Blog

By Dave Johnson
Fellow, Campaign for America's Future

The “independent” audit of working conditions at Apple’s Chinese manufacturing supply chain is out, and it is not good. Workers are being exploited in ways that violate human rights standards and laws, and letting them get away with this is costing us our own jobs. Apple’s suppliers promise to improve conditions, make workplaces safer, stop forcing such long hours and lift wages. Foxconn even says they’ll start obeying Chinese law — but not until next year! If this really does happen can China keep its competitive advantage?

“Free Trade”

By opening up so-called “free trade” we made democracy a competitive disadvantage. We just let in goods made in places where people have no say, and as a result there is no environmental protection, little worker protection, terrible working conditions, very low wages and terrible exploitation of people. So of course that undercuts goods made where people have a say, and therefore demand better. We made We, the People having a say (democracy) into a competitive disadvantage! Because we make this mistake we lost millions of jobs, tens of thousands of factories, and entire industries. We devastated out not just towns and cities, but entire regions. (See Free Trade Or Democracy, Can’t Have Both.)

Free People Won’t Tolerate That

A recent groundbreaking New York Times story by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work, exposed how workers are treated by Apple’s suppliers. Summary: Steve Jobs told President Obama, “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” because factories in China have people living in crowded dorm rooms where they can be rousted in the middle of the night and made to work 12-14 hour shifts, 7 days a week, standing the whole time, for very little pay, using toxic chemicals, and all kinds of other violations of human rights. Corporations can’t get “performance” and “efficiency” and “productivity” — profits — like that out of free people who have a say, so they move their operations over there and lay off workers and close factories over here. (Important note: it’s not just Apple, Apple is the biggest so the company name is really shorthand for the real culprits: namely, all of them.)

The FLA Report

This NY Times story had quite an impact. Apple was worried that people’s knowledge of their exploitation of workers in China might affect profits. So Apple responded by hiring the Fair Labor Association (FLA), a “labor monitoring group” that has no actual organized labor organization participation, to conduct an audit of working conditions at Apple’s Chinese suppliers. The report found numerous violations of labor standards and even Chinese law. For example, the report found “numerous instances where Foxconn defied industry codes of conduct by having employees work more than 60 hours a week, and sometimes more than 11 days in a row.” In addition, the report “also found that 43 percent of workers had experienced or witnessed accidents, and almost two-thirds said their compensation “does not meet their basic needs.”

TPM: Apple Supplier Foxconn Violated Workers Rights, Audit Finds,

The 60-plus hour work week found at the factories is above both China’s official legal maximum, 49 hours, and the maximum standard allowable by the Fair Labor Association (FLA), the organization that Apple paid to conduct what it said would be an independent audit…. The FLA inspection also revealed that “more than 43 percent of the workers report that they have experienced or witnessed an accident,” and “a considerable number of workers felt generally insecure regarding their health and safety,” especially pertaining to aluminum dust, which caused an explosion at a factory in the city of Chengdu in 2011 that killed four workers and injured 77, as the New York Times reported. (more…)

By Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

The economy added another 227,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported Friday. That’s good news, sort of. It means that the recovery is slowly progressing. At this rate, we will be back to pre-recession employment levels sometime around 2018.

However, this growth in jobs was not enough for wages to keep place with inflation; nor did the unemployment rate drop, but stayed stuck at 8.3 percent. Why? Because folks who had given up have started entering the labor force again, but the percentage of people in the labor force is still two points lower than it was before the recession began. A new study by the Economic Policy Institute reports that earnings declined over the past decade even for college graduates — so much for the education cure.

In short, the recession made a bad problem worse, but the economy on the eve of the recession was nothing to be proud of. Throughout the first decade of the new century, before the recession hit, wages lagged behind living costs for the vast majority of Americans — because those in the top one percent were capturing such a large share of the economy’s total productivity gains.

Some of this trend was the result of globalization undercutting the bargaining power of U.S. workers; some of it resulted from weakened trade unions and minimum wage laws lagging behind inflation.

Flat or declining wages did not result from declining average productivity. So when we finally climb out of this jobs recession, perhaps we can belatedly confront these deeper trends.

I have been writing about the hotel workers union in New York City.

Thanks to an extraordinarily effective union, Local 6 of the hotel and restaurant workers union, nearly every large hotel in Manhattan is unionized, and everyone who works in these hotels, from dishwashers to room cleaners to doormen to banquet waiters earns a middle class wage. The union recently signed a seven year contract giving workers a 27 percent wage.

Local 6 is an exceptionally effective union, and New York is a unique tourist destination. But since the vast majority of jobs in America will soon be service sector jobs, not vulnerable to global competition, there is no good economic reason why they can’t all be middle class jobs. The challenge is political. We as a society simply need to decide, as President Obama famously told “Joe the Plumber,” that we want to “spread the wealth around” rather than having it concentrate at the very top. All service jobs could pay a living wage. How to do that? Unions, wage regulation, progressive taxation, and government using existing powers over contractors that it seldom exercises.

But what about manufacturing? This brings me to the other Jobs of my title, the late Steve Jobs. (more…)

Kathy M. Newman
Center for Working-Class Studies

Last week, a few days before Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer, a friend posted a critique of the Occupy Wall Street protesters on her facebook page, in which she basically slammed the protesters for preaching the gospel of anti-corporatism all the while plunking out tweets and status updates from their Apple computers.  My friend was irritated by the irony: “If you want to change the system,” she wrote, “analyze first the way you live within it.”

I could see her point, but I found myself defending the protesters because they were making me happy.  I loved seeing the creative signs (You Know Things Are Messed Up When Librarians Start Marching), reading about the Human Microphone, and watching as the mainstream media seemed forced against its will to cover the movement.

Then, last Wednesday, October 5^th, two startling things happened.  First, New York unions joined the protesters and swelled their numbers into the many thousands.  Hundreds of new organizations around the world covered the actions and thousands of news articles about the protests appeared on radio, television, newspapers, and online.  On the same day it was announced that legendary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had died, and Apple devotees around the country mourned his passing on facebook and Twitter and by leaving flowers at the door of Apple stores.  Tweets from Occupy Wall Streeters supporters around the globe were mix of “RIP Steve Jobs” and “Occupy Together.”

How can we make sense of these outpourings of spontaneous action, in protesting and in mourning, that have gripped Americans over the last week?

Occupy Wall Street seems to have the most obvious political significance of the two, though the media are struggling to explain it.  The media messages about the protests can be boiled down into three basic narratives:

1)  The movement has no message.  This is a fascinating claim because in the age of instant communication I am not sure that any movement has been able to get its message out more quickly or more clearly.  The message is that 99% of Americans have far too little of the nation’s wealth.  (see Annie Lowrey, here, from Slate, examining the truth behind this claim).  The message is Make Jobs, Not War on Middle, Working Class and Poor.  The message is If I Had a Job I Would Not Be Here.  The message is A Better World is Possible.  True, the movement does not have a list of answerable demands.  But then again, while many have criticized the movement for not having any clear objectives, others have praised it for staying open and flexible.

(more…)

Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Why is the Federal Trade Commission threatening Apple with a possible lawsuit for abusing its economic power, but not even raising an eyebrow about the huge and growing economic (and political) muscle of JP Morgan Chase or any of the other four remaining giant banks on Wall Street?

Our future well-being depends more on people like Steve Jobs who invent real products that can improve our lives, than it does on people like Jamie Dimon who invent financial products that do little other than threaten our economy.

Apple’s supposed sin was to tell software developers that if they want to make apps for iPhones and iPads they have to use Apple programming tools. No more outside tools (like Adobe’s Flash format) that can run on rival devices like Google’s Android phones and RIM’s BlackBerrys.

What’s wrong with that? Apple says it’s necessary to maintain quality. If consumers disagree they can buy platforms elsewhere. Apple was the world’s #3 smartphone supplier in 2009, with 16.2 percent of worldwide market share. RIM was #2, with 18.8 percent. Google isn’t exactly a wallflower. These and other firms are innovating like mad, as are tens of thousands of independent developers. If Apple’s decision reduces the number of future apps that can run on its products, Apple will suffer and presumably change its mind.

On the other hand, the four largest U.S. financial institutions are so big and the rest of the economy so dependent on them that if one of them makes a bad decision it can take us all down. Between them they hold more than $7 trillion in assets, over half the size of the entire U.S. economy.

So why is the FTC nosing around Apple and not around Wall Street? Because the Federal Trade Commission Act allows the agency to stop “unfair methods of competition” almost anywhere in the economy except in the financial sector. Banks are explicitly excluded.

Another reason for financial reform.

And how are we doing on that front? Senate Dems and Republicans have just agreed to jettison a $50 billion fund in the financial reform bill that would have been used to wind down operations of a failing bank. Republicans had created a smokescreen by alleging that the fund could be used for more bailouts. They don’t want the public to see the real problem — that the biggest banks are so big that if one or two gets into trouble, the Fed or the Federal Deposit Insurance Company will almost certainly have to bail them out in order to protect the financial system. And this implicit guarantee allows them to make even riskier bets that generate even bigger profits — enabling them to grow even larger.

The only way to make sure no bank is too big to fail is to ensure no bank is too big. The biggest banks should be broken up. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Ted Kaufman (D-Del) have introduced an amendment that would do exactly that. And a growing number of House members are getting ready to do the same.

Hands off Apple. But cut the big banks down to size.

***

Cross-posted from Robert Reich’s Blog

***

Robert Reich served as the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and now is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book, “Supercapitalism,” is out in paperback. For copies of his articles, books, and public radio commentaries, go to www.robertreich.org.