How the US Lost Out On iPhone Work 1303
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.'"
So, to translate: (Score:5, Insightful)
"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?
Re: (Score:5, Insightful)
The only skill that the US doesn't have that these workers have is being overly pliant [merriam-webster.com]. Businesses hate freedom unless it is solely in the hands of business.
Re:So, to translate: (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a great example, the majority of a population will always be doing relatively unskilled labour ... so this is what the majority has to compete with in a free trade global marketplace. They have simply stopped caring about the opinion of the 99.9%'s to the point where they don't even bother lying about it any more ... which is kind of scary.
Re:So, to translate: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, to translate: (Score:5, Insightful)
Listen to the what the Republican voters are cheering. Gingrich wants adults janitors from school greatly reduced and replaced by poor kids (literally poor kids because they need the on-job education more), and made to clean their schools. During the school day. More well off kids will keep their normal schedules.
Romney wants to drop taxes for companies that can afford sending jobs overseas to 0%. Companies that can't send jobs to China will be taxed at 15%.
Republican state governments have been pushing for public job related union killing bills, and declaring emergency take over of poor towns and cities (including Detroit). Emergency take over meaning they give the power of complete rule to an appointed person. Any voted position is now a figurehead position.
NDAA, SOPA? We are slowly going to become China at this rate.
Re:So, to translate: (Score:5, Interesting)
Only temporarily most likely. The U.S. had company towns and indentured-servitude working conditions as well, at the beginning of its large-scale industrialization in the 1880s. It also had dozens of riots, mass unionization drives, etc., in the same decade, for not coincidental reasons.
China may delay the backlash longer because its authoritarian state suppresses workers' dissent, but I doubt they can maintain those kinds of conditions for that long.
Re:So, to translate: (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree that's true, but it's partly counterbalanced by a different attitude to business as well. In the US, taking on the industrialists in the late 19th century was controversial because it was seen as potentially intruding on free markets, etc. But in China there is no real deep-seated concern for the rights of industrialists, and the interests of stability, "harmonious development", etc. are considered higher. So I think it's comparatively much easier for the government to decide to throw a few industrialists under the bus, if the government feels it's convenient to do so in the interests of social harmony.
Re:So, to translate: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, to translate: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, to translate: (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps that needs to be forced onto Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Perhaps that needs to be forced onto Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Notice that that's working in Brazil: Foxconn is building a manufacturing facility in Brazil to build Apple products for the Brazilian market locally, in order to avoid tariffs.
Why Chinese goods are cheap (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Perhaps that needs to be forced onto Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really true, actually; free trade has lifted at least a billion people in SW Asia from complete dire poverty to being able to have a safe, clean dormitory and a biscuit, with a little additional money to send home. You view that as shitty abuse of humans, which it is. However, for those people, and they are people, the option without free trade is so incredibly horrible that your western mind won't even watch movies that depict it.
Re:Perhaps that needs to be forced onto Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Subsistence farming ain't that bad without overpopulation.
With overpopulation everything will end up bad in the end regardless.
Re:Perhaps that needs to be forced onto Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Free trade fucked America. The rich found a cheat code and won the game.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First, you must have a boat. (Score:4, Insightful)
Straight from the horse's mouth (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
"Not Our Job" (Score:5, Insightful)
'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.
With a little less sugar coating (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What you left out... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Surprise, surprise... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [alien-earth.org] 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.
Re:Surprise, surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [alien-earth.org] around the building to catch the workers trying to commit suicide by jumping off the roof?
The suicide nets were a publicity stunt done to satisfy critics. As for the suicides themselves, China as a country has a suicide rate of 22 per 100,000 persons per year. Foxconn had 17 suicides among its 1 million workers in 2 years. Statistically, publicity seemed to be more of the problem than an actual spike in suicide rates.
The living conditions are bad by Western standards but not so much by Chinese standards. The problem is many here and in print want to apply Western standards to what happens in China without understanding the full scope of the cultural problem. For instance does anyone why Foxconn builds dormitories for their workers? Many of these plants are built in the middle of nowhere where the land and resources were cheap. The towns around these factories do not have enough housing for workers. If the situation was here in America, the company wouldn't care and leave it up to the workers to find their own housing even if it meant that shantytowns were built. In China, a more paternalistic culture, Foxconn built dormitories to attract workers.
Rotten Apple Avarice (Score:5, Interesting)
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."
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
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"?
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because Apple and other top tier companies (Corning is mentioned in the article) had a good experience with overseas manufacturing doesn't mean everyone will. If you're pretty much any business smaller than Apple, you might not get the results you want since they simply may not care about you as much.
The arrogance of the executive (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It's already happening (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:The arrogance of the executive (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I think it's simpler than that... read the bit about yanking workers out of bed at Midnight and having thousands of units produced by morning. Why put up with arrogant workers who think they can sleep until the sun comes up, spend weekends and holidays with their families, and require more than a week's notice to relocate to another town? The "party line" is that China has strict labor laws that would forbid such things, but wink, wink, we can do it if it gets your business.
The United States did this after WWII, and the arrogant Europeans mostly bought our stuff, in part because their countries were decimated, and also in part because Americans worked a little bit harder and cheaper than the Europeans were willing to. China is taking it to the next level, and it's a level I wouldn't want to follow them to. It's very seductive to business, if the U.S. wants to recapture domestic production, we're going to have to do what the Germans do and start paying 3 and 4x as much for our domestically made appliances and be happy doing it because they're of superior quality and using them benefits our countrymen.
Or, we can kiss a couple of million of our children goodbye after 10th grade and ship them off to "trade University" where they'll live, learn and work in a world competitive environment for the next 30-40 years, doing whatever they're told on a moment's notice and getting 2 weeks per year of liberty - like being in the army, but without people shooting at you, and with much lower retirement benefits.
In the "bleeding edge" emerging electronics tech world, Mr. Jobs may have been right, those jobs are gone. If you want ideas transformed from an executive decision to new designs in the hands of millions of consumers in less than 6 months, there's not time for everyone in that supply chain to watch their kids at soccer practice.
Trickle Down (Score:5, Interesting)
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 fans take note (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Flexibility, Diligence and Industrial Skills (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Total Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Problem is, nobody's really at fault (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Welcome to: The race to the bottom. Get used to it (Score:5, Interesting)
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/ [pbs.org]
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.
Re:WTF... (Score:5, Funny)
Better than getting a flogging, which is what the slow ones got!
Re:WTF... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:4, Interesting)
at five times the cost?
Made in the usa means more expensive and lower quality on mass produced goods. On short runs, or one offs the standard is higher but if you need more than 1 million units a quarter USA labor just isn't a good value.
Just remember not many will buy a $3,000 smart phone. Just remember when Apple announced the iPad at $499 every company on the market that was doing the same thing had to shelve all their designs and start over as they were expecting a $999 tablet.
Besides the USA is Capitalism. Capitalism means to exploit the workers for the least amount possible. I don't know why people have such a hard time understanding that Capitalism working means the workers get screwed. it isn't useful to have happy employees.
Prove your absurd prices (Score:4, Informative)
...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.
Re:Prove your absurd prices (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA: "various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward."
Re:Prove your absurd prices (Score:5, Informative)
Any money that stockholders make comes from selling their stock, which means it comes from the next sucker to buy it, NOT the money that Apple is pulling in from sales.
Re:Prove your absurd prices (Score:5, Insightful)
What I find even more disgusting is the following:
We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.
Well apparently corporations are people too. Since when do we, as American people, not have an obligation to solve our problems?
That's the most stupid fucking simplistic sociopathic statement I have ever heard come from a company. It is absolutely obligated to participate with the rest of us in creating a better America and solving our problems.
There you go. The biggest problem with business today. Not just shortsighted and focused on short term profits, but the "Fuck America" attitude as long as it makes them X amount of more profit.
Profit at all costs.
It's possible to run a business where your primary goal is to make a good product, serve the community, and you know, basically not be such sociopathic bastards.
Re:Prove your absurd prices (Score:5, Insightful)
You realize that you are probably typing this screed on a "slave-built good," right?
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry-- this is idiotic. Capitalism's only value is profit. But that does NOT imply that workers get the shaft. Quality control is a very important part of manuacturing, and it is a FACT that workers who care about their work do a better job. This is why the Toyota Production System works. It works in America. You can hardly argue that Toyota is not capitalist.
Waking people up in the middle of the night out of company dorms so they can fix your design errors ain't flexibility-- it's slavery. Arguing that it is "just capitalism" is disingenuous, because capitalism is entirely compatible with happy and prosperous workers.
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Interesting)
Capitalism offers the single motivation of profit. All other motivations must be supplied from outside the marketplace: respect for basic human dignity, restraint of fraud, control of pollution, respect for labor laws, etc... People bring these 'non-profit' motivations with them when working for companies, and we call it psychotic when companies (or CEOs) don't respect such motivations.
Apple is arguing that the profit motive gives them 'no choice' but to manufacture in China, dismissing all other motivations. They leave it to the apologists to argue that the working conditions are fair. Apple then adjusts their demands on Foxconn when the people buying their products are bothered by Apples actions.
They let the profit motive guide their actions, balancing it against all 'non-profit' motivations, to maximize profit.
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides the USA is Capitalism. Capitalism means to exploit the workers for the least amount possible. I don't know why people have such a hard time understanding that Capitalism working means the workers get screwed. it isn't useful to have happy employees.
And thankfully, there are laws which protect workers. Workers are entitled to a minimum wage, limits on working shifts, reasonably safe working conditions and/or appropriate training and equipment when working in unsafe conditions. Workers have the right to form unions.
Sorry if treating people humanely makes your trinkets more expensive. I guess it's easy to distract yourself from how the people who built your iPhone are literally driven to suicide [youtube.com] from their working conditions when you have thousands of 99-cent app downloads and streaming movies anywhere you go. Such great value!
=Smidge=
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism means to exploit the workers for the least amount possible. I don't know why people have such a hard time understanding that Capitalism working means the workers get screwed. it isn't useful to have happy employees.
You're partially correct. Actually, Capitalism means to get anything for the least amount possible. 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, someone in need to buy "work" goes, other things being equal, for the cheap offer rather than the expensive one, also usually not asking, or caring about, the expensive "work vendor" reasons in charging more. You, me, and the ultra-capitalist over there aren't all that different when it comes to wanting to spend less: we all want more of our money left in our pockets so that we can purchase more, not less, things. And in both cases the end result -- that the one charging more gets screwed -- is the same.
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Insightful)
You could always refuse to work for a dirty capitalist.
There are a number of options available to you, including the one where you wake up every day, look for your food that day, acquire it, cook it, and sleep in the shelter you built yourself. That way you aren't a "wage slave" or whatever people call it these days.
Of course, you are neglecting the division of labor that has allowed the modern world to be so prosperous if you do that.
One thing "the workers" don't realize is that life as a business owner really, really sucks unless/until you have "made it".
I'm a small fry engineer at a software company. I _never_ worry about if I am going to make sales numbers this quarter. I _never_ worry about cold-calling customers to drum up business. I _never_ worry about all kinds of things that ultimately determine if the company stays afloat or not, can make payroll or not, etc etc.
I show up, I do what I am good at, and the owner(s) of the company are assuming 100% of the risks. Sure, I am subject to the risk of maybe losing my job, but my nest egg isn't on the line. I am not going gray haired from worrying about how to make the entire company's numbers fit.
People who work for capitalists are also participating in the distribution of labor -- they are often putting most or all of the stress and hardship of really having to fend for ones-self on to somebody else.
My father in law has been in the situation of being a business owner. And my wife recalls periods where her parents had to explain to her that they didn't have enough for anything besides box mac-n-cheese, because dad's company wasn't getting paid. (specifically, customers weren't paying for products/services received)
I never worry about whether or not my customers pay my employer. I am sure there is a team somewhere that deals with that so I don't have to.
For most people, having a place where they go every day, show up, and do what they're told, and in exchange they get paid, is a much better deal than what they could otherwise get. They risk losing their job; but fundamentally their employment is not directly tied to the performance of the company. If/when it inevitably tanks, the employee can shift to some other employer. Meanwhile the owner of a failed business has probably lost his health, family, etc.
All that said, it seems that the publicly traded company in the US has allowed the basic capitalist ideal to be grossly perverted. The captains of the company no longer place their personal fortunes on the line; everyone now speculates with others' money. Larger Corporations now have departments that specialize in government influence and rent seeking.
But that aside, your basic problem with capitalism is unsound. There appear to be people with lots of ideas and the acumen for taking risk, and who have bigger goals than what they may personally acomplish. And there are other people who, for whatever reason, don't have the inclination, motivation, or perhaps talent for these things. Yet the two are able to work together for mutual benefit. The capitalist needs talented help. The talented help needs financial/social stability, and tasks suited to their interests and expertise.
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know why people have such a hard time understanding that Capitalism working means the workers get screwed. it isn't useful to have happy employees.
In a truly free market, employers would treat their employees well so that they don't go work for their competitors.
To have a free market, however, you need some level of regulation. Otherwise, companies will just merge or collude until there are no competitors and then they can do whatever they damn well please.
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Insightful)
that 23% is also the difference between a successful product line and one shut down.
When your overall margin is 20-30% 23% is a big deal.
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or it might mean the difference between astronomical profits and just profits.
"With an estimated bill of materials between $170 to $220, depending on capacity, the manufacturing margins on the iPhone 4S are roughly 71-73%.
That, Whitmore concludes, "should support attractive corporate margins for AAPL for multiple quarters.""
http://bit.ly/AuL0aT [bit.ly]
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that any one company can outsource everything to a cheaper location and instantly gain a huge competative advantage over their competition. Thats the essence of captialism after all.
However, if more and more companies do the same thing, you reach a point where a certain percentage of employees of the orginal country no longer have enough job security to be able to purchase freely and so cuts back, first on luxary items, then increasingly on essentials.
You are right, Apple, as an individual company is there to make profits and that all it's there to do, but it does look like industry (not just consumer goods, but all industries) as a whole are cutting off the supply of money to it's own customers.
This is not a problem business's solve, it requires a government solution.
The long game of course is to bring developed nations down to the level of the developing nations.
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Insightful)
By that argument, since when does the U.S. have any obligation towards Apple? I'm sure they get hefty tax cuts being here, asking for something in return is just too fucking much?
It's not like Apple went from a garage to the juggernaut it is today overnight. This country facilitated their growth, agreements were made, concessions granted, taxes cut...and now that they've reached the peak of their market share and power, what's the response? "Ha ha, fuck you America, we're building all our shit in China! We have no obligation to you!! But thanks for all the breaks you cut us as we were growing to the point we are today, I guess..."
It was the U.S. that afforded these companies to make their billions, and now that times are tough and we're asking for a little in return, they're all giving us the finger and running like locusts to the next economy to suck off of, and once that economy is all tapped out, they'll just up and move again. If we let them, that is.
A good place to start would be to impose steep tariffs on all imported manufactured goods and use that money to subsidize jobs here in the States. Once they can't bring their crap in from China for nothing, you'll see how fast these factories all start re-opening here, and as far as prices skyrocketing, you know what? It's time to call their bluff because I don't believe for one fucking second that any manufacturer would sabotage their own business by pricing themselves out of the market.
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Insightful)
The study, Apple’s High Effective Tax Rate Obscures Foreign Tax Benefits, shows how tech giant Apple pays low taxes and keeps this fact from public view. Like Google and General Electric—two companies that have been in the news this year because of their aggressive tax planning—Apple takes advantage of lax U.S. tax rules to shift profits out of the United States and greatly reduce its tax bill. But unlike these companies, Apple also takes advantage of flexible accounting rules that allow it to report large U.S. tax expense to shareholders and the public even though those taxes actually have not (and may never be) paid to the IRS.
Source. [taxanalysts.com]
If I, as a private citizen, were to hide taxable income off-shore in order to avoid paying taxes on it, I would be jailed for Income Tax evasion. I guess multi-billion dollar corporations don't have to abide by the same rules us "little people" do.
Here's another article detailing tax breaks given to Apple to establish a server farm in North Carolina. [macobserver.com] Up to $46 million will be saved in taxes. How many employees do you think they will create with that $46 million dollar break? And if the taxes are paying the employees salaries, why the hell doesn't the state just employ them directly and put them to work doing something that benefits the public directly, and not a billion dollar corporation? You hear "Government doesn't create jobs!" rhetorical bullshit constantly, if the government is subsidizing the fucking jobs, and without said subsidies those jobs wouldn't exist, how does that even make logical sense? It seems to me that the government is the only one creating jobs via tax cuts. Problem is the bulk of private sector isn't holding up their end of the bargain and actually hiring people with those breaks, they're pocketing them and blaming them on unfair regulations and other nonsense...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Informative)
If you RTFA the main argument isn't price that's the main advantage of Chinese manufacturing. To Apple it's flexibility and speed that are the main advantages.
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a temporary situation. All the manufacturing demand is already creating a rise in wages in China and other countries. Long term, wages in the US will fall and they'll rise in China until they eventually meet in the middle.
Or you could also take the reverse view that the US and western Europe are the abberation. Most of the world lives in deplorable conditions. Working in a factory in China would be a step up for them. And if you took these manufacturing jobs out of China, what would those people do? They work in these factories because that's the best option they have.
If you really wanted to change things, here's what you do: start a social security type program that gives everyone an investment account. Can't take out capital, but you can receive dividends. You won't see results immediately, but after 50 years, you'll have an entirely different social and economic landscape.
Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. (Score:5, Interesting)
Long term, wages in the US will fall and they'll rise in China until they eventually meet in the middle.
Most of the world lives in deplorable conditions.
There goes everything our (great) grandparents fought for...
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Yeah...but (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: Yeah...but (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re: Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Will you have the same views on your death bed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Yeah...but (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
'Slavery, it gets shit done'
Next question?
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You'll get neither (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I call bull shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
An interesting metric (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yeah...but (Score:5, Informative)
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.
No, it's the problem of so-called "free trade" (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [digitaljournal.com] 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.
Re:No, it's the problem of so-called "free trade" (Score:5, Insightful)
From the New York Times
"Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn't the best financial choice," said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. "That's disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity."
That was never generosity, that was fulfilling a basic social contract.
Last year, [Apple] earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.
And there's really no excuse for not fulfilling that social contract,
other than slightly higher stock prices and executive bonuses.
Re:No, it's the problem of so-called "free trade" (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't expect people to buy your products if the 99% are making poverty-level wages - and that's where we're heading.
I don't own an iPhone, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.