250,000 Sign Petition to Apple to End Slave Conditions at Its Suppliers
Outraged at the inhumane treatment of workers in China who make iPads, iPhones and other Apple products, protesters visited a half-dozen Apple stores around the world yesterday to deliver petitions calling for reforms in the working conditions at factories run by Apple’s suppliers, accroding to Democracy Now!
A demonstration at Apple’s Grand Central Terminal store in New York City drew a dozen people, who peacefully handed over a petition with 250,000 signatures to an Apple store manager. Shelby Knox, the director for Change.org, led the effort to collect the signatures.
Knox and New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, who helped break the story about the horrific conditions involved in producing the world’s most popular products, spoke today with Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. Also on the show: Mike Daisey, whose one-man play, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” is based partly on his visits to Apple’s Chinese factories and his interviews with the workers there. Daisey pointed out one of the key reasons the ability of Apple suppliers like Foxconn to institute slave-like working conditions–lack of a free labor movement. Read the rest of this entry »
iSlaves: Forced Labor Key to Apple Profits
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More horrors out now from the Chinese serf-labor system involved in creating Apple products like iPads, iPhones and Kindles. It turns out many of the workers churning out millions of the devices in unendurable conditions at Foxconn and other factories are also forced laborers as young as 16.
The Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) says, “Legions of vocational and university students, some as young as 16, are forced to take months-long “internships” in Foxconn’s mainland China factories assembling Apple products,” according to Alternet. One study found in some Foxconn factories, which employ 1.3 million people in China, up to 50 percent of the workforce were students.
SACOM and others report that schools teaching journalism, hotel management and nursing threatened students with failure if they did not take a factory position. The Chinese government-owned Global Times noted that “automotive majors at a vocational school in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan, were also forced to serve as interns for Foxconn before they were given their diplomas.
Apple’s formula for mammoth profits, which topped $13 billion last quarter, depends upon a steady supply of forced laborers who are put through a torturous training to accustom them to the factory working conditions. Read the rest of this entry »
China’s Unfair Trade Puts U.S. Auto Parts Jobs at Risk
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More than 1.6 million American jobs in the nation’s auto supply chain are at risk unless China’s illegal trade practices are curtailed, according to three new reports released today. In a conference call with reporters this afternoon, United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard said:
China is cheating unmercifully in this sector and we are saying to China—and asking our government to stand up to China and say—“enough is enough.” It is time to enforce our trade policies.
Two reports from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and one from Stewart and Stewart, a law firm that has won cases challenging China’s unfair trade practices, detail China’s persistent and growing violations of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and outline plans by China’s government to use these same tactics to boost their auto parts exports even further.
In the past 10 years alone, China’s auto parts exports to the United States have increased by 850 percent, while jobs in the parts industry declined by more than 400,000. Says Scott Paul, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM): Read the rest of this entry »
Apple’s Profit Skyrockets, Workers Die at Its Factories
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Hours after Apple released its first quarter earnings, which showed a mind-blowing 44.7 percent profit, the New York Times published another in a series of articles illustrating some of the reasons behind Apple’s profit margin. Describing the conditions in which Chinese workers assemble iPhones, iPads and a panoply of Apple products, the report states:
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.
More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.
A separate article details a New York Times survey that found Apple consumers are less likely to worry about the conditions in which products are made. Read the rest of this entry »
China’s ‘Competitive Advantage’: Serfdom
A much-discussed report in the Sunday New York Times on why iPhones are made in China highlights the transition of Apple guru Steve Jobs who, a few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, bragged it was “a machine that is made in America.” Today, millions of Apple products like iPhones, iPads and Kindles are made in China sweatshops like Foxconn.
So what happened?
In a nutshell, this:
Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul [at a Chinese factory]. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’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. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
China’s use of near-slave labor conditions creates its “competitve edge.” But its advantage is not so much due to lower wages as to speed and turnover—an on-demand supply of workers who are housed little better than assembly parts, stacked in multiple dorm beds per room with no chance to escape.
Yet the New York Times repeats the mantra that corporations don’t create such jobs in the United States because of a “skills shortage.” Economist Clyde Prestowitz takes apart this tired refrain: Read the rest of this entry »
iPhone Supplier Equates Workers with ‘1 Million Animals’
The horror stories out of China’s mega-sweatshop, Foxconn, just get worse and worse. Foxconn is the employer of hundreds of thousands of workers who make iPhones and other cool gadgets in working conditions so odious the company dorms where they live are now swathed in nets to prevent suicides.
So what does Terry Gou, chairman of Foxconn’s parent company, Hon Hai Precision Industry, have to say? According to the Guardian, Gou told an end of year party, at which the director of Tapei Zoo was asked to share his management techniques:
Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million and as human being are also animals, to manage 1 million animals gives me a headache.
Which Is Better? Prison or Work at China’s Foxconn?
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Stumping for president, Republican candidates have finally figured out that the public cares more about job creation than deficit reduction. But their solutions involve luring corporations back to this country from overseas by eliminating regulatory policies that could make working conditions here a lot more similar to those offshore. A recent Jon Stewart segment shows just what that would entail.
Pointing to recent news reports that describe the slave-like conditions at China’s Foxconn factory, where 800,000 workers make iPhones, iPads, Kindles and most other Apple products, Stewart notes that most Apple products are made in China,
the Communist country where corporations get the respect they deserve.
So, to compete with China, Stewart continues,
we’ve got to make our factories look more like this Foxconn.
At Foxconn, Read the rest of this entry »
Report: China Rigs Subsidies, Manipulates Currency
Dave Johnson, a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, sends us this.
The new U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report on China should be a “wake-up call” for the United States, says Scott Paul, director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM). Click here to read the full report and here for a comprehensive list of the commission’s recommendations beginning on page 355 of the report.
In sum: China is rigging trade using subsidies and currency manipulation, has barriers to bringing in U.S. goods and is forcing American companies to hand over proprietary technology. The result is our huge trade deficit is getting even worse. China also is acting more like it could become a national security threat.
This bipartisan commission was created by Congress in 2000 “to monitor, investigate and submit to Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China and to provide recommendations, where appropriate, to Congress for legislative and administrative action.”
Some key excerpts:
Apple Computer Hoards Cash, Makes Products in Abusive Conditions
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Go to any gathering, and you’ll find nearly every person carrying an iPhone or an iPad, despite the Apple Computer’s dismal record on labor practices. Apple executives must be laughing all the way to the bank — their Swiss bank, that is.
In its fourth quarter earnings report released last week, Apple Computer revealed that 2/3 of its on-hand cash – some $54 billion — is squirreled away outside the boundaries of the United States, presumably to avoid paying its fair share of taxes. In the meantime, reports Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based group, Apple’s major manufacturing contractors routinely subject employees to forced overtime, wage theft and no breaks — and even unprotected exposure to toxins.
Apple, together with rival tech firm Google, have been lobbying for a “tax holiday” that would allow them to bring some of those billions into the U.S. at a lower tax rate, promising that to do so would create jobs. But, as we reported, a similar measure tried in 2004 created few jobs, and instead rewarded companies that had kept their money overseas. Where Apple has created jobs is in China, where the workers who make its slick products are made to work in deplorable conditions. Read the rest of this entry »
House Kills China Currency Bill and Chance to Create U.S. Jobs
House Republicans killed another jobs bill tonight, with nearly all of them casting a vote on a procedural motion that buried the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act (H.R. 639). The bill, which would have held China accountable for its job-killing currency manipulation, was passed last night by the Senate. The motion to bring the bill to the floor was defeated 192-236, with only four Republicans joining 188 Democrats in supporting the move to bring the legislation to a vote.
Had anti-worker Republicans supported the bill, it would have:
- Created at least one million manufacturing jobs in the United States.
- Leveled the playing field for American workers and businesses.
- Enhanced our economic and national security by cutting our trade deficit with China, at no cost to taxpayers.
