From Market Ticker:
“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”
What Apple (and other companies) want are employees that are housed in dormitories, can be roused at midnight to work a 12-hour shift on demand fueled with only a cup of tea and a ten cent biscuit, paying them $17/day.
THAT is what Apple and these other firms demand.
It is absolutely true that America cannot fill that demand, because at one dollar an hour you can’t manage to put the food on your table for a family of four, say much less pay rent, electricity or gasoline for your car to get there and back!
“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
That’s absolutely true. But America remains a monstrously-large market and America has no obligation to let you bring products into this nation without tariff or impost while you exploit the existence of authoritarian governments and environmental arbitrage.
A 100% tariff on all of Apple’s foreign-produced or assembled products should make the decision easy — is this really about the availability of a workforce, in which case it would not matter to Apple, or is it really about state-sponsored enslavement and exploitation?
Alte
January 22, 2012
Finally someone gets it.
hearthie
January 22, 2012
This is one of the things that ticks me off about illegal immigration (one of the many). Illegal immigrants are used as farmworkers because persons who are here legally aren’t going to put up with being in the hot sun for 12 hours a day without shade or water, while working on a by-piece basis. It was less than 7 years ago when the strawberry fields near me were VERY PROUD of the fact that they got a water station. Those strawberry fields have been open for as long as I’ve been alive. The farm owners say that you have to know what you’re doing to pick without damaging the produce. I’ll grant that… but why then can’t we treat the workers like humans?
“Americans don’t have those skills” seems to often mean “Americans will get OSHA involved”.
Anymouse
January 22, 2012
There is an argument to be made that many Americans are too comfortable. People used to work for 12 hours in the sun without complaint not too long ago.
Columnist
January 23, 2012
Competition in a globalized world. Sadly, workers in the Third World hate workers in the First world, preventing a globalized counter-attack.
David Alexander
January 23, 2012
THAT is what Apple and these other firms demand.
Of course, the downside is that said Foxconn employees with the exception of those who manage and own the firm are incapable of purchasing the phone even at subsidized US prices. The sad part isn’t so much that Foxconn pays so little, but allegedly, they’re considered a good employer by Chinese standards.
BTW, here’s the NY Times article that was the source of your link. FWIW, some have argued that it’s proving what happens when one has state capitalism guiding industrial policy along with the world’s largest supply of engineers and other labourers…
Chris
January 23, 2012
Agree it is plantations — where the term factory was coined (when boiling sugar cane juice in the then English slave colonies of the West Indies)
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/23/apple-supplier-chief-compares-workers-to-animals-company-apologizes/
NJartist49
January 23, 2012
“Captain” Capitalism posted on the same article and I left this comment:
“FTA:
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.’
That is the mark of a Slave Power, not a free society. If you think that it is worthy of emulation then you should be ashamed of yourself.”
And of of course Overseer Capitalism made this comment:
“njartist,
If you would kindly refer me to the part where the laborers had guns pointed to their heads to take these jobs, thereby proving they were slaves, I would appreciate it.”
…
The sheer spiritual nakedness and obtuseness of libertarians and “capitalists” is breathtaking. To believe that slaves in the plantation system have any real choice is utterly depraved – and I use that in a Calvinist manner. To believe that a business owner or the wealthy have no moral obligations to their fellow human beings is equally so.
And these would be plantation overseers are frequently in autoerotic ecstasy in regards to their high IQs; which things are irrelevant – for the most part — in the moral dimension.
NJartist49
January 23, 2012
“There is an argument to be made that many Americans are too comfortable. People used to work for 12 hours in the sun without complaint not too long ago.”
Yes and they sang wonderful gospel songs as they picket that cotton.
Alte
January 23, 2012
If they’re an American company, tax their profits. If they’re a foreign company, tax their imports. If they want to sell their junk here, they play by our rules. They don’t get to turn 200% profits while employing slave labor and trashing the environment.
China has the same policy. They run the game the way they like, and soon Apple is going to have some major low-price competition coming from there. Then they’ll cry about the unfairness of it all. LOL Hypocrites.
Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.”
This is crucial, and it’s something I’ve been harping on for years now. Where manufacturing goes, research and development go. People can’t pretend that they can ship low wage jobs overseas and keep their high wage jobs, as it all eventually ends up overseas. Clustering is important.
For the same reason, you have to keep resource extraction at home.
Alte
January 23, 2012
You didn’t read her whole comment. It wasn’t that the Americans refused to do the 12-hour shift, it was that they refused to do it for starvation wages and without water or breaks.
If you would kindly refer me to the part where the laborers had guns pointed to their heads to take these jobs, thereby proving they were slaves, I would appreciate it.
They’re technically not slaves because every other job they could get would be even worse. So, they’re universally slaves, and they get to chose their masters. Foxconn apparently being one of the more benevolent ones. The point being that Americans shouldn’t have to compete with coolies for products sold in America. Charity begins at home.
NJartist49
January 23, 2012
“They’re technically not slaves because every other job they could get would be even worse. So, they’re universally slaves…”
I think you meant “technically not [privately held] slaves”; baking, boiling or broiling a frog still gives you a cooked, dead frog.
Alte
January 23, 2012
Well, yeah. They’re slaves to communism. The idea that these are free people is ludicrous.
David Alexander
January 23, 2012
If they’re an American company, tax their profits. If they’re a foreign company, tax their imports
But what constitutes an American company and a foreign company? Apple’s an interesting case given that their headquarters are in the United States, but the factories that produce everything are overseas and not owned by them*, but the IP itself can be based off-shore which can leave far less to tax than one would expect, especially if the foreign units leave their money overseas.
*That’s admittedly one of the things that people are not realizing. Unlike GM or other industrial firms which directly employ their employees, Apple basically relies on a series of contractors and subcontractors to do the work of assembling components together. Nobody wants to bother directly employing a huge group of people and the HR headaches that come with that.
David Alexander
January 23, 2012
Where manufacturing goes, research and development go.
A lot of people make the presumption that R&D is simply computer based, but people don’t realize that it’s material science and manufacturing advances at play, and while Chinese engineers have a poor reputation, you can’t disregard that of German, Japanese, and Korean firms. Plus, as some have noted, R&D is an expense that eats away at short-term profits which hurts the share price which is sadly the only usable value of a firm these days…
hearthie
January 23, 2012
And the folks who pick strawberries pay absurd sums to coyotes and THEN get treated worse than slaves, so they’re volunteering for it too. That doesn’t mean that we should be able to look ourselves in the mirror if they don’t have water or shade… or if we decide to spray them with pesticides because they won’t complain. Wrong is wrong.
Same thing goes for the workers in China/other countries. The payment they get for their services is one thing. The way they’re treated is quite another.
Although the Chinese treat their workers worse than we ever could. (I was in China in 1980, and for some reason giving us tours of factories was something they wanted to do, so I have first-hand on this).
Clarence
January 23, 2012
Now, now, Alte.
Don’t get yourself all in a Tizzy!
As “Captain Capitalism” would say, “Supply! Demand! It’s as simple as that!”
In fact any halfway useful capitalist would refuse to play with slave (or if you want to argue some technical point) near slave labor. But that’s what we get for 30 plus y ears of “free” trade.
Steffen
January 23, 2012
It’s also nice to remember that in the U.S. the guiding purpose of our “educational” system is to mold the majority of Americans into useful idiots for the use of the “elites” who would like to be overlords with the same authority as the Chinese government.
It’s only a slim minority of Citizens who even bother with seriously following political events, and fewer still who see the system for the sham it has become.
Stuki
January 23, 2012
There is no ‘universal” slaves. If you are free to walk away, then you are not a slave. Period.
If what these guys have is the best they can get, any “tax this, ban that” policy only results in them being worse off than currently. Hey man, let’s save that nigga from his plantation, so he can head over to Auschwitz instead! Great humanitarian effort, there!
Now, if there are better opportunities available, what about just letting these guys know about them? As in, like, telling them? Or is the Chinese government (I know Apple isn’t) preventing them from communicating with the outside? If the latter, OK, maybe they are covered by some fairly wide definition of slave, but it seems unlikely, given that people from Apple is at a minimum able to talk to some of these guys on occasion.
With us approaching Peak-at least-one-thing-or-another, it is unlikely that the world’s population is sustainable even at current levels. Which means people will starve to death. By the bloody millions or billions. Now, working for some Apple contractor may not be everybody’s dream (it ain’t mine, but I’m a spoiled rich guy), calling someone a slave because they voluntarily choose that over outright starvation, is just silly. (The argument gets even more one sided, if one includes any kind of positive correlation between current job and future job in ones model. Realistically, the fact that these guys have a job paying X today, means their probability of making X+ something tomorrow is higher than if they did not have this job. Which, incidentally is the bane of all conries tring to be “nice” by having a “generous welfare system” or some such nonsense.)
And to imagine things will somehow be better, for anyone other than wannabe protected less-than-competents, by having whatever surplus these guys do produce for their “slave masters”, go towards bombing Iran rather than hookers and blow in Silicon Valley, is even sillier. At least Apple shareholders aren’t the scumbags banning me from buying a decent set of firearms to scare away the tax man with. Or taxing me to the point I cannot afford to buy some I-this-or-useless-that manufactured by some dude next door, rather than by some half starved to death, overworked Chinaman.
For all of Karl’s goodness as a reporter and analyst, he just refuses to get that one. Monetary policy and the fungibility of oil supplies/pointlessness of “securing them” with billion dollar warships are two others of his (very few) myopias.
Walenty Lisek (@aLifeOfTheMind)
January 23, 2012
“To believe that slaves in the plantation system have any real choice is utterly depraved”
It completely blows me away that this kind of thing can happen in a totalitarian communist country like China and then everyone blames *capitalism*. What’s that you say, the means of production are privately owned? In a totalitarian communist country like China nothing is ever really privately owned because there are no absolute human rights.
Now if you want to label what happened in China as a “mercantilism society”, you may be on to something.
bike bubba
January 23, 2012
I’ve been working for companies that manufacture overseas for the past 15 years now, and quite frankly, the reality is that the employees that my companies have been looking for are not the technical wizards. It’s absolutely true that the big draw is pay rates overseas.
Can we please, please, PLEASE abandon the nonsense of GATT and NAFTA (when the table of contents is 400 pages, it’s not about free trade anyways) and start a revenue tariff of 10-15% on everything coming in?
Alte
January 24, 2012
Have you guys seen this? The Economist is twisting itself into pretzels, pretending that the emerging world has developed a new type of economy based on “state capitalism”, instead of just calling it what it is: fascism.
State capitalism is an oxymoron.
http://www.economist.com/node/21543160
Clarence
January 24, 2012
Alte:
They are hardly apologists for it, and I must say that by some strict lasseiz faire idea of pure capitalism you and I are both fascists too, as we see some need for government regulation (‘meddling’) in the economy. No matter what you do, the government always has some effect on business, favoring some over others, which, even indirectly, is fascistic.
People here are very much against abuse of authority. However, it’s often forgotten that withdrawal of authority (refusal to enforce rules, for instance) can be a form of abuse all its own, sort of like parents neglecting their duties to guide or discipline their children.
Clarence
January 24, 2012
Carrying my analogy farther, I’d say that when it comes to international treaties (e.g establishing worker protections and some kind of fair trading field) our government has long been out on a bender while the child starves.
David Alexander
January 24, 2012
you and I are both fascists too
I prefer the term dirigiste. A country like France during the 1960s to 1990s in which the state owned considerable assets is probably the best example of this under a democratic Western regime. Arguably, Japan isn’t dirigiste to the same degree, but the state there did take a heavy role in directing industrial policy.
State capitalism isn’t so much an oxymoron as a inoffensive term that can be described to use the action that can be done under any country. One really can’t call Brazil a fascist state, and ownership of a state owned petroleum firm isn’t evil.
Elspeth
January 24, 2012
I haven’t commented on this because I’ve been kind of ruminating on it. I’m stunned at employees in barracks roused in the middle of the night to make last minute design adjustments. for little more than $1 a day.
I can’t afford an i-phone at present; other priorities not to mention my growing aversion to materialism and her sister technological determinism.
But I poached your entire post Alte for my personal blog. I think the faithful need to be made aware of what it takes to get us our toys on demand.
*sigh*
David Alexander
January 24, 2012
I can’t afford an i-phone at present
You can’t afford the phone or the plan to pay for the phone? FWIW, a lot of people complain more so about the latter than the former, but there are pre-paid options in varying capacities that allow for (slightly) cheaper smartphone plans.
David Alexander
January 24, 2012
I’m stunned at employees in barracks roused in the middle of the night to make last minute design adjustments. for little more than $1 a day.
The sad part is that there are many of my co-ethnics back in Haiti who would kill to work in Foxconn given that their options are begging, and thievery & prostitution, especially in a country where everything is priced in US dollars and eggs now cost a dollar per egg.
Elspeth
January 24, 2012
Technically, I could buy the thing, DA if I was willing to shoot my budget to heck and make the sacrifice, or worse put it on my credit card which is what most people do.
We’re just committed to not buying things simply because they’re the latest and greatest if we don’t need them. The i-phone meets that standard for us. It’s totally different than sacrificing for something we really need.
Any old cell phone works just fine for us, though, and my husband’s job provides him with the newest smart phone. Just not an i-phone. It’s probably manufactured in similar fashion, but he doesn’t pay for it.
hearthie
January 24, 2012
I tend to replace my cell phones when they stop getting good reception… by which time everyone stares and says, “You still have one of *those*?”
It’s a phone. I use it to call people, rarely. I use it to text people, rarely. I keep it in my purse because I want to be available should someone other than me be watching my kids, or (rarely) to echo-locate someone when we’re meeting.
I don’t need it to be a status marker, I need it to work and not unduly annoy me.
Alte
January 24, 2012
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/apple-blows-away-top-and-bottom-line
More here: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/apples-year-end-cash-equivalent-976-billion-makes-it-58th-largest-economy-world
David Alexander
January 24, 2012
I don’t need it to be a status marker, I need it to work and not unduly annoy me.
In my case, it’s not so much that I need it to be show off given that most of the people that I could show it off to already have a smartphone of some type, but I simply like the idea of having phone that can also go on the internet. While it’s not needed, it’s nice to be able to go browse while I’m sitting in my car while my mom shops at Kohl’s or when it’s break time at work. And admittedly, it’s better than trying to look for the dwindling number of unsecured hotspots these days, especially when I’m trying to fire up Google maps to look for something nearby.
Re: Apple
They’re going to hoard that cash, but the management tends to be ultra-paranoid given that during the 1990s, the company basically lived on cash until Steve Jobs came back and saved the company…