Reply #14: The baddest Apple in a rotten bunch ...

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The baddest Apple in a rotten bunch

Jason Farbman looks behind the hype about the world's most valuable tech company.

August 17, 2010

Apple CEO Steve JobsApple CEO Steve Jobs

"This don't-be-evil mantra. It's bullshit."
-- Steve Jobs, on Google's informal slogan

"WALL STREET has called the end of an era and the beginning of the next one," proclaimed the New York Times in late May. Apple Computer, widely perceived to be on its financial deathbed as recently as the late 1990s, had become the most valuable tech company in the world, with total outstanding stock worth $222.12 billon.

It was a stunning turnaround for Apple, especially considering that it came during a decade when the U.S. economy wasn't expanding as quickly as in other periods.

So how was this possible?

It was easy to predict how the Times would explain Apple's success. Its permanent entry for Apple on the Times Web site praises "the oracular Silicon Valley company...With its coveted gadgets, Apple has cast something of a spell on both consumers and investors." And indeed, the May article on Apple surging to the top of the high-tech industry heap quoted a number of executives and CEOs who were in unanimous agreement that Apple's rise to the top was due to nonstop innovation and hard work.

As one executive put it, summarizing the attitude of the rest: "Microsoft depends more on maintaining the status quo, while Apple is in a constant battle to one-up itself and create something new."

The narrative was simple, and as old as the free market itself: Apple, down to its last dime, lived up to its slogan to "think different," worked hard and pulled itself up by the bootstraps.

But did Apple really manage to leapfrog the mighty--and ruthless--Microsoft, becoming second only to Exxon-Mobil among all U.S. corporations on the strength of good ideas and work ethic alone?

To get an idea of the real reason why Apple has succeeded, it was only necessary to look below the May article hailing the company's success on the front page of the Times business section. A second article reported on a spate of suicides in some Chinese sweatshops that was drawing attention to working conditions there. The Taiwanese owner of the sweatshops, Foxconn, was a contractor for numerous tech companies: Sony, Nokia, Dell, Hewlett Packard... and Apple.

The Times didn't make the connection between these stories. Between three credited authors and any number of editors, no one at the "newspaper of record" thought to point out that as Apple was taking the Dow by storm, at least 12 workers who make its products have committed suicide this year.

Most of the workers had thrown themselves from the top of the tall dormitories they are forced to live in during their few hours off. As of the end of May, Foxconn had begun to deal with the issue in two cynical ways. It installed nets around the buildings. And it began refusing to pay compensation to families of those who took their own lives--on the grounds, the company said, that this might be encouraging suicides.

All of the workers who committed suicide were between 18 and 24 years old. As Labor Notes reported, the deaths were "the result of 12-hour shifts, alienation from not being allowed to speak to co-workers, and a rapid just-in-time production model that has workers putting in a phone motherboard every seven seconds to meet the global demand for high-priced gadgets."

The first suicide of this year was in January--19-year-old Ma Xiangqian, who had been working seven nights a week for 11 hours at a time "forging plastic and metal into electronic parts amid fumes and dust," the Times reported.

But there was still room for life to get worse. After a run-in with a supervisor, Ma was demoted to cleaning toilets. In the last month of his life, Ma worked 286 hours "including 112 hours of overtime, about three times the legal limit. For all of that, even with extra pay for overtime, he earned the equivalent of $1 an hour."

There are 400,000 other workers on two Foxconn campuses where Ma Xiangqian was driven to kill himself. They are unionized, but as Labor Notes reported, this is essentially meaningless. The head of the union is secretary to the Foxconn CEO.

International outrage since the news broke forced Foxconn to provide several raises, but it's difficult to imagine working conditions at the sweatshops seeing the sort of turnaround that Apple Computer's bottom line has.

Apple's skyrocketing fortunes seem to have carried CEO Steve Jobs further away from reality, too. Incredibly, he has defended conditions at the Foxconn plant. "You go in this place, and it's a factory but, my gosh, they've got restaurants and movie theatres and hospitals and swimming pools," Jobs said. "For a factory, it's pretty nice."

Much more at the link ... http://socialistworker.org/2010/08/17/baddest-apple-of-the-bunch