done by HCL now.
Apple insinuated no such thing, if you'd bother reading the article. The problem is that in the U.S., there are no longer the density of manufacturing capacity. It isn't a bunch of ants gluing glass panels all day, it's the screw manufacturer down the street, it's the engineering firm on the next block, etc. It is also the government subsidizing a company to expand a wing on their plant in the hopes of landing the Apple contract. The contract manufacturers have figured out how to get economies of scale they couldn't hope to get in the U.S. or Europe...with Chinese government assistance.
China can do this because they so many people with different skill levels and are willing to use state funds to grease the skids. The article stated it would increase Apple's costs by 25% to pay American wages (somewhat blithely, I might add, I doubt it is that slick).
The greatest insult of all is that in this great country so many people cannot afford the most basic of medical care.
This is false. People with jobs generally have health insurance. The poor have Medicaid health insurance. And even if you're too irresponsible to buy health insurance or sign up for Medicaid, you still get health care.
So your "greatest insult of all" is essentially false. You should stop listening to propaganda. Or at least learn to question it.
Not almost entirely. Entirely. Even the Indians came here at some point in the past.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
To paraphrase the article:
'Slavery, it gets shit done'
Next question?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Minnesota, one of the smaller US states.
We're not small! It's just really cold up here and we just got out of the pool.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
Maybe. However, I used to work in the machine tool industry back when GM and Ford ruled U.S. auto production. There were a lot of problems. But one stands out in my mind related to me by a coworker. It took them half a day to move one of our controllers in a small cabinet from outside to deep inside the plant. Do you know why? Every time they crossed a particular shop's boundary, the union shop steward for the new shop had to be consulted. After the discussion, it was allowed to move further. And when they got it there, they needed the screwdriver union guy to unbox it, it being in union rules that any unboxing had to be done by a trained union person.
Given management screwups, gov. tax policy etc., it is no secret why manufacturers moved out of America.
Really, that's not exactly a ringing fucking endorsement of the American way of life.
You are right it is not. Why are we always trying to blame Corps or Gov in America when it is We the People who can easily control change, yet choose to sit here and accept it.
Unless we change our way of life and thinking as Americans, and/or apply our real desires on Gov and Corp, we get what we get.
That's also how I remember it.
It started with Reagan and went downhill afterwards. Whenever I hear somebody wanting to glorify those times I don't rightly know into which direction to puke first.
We got rid of the employee/employer relationship and replaced that with HR. Just the other day I was at a friends home who had pinned a drawing of his daughter to the fridge. She had scribbled stuff in kindergarden over some kind of Powerpoint HR mission statement from some multi-national conglomerate.
Boy, at a glance I totally won each and every bullshit bingo ever played. They even had the audacity to use the words "mission statement".
If hard work doesn't pay off and you are just a number on some Excel sheet(measured in FTE possibly just a fragment of a number) and you can't provide for you and yours and need another income just to pay the dog food you eat each day and serve to your children...isn't it heartwarming to listen to Reagan worshippers preaching of "family values" and jobs?
I need to brush the sick from the back of my teeth.
20 minutes into the future
Another straw-man argument. The jobs were paying $50k a year. Does making workers take a 50% pay cut make them suddenly lose half their skills? No - it's the end result of 30 years of lies about trickle-down and Reaganomics, where the middle class is an inconvenience that must be killed off.
A good lesson to not let a single business become the dominant player in a town's economy. Sure it might cost you some in wages initially, but the knowledge of a steady and decent wage compared with the risk of the entire town going unemployed at the whim of the owner....seems a wee bit better to me.
I grew up in Rochester, NY. Kodak just filed bankruptcy, Xerox long ago moved it's corp HQ to CT, yet it's still relatively thriving. No one company, lots of smaller businesses that work locally as well as outside.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
"I'm too good for that job" against the work (ie., working as a burger flipper or a stripper).
I'm pretty sure if I tried working as a stripper people would abandon the place.
American companies don't usually have dormitories and everyone is up to their eyes in mortgage because for the past few decades having a big mortgage was the thing to do.
The question then arises: would the US would accept a factory with working conditions similar to China, with dormitories and where people were expected to work (say) long shifts for a period before going back home to their expensively mortgaged house whereever it is located?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
In anybody's USA, actually. That sort of obligation was supposed to be what the public got in return for limiting corporate liability in the first place!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Back when we made shit here...
My grandfather...
...like it's something new, but the fact is, the war's been raging since fucking 1980...
This country was at it's strongest economically when...
Clearly, living in the past is the answer.
Many people with jobs do not have health insurance, even if their employer offers it. Reasons for this include the proportionately high cost of the employee contribution (it's the same regardless of your hourly rate) and the fact that many minimum-wage jobs only offer benefits for employees who work more than 30 or 35 hours a week, but don't offer that many hours per worker.
My thoughts exactly. Sombody paid for their shoddy process with a lot of other people's blood. Propably got a fucking bonus for being so clever, too.
I'd say thank god I don't buy anything Apple but I suspect this is comnmon place. Could we please get some background information and names? Let's send them to the Foxconn factories so the workers there can give their proper thanks for the admiration(but not money) their extra dedication got them.
20 minutes into the future
The jobs were paying $50k a year.
So what? The guys in Muncie were willing to do them for $24,000.
Does making workers take a 50% pay cut make them suddenly lose half their skills?
Does paying them double the rate as the guys in Muncie for exactly the same work magically give them twice the skill?
Ah, but when you graph per capita GPD against median income, it paints a more disturbing graph.
In short, GDP per capita, even adjusted for inflation has been climbing steadily, but median has leveled off since the 1970s-1980s. Where has the money gone?
once treatment starts the doctors don't have any clue if you can pay or not
Actually, we do. But the fastest way to get a non-paying patient out of the hospital is to treat them, so they get treatment.
I was also under the impression that in this case the care given was to stabilize the patient to the point they could be released only, no other steps would be taken.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I don't think the kind of labour described here involves a lot of thought process. It's more like pasting iPart one to iPart two and enjoy the iFumes that need inhaling.
Also you may find that US engineers are quite fluent in imperial, metric and whatever other random system you come up. There are quite a few things to laugh about(imperial system possibly being one) but this actually is the least of anyones worries. At least the US drives on the right side of the road(got it, huh? Nudge, nudge, say no more).
20 minutes into the future
I think that the movie "Up In The Air" was making that exact point...
You are building/repairing historical reenactment stuff that uses different measurements from modern (19th century) English or modern American units? I am surprised it does not have the tolerance to use standard tools! Some "American Customary Measurements" do have the same names as "Imperial Measurements" as used in England (pints of beer and milestones on highways), but are not the same. For example volumes (pints, gallons) are noticeably different between England and America. An English pint is bigger of course, since it will hold beer not some sort of brewed rice drink. Also distance (inches, miles) are very slightly different since the US statute mile and the International mile were defined (in terms of metric of course) at different times. I think they are out by an eighth of an inch over a mile, which you would need decent GPS and long distances to notice.
in china, doesn't the lack of automation make the same manufacturing outfit more nimble? i'd imagine they can reconfigure the line for new models in hours instead of weeks because giving different instructions to humans seems much easier than reconfiguring enormous purpose-built machines while your smaller, higher-paid labour force sits on their hands and collects their union wage.
do not read this line twice.
England(can't speak for the UK because I've never been everywhere) uses a weird mixture of both.
Fatties still weigh their arses in stone because that number is lower than when you use kilograms. And a pint is a pint. In daily use the metric system is simply not there. It's all imperial AND not driving on the right side of the road. Doubly screwed, I say.
20 minutes into the future
FU US
I'm not advocating moving across an ocean to get a job.
But if you're unwilling to move for a job because it would uproot your spouse and children from their school and social circles, well... ...you're just not flexible enough to be employed.
People move and make new friends all the time. I did it when I was a kid, I've done it a couple times as an adult. That's what people have to do, and if you're unwilling to do it, then you can starve I guess.
paintball
recount the time Apple redesigned the iPhone's screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, and then each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames.
So, with the glee of a 8 yr old girl who just found a pony under the Christmas tree, this Apple exec gushes about how easy and flexible it was to house workers in sardine cans, rouse them from a probably short nap anyway, command them to the assembly line and order them to stand there doing repetitive, mind numbing tasks for 12 hours. Pay of the day? 31 cents an hour. But yea, competition and capitalism is good you say. If they don't want to do it, then hundreds of other Chinese, Taiwanese, other South Asian immigrants would gladly take their spot, right? Well I dunno about you, but I consider the US extremely luck in that for the most part, you don't have to be forced to sleep in barracks, be called to work at anytime your employer chooses, and be subjected to low-paying highly boring jobs. Then again, it's turning this way for some people. I'd rather save my dignity and live in relative poverty (I've already done so for a big chunk of my life, and it wasn't too intolerable) than succumb to the machinery of this misguided capitalist enterprise.
If you re-read my short comment, you may notice that it allows for everyone you mentioned in your comment.
Also, people who refuse to buy health insurance but aren't poor enough to qualify for government-paid health care can buy basic medical treatment just fine. A doctor visit costs $70-$80 or less. They aren't going to buy a heart transplant, but that's not "basic" medical care either.
And people with emergencies get treated in emergency rooms, regardless of whether they can pay.
The original phrase is "so many people cannot afford the most basic medical care". This is plainly false.
Or, rather Apple is not trying to build the system which will require less streneous work condition. All this audit supply garbage is just a legal protection - face it, it is just another (and being successful - most errogant) ruthless corporation.
The greatest insult of all is that in this great country so many people cannot afford the most basic of medical care. Jesus Christ, my country of origin is the second poorest in the western hemisphere, and the average city dweller has basic medical access more readily available and affordable than his/her American counterpart. How can we explain that????
I call Shenanigans.
I lived in the 2nd poorest nation in the western hemisphere for a couple years doing peace corp work back in the mid-90s, and the average city dweller was still living in half-shanty/half-cinderblock with non-potable water and power tapped off the power grid with strands of barbed wire. They were lucky to bring home more than $10/month (no rent to pay, since everyone "homesteads", and you can eat a "decent" meal out for about 25. Everyone was sick, all of the time, but grew up that way and didn't even know it could be better. Average life expectancy was still under 40.
Yes, you could go to the local clinic with a bag of stool and they would analyze it for $2. You could then even buy some anti-parasitic horse pills (incredibly bitter tasting) to clear out the infection of the week for another $2 or so. But when you're only making $10 a month, you can't afford to that sort of medical attention for something so commonplace as a parasitic infection. You needed to save that money for the big expenses, like when you accidentally whacked your leg with a machete and needed to get to the hospital and get it sown back together again.
The disconnect between our standard of living in the 1st world is so far removed from the bottom, its not even comparable. I had plenty of money while I was there, but we still had to have american doctors flown in anytime someone got really sick. If it was actually something serious, we'd have to fly back to the states to get treatment.
Of course, the average city dweller in that country couldn't get to the US, even illegally. If you were very "rich" you might be able to afford a coyote to smuggle you into LA or Houston, but it would cost you everything you owned, and then you would be here illegally and on the run -- some of my friends went that route, unfortunately. If you were very, very, very rich (i.e. top .1%) you could afford to bribe to local officials enough to get a visa, you could afford the plane tickets, and you afford to immigrate to the US.
Typically, I saw two patterns:
1) Immigrant realizes how expensive the US is, and how hard they'll have to work, and how low they'll be on the totem pole compared to back home. They work for a year or so, amass a "huge" fortune, and then immigrate back where they retire.
2) Immigrant works his butt off and sends home every dime he can spare to eventually bring over his family legally, one at a time.
The only ones I heard of who never came back where the ones who fled as refugees during the wars, and had to cut all ties or die. They typically got some sort of US Government sponsorship when they arrived and so did pretty good, but everyone they know back home is probably dead anyway (I went back a mere 3 years after the fact, and several of my local friends had died during my absence just of "natural" causes/accidents.)
The average joe there would KILL to flip burgers here in the US. And they would live better off that money than they do at home, and with money left over to send home. In one city I lived in, the job everyone was fighting over was to make cigars by hand in the local sweatshop. It payed nearly a $1/day to make cigars from the raw tobacco with your bare hands and tongue. There was a WAITING LIST for people to work there.
Burger King isn't just a step up from that -- its a whole different ladder on a different floor of the building.
Have you tried to open your own business and treat your employees the way your grandfather's boss did? Just asking. Kudos to you if you have.
It's clearly working well for Germany, Canada, and the other countries with all those "socialist" protectionist policies on the books as concerns importing foreign made goods, not to mention rational tax rates. Seems while we were busy fucking over our working class to the benefit of a very, very select few (or allowing them to be fucked by our representatives), they were actually growing their economy in such a way as to benefit all their citizens...
I suppose now I should prepare myself to hear how that's all bullshit, those countries are really failing, or that the only reason they're not is because they don't have "job killing regulations", like clean air and water standards. You know, kinda like how everyone talks about what a failure socialized medicine is despite how pretty much everyone that actually has it says they wouldn't give it up for anything?
I do own consumer electronics, and they are virtually all made in Asia under circumstances very similar to those of the iPhone.
It seems that virtually no one posting in the thread has RTFA. The whole point of the article is that the reason all this manufacturing happens in Asia and not in the US has very little to do with wages, and everything to do with supply chain.
If you're going to make any piece of electronics, you're going to need chips. These chips have uses in products in several manufacturers, so you have one manufacturer of Chip A, that companies B, C,D and E need for their products. Where is that manufacturer? In Asia.
So no matter what piece of consumer electronics you want to make, all the parts you need for it are manufactured in Asia. Since all your parts are there, and it takes 35 days to ship them to here, if you want to manufacture an item of consumer electronics, you have three choices:
- Manufacture in Asia and ship finished products here
- Manufacture here, but get your parts from Asia, adding 35 days to your production cycle (making you uncompetitive from a product design and cost standpoint)
- Build manufacturing for all your parts here, which is uncompetitive because you lose all the economy of scale of part manufacturers in asia that make parts for hundreds to thousands of different products for different companies.
Unfortunately, we have allowed the "Critical mass" of electronic manufacturing to develop in Asia, and now that it's there, it's there.
You can actually see something similar in the US - nobody makes cars in, say, Nevada, despite there being an abundant, inexpensive labor force. Why? Because all the companies that make the parts that go into cars are in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio. So you can get away with putting a factory in Tennessee or Alabama and still be close to your source for parts, but not Nevada.
One other point half-mentioned in the article: Labor costs alone would account for only $65 if iPhone production was moved here from Asia. What is not mentioned in the article is probably about half of that $65 is not the amount of money paid to the workers, but is instead the amount of money paid in federal wage taxes - FICA. That's NOT income tax either.
If we want to make production in the US more attractive, we need to fix our tax system so we don't penalize wage income. Stop providing preferential income tax rates for "capital gains" and stop charging penalty tax rates for work. All income should be taxed the same.
paintball
The only reason St. Steve moved production overseas is because slavery was abolished in the US. Not that others much better - but this company suppose to be a symbol of innovation and progress. The example with 8000 people being rushed to the assembly line to work 12 hours is just disgusting.
I guess if Apple executives find it unreasonable to work on unemployment porblem in a country which made Apple possible - they should move to place they do care about (iPhone with the golden star instead of a rotten apple on the back - I would like to see this one).
Ah, the free market at work. Remember, don't try to stop him, or he'll move the jobs to China.
That's the reality. You guys keep arguing and fighting against reality. Do you think you're going to win?
Yeah, it has nothing to do with the inhumane conditions of Foxconn.
My parents owned a small business, a quilt shop in fact, and after five years of it, all they have to show is $100k in debt. It was quite stressful for them when it was open, there's a hell of a lot of work to do as the owner of a small business and they worked all the time. I never called them to talk, because I could never keep track of when they were available, I'd just let them call me. After all that, after all is said and done, they not only didn't make a profit, they still owe $100k they used to get it started up.
Now they'll be fine, this isn't some sob story, but I just wish to emphasize the parent's point: The risk to their workers was only unemployment. If they went under, the workers would need to go and find new jobs, of course. The risk to them was not only unemployment, but losing money, which they in fact did.
The world isn't a situation where there are two magic classes of "workers" and "owners" and "owners" get all the money all the time and forever have a good life. Owners put their financial success on the line, and there are plenty of times when it doesn't work out.
amen, ive been saying this for so long. its not possible to compete with a country who have no problems with working for a couple dollars a week....
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While the article focussed on Apple because they are the flavor of the year, the same could be said for just about everything that can be bought in the US. Almost everything for sale is made overseas or in Mexico. As long as people are obsessed with getting the cheapest shiny widget above all else these sort of conditions will prevail.
You are mistaken. It is consumers that drive off-shoring through their complete and utter disregard for where things are made. Cutting costs is only beneficial to a corporation if sales are not lost. If consumers show a preference in their purchasing decisions for domestic production then corporations will not off-shore. Corporations don't care where things are made, they care about profits. Profits are based on sales and consumers make the decision as to whose products sell and whose do not.
Well - I'll agree on the suicide nets. The suicide rates at FoxConn were lower per 1000 than most countries (including the US IIRC) -- that was more about bad PR than anything else.
However: stating that it's 'better" at the factories isn't really of any significance. The frying pan is "better" than the fire, but you're still getting cooked either way.
The workers work voluntarily and can choose their employer, or even choose not to work. This is not slavery.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
If you buy pretty much anything, actually, it's not just Apple stuff. Almost all of the stuff on sale in your local Buy-n-Large is from China, or maybe Mexico.
Hospitals are collapsing due to being *REQUIRED* to treat patents regardless of ability to pay. And once treatment starts the doctors don't have any clue if you can pay or not, so you get the same exact treatment as a 'payer' gets.
I forgot to mention this part, and thanks to the options button, lost a well written one. So here's the short version: Do you support:
Ron Paul does. Do You? (Got to give him credit for stating his beliefs and following through on them) Ron Paul is also seriously misguided - he states charities will take care of those that cannot afford to pay. Charities are already handling the overflow from the current failing system and can't handle all of it. Hence the imminent implosion of the current system. So, unless you advocate all of the above, then you're only left with one rational solution: you support national health care/insurance, whether you like the idea or not. The current system could be made a lot better to the point that charities might be able to handle the difference by the following:
That evens the pricing playing field, removes significant complications to billing, removes the impediments to real competition with the health insurance providers, and last, but not least, removes the incestuous feedback loop between health insurance providers and some large health care providers that is squeezing out the majority of private and small practices. Even all these changes may not prevent the current system from collapsing in on itself. It does remove the health insurance industry from dictating what type of care you will receive and from whom you'll get it. (Gee - that sounds a lot like one of the main arguments against national health care) Speaking of National Healthcare, while I support it as a concept, I don't believe it should be more than basic health care. I.E., once a year wellness visits, vaccinations, and care for things like broken bones and other accidents, with longer term care moved over to that large facility the gov already owns, VA hospitals. Chronic illnesses, better care, etc, for non-military should be handled by private insurance, so by insuring yourself, you can check into non VA or charitable hospitals, and have care by Dr's you choose. That's just my view of where national healthcare should have gone, and it would probably not have garnered so much negativity. (And what's the deal with slashcode - lists are no longer functioning, at least in preview mode.)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You do know that a BB is also a smartphone, don't you? And it can receive email, even after hours?
Look at 3d printers. The cottage industry is coming back.
Deleted
"Me either. I can't afford it, ironically because nobody wants to manufacture anything here."
Good ironic point. We need a "basic income" and other ideas to deal with structural unemployment from automation:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
See also for how far the USA and the legacy of Steve Jobs has fallen, from 1990 and the NeXT days: ... Welcome to the Next world. Here a robot that looks like a futuristic sewing machine places tiny capacitors and integrated circuits, rapid-fire, on a printed computer circuitboard. A laser zeros in on each electrical connection. Two robot arms move in tandem, one selecting parts from a bin and the other deftly inserting them into the board. After 20 minutes the board reaches the end of the assembly line, where -- finally -- a real person steps in to check it. Robots outnumber people 13 to five on this line, which turns out the brains for aging whiz kid Steve Jobs's new workstation. Not to save money: Labor accounts for only 3% to 5% of the cost of a typical computer-manufacturing operation. Instead, the automation is meant to ensure the highest possible quality. When Jobs left Apple Computer and started Next in 1985, he was determined to create a manufacturing process as advanced as the product it makes. He assigned some of his best engineers and software designers to the problem. Until recently the 40-person manufacturing staff had more Ph.D.s than the group designing the Next machine. Says Randy Heffner, vice president for manufacturing: ''Most startups don't invest in advanced automation, but that's the key to long-term success.'' ..."
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990/02/26/73121/index.htm
"THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER FACTORY Steve Jobs has built a Next workstation plant with just about everything: lasers, robots, speed, and remarkably few defects.
But even China is automating more now for the same reasons...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
This is the iPhone they are talking about.
The one where they changed the screen at the last minute?
The one that they did not test in the real world and was found that it did not work in the real world unless you held it that way?
Apple only sell shoddy stuff for the benefit of their shareholders and that is an inconveinent truth.
.... says the anonymous coward lol
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Despite the fact that there are people who would happily take a high-tech manufacturing job, working weird hours and living in dorms when pulling multiple shifts, Apple would find itself stumbling across Union regulations if it tried to find service like that in the US. Union rules and other labor laws are keeping the US from competing globally. It's the reason for the recession and why there are so many out of work. The US has legislated itself out of providing the services modern employers require.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Social responsibility is a personal issue, not a corporate one. A corporation's job is to make a profit, the government's job is to protect against force and fraud, but it is each individual's job to be a good person.
If we want to see various causes enacted, we need to cut the corporations and governments out of it. First off, so people can choose the causes they care most about, and secondly so that they have as much disposable income to donate to various charities. Today, every taxpayer can say they are "charitable" because a large chunk of the money they earned gets forcibly redistributed to others, they think by buying a certain product they help X. But if we would focus on giving consumers more income, there would be a much, much, larger base of donations because they would have more money to spend.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Sacrificing 8,000 population would give me a whole lot of hammers...
Another imbecilic drone who parrots the "entitled" phrase.
It is a Fox/GOP buzzword to demonize entitlement programs. Republicans want to eliminate things that people are entitled to by law, like Social Security, Medicare, Pensions, and public education, hence the campaign since the Reagan years to attack the middle-class.
If you see a poster GOP buzzords like "entitled", "Democrat Party" (it's the Democratic Party), "union fatcat", or "lazy teacher" you can reset assured that they are either a paid shill working for a right-wing PR firm or a fucking moron.
Actually, Capitalism means to get anything for the least amount possible.
That is not correct either. Capitalism is about delivering a product that best meets the consumer's requirements and preferences. If consumers have non-monetary preferences that factor into their buying decisions then those preferences will be reflected in products. For example consumers have demonstrated a preference for environmentally friendly products and the market responded. Similarly if consumers demonstrate a preference for domestic production the market will respond.
There is nothing inevitable about off-shoring in capitalism, nor is there a requirement for the lowest cost of production. These are artifacts of consumer preference, namely the preference for the absolute lowest priced goods regardless of all other considerations. Consumers drive off-shoring, not corporations. Corporations desire profits, in other words corporations desires sales. So corporations will follow the preferences of consumers.
When you to shopping, and you have two sellers selling the exact same thing (let's say, cheese), with the exact same quality (insert everything you can think in this: brand, weight, environmental conscience, distance from your house, amount of sunlight, nice vista etc.), but priced differently, which one do you chose? The one where it's cheaper, or the one where it's more expensive? In the exact same way you don't usually ask, or care about, the expensive cheese vendor reasons in charging more ...
That's the key. To reverse off-shoring consumers need to actually care. I'm not suggesting some ultra patriotic buy-domestic-only dogma. Just to give domestic production some weight. If a domestic good is "close enough" to the imported good then give the domestic good the preference.
Do you recall that Foxconn had to put bars on the upper-floor windows of their facilities, to keep their employees from willfully jumping to their deaths through them? Even the Chinese don't want to work for 31 cents an hour, let alone for the number of hours they're required to work. For how their time goes, they can be said to be alive, but not really living.
As for Apple, on the scale that they're working on, they'd probably actual do better to have their products manufactured here. Smaller businesses can have their products manufactured in China and it will have little impact on the economy, but when we're talking about the amount of money that Apple or say, GM, for the sake of example, pays for labor, the money flows out from their factory workers, out into the economy, and eventually back to Apple in the form of iPhone sales. They'd actually be able to charge more for their product, and people here would still be able to pay it, due to the increased flow rate of the country's money.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
Another GOP/Fox news shill?
How much do you get paid to post your anti-union/anti-american CRAP?
You mean choice to starve?
fuck you, sociopath
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Don't worry, it was corrected to +4 later. Good catch, though.
Something you didnt mention - I recon your grandfather would have gone above and beyond if his boss needed help to keep the company going.
Loyalty something companies think should be one sided these day. Well if they have no loyalty to me then Im a mercenary and I ONLY work for pay.
let's repeal a small number of laws that act as a barrier to business in the US
Sure, why not. Let's give it a whirl one more time.
If you keep flogging a dead horse it's gotta get up and start galloping eventually, right?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
While the article focussed on Apple, the same problems exist for just about any product that is on the shelf at your local Buy-n-Large. This is not an Apple-centric problem, but a free trade centered problem, I think. Why would a multinational corporation favor one country over another? Remember, if corporations are people, they are sociopaths, potentially immortal sociopaths.
...in theory. In actual practice, prices are random.
If you have lower quality good (and phones qualify, they only have to survive a couple years maybe) and you can put up with failures in the products and basically do the QC elsewhere then they can do well.
However this idea that China can just magically make high quality good for so much less seems to be so much bunk in my experience. As an example:
A popular type of reflex sight for long guns is the EOTech Holographic Weapons System. It's made by L3 in Michigan and it carries an "American" price tag. Their cheapest sight is about $400, and they go up from there. They are top notch pieces of equipment though rugged enough that they in fact ARE used in combat, exceedingly good optics (never have I seen such an amazing anti-glare system) and so on. Plenty of shooters both recreational and professional buy them. EOTech is the only company that officially makes sights quite like this. Other red dot sights perform a similar function, but are different in the details (only EOTech seems to like to use holographic projection of the reticule).
Well, turns out you can get something like them for cheaper, thanks to China. There are cheap EOTech knockoffs you can find, Cheotechs we can call them, for sale on line. You can get them for like $100. So, proof of China's amazing ability right? They can produce the sights for 25% of the cost and all of the quality!
Not hardly. They are 25% of the cost and 25%, or less, of the quality. The optics are crap, cheap plastic lenses that reflect a lot of light as opposed to the basically completely reflectionless EOTech lenses. The build quality is crap, the sights cannot handle recoil well and will break under heavy recoil, and lose their zero position under moderate recoil. The reticule isn't a holographic projection, so it doesn't keep it's apparent size regardless of distance, and isn't completely parallax and distortion free. Also while they have a "night vision" button like some of the more expensive EOTechs it does not set the sight to a night vision compatible mode, it just turns the reticule green which does fuck-all.
So sure enough, they found a way to build the things much cheaper (including not paying for the R&D of course) but it is also much cheaper quality. There are no influx of high quality "Could fool you it is the real thing," sights that cost a ton less. No, they cost less because they are of lesser quality.
So your preference is that there be no factory, thus no choice but to starve?
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Rev. Martin Luther King stood up for workers' rights (and much else), and he was killed.
Bobbie Kennedy stood up for workers' rights, and he was killed.
Sen. Paul Wellstone stood up for workers' rights (sponsored much improved labor law), and he was killed.
I think we get the message........
Further, the U.S. lacks the numbers of workers with the engineering skill that these factories tend to employ: somewhat higher than high school but not a full four-year B.S. degree. We therefore can't easily mobilize and structure a sufficient (in both numbers and skillsets) labor force on short notice. The article states that China could amass the required talent for a job in 15 days that would take 9 *months* in the U.S.
Then explain Toyota and Honda: Toyota has 6 factories in the US and Honda has 3. How are they able to build millions of some of the top-selling vehicles in the US and still remain profitable all while using American labor?
And how many years of school does it take to learn "glue solder board to base"? Machines create the circuit boards, humans just put it together, guessing that requires at least an Associates, right?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Using Foxconn as a manufacturer (did I spell that right, english is not my first language), they are enabling that company to practice slavery, have you seen how much (or more accurately how little) they earn and how the people are treated?
They get 12 years in prison for wanting to start a union for fracks sake.
No, Apple is a company that only cares about money, I won't buy from a company that uses Foxconn.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Companies want personhood, that includes social responsibility.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
he greatest insult of all is that in this great country so many people cannot afford the most basic of medical care. Jesus Christ, my country of origin is the second poorest in the western hemisphere, and the average city dweller has basic medical access more readily available and affordable than his/her American counterpart. How can we explain that????
I explain it as you lived in a socialist nation.
Fail. Fail of the worst kind. Ever been/lived in Japan? I have. You can get health care more readily, cheaper (and better) than what we get in the US. My second to the last trip I got a severe case of food poisoning - the doctor pretty much said that my stomach linen and blood were not just infected, but inflamed (how the fuck do you get inflamed blood!!!???.) From the time I got to the hospital to the time I got IV antibiotics pumped on me up to the wazoo in intensive care: 2 hours. Cost: $200 (US dollars) including follow-up prescription medicine and additional anti-biotics for 4 more days.
And this is a capitalist country that almost, almost knock the shit out of the US 2-3 decades ago. How much do you think the same hassle would have cost me here in the US? How much do you think it would have cost me in South Korea or Germany (another pair of capitalist countries)?
So there you go, a nice counter-example pin to blow your argumentative bubble (unless you find a way to explain me how socialism has anything to do with better, more affordable health care in these other 1st world capitalist countries.)
Myself i will give up health care in exchange for freedom.
I respect your freedom to have that sentiment, but it is still full of shit. Anyone can be an armchair Che-Guevara or Paul Revere (depending on one's ideologictardic predilections.) When shit happens, then talk to me, specially if you have children. Are you gonna trade health care for your family in exchange for freedom as well?
Are you that gullible to think this is the only capitalist country in the world, and that if something happens somewhere else it is explainable by socialism alone?
Also, you are incorrect since anyone can get care in this nation if they need to. Just drive down to the hospital and they WILL treat you, regardless of your ability to pay.
Oh yes, absolutely, and then you get an un-explainable expensive bill that is completely out of proportion, and then you either pay (because you can), or you don't (because you can't)... and in the later case you get either hounded by a collections agency until the hospital writes you off as a loss (and you get a nice red x your credit history). on your or you fill for bankruptcy.
60% of US bankruptcies are due to medical bills. How the fuck do you explain that? This was never like this and this country has always been a capitalist country. This situation is pretty fucking unique among developed capitalist countries.
Also I find your post disingenuous. It is a fact that a large number of Americans do not have health coverage. Yes you can get emergency medical coverage regardless of whether you can pay for it or not (with the caveats mentioned above.) But that's not health coverage. A far greater number do not have dental coverage (do you have an idea how that affects people and the economy, specially since we know that dental health is linked to cardiac conditions)? If you really think this is acceptable, I'd suggest you go travel a little to other developed capitalist countries, or better yet, learn something about recent US history. What we are living now is an immoral anomaly. Armchair patriotic antics about freedom and shit like that aren't acceptable explanations for the unjustifiable lack of health care in this country.
This is a first world country, the most powerful country in the planet, capable of moving far more shitloads and shitloads of money than any country in the world. You would expect then t
Unskilled labor is becoming more and more unneeded because technology. Chasing after low skilled jobs is not a way for America to have a prosperous future. The key to the betterment of America is better focus on education, skill development and retraining. The day where you can sit on your butt and take some random well paying job without any education are coming to an end. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans are lazy.
You can do the same thing with slave labor, but essentially their workers are almost slaves. The only difference is that the owner of slaves has to take care of his investment (the health, room and board of his slaves). What we have here is actually worse than slave labor because when the worker can't (or won't) do the work, they just discard him like a child discards a broken toy. You see, the corporations don't have to worry about their workers, they just fire him and replace him with someone else. They cry that their workers no longer have any loyalty to the company like they used to 50 years ago. They of course don't have loyalty to their workers. A DECENT company would not make such demands on its workers!
I would like to know how this point of view became so prevalent. The libertarian rhetoric is fascinatingly blind to how people actually behave. Web development work is a hot field even today and skilled people make bank, just like I do as an IT manager. There are a lot of people out there working very hard and not making progress due to external factors. If you only knew Frontpage then yeah, you saw your contracts coming up empty, but if you progressed and kept up with modern developments you continued to do very well.
Sub-prime mortgages were stupid for regular folks, for investors it was great though as it drove up the housing costs forcing more people into sub-prime deals because it's the only way to get into a property. It's easy to say such people should rent their home and a great many people do. The problem is that not all houses are up for rent so people have to buy in order to find an affordable place.
Predatory financial industry practices have forced up the cost of almost every product we consume, notice how banks got into oil futures and surprise, now the price of gas is triple what it used to be. There is plenty of blame to go around, some people were plain dumb, regulations of the past were put in place to save people from themselves, then the laws were repealed and we found ourselves in a post-2000 economy.
When you have millionaires and billionaires throwing their money around, expect competing with their spending power to be very difficult. Especially when they are well organized.
"I can tell you that you simply cannot live at a hamburger flipping salary. How? You cannot even pay rent with that."
Sure one could. Last year, a university (University of Missisippi?, cannot find link) released a study comparing a single parent that held minimum wage jobs vs a single parent that had a degree and a professional job. 15K vs 68K respectively.
Since the "burger flipper" is considered "poor", they qualified for many government programs. Rent subsistence, food stamps, health care, utility assistance, Earned Income Credit, etc. The result was that this class of worker had 38,000 USD of disposable income each year.
Since the professional at 68K does not qualify for any of these programs, their disposable income each year is 34K.
If someone knows the study, please correct my mistakes as I am going from memory.
Ok, let me rephrase that (and I call bs on how you applied this study.) Here is my rephrasing: A single person with a hamburger flipping salary without expecting or asking for welfare support (which is pretty much passing the costs down to the rest of us.) I honestly don't mind paying higher taxes and help those in need. But constant, never-ending welfare the way it is implemented in this country is not a solution.
What you want in a healthy economy is that the majority of low-paying salaries are enough to subsist without requiring welfare and food stamps, leaving those only for the extreme cases of poverty or struggle (single moms and families devastated by disease come to mind.)
If I'm a single person working at a minimum wage, I cannot expect the same type of welfare a single mom is entitled to when working at that same minimum wage, not unless I start cheating. A solution for a single mom is not a solution for the general case, and for that reason, the study you mentioned does not refute my original postulate.
For the general case, depending on welfare is not a solution. And having the majority of low income bracket people having to make trade-offs between basic necessities and health coverage is not an acceptable situation for what it is supposed to be the richest country in the world.
Living in a right-to-work state... well, let's say there's a reason those laws are colloquially known as "right to fire".
I'm not saying that the all-employment-is-at-will approach is wrong, necessarily, but it certainly has side effects that your blurb above skips over.
Indiana is already an "At Will" (which means at the EMPLOYER's will) State.
Having been laid-off simply because my new boss didn't like me (and was the neighbor and church-mate of the President of the company), I sincerely believe that we need some true EMPLOYEE Rights legislation (say, like what France has), instead of yet another Orwellian-Named "Right To Work" (which as you pointed out, simply means "Right To Fire") piece of anti-worker bullshit.
Understandably, this scared people to death, what with mortgages and all.
See, that's the key word. Mortgages and debts.
There's been this "assumption" that you can buy know and pay later without considering the possibility that the economy might go south and you might end up losing your job. It happened before ('29-'33) but people forgot. Now they face pretty bad times; but those times wouldn't be that bad if they wouldn't have gone deep in debt.
Globalization, whether you like it or not, has thrown in another factor that people could barely comprehend 20 years ago: cheap, active, efficient laborers who can do what US citizens could do, but faster, with less complaints and for a 5th (maybe even a 10th) of a regular US salary. It's nobody's fault, really; it's just the world opening up.
Sure, you could blame it on greedy corporations, but it's just like you being offered a house just like the one you have, but for a 5th/10th of its regular price. It's a no-brainer: "sure, I'll get one!". Companies go where they can produce the same shit for less dough, just like you would go where you could buy the same shit for less dough. Morality ain't nothing to do with it. It's economy, commerce, capitalism. Wild but very, very real. Also, if you deny its trends you'll only get hit harder when it's going to hit you, and it will do so.
We've all (1st world countries) lived on borrowed money. Now people who we despised (3rd world countries) and pitied come and gladly take whatever we frowned upon (dirty jobs, low wages, ugly neighborhoods); not only that, but they are happy with them, because those mean more to them than what's been available before this or that corporation opened offices in their countries and started outsourcing stuff.
Not only that, but many of those people have the same brain size and learning capacity; they have the same skills and if not, are willing to learn them (and they learn them faster than you'd expect!); they accept what you'd consider petty payments and they sometimes end up outsmarting their trainers and US-based colleagues. How do you compete with that? Except for making fun of their MTI (http://dhanyasn.wordpress.com/2007/04/19/mother-tongue-influence-the-disease/), nothing really. Maybe it's time to realize hard times are coming; maybe not now, maybe not in 5 or 10 years, but during your lifetime, yes (unless you're really, REALLY old). You'll get "invaded" by foreigners accepting lower payments but doing the same job, and successfully. Your jobs will be "stolen" by them. And they're many.
Don't blame any of them. Blame the times, blame technology (oh yes!), because it made supersonic planes available, and huge, HUGE transport ships, and instantaneous communication anywhere in the world. Its advantages are balanced by the sheer amount of 3rd world country people who now have a shot at "the american dream", and, dear oh dear, they throw themselves over it, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Disclaimer: I'm one of those people. And funnily enough, in my country, there are people coming from poorer countries who already take some of our jobs as well. But they're not going to catch me pants down!
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Indentured servitude tends to make people work harder.
It is better than no job isn't it?
Also why did you work there when you came to the US? You said there are no jobs right? Then if you are about to starve to death then these jobs look more attractive. People need to work more of these jobs more until something else pops up.
http://saveie6.com/
So true.
Here's three more "brain freakers" for the GP:
- I don't own a car;
- I don't have a driver's license;
- I don't watch, own or need a TV.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Yeah, he would have. My grandfather had the strongest work ethic out of anyone I've ever known (granted, I bet a lot of people feel the same way) and never hesitated to help anyone in need, whether it was his boss, through the church, in his neighborhood. He had his share of late nights, and when times were tough sacrificed along with everyone else until times got better again.
I honestly attribute it somewhat to the fact that so many of the men were veterans, and outside of that, so many people here at home were united in the war effort. It brought people together, and fostered a mutual respect for each other, in ways that nothing these days seems to be able to. His employer wouldn't have fucked him over because that would be like fucking over himself.
Somewhere along the line employees went from being considered assets to being considered liabilities...fostering the adversarial nature of the employer/employee relationship that is so common these days. How many people out there truly think their boss gives a fuck about them personally, beyond how much they can profit from their labors? Is it any wonder that the rank and file feels the same way? Treat the like a faceless number, you'll get all the loyalty of a faceless number next time the 'bigger better deal' comes around...
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories [...]
And if, after reading this, you still buy Apple products, you've won a free confederate flag.
I make 17 per hour working at a university - and post tax (healthcare and income tax - I lump them together) I have home a whopping 22-23k a year - rent is half that. Sadly I make just above the amount to qualify for food stamps so every month is a challenge making ends meet.
Well get this:
- You say McJobs are not an acceptable employment solution for an American. Maybe it's true. This is exactly why corporations move various types of jobs abroad: because you don't want them.
- I'd take a McJob employment in the US, because I don't mind living with 3 other people in a 2-room flat for a few months (years, if needed) and in the meantime apply for jobs I'm actually qualified for. You wouldn't.
- That's why you feel "invaded" by foreigners: because that McJob you loathe is a gold mine for someone else.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Then explain Toyota and Honda: Toyota has 6 factories in the US [wikipedia.org] and Honda has 3. [wikipedia.org] How are they able to build millions of some of the top-selling vehicles in the US and still remain profitable all while using American labor?
They did that for two reasons:
1. There were significant trade restrictions that did NOT apply if they could claim the car was "American" (contained at least x% of US-Produced parts), and once that threshold was made, it was actually cheaper to have them assembled here, than to ship all those parts overseas, then ship the completed car BACK to the U.S.
2. Shipping costs in general.
And how many years of school does it take to learn "glue solder board to base"? Machines create the circuit boards, humans just put it together, guessing that requires at least an Associates, right?
Yeah, I can imagine Bubba the Auto-Worker assembling cellphones with his vienna-sausage fingers. How many returns and how many scrapped units do you think that approach would create? Not to mention the throughput of 2 cellphones per hour (in between Union-Demanded breaks, of course)
True. The flip side to that problem though is that most everything in North America is priced for people that have High Wage jobs.
Try buying a house in a decent neighborhood on $24K per year, it just can't be done because most everything is priced for people earning 2 - 4 times that! Or haven't you noticed the increasing trend where families need to have both parents, and sometimes the kids, chipping in to buy a house?
In 1970 the average US home cost 23,400.00 and the average worker made 6,186.24, in other words a house cost 3.78 times what a person made.
Contrast that with 2004, same links as above, where the average US wage is now 35,648.55 but the price of homes has skyrocketed to an average of 221,000.00, or about 6.19 times what a person made. In order to get back to the 3.78 times value from the 70's a person needs to make at least 58,465.61, or the equivalent of 1.64 jobs at the average rate of pay. So you can take on two jobs or amortize your mortgage until your well into your retirement. And I haven't even really touched on the disparity in cities where the 24K wage job still exists but housing costs are so far above the average that the only place you can afford to live is a slum in a crime ridden neighborhood.
I'm sure if I went digging for 2011 numbers the disparity for wages vs housing would be even larger. So yeah, you're right, the 24K wages can and should exist because not everyone has the skills to command a higher wage job. But unlike the 70's the average wage earners can no longer to afford a home for their families, housing ownership is now solely in the purview of people who can command higher wages. Its unsustainable, particularly with the wage gap increasing, and we as a society better get our act together to ensure we're providing affordable housing in nice neighborhoods so people making that small amount of money can actually afford it, otherwise those "Occupy" movements are going to get worse and start getting violent.
Ok go in there
Get charged $500 a minute for care if you get extremely hurt or sick with no insure.
After 3 days go then try to fend off the debt collectors harrasing your parents, neighbors, and your boss on why Nurb432 wont pay his $90,000 in cash? These slimy f*ckers will try to sue you, take you to court, and even reposses your car, and house if you do not pay. This leaves bankruptacy the only option. ... oh guess what? Under the corrupt laws you have to file a chapter 13 and not a 7. This means you have to pay 100% OF IT ANYWAY. Now you have an additional $900 a month bill for 10 years. The judge denies you the right to get a car, you lose your home, and oh thats right that nice better job you wanted ... well Mr. Jones just ran a credit check and WOW sorry buddy we can't hire you etc.
Your life becomes a living hell for a good 10 years and that is a very LARGE CHUNK of your working years that will ultimately cost you retirement too. ... so what is this about having the hospital always treat you? I seriously hope you NEVER have to be in this situation. I thankfully have never been and hope I never do but this is very unfair. My exwife had some family members like you who were strongly republican hated Obamacare and government and nationalized health insurance from the all sooo scary government. The above situation happened and he did a completly 1080. This is one area the government desperately NEEDS TO address.
http://saveie6.com/
"Stabilizing" is often all that is needed; there are people whose needs aren't addressed by this (cancer patients are probably the largest group, because their treatment isn't "stabilizing" and isn't cheap), but the vast majority of people who are admitted to the hospital have a limited condition that can be fixed - you can't ignore the guy who is having a heart attack, or appendicitis, or a broken leg.
No, actually, you are the moron that clearly hasn't received care through the ER without insurance. Hospitals have funding issues for a variety of reasons including extremely high costs associated with collecting from insurance companies. In addition to this extremely and painfully short-sighted view you also completely ignore costs of preventative care. Only emergency medicine has these treatment requirements after-all. Some communities fund vaccines and other preventative measures but for the most part people are on the hook for their own medical expenses. Why get regular cleanings, you can live with that cavity because without insurance you're going to pay out the ass for care assuming you can afford it. Same goes for vision care and a myriad of other situations.
A friend of mine was hit by a truck and he lacked insurance, he was on the hook for a million dollars because the truck dragged him taking pieces of his leg every inch of the way. He either declares bankruptcy and the hospital doesn't get the money or he sues the truck driver to recover the costs. Those were his options. As a result, insurance for the truck driver is now higher, lawyers made a ton of money, and the hospital eventually got what was owed to them. How on earth can you defend this?
I was lucky enough to grow up in a family with health insurance, now that my sisters are old enough to have families I see the situation has changed rather dramatically for the negative as they look for ways to insure their kids without the thyroid condition making insurance prohibitively expensive. This is stupid, if we pooled our resources and turned human life from a for-profit industry to one that serves to better the community we can all live better lives and pay less for insurance for those of us that do have it.
Perhaps, more to the point, we can then achieve what most other nations accomplished 30 years ago. I have no idea how socialized medicine became so demonized.
Very nicely put.
Stick Men
Wait.. there are American companies with dormitories???
Not anymore.
...or is that "Not yet"?
What do you think is the REAL reason why Immigration Laws in the U.S. have been decimated and/or largely ignored for the past 20 years or so?
First there was NAFTA; and some corporations closed their U.S. factories and moved them to Mexico. That was supposed to break the Unions (and save our TRUE overlords some money). Then, someone got the idea that it would be much cheaper to bring the cheap labor (Mexicans) here, rather than to rebuild factories down there. Again, an attempt to break the Unions. This is the phase we're still in. However, the Unions STILL aren't going-away; so now there's this "Right To Work" "movement", which AGAIN is aimed at de-fanging the Unions...
We'll see...
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I can't say for sure. Unions were a very necessary thing during the robber-baron years (early 20th century); but like all "good things", they eventually lost sight of their (laudable) goal of making sure that workers had decent working conditions (e,g,, we can thank them every "weekend" that we have off) and a "decent wage"; but they have long-since swung the pendulum the other way, where U.S. Labor is simply not cost-effective, and worse yet, has the (somewhat deserved) reputation for being lazy and sloppy.
Wow, a bunch of BS there. You enjoy life as a mercenary tech nomad? And your wife happens to tolerate it too? Good for you, but most people are luckier than you to have local family, friends, and community. You don't value those because you don't even know what they are, but most normal people do. Oh, and wait until (if) yuo have children, how that nomadic life will feel for them. Get lost.
I hate it when people associate this sort of behaviour with sustainable capitalism. This man is not just raping his employees, but himself. He is obviously too stupid to understand the tragedy of commons, and that he is blighting the goodwill with his employees, the backbone of his organisation.
It is exactly this type of short term marauding that has led the country to where it is today.
I'm lucky in that I don't have to put up with this sort of crap. If it surfaces, I quit and get another job, if needed in another country. There is no need for further laws, but rather a change in culture. Perhaps the employees should call his bluff. Moving kit and kaboodle is not cheap. Of course, they would need the stomach for the risk involved.
At the end of the day though, the greatest tragedy is for the business owner. With the lack of goodwill, and the revolving door mentality, his quality of goods will suffer, as well as his profit margins etc etc. Productivity is not optimal, trenches level observations get missed, and new income streams from this information are lost. Of course, his books won't reflect this, because you shouldn't believe any statistic that you don't make up yourself.
Smart capitalists are all too aware of their social responsibility to their employees. It is a two way street. In some cases during this crisis, cutbacks are necessary, but this guy isn't even smart enough to hide his disingenuous standpoint. He will also be too stupid to run his business well.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Apple should manufacture in Detroit. Thousands of unemployed manufacturing workers looking for work.
"Our only obligation is making the best product possible."
Should read
"Our only obligation is making as much money as possible."
Robots.
Try buying a house in a decent neighborhood on $24K per year...
Yeah, obviously, low skilled people probably can't afford to own a house. A house is a somewhat high value item. If you only have low value skills to offer, you probably can't afford to buy a house.
In 1970 the average US home cost ... and the average worker made ...
So you're saying a low skilled person should go back in time 40 years? This keeps getting brought up, as if living in the past were some sort of solution. The past is gone.
I'm sure if I went digging for 2011 numbers the disparity for wages vs housing would be even larger.
Or as if complaining about a "disparity" is some sort of solution.
Its unsustainable, particularly with the wage gap increasing, and we as a society better get our act together to ensure we're providing affordable housing in nice neighborhoods so people making that small amount of money can actually afford it...
Got any ideas?
I do. They involve eliminating artificial costs in the US - money that goes to lawyers, union bosses, government red tape, regulations, other government services, etc. We can't afford to keep chasing utopian fantasies.
Do you have any ideas?
otherwise those "Occupy" movements are going to get worse and start getting violent.
And that would solve what? The Occupy movements can't even say what they want without alienating the public. Because they essentially want to receive and/or spend money they didn't earn.
Last year, a university (University of Missisippi?, cannot find link) released a study comparing a single parent that held minimum wage jobs [...] 15K [...] The result was that this class of worker had 38,000 USD of disposable income each year. If someone knows the study, please correct my mistakes as I am going from memory.
I can correct a mistake that doesn't require knowing the study, or even having memory. It only requires basic knowledge of maths. Those "government programs" you mention pay for expenses, they don't give out cash. As such, it's mathematically impossible for someone making $15k a year to legally have more than $15k of disposable income (even then, only if the government paid for 100% of their expenses, which simply does not happen in the USA).
Unless one of the elements of the study was "and he stole $23k" or "and he found a suitcase with $23k in cash", I have a feeling no one will "know that study" because the only place where it can exist is inside your logic-challenged brain. If that was true, everyone making 68k would be asking to have their salary reduced so they could make more money. Does that make any sense to you? Nevermind; if you went to the trouble of posting that message, clearly "making sense" is not one of your areas of expertise.
Apple is spinning things to put a happy face on what Apple is doing.
IMO: Apple is no different than any other major US tech company.
I am surprised at how many people still fall for this BS.
Shorter version: your "idea" is to steal money from people.
Thanks for letting us know.
How is this fundamentally different from, for instance
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
But you and many others also have a "no we can't" attitude.
It's quite possible the the USA can't -- we appear to be stuck rather hard in a mode of "there is nothing that the rest of the world can teach us."
However, American perceptions of our own inferiority aside, other countries seem to be doing quite nicely. Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway seem to have combined thriving economies with high median standards of living and more upward social mobility than the US. Perhaps someday we'll decide that we can learn something from them other than "don't be like them."
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Those poor people are so destitute that they're willing to become virtual slaves for some meager earnings
Which is exactly the same choices made by Western factory workers during the industrial revolution. It's what happens when countries industrialize. It generally leads to the formation of unions, workers rights, and all that stuff we take for granted here as the situation firms up.
People who are criticising Chinese civilization are doing so from on top of the legacy left by the exact same behaviour in their history, a couple of centuries ago.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Time to ditch NAFTA and impose a $1-a-gallon export tax on all Canadian and Mexican crude. It wouldn't bring US oil prices near the world price, but it would start, as well help pay for some of the damage being done in both countries.
Indirectly subsidizing US jobs through low consumer oil prices in the US market (while paying high prices in the Canadian and European consumer markets) is just as bad a market distortion, and with just as many bad knock-on effects, as the "everyone gets a mortgage even if they can't fog a mirror" shell game that caused the mortgage crisis.
The net effect of the "below-world-oil-price" is to enable employers to pay less, since employees aren't paying world-level prices for fuel.
Since the US won't raise domestic gas and diesel prices to world levels through fuel taxes (despite having the largest deficit in the known universe, and one that we all know will never be paid back), but rather, depends on printing more money and more debt to keep them artificially lower, countries that don't do the same crazy "print the money and pile on the debt" are still being forced to pay the price for that policy in terms of lost jobs, as well as US consumers not being forced to pay the true cost of continuing to buy gas guzzlers and "hybrids" that have real-world gas consumption that sucks.
I would bet that those countries have programs that exclusively hire from Asia. This was the case for the former German technical Green Card program (and is almost certainly the case with it's current manifestation).
He didn't mention the fact that most of Apple's cash is held in overseas accounts because they don't want to pay taxes on them, so they have no choice but to spend that money overseas. I guess this is a shining example of proactive PR, as corporate taxes are going to become a hot topic in this year's elections. Point out the fire on the stove so nobody notices that the rest of the house is also on fire.
Toyota build the Camries and Intel build the chips in U.S. Canon build the cameras in Japan and BMW build the cars in German. My guess is that these products technologies are relatively mature, so the manfacturing processes are streamlined and automated and not much will change between this and next generation.
iPhones are evolving all the time. My guess is that it require lot of manual customizations between this and next generation to the extent that it's more economical to hire human than robots to do the assembly work.
+1 :D
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
We should definitely learn from them. For example, all of those countries have lower corporate tax rates than the US.
Lower nominal corporate taxes, but higher revenues from them thanks to fewer tax preferences.
And then there's the higher personal income taxes. Which are also "theft."
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
N/T
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I came up with a great idea about 25 years ago - a new political party, whose objective is to achieve the promise of the Industrial Revolution. That promise was that with automation the machines would do all the work and we could all live like kings. Now with robotics we are getting closer to being able to achieve that vision. The flip side of that is that there are no jobs.
So, the solution of my new Technical Party is to make unemployment the goal, not the problem! Let us make the objective to reduce our required working life to zero over the next 50 years! Someday, when we finish our 20 years of schooling (because we want to go to school, not because we have to). Then we are drafted to work for, say, five or 10 years. Then we retire to paint, make robotic art, do tai chi, or whatever. Sure, some folks will decide to go for the 'career' slot, just like some of the military used to do when we had a military draft - most folks went in for the minimum, but a few stayed.
Let the robots do all the work!! :D
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
The PRC becomes a glowing parking lot, courtesy of its own internal fighting and a hyper-nationalist US taking advantage of the situation.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
On semi-skilled labor, not without some serious protectionism in our trade agreements. On skilled labor, absolutely. We have a serious cultural advantage in our approach to knowledge engineering fields (CS is my personal area of experience). From everything I've seen, Asia just can't compete in any real sense.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
1. Nobody owns you a job.
Then fix things so that the obligation exists.
2. Apple didn't get help from government coming up with their own computer, it was all private enterprise.
Only if you don't count the PRC funding all the factories and supplying them with pliant labor.
3. Apple has done PLENTY for USA and the world, produced products people loved, hired other people, who got paid, weren't a drain on the system, paid their taxes.
Not enough for the USA. But if you want to apologize for some despotic hellhole, go right ahead. Just leave your US citizenship and assets at the door.
The rest is just a tax squabble.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If we don't allow low wage jobs, then low skilled people can't get work at all.
No.
If you don't allow low wages, then people will have to choose whether they still want the work done or not. If it is important or necessary, they will pay more for the work.
Rational employers will employ as few people as they can get away with for as little money as they can get away with (except for executive staff, for some reason.) Raising the bottom limit changes the "can get away with" element of that equation. Entry level is entry level, but forcing labor costs on the bottom up will generally have benefits all around - increased markets, less inequality, etc.
too late. "He who has the gold makes the rules". And, "The borrower is slave to the lender." At this point, any attempt by the US to enforce much of anything beyond a bit of food safety will quickly result in the Chinese deciding they'd rather not lend us any more money, and that 40% of US government spending that they are supporting by buying all those bonds goes away. Then you'll see the US government really, really cut budgets in a hurry.
Economists are already talking about how China may well control the future negotiations over a new worldwide monetary agreement to replace the existing floating rate system (that was based on using the US dollar as the reference currency). And it will probably look a lot more like a centrally planned system than we are used to. The US dollar was the reference currency because we were the world's biggest lender. Now, we're the world's biggest debtor.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
We plan to change reality. It's changed before, it can change again.
Huge tariffs is one way, and not the only way, to change that reality.
That great time after the war was a historical anomaly. Look at the country before that - it was not at all like that. After the war we were the only nation on earth whose industrial infrastructure had not been destroyed, and the only one that had any money. And we had a huge expansion of industry here for the war, and all those factories were going to need customers. So we set up the Marshall Plan, and lent money to nations to rebuild - but they had to spend the money on US goods. So companies like Caterpillar had an instant worldwide market. This resulted in about a 5X multiplier on the money the government gave away, generating very good tax receipts to pay for it. This could best be described as a postwar bubble. And unfortunately we got used to those good times, and got to thinking that was 'normal'.
Unfortunately, the true 'normal' is something much closer to the Depression.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
He wasn't talking about prohibiting low wage jobs, he was talking about having employers locking you into them regardless of your skill level or experience for no other reason than the fact that he can and pocket more cash for himself in the process all while still forcing you to do the work you were doing at a higher wage.
Captcha: romantic...... to many employers, this probably is.
The article stated it would increase Apple's costs by 25% to pay American wages (somewhat blithely, I might add, I doubt it is that slick).
Actually I think it just said it would increase the 'cost of goods sold' by 25%.
The key components of cost generally include:
Parts, raw materials and supplies used,
Labor, including associated costs such as payroll taxes and benefits, and
Overhead of the business allocable to production.
Which is somewhat less than total costs - it does not include cost of sales (typically from 30% to 50% of revenue), administration outside of production, etc. It includes only part of overhead. So, bottom line, it would be somewhat less than 25% of total costs. I hesitate to guess just how much - it might be as low as 10% or less, of what Apple receives from the wholesaler or distributor, and an even smaller part of the price on the shelf.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I approve of the destruction of America (I will enjoy the day it implodes under its hypocrisy, lies and selfish attitudes), but it's the slavery aspect that is stopping me from making my next purchase. So I am 50/50 at the moment. I'm dead serious.
Jonathanjk.com
His wife appreciates it because she can have affairs with men from all over.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
New Zealand has a wonderful law all pre-written that we can sell you. You know, to return the favour for that Copyright law you gave us last year.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Those are for the Eastern Europeans that work there over the summer, and they have to pay a certain amount for rent. Sandusky doesn't have much of a housing market for college kids.
FTFY. With so many schools starting fall semesters earlier and earlier, Americans are losing competitiveness with Russians and other who have more flexible schedules. Happening in lots of resort towns as well.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Let's do a little thought experiment.
Take a manufacturing firm, one with an inexplicable level of political clout. For unknown reasons, this firm is able to manufacture any product whatsoever, completely free of royalties or licensing fees, but only if the work is completed entirely within the borders of the United States.
Could this firm manufacture and sell an exact copy of one of Apple's designs more cheaply than Apple can manufacture it overseas and ship it to the U.S. for sale?
I'd say that the answer is probably yes. So logically, since Apple does not care about the United States's problems, the United States should stop caring about defending Apple's Intellectual Property and start making cheaper iPad clones for itself.
I don't think greed is inherent, it's a taught skill.
Jonathanjk.com
If you don't allow low wages, then people will have to choose whether they still want the work done or not.
They don't. They can't compete or make a profit at the higher wage levels. Businesses don't "want" work done. They hire when adding payroll increases profits. At higher wages, that won't be happening much.
If it is important or necessary, they will pay more for the work.
It isn't. And even if it were, they'll outsource it. They'll offshore it. They'll hire independent contractors. Smaller companies that can't get around your artificially high wages will lose out to bigger companies or foreign companies who can.
Entry level is entry level, but forcing labor costs on the bottom up will generally have benefits all around - increased markets, less inequality, etc.
It causes unemployment. All economists agree it causes unemployment, BTW, they only disagree on how much.
We can see the results of your philosophy. It's Detroit.
'We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
In that case as an American, my obligation is to make sure I avoid buying any Apple products. Thank you for drawing attention to the fact that Apple officially regards itself as unamerican.
Unless, American consumers choose actively to buy and invest in companies that hold America in higher regard than Apple, America will continue to be burdened by corporations like Apple that feel its fine to accept a broad range of tax credits from the American taxpayer, without providing anything in return that they wouldn't also provide to Iran or North Korea. Essentially, Apple's official policy is that it doesn't give a shit about Americans. All that it wants is their money.
Personally, I make it my business to avoid doing business with corporations such as this, lest I suffer even more from their malevolence in the future.
We'll never be able to afford it if Americans make it, after we've made all of America poor by sending all the jobs off shore". Now that we can provide America with a cheap product Americans don't earn enough to buy it.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Speaking for myself, several. Have you tried buying organs from people under forty? They've got like dreams and aspirations to use those things, and haven't quite fallen into the level of required desperation. So you do what you can to keep your average age under 60, but shit happens.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
My question would be: Did you give the Western manufacturers an opportunity to compete to be as flexible as the Chinese competition, or did you simply tell them "We're packing up and moving to China, see you later!"
When employees started looking for ways to cut costs without having to cut their salaries that much (and found some) and presented them to the owner, he basically said "This isn't about money; the economy is soft right now, and I'm going to use this opportunity to increase my profit margin by cutting your wages. Don't like it, there's the door."
And that fucker is still alive? That is amazing.
This space unintentionally left blank.
You don't like unions? Then you don't like the free market, where individuals should be allowed to band together and sell their collective labor for the highest price the market will bear. Where a group of laborers can exercise their right to demand an exclusive contract, if need be, to protect their single asset, their willingness to work.
And this is a good part of the reason why we don't have manufacturing jobs in the US. Greedy slimeballs like yourself that think that doing these jobs are actually worth $50k a year. They aren't. Most of them got shipped overseas, and the workers are doing the same thing for a fraction of the cost. You've collectively priced yourselves out of your own jobs.
Also known as "right to work for less" states.
The US lost? I don't think so.
NOBODY wants those kind of jobs in the U.S.
I'll tell you who loses. Apple. While they rake huge profits now, "think different" looks too different, and as their attention get gathered, Americans are going to be just as upset as they were about similar abuses in the clothing industry, for example. Foxconn also loses, big, as it is going to become unpalatable for American businesses to with them, lest they suffer a similar castigation as Apple is about to feel.
The ones that lost the most are the Chinese workers who have been bid all the way to the bottom. I feel genuinely sorry for those people.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Entry level is entry level, but forcing labor costs on the bottom up will generally have benefits all around - increased markets, less inequality, etc.
I've seen this first hand, and while you seem to paint this is a pretty light, the reality is far grimmer. Incompetent people hold titles they shouldn't and get paid the same as those who form the backbone of the company until they get fed up and leave. I've seen good companies die out this way many times in the name of "fairness". Life isn't fair, and typically those who cry the most are the lazy, incompetent ones who kill off a company. Better to let them whine, fire them and replace them with someone who actually wants to do their job, and do it better and for less.
I can't count the number of times I've heard "that's not my job" at a company. They use it as excuse as to why they can now slack off since they've "completed their duties", not realizing the fair thing is then for the company to cut your hours (and/or pay) since obviously you have no more work to do.
Wanting to make enough money to raise a family does not mean people are "greedy slimeballs". Your parents obviously wanted the same thing (or was that a rock you just crawled out from under because you were hatched, not born)?
It also doesn't explain how, before this current bout of Reaganonics, "Free Trade", and the 30-year stagnation of personal incomes, companies could afford to pay a living wage.
Or how Henry Ford was able and willing to pay more than his competitors, so that his employees could buy the fruits of their labour.
Labour doesn't have the same mobility as capital. That's why we need to restore trade and tarriff barriers ASAP - to prevent multi-nationals from engaging in the type of destructive arbitrage that is going on now. You want to sell in our market - either create some local jobs or face import tariffs. Give and take involves giving, not just taking.
Funny your very argument known as JIT inventory is why many companies are moving back to the US.
Where are you going to store all these products. Oh yeah overseas. You have fuel costs and huge latencies. IN the US workers are more productive and you can place them close together close to the customer to cut down on inventory costs and increase shipping times.
Even in China it is a huge country and it is hard to find land not taken by another factor down the street to have the parts ready. In the US there are many vacant factory buildings in places like Detriot.
http://saveie6.com/
Americans and westerners simply need to stop buying Apple products. That is esp. true of the American and EU gov. Likewise, if the western gov. will insist on secured products the way that China does (i.e. ONLY produced in their nation), then we will see things change.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Oh stop this slave BS.
We are in the real world here! Why is your bank account 0? That is irresponsible and you know what? If I were a betting man in 2030 Kahlandad will have a nice home, savings, and will retire without government aid and have a wonderful life and you probably wont. Why?
He is willing to do what it takes to better himself even if the results are crappy and SUCK. Shit happens and he prefers to work so he is not a slave to capital with this thing called debt. You are desperate because you view works as SO HORRIBLE and you wont take the responsibility to do what is right even if it is not what you need to do.
Hey, Kaylandad I had a similiar fate with a job loss and divorce last year and left a place I loved to move back in with family. Lost everything and my heart goes out. Good for you for trying to do the right thing and taking personal responsibility. I did the same and in a few years it will show.
http://saveie6.com/
Hahaha, I'm sorry, that's so funny. In *emergency situations*, hospitals are required to give you sufficient treatment so you won't die. But once you're stabilized, they can (and do) kick you out on the street. You may be maimed, you may need meds for further treatment that you can't afford, but you're alive, which is all that's required.
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
And yet 40 years ago people who were making low skilled wages could afford to buy a house, something that's quite impossible now. Where do you think these low skilled people are going to live? Got any ideas?
Now we could start talking about increasing the average wages to better keep pace with the inflation of housing costs, or forcing maximum prices on homes to bring them down into the realm of attainability, or requiring builders to set aside 20-40% of the homes / units in a condo for low income earners, or forcing renters to base it in proportion to income and provide tax incentives on the difference for them to do it. Hell, with the cost of invading a country for their oil we could have bought everyone in the country a modest 3 bedroom home or condo! But don't you dare suggest any of those things, loads of people would start complaining about a welfare state, or that you're attacking success, or any other conservative nonsense that amounts to the abdication of shared social responsibility, basically boiling down to "I got mine, sucks to be you, now go fuck off!"
Certainly the past is gone, but it would be foolish to ignore the lessons history has gives us.
Or don't you think there is something wrong with a society that has allowed homes, something everyone needs to survive, to jump in value by 944% but yet only increased the average wage by 152%? People keep bringing this up not because we all want to hop into our DeLoreans and go back to the simpler times in 1970, we point it out because its important to illustrate disparity between what we earn and what it costs us to buy the stuff we need to live! The fact that wages didn't keep pace with the rising costs of inflation in relation to housing should be of tremendous concern to everyone, low skilled jobs and wages make up the bulk of an economy but are unsustainable when a person is unable to make enough to support themselves and their families.
In 1970 a low skilled wage earner could buy a decent home and have a good life, even in the city, now they make about 50% more but have to live in a crime ridden slum. Think about that. Got any ideas on how we can fix it?
Never going to happen as the people in charge will never allow it, they make far too much money from the status quo. Hell, the US is a country where rich bankers can cause a worldwide global economic collapse and still get a Trillion dollar bail out package for their "troubles". Right now some rich Wall Streeter, who should be rotting in a jail cell for what he / she pulled, earned a big fat bonus and a pat on the head for screwing everyone out of their money and were basically told to just keep doing what they were doing.
Meanwhile some guy with low wage skills, who could have bought a nice place for his family 40 years ago, has to live in an impoverished crime ridden neighborhood because its all he can afford. We more than have the money as a society to fix this, as you said there is a lot of unnecessary government spending, but anyone who even comes close to suggesting fixes for this disparity will get immediately labelled a communist, socialist, and "out to Destroy America!".
The other cool thing about Right-to-work is that the union by law *still* has to represent the interests of the non-union members. Basically it's right-to-freeload, and its sole purpose is to break unions.
No, actually, you are the moron that clearly hasn't received care through the ER without insurance
Don't make assumptions where you have no business making them, it just makes anything say invalid and not worth reading from that point forward.
idiot. if you want to live in a socialist country so bad, move. Today. You can get the hell out of my country and don't bother coming back when you find out its not all rainbows and butterflies like you thought as you wont be welcome.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yet the countries with the highest minimum wages generally have high productivity rates, low social inequality, etc. You want low minimum wages, or none? Try Latin America, China, Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia. You want high minimum wages and low inequality? Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, Japan.
The freedom to hire and fire, and the question of freeloaders, is separate from that of wage minimums.
No, it's called Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Norway.
Besides, the question of when adding payroll increases profits depends also on the labor costs of their competitors. If their competitors enjoy virtual slave-labor, then the pricing pressure comes into play. That's why high minimum wages need to come hand-in-hand with high tariffs.
In your example you could have had insurance/pay your bills in the first place, so its a non discussion related to the original topic. Try again with a rational argument if you want to continue. If not, then see ya.
And ill say the same thing i did to the last idiot. If you love socialism so much get the hell out of my country. You don't belong here.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That sure is a lot of complaining with zero ideas on how to solve anything.
Yours seems to be a common attitude: "No we can't".
Can we build a better factory? Unions say: "No we can't."
Can we get cheaper energy? Environmentalists say: "No we can't."
Can we cut the cost of our insurance? Lawyers say: "No we can't."
Can we educate our children? The teachers union says: "No we can't."
Can we cut local taxes? The government unions say: "No we can't."
Can we cut crime in the neighborhoods? Community organizers say: "No we can't."
Can we improve anything? Slashdot says: "No we can't."
If you can't raise a family on $50k a year (You do have a wife do you not?) then you are doing something wrong.
I hate to break it to you, but the current economic crisis was CAUSED by individuals like yourself who think they deserve more than they do. Buying houses they couldn't afford, and then defaulting on them causing responsible people like myself to eat the costs of your stupidity. You want to know why companies can't afford to pay their employees what they would have? Take a long hard look in the mirror.
You're lying about the $1.20/hour. 1500 RMB is $240/month. That's $8/day, for far more than 8 hours of work per day. Please stop lying.
Admit it, you just like the girls.
It also speaks to the sociopathic nature of the speaker in the article and the sycophantic tendencies of the people who agree with him.
You just know the spoiled, sycophantic freaks who agree with Apple would be throwing a ruckus like you wouldn't believe if they were put in that situation. Honest to god I hope a heaven exists, just so the baby boomer generation complicit in the destruction of our society can meet their maker and be sent to the depths of Hades to be tortured for their sins.
Here's a list for you, of some of the countries with the highest Minimum wages:
Greece
Portugal
Ireland
Cyprus
Italy
Slovenia
Spain
Oh, let's compare.. Here's another list, this time of European countries in financial crisis, on the brink of going bankrupt:
Greece
Portugal
Ireland
Cyprus
Italy
Slovenia
Spain
Hmm....Odd, they seem like the SAME LIST.
Actually he's complicit in the destruction of our society and economy, and puts down others who don't wish to destroy their life for the sake of earning money. He's worse than most, since a better person would cobble together a union to demand fair pay and treatment from their employers.
Oh, and Germany has no minimum wages except in a few select industries, and they are by far the strongest of the EU countries financially.
Huge tariffs is one way, and not the only way, to change that reality.
Global depression and war are only two of the problems with your plan.
Luckily, it won't happen because we won't be raising huge tariffs to protect low skilled workers. Low skilled workers lack the numbers, the unanimity, the money, and the will to become politically powerful enough to get this done. It's a fantasy on many different levels.
You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination and an endless supply of expendable labor.
The bottom line is that the USA used to do this. Old school Americans who still posess the American spirit do things bigger, better, faster, stronger. There is no room here for "work life balance", there is no room for a giant party at every turn. Do that on your own time, when you're not on contract, and your life is yours.
Some of us still do work this way. We get in, get shit done, and get out and work 60-80 work weeks. Most of us are not from the West Coast, though: we're from small towns in "flyover" country. We grew up working hard, and for those who didn't, we had plenty of examples around us of people who were. Importantly, you don't want to be the lazy, ineffectual guy. There are still a lot of us from the non-urban parts of the northeast and southeast as well.
It doesn't matter in America if you get things done anymore, not normally. What matters is if you "work well with others". You are considered a bad employee if you're making your "peers" look poorly, and you're "unprofessional" if you say it like it is (even if it's polite).
What has to happen to make this change? Drastic, unsavory things, for most people. People have to embrace being 'geeky' again. No more stupid jock films, no "go to business school" recommendations to your kids. Have a lot of kids and don't feed them things from bags. Get rid of golden parachutes. Stop selling shitty glamour magazines in check-out isles. Don't structure school around passing the majority, structure it to make 10% excellent and damn the rest (because they'll be damned anyway, particularly if things continue apace). People need to stop being looked down upon for "starting life early" and accepting responsibility. Employees need to be rewarded for doing the best job, not for billing the most, answering the most calls, or fucking the most customers for services they don't need. Not everyone should go to college, and in fact, they should not be allowed to if they don't have intellectual potential. Trade schools need to come back into vogue and intellectually weak 4-year degrees (business, humanities, etc.) should simply be done away with outright at most institutions.
People need to forget about the NIMBY mentality. Nuclear power needs to be accepted, and suburban sprawl should be abandoned in preference for many smaller cities.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
What if I can't do any work that's worth more than $24,000 a year? What does "want" have to do with it then? People with very low skills, and people who have very little value to offer anyone, can't expect to always get what they want.
That's bullshit. I don't care if you dropped out of high school and never went to class while you were there, but if you've got an IQ over 80 and haven't smoked it away, chances are you're smart enough to figure out how to pull levers, lift objects, push buttons, while not damaging yourself or equipment. This is not rocket science, it's assembly line work.
If the makers of Dr. Bronner's "Magic Soaps" can manage to not only employ people at a generous living wage, successfully, with good benefits while making millions in profits, I find it hard to believe a manufacturing plant couldn't do the same for similar levels of experience while making drastically more expensive products. (Again: SOAP.)
Another good example: Lee Precision. They make ammunition presses and misc. similar machinery for consumer purchase. Manufactured in the US. They are inexpensive compared to the Chinese-built variants (RCBS, for instance), and their quality and engineering is still progressive and superior. (I suspect they probably pay their engineers and machinists pretty well, because their products are known for being consistently well made and designed.)
If you're able to work at McDonalds, chances are any other average assembly line job is well within your grasp.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Can you even read?
We're not talking ~ $50k a year - we're talking $24k a year (after the 50% wage cut). Do you really want to argue that you can raise a family decently on $24k a year? That's not middle class. That's not even "upper lower class". That's pretty much right on the poverty line. That's trailer park. Is that what you think people should aspire to - being fodder for Jerry Springer?
One major problem and you're wiped out, because at those wages, it's "paycheck to paycheck". "Going back to school" becomes something to fear, because of the cost of new clothes, school supplies, school bus, lunches, etc.
It also means poorer health, and poorer health outcomes.
Higher incomes also mean a better tax base. Do you have something against people being able to make enough to help pay off a bit of the deficit? Or save a bit for a rainy day? Do you really believe the 1% are going to pay it? Warren Buffett was the single biggest shareholder in both AIG and Moody's - he got HIS bail-out, paid for by the increased public debt which the 99% assumed, with no corresponding benefit (forced bankruptcies and jail terms would have been a more effective way of removing the bad debt from the system - instead, it's still floating around).
And, BTW. you could save yourself some embarrassment from your first question if you enabled signatures (or looked at my profile).
And, as soon as those Easterners start getting a little money (because there's a call center in town, maybe), they get their own apartment.
You may want to look up the housing boom in China, for instance.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
People aren't so oblivious to fact that Apple products are being made by workers in extremely slave like conditions
Looks like your reading comprehension has failed you, here let me try again in the far easier to read list format:
* Increase average wages to better keep pace with the inflation of housing costs.
* Set a maximum prices for homes to bring them down into the realm of attainability regardless of income level.
* Require builders to set aside 20-40% of the homes / units in a condo for low income earners.
* Encourage renters to base rents on a proportion of the applicants income and provide tax incentives to make up the difference in unit cost.
* Spend the money spent on invading a country for their oil and give everyone a modest 3 bedroom home or condo.
Can we do all those. Damn right we can. Will the people in power do it, no way in hell. It would require them to have less, since they make the rules they will never vote to willingly give themselves less. It really does boil down to "I got mine, sucks to be you, now go fuck off!"
As for your "Can we" list, I agree with a lot of that. Classic Unions are great, 5 day - 40 hour work weeks, 2 day weekends, vacation time, minimum wages, work-place safety standards... None of those things would exist without the Classic Unions taking a stand for them, I like them and I think they're important. The problem is with Modern Unions. When was the last time you heard on TV about unsafe working conditions, or shifts that were too long, or vacations that weren't being granted?
You don't, or at least very seldom do. Its always three things, Wages, Job Security, and Benefits. We want more money, we never want to be fired, and we want all our health care needs covered by the company in perpetuity. What. The. Fuck? I agree with you. Its stuff like that, the ever rising cost of wages, that has priced lifes necessities out of the reach of the common low wage person. When a significant portion of the country can pay a specific amount it makes financial sense to price things to those people's wages. Its why houses cost so much, its why food costs so much, cars, pretty much everything.
Although you are being just a bit dishonest with your list. So let me clean it up:
Of course there are several challenges in this approach: you need the capital investment to build the automated factory;
China gives huge sums of money to 'companies' as capital investment to build up factories and facilities. In the US, this only seems to happen with WalMart and Pizza Hut, in my recent recollection.
you need the education levels to train your population for a world where half the jobs are sophisticated technical problem-solving jobs;
As in most things, Americans aren't being challenged enough. This is why we fail in this regard. We've been encouraged to be mediocre.
you need a LOT of factories like this to keep your whole population employed; and, for now, you need to compete with countries still developing who have workers willing to work for a few bowls of rice per hour. This last problem will go away in due course.
They're doing the same foolish things to their economy that we did to our own. Unfortunately for them, it's not going to run full circle due to how quickly and utterly they're moving in that direction, and the damage they're doing to their lands.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Um, of all the countries on that list, only Ireland has a higher minimum wage than the US.
Countries with a higher minimum wage than the US include:
United Kingdom
Australia
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Ireland
Belgium
France
New Zealand
Canada
San Marino
Switzerland
Though Germany, Finland, Switzerland, and Denmark's minimum wage is not mandated by national policy, they are mandated by universal collective bargaining. Denmark's is, effectively, the highest of them all, at about $20 per hour. It's minimum wage by a different mechanism that the US one.
I guess I don't understand your point. Are you saying that people who are as smart and reliable as your average high school junior should get paid a lot?
Are you saying that small companies making niche products can easily hire all unemployed people at high wages?
I think US companies can definitely manufacture products here and pay a pretty good (but not great) wage. We should be making it easier for US companies to do it profitably by eliminating government roadblocks.
But so many people (including many of the loudest on Slashdot) hate US companies and won't support anything that might help them, even (especially?) if they want to employ manufacturing workers here.
Fuck you and your implication that the unemployed are lazy and would rather collect on their insurance instead of work again. Your response would have been better without your editorial.
* Increase average wages to better keep pace with the inflation of housing costs.
* Set a maximum prices for homes to bring them down into the realm of attainability regardless of income level.
* Require builders to set aside 20-40% of the homes / units in a condo for low income earners.
* Encourage renters to base rents on a proportion of the applicants income and provide tax incentives to make up the difference in unit cost.
* Spend the money spent on invading a country for their oil and give everyone a modest 3 bedroom home or condo.
Summary:
- Steal money from employers.
- Steal money from current home owners
- Steal money from builders
- Steal money from rental property owners
- Steal money from a paranoid fantasy world that even the true believers gave up on in 2005. Create land from nowhere and build magic condos on it.
Will the people in power do it, no way in hell.
We agree on this.
I don't agree with everything you did to my list, but you kept the important part: "No we can't."
The workers work voluntarily and can choose their employer, or even choose not to work. This is not slavery.
that explains why they're choosing suicide rather than quitting
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Can you even read? I did say $50k a year (you do have a wife do you not?). I guess I should have said significant other. And yes, you can raise a family with both parents making $24k/year each.
As for your AIG/Moody Warren Buffett rant. You do realize that the top 25% of the the income earners pay over 85% of the taxes. Your income puts you in the bottom 30%, so worry less about what everyone else is paying. It doesn't really affect you since you're never going to pay for any of it.
You could save yourself some embarrassment if you didn't name your account tom.
Got it, you're one of those "I got mine, sucks to be you, now go fuck off!" types. No sense trying to have a reasonable conversation anymore.
All of those I listed are in the top 10% of the countries, minimum wage wise.
Got it, you're one of those "I got mine, sucks to be you, now go fuck off!" types. No sense trying to have a reasonable conversation anymore.
I'm one of those "stealing is wrong" types. So yeah, since your only ideas are stealing and traveling backward in time, there's not much to talk about.
I guess I should have listed the US in both lists if that would make you feel better. I looked that the top 10% countries, not who pays more/less than the US as where they fall above or below the US isn't a relevant cut off point.
So what you're now claiming is that both parents need to work to maintain any hope in h*** of having any sort of life. Ever cost out how much daycare costs?
Funny how previous generations were able to do it on one income.
As for the whole "top 25% pay over 85% of taxes", again, what sort of problem do you have with people earning enough to get them out of poverty so they can, you know, live better and pay more taxes?
And BTW - the rich aren't paying those taxes - they're paying it out of money they got by NOT paying the underclass a living wage.
What if your employer does not offer it because 20 million under or unemployed will be happy to do your job without it?
Do you personally have $90,000 sitting in the bank. I sure as hell don't. With the average salary being $31,000 it would not be a great exgeration to expect the average citizen to have that too.
This is perfectly on topic with this thread. I am not a socialist at all but explaining the truth. That rate I used is an actual rate as I worked for a contract with a hospital last year for intensive care unit believe it or not.
PS half the people who have to declare bankruptacy due to medical issues have health insurance. These so called death panels do exist in the private sector. You sir will have a rude awakening one of these days and like my example of the person who hated socialism who lost his life savings due to a medical issue that occured after being laid off and he lost his house too. With the bankruptacy he could not even get a car loan without a judge's permission.
Call me a red communist even though I am a conservative all you want! This is one area that the government should get involved in as it is a real problem.
http://saveie6.com/
because you're submitting anonymous, but I hate this sentiment. If it's one thing I've learned, you don't leave anything important to unregulated private industry. Fuck, they couldn't even get SAUSAGE MAKING right, let alone medical care. Leave private industry to itself and all but the super rich get taken advantage of.
Anyway, here we go: You can't make informed healthcare decisions because healthcare as a product is different than the crap Adam Smith was hawking in Wealth of Nations. You don't but it enough and the consequences for purchase are too high. Please read this and the STFUGO. Once again, fuck. Even Steve Jobs with all his money screwed up and bought the wrong product. He realized at the end that that homeopathic junk didn't do anything, but by then he was on the way out the door.
It's just another reason why, for anything really important, capitalism doesn't work. You want capitalism? You can have it for twinkies and video game consoles. Keep your capitalism off my body. It's dirty, and I'll get an infection.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Apple just recently reported on its contractors and sub contractors and sub-sub contractors regarding their human rights policies, and charges. Suicides at FoxConn, and various worker injuries and deaths at Apple direct and subcontract suppliers have made Apple a target for Human Rights campaigners.
Apple just wants dirt cheap workers. And they are willing to sacrifice like Nike, poor publicity, inevitable scandals, huge cultural differences, vast time zone difficulties, and huge lead times in order to get dirt cheap workers. Simple as that.
American workers offer: a US legal system insuring human rights are not violated, no slave labor, proper heath/safety inspections, no hassle for employing companies that kill workers or enslave them, to shave a few pennies off manufacturing. They also offer flexibility, in that most factories are six hours at most away from Cupertino, and many far closer, so execs and engineers can personally visit them and communicate in English what they want. They are also more flexible, with lesser lead times, because they don't have to ship across an Ocean.
BUT American workers cost more. A lot more. They won't work for $1 a day. Like in China. That's why Apple makes everything abroad. In search of dirt cheap labor. Want to stop that? It requires quotas. Hard ones. Import duties, and the like.
Funny how its only stealing when trying to solve social inequality for the average person.
Funny how that totally goes out the window when talking about tax breaks for the rich, or for Companies who offshore everything (try finding anything that doesn't say Made in Someplace Other Than America on it), or when letting Corporations report earnings out of country for goods sold in country to avoid paying taxes, or any other number of instances of Corporate Welfare which steal money out of the economy and society as a whole.
Because in that fantasy world where Corporations always have our best interests at heart its totally okay when rich people steal! You got yours, the system works as advertized, everyone else can go fuck themselves!
> A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, and then each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. 'The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,' says one Apple executive.
One person's "breathtaking" is another person's "appalling".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Funny how people that want to steal can always find some justification or rationalization for it.
Yes barbara, I've raised 2 kids, so I'm quite well aware of how much daycare costs. Don't have parents, neighbors, or other family who can help?
Funny how previous generations were able to do it on one income.
Funny how we aren't living in the same conditions 20 years ago. Odd, my grandparents watched me when I was younger. My grand mother worked the night shift so she could watch me during the day for my parents.
what sort of problem do you have with people earning enough to get them out of poverty so they can, you know, live better and pay more taxes?
I don't have any problem with people making more, if they deserve it. You obviously want to make more, but have no grounds on which to stand for as to why you SHOULD be making more. You can't just keep raising the minimums to help those poor people at the bottom. There will ALWAYS be people at the bottom, ALWAYS. Well, unless everyone in the whole world makes exactly the same amount. Yeah, good luck with that, what a utopia that would be when the lazy dumb asses make the exact same as those who work their asses off.
And BTW - the rich aren't paying those taxes - they're paying it out of money they got by NOT paying the underclass a living wage.
And BTW -- the lazy aren't paying those taxed at all, and they are just jealous little bitches trying to take what they haven't earned.
They are also choosing to emigrate, by the tens of millions, from subsistence farms to factories.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Funny, I was thinking the same thing about you.
ASUS got to the point where they could sell things on their own without a DELL label on it.
This is idiotic. Putting aside the abusive tactics of the lenders and real estate agents who convinced people they could afford the house on an interest-only variable rate loan because "the house will be worth twice as much in a few years!"
Normally, when a borrower defaults and a foreclosure results, the property goes back to the lender at higher worth than it was sold, so there are no costs for you to bear. Thanks to the bubble created by speculators and the lending orgy, those houses are practically worthless because they can't be sold in today's market.
Borrowers didn't create that mess. They didn't ask for layoffs and wage reductions. Stop blaming the victims.
Except I don't want anything stolen from anyone.
Indeed, this isn't slavery.
Slavery is when you do the job because the man you work for owns your very life.
Serfdom is when you do the job because the man you work for owns the fruits of your labor
Unregulated capitalism when you do the job because the man you work for owns the tools you need to produce anything worthwhile to feed yourself.
Either way, though, the end result is that you are basically at the whims of someone else - if they pay you, or otherwise spend money on you (slaves have to be fed and clothed, too), it's only as much as is needed to keep you running. You can't really negotiate for anything more than that.
Am I slave? People in the US work ungodly stupid amounts of hours as well. We get paid more, but in economic terms our "living wage" is a lot different than China's "living wage".
Abuses should be found and stopped, but ask any of the people working for Foxconn if their life is better or worse off because of Foxconn (and by extension Apple), they'll probably say their life is much better with the high-tech manufacturing jobs.
Foxconn, the biggest supplier and manufacturer to apple, as mentioned in the apple executes, was facing a severe moral problem.
Its workers, who made apple products, just committed suicide in series, 18 in 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides
It is just capitalism in its full form.
Yeah, they are.
Works for us. We get shiny, cheap tech toys, and in return they get paper that will ultimately be worth less than the scrap the toys will become.
Many of the people don't want to leave the factories.
Many slaves wouldn't want to leave for Africa, too. Your point being?
So what happens when John Deer moves to Muncie and can make and sell the product cheaper? Everybody buys the cheap product, Caterpillar goes out of business, and the employees make 0.
Corporate greed isn't the only driving force here. Individual greed is a major contributor.
I've never purchased an Apple product for myself. But I bought the wife an ipod, Macbook Pro, Iphone 3, iPad 2 and most recently an iPhone 4S. But I recently told her we are through with retail Apple products. I will use Steve Jobs' argument against him. Apple has made such great products there's no reason to buy any more.
This problem is being corrected by the collapsing housing market, yet people act like lower house prices are a bad thing.
They ARE a bad thing, if you were dumb enough to get yourself saddled with a huge loan during the runup, but there's an easy remedy for that: Stop paying, let the bank bank forclose and eat your losses, take your credit hit, and move on. You even get 2 or 3 years free rent while the bank futzes around.
"If you're able to work at McDonalds, chances are any other average assembly line job is well within your grasp."
The fact is, there is a growing number of people for which nobody has any use at all.
Looks to me like you're a "Gimme mine, because I deserve it" type that can't defend his position and storms off in a huff.
When you take Capitalism and apply it by proxy to a communist workforce you get a form of proxy slavery. Who calls waking up 100s of people in the middle of the night to fix your problems "flexibility"? Someone with a heart of stone. We should have laws not to protect our workers and their very valid rights but to protect these other countries workers from exploitation in order to subvert the rights of local wrokers.
You have children. They make you happy. He has money. That makes him happy.
Yet you envy him, and attack. Why is that?
Yet your words, or lack thereof, certainly implies you do.
For a great example of theft take a look at this and then please tell me oh great and wise Kohath, who seemingly has all the answers and proclaims that you "don't want anything stolen from anyone", how this isn't stealing?
That's why some of us put off pumping out kids and getting into mortgages to acquire the skills that will make us enough to live on.
Others think graduating high school, knocking up their girl, and buying a no money down house qualifies them to receive the American Dream.
Evidence indicates one of these groups are misguided.
I can defend my position just fine thanks but once a person starts equating any possible solution with theft while blatantly ignoring the types of theft that helped cause the problem in the first place, well, there's just no point in talking anymore.
Now we're basically trolling each other because we're bored, or at least I am. I have no clue what Kohath has in this.
I don't suppose anyone noticed that they roused 8,000 workers to be producing, eventually, 10,000 iPhones per day? Why is that? I mean, the 1.25 / iPhones per worker per day? I'll tell you why, it is because they are using people like they use machines.
This is not the American way to produce things. The American way to produce things is to automate the process, and use 250 workers to produce those 10,000 iPhones / day, with the help of computer-controlled machines to do it.
Why don't we do it? It has nothing to do with the American worker. What it has to do with is income taxes and regulations. Income taxes are sabotaging America's ability to compete both at home and abroad, and these income taxes have help in doing this by the over-regulation from the Federal gov't, much of which is from the EPA.
You will note in ANY newspaper description of ANY attempt to build ANYTHING in the USA, there are ALWAYS a phalanx of environmentalists that are against it. And, they usually get their way. That's a big reason why no one wants to even TRY to build here.
If you study the Fair Tax (www.fairtax.org) you find that their research shows that 22% of the selling price of American-manufactured goods is composed of passed-thru income tax expenses incurred by American manufacturers. That's a lot. In contrast, look at the auto industry, where the workers, according to the newspaper reports several years ago when they were going bankrupt it was revealed that these auto workers were costing companies a total of $78 / hr. It only takes 30 - 33 labor hours to build a car in the US, tho, so that is only about $2,500 or so of the selling price that can be attributed to worker expenses. And with 22% of the selling price being taxes, then a $20K car would have about $4,400 of embedded income taxes, a $30K car about $6,600 of embedded income taxes, and, say, a $40K SUV having $8,800 of embedded income taxes.
Put another way, with only 30 hours or so of labor, if they paid the workers $20 / hour more, it would only raise the price of the vehicle $600.
So, really, its not the workers. Its the gov't that's at the bottom of it, and its/our corrosive methodology of collecting taxes.
Fair Tax research also indicates that if the Fair Tax was adopted, and the income taxes totally repealed as called for by the legislation proposing the Fair Tax, there would be an economic expansion of biblical proportions within the USA, and an unemployment rate of 3% within 2 years. 10 - 14 trillion dollars of American money sequestered overseas for the purpose of hiding from the US income taxes would come back home, and the building of factories would begin. 10 - 14 trillion dollars is far beyond any stimulus that the US gov't can approach, but it would be free to America if we were willing to treat our entrepreneurs and businesses right.
Exactly my point, low housing costs are NOT a bad thing. Low costs on things we absolutely need to survive are never a bad thing.
When I'm talking about helping people out with housing costs I'm not even talking about some luxury houses or condos, I'm talking a nice modest place that people will take pride in and work hard to keep nice. Because lets face facts, its really sad that something a person absolutely needs to survive is priced right out of the ability for all but the most wealthy of us to get without going through incredible, and ultimately unnecessary, hardship.
Or an ever better remedy would have been for Obama to let the property values tank. He could have then expropriated the land at the lower value and given the houses back to their owners, while adding its value to their tax bill, and then letting them pay it back over 25 years. In effect he could have let all those people transfer the mortgages from the bank to the public and because, unlike the banks who will use all kinds of creative lobbyist accounting to avoid having to pay the government back the Trillion dollars they were loaned, the homeowners would go to jail if they defaulted on their taxes. We would have been virtually guaranteed to get the money back while helping people out at the same time.
Instead he took the Trillion or so dollars that it probably would have cost and gave it to the thieves and liars who caused the problem in the first place. Then those same thieves and liars turfed the people they duped into the loans in the first place out of their homes, then refused to let them buy them back during the liquidation process. So not only did they steal from the economy, they also stole from the homeowners, and then they stole from the government tax rolls. All kinds of theft there, thefts that were they committed by me would place me in a 4x6 cement room for a few years but when done by the wealthy elites is totally okay and totally not theft.
That sure is a lot of complaining with zero ideas on how to solve anything.
Yours seems to be a common attitude: "No we can't".
Can we build a better factory? Foreman says: "Stop the line once to fix a defect and you're fired."
Can we get cheaper energy? Environmentalists say: "We can get it cleaner."
Can we cut the cost of our insurance? The GOP says: "Not on our watch."
Can we educate our children? The teachers say: "Our students learn Algebra by 6th grade."
Can we cut local taxes? The local government says: "We gave tax breaks to Wal-Mart so they could locate here."
Can we cut crime in the neighborhoods? Community organizers say: "We lost funding for our after school programs"
Can we improve anything? Slashdot says: "And that's why Kohath is trolling on Slashdot."
Thank you for writing the same thing I wanted to write but you beat me to it. Waking up people from dormitories to do some work sounds slavery to me and if companies consider this as a plus point for flexibility then I'm afraid we're going back hundreds of years.
China is heavily regulated and still, in fact, communist at its soul. You cannot start your own business, for example. This greatly limits competition between employers.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
"I am Filipino Systems Engineer"
"4 european countries"
"that is where the job is"
"when I hear statement like this"
"i laugh"
And you idiots would claim to be able to speak English?
Your native language is Tagalog and you know it. Now GTFO.
nurb432 apparently is advocating that all we do is minimal fixing and kick them out, but can't admit it.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Also, people who can't afford to buy health insurance but aren't poor enough to qualify for government-paid health care can buy basic medical treatment just fine. A doctor visit costs a bit less less than two days' pay assuming you're fortunate enough to have a minimum-wage job.
TFTFY.
P.S. YMBGFAP.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
(Pardon me for replying to myself...)
By way of comparison, here in Sweden, a visit to your local Vårdcentral (clinic with 1 or more doctors) will run you SEK150, or roughly US$20. In more realistic terms, you have to work 1-2 hours at the minimum wage here to pay for it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Yes, we call them privatized prisons...
China is heavily regulated and still, in fact, communist at its soul.
It can't be communist unless workers own the factories they work in. In today's China, those factories are all private property - so it's capitalist through and through.
The presence or absence of government regulation of the market, in and of itself, does not define whether the country is capitalist or not. What matters is
You have responsibilities to maintain your investment in your property. But employees can be discarded and replaced at zero cost.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I don't support GE or any of the rest of Obama's corporate cronies. GE is among the worst of them. When GE uses their special relationship with the Obama regime to get subsidy checks and bank bailouts (even though their GE Capital arm didn't technically qualify as a bank -- but hey, playing by the rules is for the little people) it's essentially stealing. When GE uses their NBC networks as a propaganda outlet for Obama, it's corrupt. GE is acting as a criminal organization would act. If they figured out how to do it without technically breaking any laws, that's sad -- in addition to it being despicable.
We need to shrink government so companies like GE can't use government power against the rest of us. And we need to eliminate every subsidy so companies like GE have to earn their money by serving customers, not have it stolen from taxpayers and handed over as a "thank you" gift for the campaign cash and the favorable NBC news coverage.
But if they someday go back to earning their money honestly, I don't want the government stealing (taxing) it from them. Because stealing is wrong. Low levels of taxation to support a few essential services is OK. Looting them to finance government giveaways isn't.
"A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, and then each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames."
If you cant do that, some one overseas will be ready..
My friend, I hate to be the one to tell you this but your pants are already down around your ankles and you are about to take a most unpleasant excursion into what happens to people with unprotected orifices. There are huge forces at work here. Some of those forces have faces, but many of them don't. Greed is a mindless drive. It doesn't look at repercussions. A company makes a financially wise decision for this quarter, sowing the seeds for the destruction of of own middle class market. That's profoundly stupid, but the bean counters can't see the connection between short term choices and long term impacts. You crap into the water and air, and in a hundred year you can't drink or breath... or worse, the climate rolls over and dies and nobody can say for certain it was all that crap, so they just keep on crapping.
That run away locomotive, technology, it has you square in its sights my friend. I may get run over first, but you aren't far behind. What happens when the machines you design today leads to machines who can do your job, or any job cheaper that any human being can do it, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Tell me where your pants are going to be on that fine day. We are in a race to the bottom, with a tiny few who are now at the top. However, even that will collapse. The world is getting very unpredictable, and I would be ever so careful not to cultivate hubris in the face of accelerating change. Now is time for sanity, in world where sanity is quick becoming a rare commodity.
Well, yeah, but unlike more developed countries citizens, my fall will be way shorter. The closer you are to the bottom, the lesser the pain.
I've had shitty jobs in the past and I don't shy away from taking a shitty job again and heavily decreasing my (and my family's) quality of life. It's something I expect to happen, and unlike others, I won't uselessly protest the change, rather understand its inevitability and go with the flow, trying to stay on top of it.
Time shall tell. For now, the difference between us is attitude towards the changing life style.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Of course, one thing you miss is that in the 1970s, most households had a single wage. Since then, dual wage households have grown dramatically, so in theory a dual wage household will be better off as with an average comibined wage of 70,000 the house costs 3.3 times what a person made.
The main thing though, is how is your average wage calculated? Is it the mean then it will be skewed upwards, So, you possibly need to discount the top 10% of earners. to get a fairer refelction of what the average wage is.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
Culturally Germany does have a minimum wage, but it's generally done by collective agreements rather than as a statutory minimum wage, and those agreements are enforceable by law. Italy also uses collective agreements, so if you're ignoring Germany then you should be ignoring Italy too. Irelands minimum wage is fairly low - comparible to the the Netherlands and UKs, so if you're not adding those then you need to take Ireland off that list. Slovakias minimum wage is about 2/3 of Ireland, UK, Holland etc, so you're new list should be
Greece
Portugal
Cyprus
Spain
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
Despite living in the first world I still feel my viewpoint is rooted in the third world.
There's a lot of scorn here for the working conditions at the plant. (12 hour shifts and low wages.) A lot of people conclude that China is a giant plantation.
That's a first world way of digesting the facts of the article. You guys only manage to see how relative to rich world standards, the working conditions are terrible.
However, I think the article shows that China has pulled off an amazing feat. Anybody in China can get a regular wage job, live in a dorm, and save money to send back. No country in the third world can claim to give such an achievement. Not a single country. In all other third world countries, many laborers are outside of the formal economy and must figure ways to eek out from emergency to emergency.
This article shows that China is doing an outstanding job of distributing benefits to the mass of a population living in the third world.
I know I will be dismissed as an apologist but I think the analysis of people here is too limited and doesn't consider a worldview.
Being roused from my sleep in a factory festooned with nets to prevent me from committing suicide would be a close approximation of worker hell. I've got other ethical problems, and don't need to make poor Chinese wage-slaves one of them.
Interesting if true. In case you are wondering; it is not!
The highest minimum wages:
1. Danmark
2. UK
3. Australia
3. Luxembourg
4. Netherlands
5. Ireland
6. Belgium
7. France
8. New Zealand
9. Canada
10. San Marino
11. Switzerland
12. USA
Of these countries only number 5 and 12 have serious problem with the financial crisis. Denmarks biggest problem is that the GDP isn't growing very fast, but when you have on of the highest GDPs in the world it will take a long time of low growth before it will knock it out of the top 1% club of countries.
Yeah, I can imagine Bubba the Auto-Worker assembling cellphones with his vienna-sausage fingers. How many returns and how many scrapped units do you think that approach would create? Not to mention the throughput of 2 cellphones per hour (in between Union-Demanded breaks, of course)
Are you implying that Americans are physically incapable of assembling small electronics, and that Chinese somehow have more nimble fingers? Bullshit.
-- Sent from a computer.
Even in the context of a lower cost of living in China this is slavery.
China now spends more on internal repression and policing than on national defense.
These super profits made by companies like Apple are the proceeds of slavery and theft by proxy not to mention the usage of and low price paid for energy, water and other natural resources and the unpaid costs of pollution remediation, (smugly called "externalities" by economists).
Slavery has not been abolished in the West, merely displaced.
I'd like to see some fascist boss try and get me and 8000 other western workers out of bed for an emergency 12 hour shift with the offer of a cup of tea and a biscuit (ten cents each?). It would cost them a hundred Dollars and "time and a half" the regular pay, minimum.
Apple shareholders should not too happy about this situation because the Chinese workers are fighting back. China had 100,000 social/industrial disputes last year and 20,000 of these had to be put down by the national armed police (PAP) or the army (PLA).
Lastly we international workers promise you that we will expropriate and redistribute ALL this stolen wealth sooner or later, it is just a matter of time.
If Apple want to continue to exist as a US business they had better move back to the states and take a more moderate profit otherwise fewer and fewer Americans will be able to afford to buy their products.
It's all the more disgusting from a company boasting $400,000 profit per employee. It's not like improving working conditions will break their bank, the only reason they exploit other humans like this is pure greedy profit.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
How is it 'private' when private industry cannot create its own entity? Businesses are only created when the government deems it necessary. Businesses are controlled the same way that wheat was controlled. Additionally, many of the factories are government owned.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
It is true. Continue your list to the top 30. Why stop at 12?
This will bring back a resurgence in automated manufacturing. In fact, with the rising cost of wages in China, factories are already exploring this. Automation and robotics aren't going to happen tomorrow. But there are only so many third-world countries where wages are still low. Wages in Vietnam, China and Malaysia are already slowly increasing. There's already movement in the textiles industry to shift capacity from China to Vietnam.
In 50 years all low-cost labor (barring WW3) is going to be expensive.
And when robotics actually reaches the point of replacing factory line workers, then people aren't going to have jobs. This argument, and this essay, in some variation, are going to appear again. It's no longer slavery, it's simply technology making basic labor irrelevant. What then?
I'm surprised no one takes the other side of this argument - the middle class has shifted. No it's not about working a production line, it's about implementing ideas. It's not about avoiding an education and being able to be protected by a union doing menial labor. It needs to be about developing skills in design, implementation and management. Throughout history, these professions have never been obliterated. Take a look at the fashion industry - it has virtually remained unchanged for over 100 years from the top down. The factories are the ones that constantly change location to find lower costs.
Yeah, because I've never been woken up in the middle of the night, without a biscuit OR tea, and faced an 18 hour shift because I was "on call" and a salaried employee.
At least they got the damn biscuit.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Or the alternative, same as Henry Ford did - make a better product, pay better wages, so your work force takes pride in what they're doing, does higher-quality work, and gives feedback on how to improve both the product and production methods rather than just punching the clock. Net result, market share and profit increase. Virtuous cycles work.
comparable to the uk
So, comparable to the second highest in the world? That doesn't make it "fairly low". That makes it one f the highest in the world. Please, it's not hard to look ths stuff up before you say silly things you apparently know nothing about.
Engineering failure meets the success of the slave worker. No one should have to be roused out of bed to retool an assembly line because some bright eyed idiots decided to switch things around at the last minute. Let the product be light, it isn't like people's lives are at stake, just their pride. This really makes me not even want to try apple.
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
Europe is a hell of a lot more worker-conciliatory than America.
And for those two years, you are just praying that you don't get sick.
Put identity in the browser.
It is as simple as that.
That works fine when one of the parents is also a stay-at-home, but not so well when both parents work, or a single-parent scenario.
So - the math. Assume that the grandparents both have to work until they're 65, because after all, on $24k a year, they're not going to be able to raise a family on one paycheck, right?
So, that mean that they're only available to "watch the kids" starting when they turn 65. With me so far?
Now that means that their children need to plan things so that they don't start producing kids until the day their own parents retire. Someone who was born when their parents were 25 would have to wait until 39 for her first pregnancy - and that would be high risk. So, let's assume that they picked better parents (so to speak), and their parents split it right down the middle, they had their first kid at 33, a second one a couple of years later, and maybe a 3rd a couple of years after that. 33, 35, and 37.
So, our current mom does the same - 3 kids - at 33, 35 and 37.
The grandparents will be watching those kids - from the time they're 65 to the time the mother retires, at 65, when they will be 83. Do you really believe that someone at, say, 79, can handle 3 teenagers day in, day out?
Of course, this assumes that the grand-parents are still alive at that point. My parents died before they hit 60, which just goes to show you can't assume that everyone is average, any more than you can say that, with one foot in a bucket of boiling water and one in a bucket of ice, you should be, on average, comfortable.
Now, stuff happens. Having wasted the last few decades writing code (not every dot-com was a success, and for every person who made money, you'll find several who ended up getting burned doing long hours for, in the end, nothing), in the end I would have been better off doing almost anything else, since the long hours and stress would probably have not caused the high blood pressure that cause the blood vessels in my retina to burst. The end result is that nobody wants to hire a programmer, no matter how good in the past, if they can't see what they're doing 8 hours a day, every day.
Sometimes, it boils down to doing the best you can with what you have, and either you get the breaks, or you get broken. It's the way things are. Studies have shown that we have been lied to about hard work being the path to success - the ONE factor that contributes most is having the right connections. Not hard work, not education - connections. In other words, "picking the right parents."
There will be exceptions, but they are few and far between.
When you employ slave labor it's pretty easy to make cheap products. Make the same products in Germany then talk to me how uncompetitive American labor force is....but forcing workers to work 12 hours shifts at slave wages in a Communist country where workers go to jail is the forma union and factories can pollute the environment....not exactly Apple and Oranges comparison comrade.
So 8,000 workers 12 hour shift.10,000 phones made per day. Assuming 3,000 of the workers are management and do not make phones. that 5,000 workers make 10,000 phones per day. Wow, no wounder it can't be done in the US.
I was recently insured in the U.S. under a very nice system. I was injured and my symptoms worsened, so I was sent for an MRI, which confirmed the terrible news they suspected (severe L5/S1 nerve impingement).
Unfortunately, I was actually injured at work, so I was required to restart the whole process two days later with the workplace injury insurance. The doctors wanted to claim that I had a muscle strain and "wait and see," despite my symptoms being the same, until I went to get a hard copy of the MRI from the previous visit. Still, even with the proof, they wanted to wait twelve weeks for improvement for me to have surgery that the original hospital was ready to put me through to immediately. The result? That nerve is permanently damaged, and I don't have full use of or feeling in that leg.
That was just the difference between top-tier and lower-tier insurance. I can't imagine the lack of treatment I would have gotten had I been uninsured.
Put identity in the browser.
It's not hard. Spend any time working with at a place with a strong union observing stupid union mandated rules. Not all union mandated rules are stupid... but the stupid ones are unbelievably frustrating to deal with. The intelligent rules won't even be noticed. Also, it depends on what you mean by anti-union. I'm not against unions as a concept. I do think closed shop laws are immoral, as are laws about what constitutues an illegal strike and which prevent the hiring of replacement non-union workers.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
In your example you could have had insurance/pay your bills in the first place, so its a non discussion related to the original topic. Try again with a rational argument if you want to continue. If not, then see ya.
And ill say the same thing i did to the last idiot. If you love socialism so much get the hell out of my country. You don't belong here.
"idiot says as idiot does" (paraphrased from Forrest Gump, brighter than you)
I drew up a logical chart of where we are and what the choices are. There are few things I agree with Bush on, especially his "you're either with us or against us" black and white statements, but this is truly one of those cases where I can no longer realistically see anything but one of two outcomes that are viable - either we let people die, or we go with national healthcare.
You may argue the points in the reply to your other post.
There are countries out there that don't care if their citizens die, perhaps you'd like to try one of those? N Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
And we wonder why employee suicide is a real issue in China!
The fact that Apple executives value such absurd levels of service at the cost of people's humanity is sickening.
Then you must also be opposed to closed shop laws, and current us labor law, which prohibit the union and employer from making agreements that they would prefer, and also prevent the employer from firing the union wholesale and replacing every employee if the union strikes.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
You can afford your own house, right? Or at least an apartment? You're not paid a low enough salary that the only way you can survive is to stay in company dormitories and give most of your paycheck back to the company store for little things like rations, right? Do you get vacation time? Do you work six 12 hour days each week?
No, obviously your job is as exploitive as a factory worker job in China.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Can we get cheaper energy? Environmentalists say: "We can get it cleaner."
... and, for the guys making $24,000 a year who are trying to find a way to pay their bills and raise their families, environmentalists say "Let them eat cake!"
First, grandparents shouldn't still be raising their 30-something year old kids, so I'm not sure why you would expect them both to still have full time jobs. My mother is semi-retired, working from home on projects as they come up and as she wants them.
You can do like my grandparents did. My grandmother worked the night shift, and watched both my mothers and her own daughter during the day.
Or you could do like me and my wife did; She took the early shift (5am-2pm). Plenty of time to be home before the kids get out of school.
Or a dozen other scenarios. You just seem to be looking for the perfect world, which is easy. There are solutions; You just don't want to hear them.
...Sold ALL of my furniture and probably 90% of my personal possessions. ... I used the money earned from my yard/ebay sales to pay for gas and 1st month's rent/deposit on a cheap apartment and utils. Total cost to move = $0.
Uh.... No, I think the actual "cost to move" was the price of the gas and 1st month's deposit/deposit.
You're saying that if I cashed in all my stock and did something with it, the cost would be zero. That's nuts. Really dude, learn the meaning of "wealth".
given "a biscuit and a cup of tea" (as though this is some magnificent reward)
I think you're trying to apply US cultural norms here. You should stop that and open your eyes to other cultures. For every Asian family I've ever met (which is a lot, my girlfriend and her friends and their friends, etc.), "breakfast" is not something they really do beyond a cup a tea. The US born and raised kids, yeah, but not the parents who are originally from across the Pacific.
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/11/local/me-goldengate11
Really, seriously, your stupid is showing!!!
We're not talking ~ $50k a year - we're talking $24k a year (after the 50% wage cut). Do you really want to argue that you can raise a family decently on $24k a year? That's not middle class. That's not even "upper lower class". That's pretty much right on the poverty line. That's trailer park. Is that what you think people should aspire to - being fodder for Jerry Springer?
I live on $24k a year in a condo (mortgage, $800/mo) in a real city and I'm not desperate for cash, so you can't generalize that as poverty. I can't afford hookers or blow, though, but if you accept that and don't try to live in midtown Manhattan or spend money on frivolous things you can't afford, you'll be fine. The key is accepting that you'll have to adjust your lifestyle to fit your income.
You obviously don't know what slavery is.
It sounds as if we need to bust up the unions in the USA, where they hinder productivity, and establish them in China, where they are actually *needed* because of deplorable working conditions.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Nowhere did I say anything about parents raising 33-year-old "children".
There's no point discussing this with someone who fails basic math and literacy.
At one time, companies made a point of providing the relevant training and skills so that they had the workforce they wanted. It worked quite well then and would work well today.
US citizens, if provided direct-hire, full-time and well-paid middle-class jobs, they would outshine the world. The problem is that they are too free to object against business. Business hates freedom that it can't control - which is not freedom, but slavery.
You have the mindset that's making things worse in the US - the Southerner's one. Or one that is envious enough to want to tear down the US down to Third World levels.
As for your canard about "competition", it implies a defect that does not exist.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Take a pill dude, it was meant to be humor.
I still want my biscuit.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"Why does Apple hate America."
How many American cities are factory-dormitories where the employees have no rights and kill themselves at an alarming rate when not doing repetitive labor all day?
Oh right, none. We have rights and we try to treat people with dignity -- that's what sets First World countries apart from the Third World.
It's cheaper to make products overseas because you can mistreat workers. I'll gladly pay a premium on goods that were made in the USA, and I do so when I buy goods within reason.
Apple sells overpriced, overhyped junk that was made by people in deplorable conditions. You can't spin it any other way.
The reason that became the thing to do was because after the first suicide or two, companies compensated the families of the workers.
The compensation far exceeded what the worker would get in take-home pay that didn't go towards necessities.
Workers on the brink concluded that they could contribute financially to their families far better by jumping to their deaths. And while suicide is not as historically big in Chinese culture as it is in Japanese, it can still be seen as honourable (helping family in death) rather than an end result of depression like it is in the west.
AFAIK companies have stopped compensating families of workers committing suicide (or at least greatly reduced the amount), to discourage this practice. Doesn't stop them all from happening, but it does remove a strong motivating factor.
It's not the "middle class" that is an inconvenience, it is unskilled or low skill labor. Skills give you leverage. I'm middle class, but I am a highly skilled. I'm doing just fine automating low skill jobs out of existence.
Assume that the grandparents both have to work until they're 65, because after all, on $24k a year, they're not going to be able to raise a family on one paycheck, right?
Your assumption was that both grandparents needed to work until they were 65 because they were raising a family. That would imply that at 64 they were still raising their family. How old do you think a pair of 64 year old's children are if they are still raising them?
I'm sorry if you have difficulty thinking a complete thought that makes sense, and writing it down. Please continue your rant about how evil the world is, and how everyone owes you everything because you're so special.
I don't believe Honda or Toyota have unionized auto plants.
Cheap storage VM.
Apple audits 5% of their suppliers: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/compute/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501832&objectid=10779344
What they are doing is a good thing, but 5% is 5%.
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
And they also have to do other things, like save for their retirement (not very likely on one $24kpa income, is it? between the time their kids leave home and the time they stop working) And eat. And medical bills - which go up, not down, as you get older. The economy has changed - in many ways for the worse - in the last generation - so try to get real, hmmm?
They don't talk about the slavery that it takes for such manufacturing.
The workers live under constant threat, where the company, government, and Apple make sure that workers aren't free. That, and a constant supply of replacements seal their fate as unfree. But feel free to write what you're told by the PRC to shape opinion.
The only good way to fix it is to tariff until they start harmonizing worker conditions to EU standards.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The problem with that is that such "improvements" come at the cost of pulling the US down. All that suggests is that you're trying to put a wedge between the First and Third World's folks.
A lesser evil is still evil - even if it looks shinier than the other. State capitalism only rewards totalitarianism while providing an interface to nations that have the (as viewed by business) encumbrance of worker-side freedoms.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If they want to deal with US customers and not be considered on equal footing with AQ, they can start doing things in the US.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Aside from the rent, that is.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
That's not the case - Apple and other companies do have that option and it is a good thing that they do, because USA is unbearable and nobody should have to be put into a position of hiring an American or a European worker with all the rules, regulations and taxes (including the counterfeiting tax of inflation, that destroys investment capital) present in those systems.
Pardon if you're denied divine right and are required to have some sort of respect for those that aren't business owners. But not everyone is fit to be a business owner, nor should they be consigned to destitution for that specialization.
By hiring a worker in USA or some of Europe the entrepreneur becomes a whipping boy and a slave of the system, the entrepreneur has to be a fool to subject himself to such a stupid predicament.
While making the worker the whipping boy? All you support are totalitarian systems that reduce freedom unless you're a favored entity.
The only thing that governments should do is make sure your kind don't have the option, and have to hire US and EU workers - on the terms of the worker. For as long as your kind refuses balance and nations like China exist.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I didn't miss that, in fact I compared that directly on purpose because that was the whole point of the argument. A single wage earner in 1970 was more than capable of buying a home and supporting their family.
Take a look at what you wrote. Has it sunk in yet? TWO people are now needed to do the same job as ONE only 40 years ago.
While the average price of housing has risen 900+% over that period the average wage has only gone up 50%. We, as a society, have almost the same amount of money to spend but now have to pay a far higher cost in order to attain even the most basic of necessities. Wages aren't keeping up to match the global realities, in order for a single income family to exist the average wage needs to be increased to at least 58K+.
And its not just housing, its food too. Back in the 70's you could walk into the Grocery Store with a hundred bucks and walk out with enough food to feed a family of four for 4 - 6 weeks! Now, you're lucky if a hundred bucks gets you enough food for a week, and that's assuming you eat cheap processed crap because fresh stuff will set you back even more.
Everything is more expensive, not just luxuries, but the money we collectively earn hasn't kept pace with that reality.
That's the problem here. People shouldn't have to work two jobs, or have their kids raised by Day Care so both parents can work, or go into such crushing amounts of debt, just so they can afford basic necessities. Necessities are supposed to be cheap and luxuries are supposed to be for those who can afford a bit more, but now housing is priced like a luxury and due to unending corporate / shareholder greed the wages haven't been keeping pace.
You are correct, I seem to have missed "Or haven't you noticed the increasing trend where families need to have both parents, and sometimes the kids, chipping in to buy a house?" which you put in your orginal comment, for that I apologise.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
Can we then conclude Apple (and probably many companies) have successfully defied the holy trinity law ?
When we pass our buddies on the road, we get to high five with the right hand, the proper hand.
England(can't speak for the UK because I've never been everywhere) uses a weird mixture of both.
Fatties still weigh their arses in stone because that number is lower than when you use kilograms. And a pint is a pint. In daily use the metric system is simply not there. It's all imperial AND not driving on the right side of the road. Doubly screwed, I say.
Up in Scotland it's much the same. People are weighed in Stones, beer is served in pints, spirits are served in millilitres, I can only use celcius for temperature, my grandparents can only use farenheit, distances and heights are in miles, yards, feet and inches. Fuel is sold in litres but we use MPG for fuel efficiency ratings.
Would you be laughing so hard if you were a Philipino seamstress?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
I agree entirely - I'm not US based, I'm in the UK, and I'm also not in the McJob situation, but after I finished uni, I lived with friends for several years because it was cheaper than living on my own (or with just my girlfriend). It was also a lot more fun! Having friends in the same house is fantastic for your social life so I can't understand why more people don't do it. Granted, you need to get in a situation where you have friends who want to live in the same area... Moving in with random people would be a lot riskier. But if you can manage it, it beats living on your own in practically every way! Then, later in life, when you're ready to settle down a bit more and have some money saved up, that's the time to buy a house or flat.
To be honest, I kinda miss the days of living with friends...
I saw your earlier (or at least further up the thread) comment about the guy not being able to get a car without permission from a judge, and thought it was rather odd. Now I get to this post where you say actually the guy can't get a car /loan/ without permission. That's completely different - you can (at least in the UK) buy a car for whatever you want to spend. I know someone who bought a car for £100, for example. Yes, it was ancient. Yes, it only lasted a few months, but I bet on a per-month basis she paid less for it than she would for a newer one.
If you need a car that badly for a job, it's possible to find one that won't break the bank.
Did you read the summary?
That is exactly how it reads to me. Apple Exec: we love it in China because when we needed a change made to our product at the last minute, it was no problem for the foreman to wake up the workers to make the change.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
There is plenty of infrastructure that needs to be replaced or repaired, lets start there before we look at the random holes in the ground.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
If the US starts taking over all these tax havens by surprise, it would be able to put a stop to that.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There. Fixed that formula for you.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
That are highest common denominator.
The mantra should be:
No WTO World Trade Organization (with teeth) without a WLO World Labor rights and Regulations Organization (with teeth)
If you knee-jerk call me a communist for saying that, I'll knee-jerk call you out as a wannabe slave-owner.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Steve Jobs sent out an email telling his employees (I was one at the time) to please vote for Obama, and contributed to the Democratic party directly to get around the donation cap for a presidential campaign.
Steve was very much a Democrat, you need to quit painting him as a Republican merely because you disagreed with his take on economics.
China was granted Most Favored Nation status under Clinton, and continued it under Bush, and now Obama, just so you can't call me as playing favorites.
If this status was revoked, 95% of imports from China would be subject to additional tariffs, which in turn could be linked to pollution controls, Carbon emissions, and labor reforms, which would tend to raise the cost of doing business in China, making it more economical to employ American workers to achieve the same results. See also: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl30225.pdf
The U.S. is pricing itself out of certain types of labor by the artificially depressed costs of doing business elsewhere, including government subsidies. If you actually read the article, then you would have noted that the reason China's factories were able to move so quickly on the glass iPhone screens was that there was immediate Chinese government subsidy for a speculative build-out of the factory.
Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are willing to address the sacred factory cow that's protected by business interests, such as CD and DVD pressing on behalf of RIAA/MPAA member companies -- it's not just Apple. People will pay more for Apple products; they probably wouldn't pay more for another crappy movie retread of a story from the last century whgich had better actors.
-- Terry
the assembly job goes like this: do { a production line moves in front of you; you pick a part; place it on the right place; do one more manual operation; and the line goes on; } while (forever); why would we want jobs like that anyway? even if they were paying u.s. salaries. with today's technology you CAN replace them with robots, it's just that it takes enormous effort to program/build the robots, but at least it's more fun, and we can volunteer undergrad students just like for any other research.
Ehm...where the bloody hell do you get your information from? China is flushed with private businesses, not just the multinationals that's allowed to setup shop but Chinese entrepreneurship have skyrocketed.
The fact that its heavily involved with their own state enterprises does not change that fact.
Its a variation of mixed economy, like every other place on the globe since Mesopotamia.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
You're lying about the $1.20/hour. 1500 RMB is $240/month. That's $8/day, for far more than 8 hours of work per day. Please stop lying.
No lie, just truth - as opposed to your ignorance. Please read this good summary, since I'm pretty sure you cannot read the original Mandarin.
The law is 40 hours per week; overtime (which is readily available all the time) is to be paid at a minimum of 150% of base hourly rate.
There are 4.333 weeks per month, on average - that yields 173 hours per month. At a rate of 1500 RMB per month (minimum wage), that is 8.67 RMB per hour. At the current exchange rate of 6.31 RMB per USD, that is actually $1.37 per hour.
Disclosure: I've lived the majority of my life in China, for the last 7 years. Self-employed engineer/consultant for US, EU, and Chinese companies, and work in the consumer electronics industry (hardware design and manufacturing side of things).
I look forward to your apology.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I've been importing from China since 2005. I visit at least once per year. Sure, you can start a small business, but want to start a factory? Something that makes real money? Good luck with that.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Even IBM goes to lengths to get on the Chinese government's good side.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
'We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making as much money as possible'"
Rochester...thriving? Brain...exploding!
Man, you really need that seminar!
Some lenders are coming after some lendees for losses after foreclosure/short sale, depending on your state. There are 14 "recourse" states where lenders can hold you liable for losses.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Also, you are incorrect since anyone can get care in this nation if they need to. Just drive down to the hospital and they WILL treat you, regardless of your ability to pay. Maybe you wont pay today. But you will. If you own a house, they will get a lien on it. Own a car? They can take that too. If you work, your wages will be garnished. Your credit -- ruined. Wake up dude. You will end up on the street. They will get their money
>Ummm... no. An emergency room is required to stabilize you or transfer you to a more appropriate facility. They are not required to "treat" you. They can, do, and will refuse many life-saving treatments if you can't pay. Just pray you don't get laid off and get cancer a couple of months later, because under the current situation if you do you're screwed.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Prior to the 1990's there wasn't much of a race to the bottom. At least not at this rate.
Clinton signed massive amounts of free trade agreements and in the last 20-25 years our import tariffs are basically set at zero. Free trade has lifted a significant portion of China out of poverty, but it has basically been at the cost of US manufacturing jobs.
Clinton was a pretty smart guy, and I can only assume that he and others that promote free trade knew full well that free trade = draining US wealth and spreading it around the world. I guess they assume that as we lift the standard of living around the world, that eventually things even out and the US might be selling goods in China, and vice versa, at an equal level. To get there though, does require a race to the bottom.
But that race to the bottom is easily prevented by putting in place the tariffs we had in place prior to several administrations worth of 'free trade' agreements. I guess the question everyone should ask is, "Is it worth it?"
I'm not even sure where I stand on the issue.
I kind of feel like tariffs should be in place to reflect our society's morality. Take into account lax environmental laws, worker safety, etc.. and put a price on those externalitites, and then put a tariff in place to account for them. That means that any country that wants to sell in the US, has to act like the US in terms of pollution, safety, worker rights, etc...
And I don't think it should even be up for debate that tariffs should be in place to account for governments who massively subsidize an industry with the obvious intent to undercut the global market. China is doing that with solar panels right now. I heard an npr interview with a US solar panel maker that said that the cost of labor is a small amount of the total cost of solar panel production, but that his company can't compete with Chinese panels because their government directly funds their solar panel companies. That sort of practice just begs for a tariff.
Prior to the 1990's there wasn't much of a race to the bottom. At least not at this rate.
Clinton signed massive amounts of free trade agreements and in the last 20-25 years our import tariffs are basically set at zero. Free trade has lifted a significant portion of China out of poverty, but it has basically been at the cost of US manufacturing jobs.
Clinton was a pretty smart guy, and I can only assume that he and others that promote free trade knew full well that free trade = draining US wealth and spreading it around the world.
I think you give them too much credit, and assume politicians were pulling the strings.
Getting rid of tariffs, was almost certainly a lobby by large corporation that could see the short term gain of reduced labor costs from outsourcing.
Corporations think short term (get the CEO the next bonus, for the next big quarter). China exploited this behavior to do the labor, but also take over much of the technology it builds.
Look what they did with high speed trains, had contracts that insisted on technology sharing, so short term thinking corporations, took the deal and now China has used the technology to steal their business on future contracts around the world.
Rolling this back would be near impossible now, without near worldwide agreements to have something like fair labor tarrifs, that would ensure decent working conditions, and of course tariffs to ballance unfair subsidies.
But it isn't going to happen. The USA is too dependent on China's manufacturing. China holds over a $Trillion in US debt and China keeps dangling the carrot of access to their market and the suckers keep taking the bait.
So essentially, there will be a movement toward equalization, which means we will sink and they will rise, until we meet closer to the middle someday. But that is going to take a long time as they have hundreds of millions of people left to exploit.
Most of the time it is expressed as the median. Mean is higher due to outliers at the high end. In the US, median is about $45k and mean is about $60k.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Luckily, I had a document retention order. The email is retrievable because of a number of court orders regarding certain disputes before the court which were not very narrowly scoped to specifically case-relevant content. All it needs is another court order.
-- Terry
When their method of "going on strike" is threatening to kill themselves, one has to wonder exactly how voluntary it really is.
Do you honestly believe giant megacorporations follow those laws to the letter? Or that your employment situation is at all relevant to Foxconn workers, who have neither the skill nor education to be self-employed or in-demand outside of their bubble world inside the plant?
Basically in the US if you declare bankruptacy under a chapter 13 status the judge can bar you from making any loan at all. You can get a loan but only under his permission until the said agreed upon debt is paid off and he agrees to discharge the bankruptacy.
In the US some places you can get a car for cheap. In bad ecomic areas that got hit in the American housing crises like Florida or Nevada they are expensive. This is because so many people are terrified or can't get any good loans for newer better cars. The increase in demand raises the cost of the lowest quality cars.
http://saveie6.com/
The author of this article has no idea what he's talking about. The core idea of H1B visa is that you need to pay at least as much as the US market price if you want to hire a foreigner. The term is called "prevailing wage", and in Bay Area the prevailing wage for a entry level (foreign) software engineer is over 90k a year. Cheap? I don't think so. Not to mention the enormous amount of hassle/paperwork/legal issues to hire a foreign citizen in any company that is a govt contractor.
My team has doubled its size during the last 2 years. The average salary in this team is a little more than 100k, and guess what, NONE of the new hires are American, simply because NONE of the American candidates are qualified for this job.
Blame your own American ass for not being able to compete with China/India's education systems.