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 »
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 »
Poet Laureate Levine: I Do Believe in People
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Introducing the nation’s poet laureate, Philip Levine, yesterday, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka described his poetry as cutting through false language and ”unflinching” in exposing the ”raw realities around us.”
In lifting up the truth in our lives, Trumka said, Levine:
“writes about what it is to be human, which is to say that he writes about labor and dignity and the heart of the human condition.”
Levine, who gave a reading of his poetry at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., is best known for his visceral depictions of working life and his volume, “What Work Is.” He has authored 20 collections of poetry, won a Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, two National Book Critic Circle Awards and received many other honors. He also taught literature and creative writing at California State University, Fresno, for 30 years.
His poems, not easily excerpted, are best read in their entirety, as with his most oft-quoted poem, “What Work Is,” which he read here during the gathering (see video, above). Asked about his source for inspiration during these difficult economic times, Levine offered a sage’s view:
In a way, times have always been hard.
Levine went on to say his inspiration is his memory—of the factory work he experienced in Detroit beginning at age 14 and, most of all, of the people who made those tedious, dirty jobs bearable. The workers who fill his poems carry with them the hope and perseverence that Read the rest of this entry »
Philip Levine: Reflecting the Poet’s Vision of Working in America
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When the nation’s Poet Laureate, Philip Levine, gives a reading of his work tomorrow here at the AFL-CIO, he will recite poems that weave a lyrical web of words around his visceral understanding of the world of work. Levine, whom the Library of Congress named Poet Laureate in May, and who has written of his experiences working in Detroit factories in the post-World War II years, finds his verses especially resonate with America’s workers—and that’s in part because his portrayals are so honest. (To attend the event, which begins at 1 p.m. Nov. 15, RSVP here.)
“I hated many of the jobs I had—they were hard, they were dirty, they were brutal, working lousy hours,” Levine recalls of the time he spent working at forges, on assembly lines and around slag heaps. Yet he also notes:
When I became a union worker, things were a hell of a lot better.
His experiences on the job without a union burned an anger in him so deep that for years he tossed every poem he wrote about that time. Quoting the poet William Wordsworth as saying Read the rest of this entry »
Bad, Bad, Bad Jobs Report: Unemployment at 8.1 Percent
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Stunningly bad news on the nation’s jobless rate today: Unemployment worsened to 8.1 percent in February, from 7.6 percent in January, the highest level in more than a quarter century, according to Labor Department data released today.
We’re now looking at historical comparisons of joblessness not to the bad recession of the Reagan years but to the Depression era. This from Bloomberg:
Employers eliminated 651,000 jobs, the third straight month that losses surpassed 600,000—the first time that’s happened since the data began in 1939.
