Breaking Apart An iPhone’s Cost
It’s still shocking to see just how little of the profits from an item go towards those who made it. From a piece on the power of transnational corporations, via Reports from the Economic Front:
The production of the iPhone offers one of the best examples of the logic and operation of these transnational corporate controlled cross border production networks.
Not surprisingly, the division of profits, as shown below, reflects the overall hierarchy that structures this and other cross border production networks.
Alabama Looks To Replace Immigrant Workers With Prison Labor
A draconian law passed earlier this year has resulted in an exodus of illegal (and legal) immigrants from Alabama, and as a result, crops are rotting in fields on farms across the state. The solution? A return to chain gang days, reports AFP:
Alabama farmers have proposed using prisoners to work their fields to replace migrants who fled the state after it passed the country’s harshest anti-immigration law, officials said Tuesday.
The Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industry officials met Tuesday in Mobile with farmers to discuss their proposal. A statement by the department said the meeting with the farmers was convened “to help solve the chronic labor shortages created by Alabama’s new immigration law.”
Known as HB56, the new law requires local police to verify the immigration status of anyone they have a “reasonable suspicion” of being in the country illegally.
The law touched off an exodus of mainly Hispanic workers who moved…
South Korean Lawmaker Uses Tear Gas to Protest Free Trade with the U.S. (Video)
Now, why would a member of parliament in South Korea object so strongly to a free trade deal with the United States? Haroon Siddique reports in the Guardian:
An opposition MP set off a teargas canister in the South Korean parliament in a failed attempt to prevent the ruling party passing a free trade deal with the US.
Proponents said the deal, the largest US trade pact since the 1994 North America Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), could increase commerce between the two countries by up to a quarter. But the opposition claims it will harm South Korean interests, putting jobs at risk …
Prisoners Help Build Patriot Missiles
File this in the “in case you missed it” news cycle. Why should the government not hire unemployed Americans to do this …? Noah Shachtman reported back in March on the excellent WIRED’s Danger Room:
This [past] spring, the United Arab Emirates is expected to close a deal for $7 billion dollars’ worth of American arms. Nearly half of the cash will be spent on Patriot missiles, which cost as much as $5.9 million apiece.
But what makes those eye-popping sums even more shocking is that some of the workers manufacturing parts for those Patriot missiles are prisoners, earning as little as 23 cents an hour.
The work is done by Unicor, previously known as Federal Prison Industries. It’s a government-owned corporation, established during the Depression, that employs about 20,000 inmates in 70 prisons to make everything from clothing to office furniture to solar panels to military electronics.
One of the company’s high-tech specialties: Patriot…
Ikea Used Political Prisoners As Slave Labor
Photo: Alexander Kaiser (CC)
Like many global companies mass producing goods, Ikea has a past of unjust labor. The Telegraph reports:
Ikea developed strong links with the communist state in the 1970s, opening a number of manufacturing facilities, one of which, according to Stasi records discovered by German television company WDR, used political prisoners to construct sofas.
The factory in Waldheim stood next to a prison, and inmates were used as unpaid labour, it is claimed. Gaols in the Democratic Republic housed significant numbers of political prisoners, with some estimates indicating they made up at least 20 per cent of the entire prison population.
Quoted in a Stasi file, Ingvar Kamprad, Ikea’s founder, said while he had no official knowledge of the use of prison labour, if it did indeed exist “in the opinion of Ikea it would be in society’s interests.”
[Continues at The Telegraph]
City Introduces “Sex Tax Meters” For Prostitutes
Inspectors may be pulling prostitutes off the streets in Germany. Not because they’re trying to lower crime rate, but because they haven’t been paying their income taxes. Via Reuters:
Prostitutes in the German city of Bonn must carry a ticket purchased from a new parking meter-like machine while working the streets or face hefty fines from tax authorities in a scheme launched on Monday night.
In Germany, ladies of the night pay income tax — the level of which varies from region to region — but compliance is difficult to enforce with women seeking business on the street.
Germany’s first “sex tax meters,” from which prostitutes can purchase a ticket for 6 euros ($8.72) per night, will ensure the tax system is fairly implemented, a city spokeswoman said.
“Inspectors will monitor compliance — not every evening but frequently,” the spokeswoman told Reuters.
[Continues at Reuters]
Foreign Workers In Baghdad Can’t Leave And Can’t Get Paid
Photo: Kjirstin (CC)
The New York Times reports:
For months, they have sat here, half a block from the prime minister’s palace in the Green Zone, essentially captives with little food, drinking water or electricity.
Humble laborers, they had come to Baghdad in January from Eastern Europe and Asia seeking better wages.
They had the important sounding assignment of building a dozen villas to house heads of state for the annual meeting of the Arab League, which was scheduled to take place here.
But the project was halted in April for reasons that are unclear, and a month later, as the Arab Spring rolled on, the Arab League meeting was postponed until next year.
Now the workers — 27 Ukrainians (including a woman), 7 Bulgarians and 1 Nepalese — are marooned here, living in one of the world’s hottest and most inhospitable cities in an abandoned building next to the construction site and lacking the documents they…
Tricked Foreign Students Stage Walkout Of Hershey’s Chocolate Factory
Remember that Simpsons episode in which Bart is conned into becoming a slave on a French grape farm through an “exchange student” program? The New York Times reports:
Hundreds of foreign students, waving their fists and shouting defiantly in many languages, walked off their jobs on Wednesday at a plant here that packs Hershey’s chocolates, saying a summer program that was supposed to be a cultural exchange had instead turned them into underpaid labor.
The students, from countries including China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine, came to the United States through a long-established State Department summer visa program that allows them to work for two months and then travel. They said they were expecting to practice their English, make some money and learn what life is like in the United States.
In a way, they did. About 400 foreign students were put to work lifting heavy boxes and packing Reese’s candies, Kit-Kats and Almond Joys on a…
Major Corporations To Hide Income Disparity
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
A group of 81 major corporations believe that public knowledge of what their CEOs make in respect to the average worker is “useless” information. The Washington Post reports that more than a year ago (H/T Alternet), some of America’s biggest corporate movers and shakers began lobbying Congress to force changes to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, so companies needn’t bother disclose the wage gulf between executives and workers. A House committee approved the bill 33–21.
Rep. Nan A.S. Hayworth (R-NY), who sponsored The Burdensome Data Collection Relief Act (HR1062), said comparing a CEO’s wage to the average worker could “mislead or confuse investors” and that such a comparison “creates heat but sheds no light.” Tim Bartl, senior vice president and general counsel for the Center on Executive Compensation asked “You can already tell where a CEO falls relative to his peers, you can…
The Pentagon’s Invisible Third-World Army
When enlistment is down, what’s the military to do? Outsource. Seventy thousand of the people in the Pentagon’s war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan are not U.S. soldiers, but “third-country nationals” — Filipinos launder our soldiers’ uniforms, Bosnians repair electrical grids, Indians serve up iced lattes. Many say they are being held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by subcontractors who operate outside the law, the New Yorker reports:
In the morning of October 10, 2007, the beauticians boarded their flight to the Emirates. They carried duffelbags full of cosmetics, family photographs, Bibles, floral sarongs. More than half of the women left husbands and children behind. In the rush to depart, none of them examined the fine print on their travel documents: their visas to the Emirates weren’t employment permits but thirty-day travel passes that forbade all work, “paid or unpaid”. And Dubai was just a stopping-off point. They were bound for U.S.…
Anti-Protest Laws Being Pushed Through Egyptian Government
Over 1 million protestors in Tahrir Square demanded the removal of the Mubarak regime on February 8, 2011. Photo: Jonathan Rashad (CC)
Ahram Online reports:
The Egyptian cabinet approved yesterday a decree-law that criminalises strikes, protests, demonstrations and sit-ins that interrupt private or state owned businesses or affect the economy in any way.
The decree-law also assigns severe punishment to those who call for or incite action, with the maximum sentence one year in prison and fines of up to half a million pounds.
The new law, which still needs to be approved by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, will be in force as long as the emergency law is still in force. Egypt has been in a state of emergency since the assassination of former president Anwar Sadat in 1981.
Since former president Hosni Mubarak stepped down on 11 February, Egypt has witnessed escalating nationwide labour strikes and political protests. Amongst those protesting…
Indiana Prosecutor Resigns After Suggesting Staging ‘Fake Attack’ In Wisconsin
Vic Ryckaert and Kevin O’Neal report in the Indianapolis Star:
For the second time, an Indiana public official has lost his job because of provocative comments made about the political brouhaha in Wisconsin.
Carlos F. Lam, a Johnson County deputy prosecutor, resigned Thursday after acknowledging he sent an email last month urging Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to discredit labor union protests by orchestrating a fake assault on himself.
Possibly, Lam suggested, the pretend assailant might even use a firearm.
Lam’s boss, Prosecutor Bradley D. Cooper, accepted the resignation. He called Lam’s Feb. 19 email to Walker a “foolish suggestion.”
On Feb. 23, the Indiana Attorney General’s office fired deputy Atty. Gen. Jeff Cox after he suggested in blog posts and on Twitter that police use live ammunition on protesters who had poured into Wisconsin’s Capitol.
The political fight in Wisconsin erupted when Walker, a Republican, called for eliminating collective bargaining for public employees. That bill passed…
Unpaid Huffington Post Writers May Strike Following $315 Million Sale To AOL
The progressive views of leading liberal website the Huffington Post apparently stop at the office door. When your company is worth $315 million, it’s hard to make excuses for not paying your writers, and so the Newspaper Guild is urging the site’s unpaid bloggers to strike, in a controversy that has gone oddly undermentioned in the left-wing blogosphere. The Wrap reports:
Arianna Huffington scoffed at a group of unpaid Huffington Post contributors that announced on Wednesday they would stop contributing content to the site, weeks after its $315 million sale to AOL was announced.
“The idea of going on strike when no one really notices,” Huffington said. “Go ahead, go on strike.”
The controversy arose after writers for the websites ArtScene and Visual Art Source , which had been contributing content to the Huffington Post for free since 2010, refuse to contribute additional material to the site unless they got paid. They are asking…
Ralph Nader Discusses How The Labor Movement May Start A Revolt
On the Middle East news network Al Jazeera, Ralph Nader suggests that President Obama is not supporting the labor movement and if such ‘games’ continue it may lead to a ‘popular revolt’ in the United States.
Rise Of The Precariat: The New Working Class
British economist Guy Standing has coined the term “precariat” to refer to the fast-growing working-class caste of the 21st century. With labor markets now globalized and “flexiblized,” the risks and uncertainties of capitalism have been transferred almost completely away from capitalists and onto workers. Below, citizens discuss living and working in post-industrial England, where large numbers scrounge to obtain low-wage, unstable jobs.
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The U.S. Government Stops Paying Dead People
The U.S. government sees dead people. Explains a lot. Mark S. Smith writes on the AP via Yahoo News:
Here’s an idea, Uncle Sam: Stop writing checks to dead people.
The government sent benefit checks to 20,000 departed Americans over three years, totaling more than $180 million — a remarkable number that provoked the Obama administration to create a government-wide “do not pay” list as part of its brainstorming for ways to save taxpayer money.
Once the database is up and running, agencies will have to search it before sending out payments. A pre-check check, so to speak.
“We’re making sure that payments no longer go to the deceased — it sounds ridiculous even to say it,” acknowledged Vice President Joe Biden in describing the database.
Also planned for inclusion: contractors who’ve fallen behind in their payments or, even worse, landed in jail, and companies that have been suspended or otherwise deemed ineligible for government…
Adderall Receives Honorary Degree From Harvard
The above headline is from the good folks at The Onion, please read their story here. What is alarming is, if you watch this recent report from 60 Minutes, this really isn’t a joke.
I have to imagine the chemically induced behavior (i.e. “productivity”) makes it way into the workforce, what does this say about the state of America, is this is commonplace among the so-called best and brightest?
Americans, You Have the Worst Quality of Life in the Developed World — By a Wide Margin
Photo: BrokenSphere (CC)
Lance Freeman writes on Escape From America Magazine:
Americans, I have some bad news for you:
You have the worst quality of life in the developed world — by a wide margin.
If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.
I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home. I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.
Consider this, you are the only people in the developed…
Apple iPad-Maker Foxconn Makes Employees Promise Not To Kill Themselves
The Sydney Morning Herald reports:
Apple manufacturer Foxconn was taking extraordinary measures to safeguard its business and workers following a spate of suicides at its sprawling plant in southern China.
Workers have reportedly been told to sign letters promising not to kill themselves and even agree to be institutionalised if they appeared to be in an “abnormal mental or physical state for the protection of myself and others”.
Nets were also reportedly being hung around buildings to deter suicidal employees.
The moves came after a 19-year-old employee fell to his death at the Shenzhen factory — the ninth apparent suicide at the enormous site this year.
The deaths have raised questions about the conditions for millions of factory workers in China, especially at Foxconn, where labour activists and employees say long hours, low pay and high pressure are the norm.
Read More: Sydney Morning Herald
