I gave up eating chicken long ago, due to how they treated the chickens.
Not surprised the cruel, inhumane conditions would spill over to the human workers.
Well, what else are you supposed to eat on a salad?!
Seriously, one disadvantage of becoming vegetarian is you can never order a salad at a restaurant anymore - restaurant salads have more animal products on them than a cheeseburger.
As long as chicken is considered a good “lean protein” and helps people lose weight, we will continue to let chickens and workers be treated like that.
People are selfish jerks.
Of course, I’m one of them, sitting here with my macbook…
Re #21
May be regional, but I have not seen much issue with finding vegetarian offerings including salads at restaurants. Vegan may require more attention, however.
Re #12, #14
Nothing wrong with squat toilets per se. However, the ones in western Europe are likely to have the expected flushing behavior. The ones in China may not.
It isn’t just Apple, what you see is common across the board, if they don’t like in company housing, they are living in
conditions where many people are living in a room, it isn’t all that different than the way many of the guys you see doing day work, from Mexico et al, are living in this country (known as ‘stacking’). Even with the rise in wages in China, it is not even close to approaching what we would consider a ‘living wage’. I will add that it is likely better than they would have faced in the rural areas they likely came from, but one of the most specious defenses I hear about shipping manufacturing to China and the like is it pays “decent wages” and that it isn’t wages, but rather things like taxes, the epa, OSHA, etc that make jobs move overseas…and it isn’t (anyone want proof? Chinese companies are starting to ship jobs to Vietnam and to Africa, because wages, as low as they are, have grown “too much”).
And yes, people are right, even if you buy something made in the US, likely many of the components were made offshore, you will see “assembled in the US, from parts sourced internationally” and the like.
I think with Apple what drives people nuts is that the products are expensive and Apple gives off this kind of New Agey, counterculture kind of feel to it, they talk about how they change the world, how they are transformative, they fight the government over privacy, etc, the Apple devotees love to pretend it is still the infamous “1984” commercial that compared Apple with IBM as big brother, and yet they act like any other corporation. The largest cost on an Iphone/Ipad and Mac by far is not labor, the most expensive part are things like the com chips in the phone, the camera components and such, and Apple’s margins are huge because of the low cost labor. This is true with a lot of industry, being a devotee of the three rail O gauge world of trains (used to be just Lionel, now there are other companies), the stuff is very expensive (typical engines are running up to 1500-2000 bucks for the top of the line, rest are in the many hundreds of dollars, prob 500 on average), and they are all made in China by people making very low wages (and the quality and such of the products are indifferent at best).
The Apple conditions almost look like a palace compared to the report that the HBO Vice series did on workers in Dubai building Trump’s properties there.
http://www.vice.com/read/vice-on-hbo-dubai-workers-trump-international-golf-club
One of the cost pressures faced by employers in the US is the rapid rise of medical care costs, which are much higher in the US than in other rich countries, as well as often being borne directly by the employer. So an employer in the US has likely been looking at rapidly rising costs of employing someone over the recent decade or two, even though the employee may be griping that his/her cash pay is only barely keeping up with inflation over the same period of time.
Or like my nephews recent job, the employer only gives him enough hours to keep him under the ACA required amount for medical insurance.
@ucbalumnus:
If you are talking China, then it doesn’t matter, because the jobs there don’t have medical and other benefits at all, like paid vacation, etc, so it still falls under the rubric of pay (if you look at compensation, with the cost of benefits). If it were medical costs, they could move the jobs to countries where they have single payer insurance, like Canada or UK, which would take out the cost of health insurance, but they don’t because it is the whole shebang that is cheaper. I am not saying that health care costs are not a big problem, they are likely crowding out wage and income growth for many workers, I am saying that moving to China et al is a lot more than that, when you are talking for a manufacturing worker 50c an hour and no benefits (or even 1 dollar an hour), that is a big, big total drop in cost and most of it will be in the base wages at those rates, though I am sure the cost of health insurance makes China more than attractive as well. I have heard people blame ACA for that, and it makes me want to kick them someplace rude, because the cost of health care insurance has been going on for 40 years, ACA didn’t cause it (didn’t help it, but didn’t cause it).
My employer, a small US manufacturing company, recently changed to employees paying 100% of the health insurance premium. Large companies are slower to change, but change they will. The salesmen who run our company are good at feigning concern for production workers but the prevailing feeling is that they should be grateful for the job. Union shops in Chicago are being relocated to the non-union southern states. Even the high margin defense manufacturers have a steady stream of pallets arriving from Asia.
No Apple products in our house (except an old ipod), but there are not any choices left for electronics built by middle class labor either.
I answered that in post #11. Many of the same manufacturers of Apple products also manufacture OEM PCs/PC parts.
For instance, Foxconn parts are used in several lines of Dell notebooks…including their higher-end corporate Latitude/XPS lines. Pegatron produces motherboards and parts for HP and other OEM PC companies. Many of the same companies making Iphones/Ipods are also making Android devices.
Two questions:
- are these conditions better than where they would otherwise be living?
- what is a typical Chinese dormitory like?
Sure… disenfranchised people just like squalor. When they finally become billionaires, they still prefer squalor.
The whole question of squalor-as a neat freak/germaphobe, I notice when stuff isn’t clean or tidy. Squalor is everywhere-I had an acquaintance who was a hoarder, and her house was disgusting. I don’t think she was mentally ill-she just had a different standard of cleanliness than I did.
I think when you’re a middle class American your lens for viewing the world is so distorted. Most of the world is not Mayberry. Mayberry is weird. Those pictures seem pretty typical to a lot of places I’ve visited on the planet.
I think a lot of Americans have their squalor meter skewed. There’s a really good book out there about what it means to be middle class in different countries-I showed it to the girls a while back and it was very eye-opening to just how luxurious middle class is in the US.
It’s called “Material World: A Global Family Portrait”
http://www.amazon.com/Material-World-Global-Family-Portrait/dp/0871564300
Here’s an article about the book with about a dozen photos:
http://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2010/08/10/129113632/picturingpossessions
To me, “squalor” means - filthy, unsanitary, unsafe conditions.
I do think the dorms seem way too crowded for a minimum level of comfort, if they were full, which they likely were.
But, the dorms also look a lot like some first-world hostel bunk rooms, or summer camp cabins.
They seemed clean enough, aside from the mold - which probably grew after the dorms are abandoned.
Or maybe they didn’t.
I am all for workers everywhere having better living conditions than living in a bunkhouse. Ideally, everyone should be able to afford, at the minimum, their own PRIVATE space to live in.
I’m just saying I disagree that “squalid” equals a simple, bare-bones bunkhouse and squat toilets.
Lacking privacy and some measure of comfort? Yes. But squat toilets and bunk houses are not necessarily “squalid”.
If you’ve been to China, these aren’t that different from living conditions elsewhere in the country. Just because they look bad to someone in the west doesn’t mean they look bad to someone from China.
A few years ago I accepted a job assignment in China. The posting was not in Beijing, but in a city where there were not many foreigners. My company had a relocation agent take us around to look at housing to rent. All the houses/flats we visited were built for the Chinese market, because as mentioned earlier, it was a Chinese city with few foreigners. All the properties we saw had modern Western plumbing & kitchens-- nothing really different than what I’d expect in the States, except for one thing: not enough space/rooms for American tastes. We were told the smaller housing square-footage was because of China’s one-child policy. There was no squalor. Ultimately, I turned down the job posting, but the reason sure wasn’t about squalor.
Re: #36
But were the properties shown considered very high end in that city, or were they the kind of places that typical middle income (for that city) residents of that city could afford to live in?
Very likely considering the occupation along with GMT’s foreigner and SES status would have been perceived to have by the company’s Chinese division. Would have been considered exceedingly bad manners in their corporate culture to do otherwise.
Similarly, dorm accommodations for foreign students tend to have much more space and amenities than those given to domestic students. For instance, the study-abroad program I was on assigned 2 students to a room the size of a spacious American double each with its own bathroom with a western style toilet.
Domestic Mainland Chinese students dorm accommodations tend to pack 6-8 undergrads into two rows of bunk beds and a small table in a room the size of a cramped American double. Bathrooms are shared by a floor section of around 8-10 rooms And while there’s likely more grumblings about it now, it was considered “normal” and a “rite of passage” all domestic undergrads in Mainland China had to undergo when I was studying abroad at a Mainland Chinese U in the tail end of the '90s.
@ucbalumnus
Admittedly the housing I was shown was for higher income Chinese (but not wealthy Chinese). The Chinese government-run hotel (for Chinese clientèle) we stayed in in a distant field location had really nice Western-style bathroom fixtures from Toto Japan.