Labor Union Blog

Hours after Apple released its first quarter earnings, which showed a mind-blowing 44.7 percent profit, the New York Times published another in a series of articles illustrating some of the reasons behind Apple’s profit margin. Describing the conditions in which Chinese workers assemble iPhones, iPads and a panoply of Apple products, the report states:

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

A separate article details a New York Times survey that found Apple consumers are less likely to worry about the conditions in which products are made.

Over all, 52 percent of the public said it was very important that the products they buy were made in the United States; only 42 percent of owners of Apple products agreed.

Earlier this month, the Fair Labor Association, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending sweatshop conditions in factories worldwide, announced Apple was admitted as a “Participating Company.” That means that Apple promises to clean its supply chains from labor abuses during the coming two years.

The International Metalworkers’ Foundation expresses skepticism that Apple will carry through on it promises.

In fact, if Apple and other companies that outsource their work corrected the massive abuses of workers at their factories overseas, their incentive for shipping jobs from the United States would be greatly reduced.

Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, a national resource center on privatization and responsible contracting, sends us this.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott and the Republican-controlled legislature are moving fast to privatize all 29 prison facilities in 18 counties in southern Florida.

Last year, the GOP prison privatization proposal was ruled unconstitutional because it was wrapped into a budget proposal, a violation of Florida laws that requires policy changes be in separate laws. Tallahassee Judge Jackie Fulford ruled that the lawmakers rushed the process. 

The privatizers aren’t making the same mistake this time. Not only are they proposing to privatize the prisons but they are changing the law to be able to privatize any service as fast, as easily and as secretly as possible. Under the latest proposals, an agency would not have to report its privatization of a program or service until after the contract is signed. And they also would eliminate a current legal requirement to do a cost-benefit analysis before privatizing any government function.

In other words, don’t let the public know what you’re doing and don’t bother to find out the costs.  

Scott, former CEO of hospital giant Columbia/HCA, came into office on a mission to privatize Florida government. Scott left HCA as the company was being investigated for the “biggest Medicare fraud case in U.S. history.”  Columbia/HCA ultimately paid a record $1.7 billion in fines, penalties and damages.

Scott has already proposed privatizing the state’s Medicaid system, state park campgrounds, the state’s three remaining public mental hospitals, three centers for the developmentally disabled and six veterans’ homes. 

The two largest prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut), are poised to strike, in what Judith Greene, director of Justice Strategies calls, “an unprecedented” expansion of the use of private prisons that no other state has undertaken.

GEO has been a consistent force within Florida politics. GEO Group alone gave more than $400,000 to the party in the past election cycle. Geo Group‘s lobbyist, Brian Ballard, hosted Scott at his Tallahassee home to watch the Super Bowl. GEO Group and CCA donated nearly $1 million toward the Scott’s inauguration celebrations.

A much-discussed report in the Sunday New York Times on why iPhones are made in China highlights the transition of Apple guru Steve Jobs who, a few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, bragged it was “a machine that is made in America.” Today, millions of Apple products like iPhones, iPads and Kindles are made in China sweatshops like Foxconn.

So what happened?

In a nutshell, this:

Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul [at a Chinese factory]. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

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.”

China’s use of near-slave labor conditions creates its “competitve edge.” But its advantage is not so much due to lower wages as to speed and turnover—an on-demand supply of workers who are housed little better than assembly parts, stacked in multiple dorm beds per room with no chance to escape.

Yet the New York Times repeats the mantra that corporations don’t create such jobs in the United States because of a “skills shortage.” Economist Clyde Prestowitz takes apart this tired refrain:

The Apple argument is that the U.S. schools and education system are not turning out the kinds of workers with the kinds of skills we need. So, we have no choice but to go overseas. But the truth is more nearly the opposite. It’s because the companies are moving the jobs overseas that no Americans are learning the necessary skills. This is true for two reasons. One is that Americans are generally not stupid and recognize that because of off-shoring there won’t be any of those kinds of jobs and thus there is no sense in learning the skills necessary to do them. The second is that most of this kind of job or skill training occurs on the job, and if there are no jobs then there will be no skills.

Prestowitz applauds President Obama for asserting in his State of the Union address Tuesday night that a U.S. “economy built to last” must have a robust manufacturing base and that corporate tax incentives to offshore jobs must be reversed.

But as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka notes, Obama alone can’t turn around this nation’s economy and create good jobs.

Now it’s time for Congress to stop standing in the way of rebuilding our country and act.

This is a cross-post by Karen Hickey, communications director at the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO.

Amid John Doe investigations into former staff and a recall election imminent, Gov. Walker delivered his second State of the State address last night. In one year in office Gov. Walker has torn our state apart, attacked workers’ rights and dismissed our democracy. As job loss continues to plague Wisconsin, Walker’s actions speak louder than words.

“Gov. Walker lied to the electorate last November, concealing his plans to attack Wisconsin workers and slash funding for local schools and communities. [Last night], his State of the State speech rang hollow to too many Wisconsinites who are living with the everyday realities of the current Wisconsin economy,” said Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO. “Six months of job loss show that Gov. Walker’s policies are not working. It is time to change course, stop rewarding special interest allies at the expense of the working people of Wisconsin, and get Wisconsin back on track.” 

“In the last year Gov. Walker has cost Wisconsin job after job.  First, by rejecting high-speed rail initiatives than by enacting a job-killing budget and attacking the rights of Wisconsin workers,” said Stephanie Bloomingdale, secretary-treasurer of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO. “The people of Wisconsin are smart and see through the rhetoric and half-truths. We look forward to recalling Gov. Walker in the coming months.”

Earlier [yesterday] Wisconsinites throughout out the state gathered in the Senate parlor in the statehouse for the “State of the 99%” to describe what everyday life is really like for ordinary citizens since Gov. Walker took office. 

“I depend on BadgerCare to keep my 12-year-old twins healthy,” said Catherine Capellaro, in Madison, who is concerned about the pending cuts leveled at the program. “I’m dismayed that Gov. Walker rewards those already at the top by taking from those who have so little.”

On Jan. 17 more than 1 million signatures to recall Gov. Walker were delivered to the Government Accountability Board. Currently the signatures are in the process of being certified.

Today, 285 Brooklyn-based Cablevision workers—the Cablevision 99%—will vote in a election for union representation.

According to the New York State AFL-CIO,

the workers have withstood a blistering assault on their right to form a union. Rather than coming to the table and discussing the merits of union representation in the open, Cablevision management is truly taking the low road, by pressuring workers with misinformation in endless “captive audience meetings.”

Despite this enormous pressure from the management 1 percent, the Cablevision 99% have been standing strong.

Check out the workers’ powerful video here. Then follow the directions on the action page to e-mail Cablevision management and let them know their workers have the right to organize free from harassment and intimidation.

According to their website,

While the 99% at Cablevision are trying to make ends meet, the top six executives raked in $75 million in 2010 and the company pulled in $361 million in profits. Cablevision’s Brooklyn workers are tired of their poor working conditions, lousy healthcare coverage and sham retirement plans.  Cablevision’s workers are demanding the right to join a union and negotiate a fair contract that will provide the job security and compensation necessary to support their families.

Cablevision workers have the right to decide for themselves whether a union is the best way to bring about a safer work environment, better health care, a more secure retirement and salaries that allow them to support their families. It is morally wrong to force workers to run a gauntlet of intimidation and misinformation simply because they seek to exercise their democratic right to have a voice at work and to achieve a measure of equity and dignity on the job.

Moments ago, the Indiana state House passed a “right to work” for less bill by 55 to 41. The issue now moves to the state Senate, where it’s expected to be taken up and voted on next week. The Senate previously passed a different version of the bill.

Working Hoosiers by the thousands have been rallying in opposition to “right to work” for less each day and plan to keep it up as Gov. Mitch Daniels and his Republican statehouse colleagues push to ram through the measure.

Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma and Gov. Daniels have been ramming the so-called right to work bill through even after the voters have made clear that they want a public referendum on the controversial anti-worker measure. Only one-third of Indiana voters favor passing the RTW for less law and a whopping 69 percent of Hoosier voters say that the Indiana General Assembly should slow down the process to allow more debate. An overwhelming 71 percent of respondents want to give voters—not the legislature—the final say on this controversial legislation.

Follow all the action at #inunion.

Donna Gratehouse, who blogs at DemocraticDiva and elsewhere on all things Arizona, sends us this.

Hundreds of high school students walked out of their Tucson, Ariz., schools Monday in a coordinated protest against the banishment of the district’s acclaimed Mexican American Studies program. This from Common Dreams:

In recent days, administrators and board members have issued a series of conflicting and inaccurate statements and carried out the extreme actions of confiscating books in front of children.

Last week, a recently hired assistant superintendent from Texas told Tuscon students to “go to Mexico” to study their history–nevermind that most of their families have been in the United States for decades.

If you are not familiar with the Tucson Mexican American Studies saga, Sunday’s New York Times
editorial summarizes the current situation nicely and says in part:

The Tucson Unified School District has dismantled its Mexican-American studies program, packed away its offending books, shuttled its students into other classes. It was blackmailed into doing so: keeping the program would have meant losing more than $14 million in state funding. It was a blunt-force victory for the Arizona school superintendent, John Huppenthal, who has spent years crusading against ethnic-studies programs he claims are “brainwashing” children into thinking that Latinos have been victims of white oppression.

More background and a disclosure: I ran (sadly, unsuccessfully) against John Huppenthal for State Senate in 2006. That was also the year Republican Tom Horne was reelected to his second term as Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction. Killing the Mexican American Studies program – often referred to as MAS or “ethnic studies” – was really Horne’s crusade from the beginning.

It all started in 2006, when famed labor organizer Dolores Huerta addressed a Tucson high school assembly. Huerta is known for being feisty and pulling no punches – ideal qualities for a labor organizer – and in her characteristic style at the assembly she made the blunt observation that “Republicans hate Latinos.”

Horne got wind of it, took umbrage, and sent Deputy Superintendent Margaret Garcia-Dugan, a Republican, to address the students and refute Huerta’s statement. Dugan was booed and some students turned their back on her. Superintendent Horne took even bigger umbrage at that. Rather than chalking it up to typical teenage recalcitrance and calling for disciplinary action of individual students if necessary, he decided that Tucson’s MAS program was to blame and that it needed to be dismantled. He enlisted Huppenthal and other eager Republican legislators in the effort.

Huppenthal was elected school superintendent in 2010, after campaigning heavily on a “stop La Raza” slogan in Anglo conservative Greater Phoenix communities hundreds of miles away from the Tucson schools where MAS is taught. Republicans swept every statewide office in the state in that election, in a result that could be attributed partly to the “tea party” momentum but mostly to SB1070 and relentless anti-immigrant rhetoric. Huppenthal won his race and Horne was elected Arizona attorney general. The two men got immediately began implementing their plan to eliminate that dastardly ethnic studies program. The law prohibits teaching that “promotes resentment” and that doesn’t treat students as individuals. But it stems from one man’s personal greivance and his assumption that Latino students are all alike. Ironic, to say the least.

Meanwhile, Arizona State Representative Terri Proud, a tea party freshman, just introduced a bill that
would allow Arizona public schools to teach an elective course about how the Bible and “Biblical principles” influenced Western civilization and American democracy. I guess there’s no worry about alienating students of other religions with that.

Whether or not the Tucson MAS issue, in itself, is important to you, everyone should be concerned about the disdain for education and a free flow of ideas displayed by Huppenthal, Horne, the Arizona Legislature, and Gov. Jan Brewer (R), who signed the law last year. Labor advocates should be especially alert to these heavy-handed attempts to censor education in the name of preventing “resentment” over
injustice. One can easily imagine how programs that teach about the labor movement and the brutality that labor organizers and striking workers experienced would be found unacceptable by self-appointed thought police like orne and Huppenthal.

More than 300 scientists, doctors and workplace safety experts are asking President Obama to step in to speed much-needed protections against worker exposure to crystalline silica.

They signed a letter to the president today, urging him to direct the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to complete its review of a proposed rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) on silica dust.

Some 1.7 million workers are exposed to crystalline silica, which kills some 200 workers each year and causes new cases of silicosis in as many as 7,300 workers, mostly in the construction field. Silicosis is incurable but preventable.

Says Leonard Serafin, a former railroad worker from California:

Every day I struggle to do activities because of my condition. I want to see that other people are protected from this dust—it’s not fair to expose people to something this dangerous when they can be protected.

OMB should have completed its review of the proposed rules within 90 days, but has delayed for nearly a year. The letter notes that OMB staff has hosted at least nine private meetings on the rules, most of which involved representatives of companies with a direct financial stake in their outcome.

Stronger worker protections from silica  are a priority for the AFL-CIO, the Building and Construction Trades Department and many unions, who have been pushing for improved standards for years. This current rule has been in development for 14 years, according to a release from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Every day the rules are delayed, more workers are at risk.

Read more in this report from Huffington Post.

Thousands of working Hoosiers are chanting, “No Right to Work,” while the Indiana House sets to vote on passage of a “right to work” for less bill that will lower wages for the state’s working people.

Listen to the debate here.

Indiana’s Gov. Mitch Daniels, who gave the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, represents all too well the sad decline of the national Republican Party. As suggested by the Twitter hashtag #MitchFail, Daniels was an improbably bad choice to represent a party already facing questions about its commitment to the 99 percent. (Feel free to post a message to Daniels at his Facebook page: www.facebook.com/mymanmitchfans .)

In his rebuttal, Daniels had the audacity to claim the mantle of people’s champion—this from the man who said he was against the “right to work” for less before he was pushing it armed with lies and ruthlessly anti-democratic tactics. This from the political party fighting Obama’s plan to address the deficit by raising taxes on retired financiers like Mitt Romney, who pay less in taxes than most firefighters, bricklayers, teachers and nurses.

Inconsistency and numbers not adding up is nothing new for Daniels, who failed miserably as George W. Bush’s budget director for the first 2.5 years of Bush’s presidency, which had massive tax cuts for the rich as its No. 1 domestic priority. And Daniels’ concern for working people is more than a little bit ironic in light of his record as governor of Indiana, which has included taking away the right in 2005 of  public employees to collectively bargain.

Today, Daniels has entered the national stage as an angry opponent of workers acting collectively. He may have seemed mild-mannered in a speech well-received by right-wing pundits, but that manner is belied by his efforts to shut down the basic institutions of democracy in Indiana.  Daniels, a lame-duck governor who seems to be spending a lot more time thinking about Washington than about getting Hoosiers back to work, ought to follow the lead of President Obama and listen to working people rather than CEOs.