Apple comes out and says it

[dreamnightwind]

62. Great article about global capitalism

Apple is used as an example (and they are a perfect example), not as the whole problem, so being hung up on Apple, good or bad, is missing the point.

This long article does a great job of laying out the whole situation. Some of the comments on the Times' site are good too. If anything, I thought the article was too easy on the whole system. Its strength was in painting the picture, its weakness was in interpreting the picture, and there was no attempt to do the analysis of how do we create a better picture in the future. But that's the New York Times for you.

It paints an amazingly dismal reality for the American worker. We're all living it, so no surprise, but it shows that we need radical change, not better management of our current system.

Productivity has never been higher. And, given a company's ability to offshore much of product development and manufacturing, taking advantage of controlled and desperate labor forces overseas, productivity has never been cheaper. Profit margins have probably never been higher. So, the privileged few get richer, the Asians get to live in forced work encampments, and we, if we can get any job that gives us enough money, can buy the products they make. No way is this a workable scenario for the future of this country.

I believe the corporate charter mandates maximizing shareholders' value. There's a real problem with this. What if a company wants to provide good wages, benefits, and good LIVES for their employees, at the expense of huge profits, and makes that their company's priority? They can be sued by their shareholders, that's what. That HAS to be changed.

Apple used the Chinese factory's ability to wake several thousand people in their dorms during the night to immediately begin work on the iPhone glass screens when Steve Jobs decided to wiggle his finger and demand the change in weeks. That's totally sick in so many ways.

Soon they'll just keep large pools of trained workers in suspended animation in tiny hibernation pods, only to be awakened when their services are needed for a job, then back to sleep they go, into a chemically induced comatose state. Worker drones. Count on it, that's where this road leads, and it's evil at its core.

I like the idea of tariffs. I've always liked the idea of a labor exchange rate, too, similar to a currency exchange rate. Or how about using monetary policy to enable us to make $17/day and live well on that amount of money in this country?

Ultimately I think we need to reject this whole business model, and make it either illegal or super expensive to buy products from companies that use it. It's why the trade agreements (supported by most all of our Dems as well as the Republicans) suck, they do nothing to address concerns of the workers, only concerns of the capitalists.

We want lives, not jobs. The two are not mutually exclusive. The story told in the Times' article is the story that results when the capitalists are running the show.