Posted on 10/25/2014 2:31:17 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Ralph Nader, a five-time failed U.S. presidential candidate, has written an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Here it is, verbatim:
Dear Mr. Cook,
“Designed by Apple in California” has a nicer ring to it than “Assembled by workers paid about a dollar per hour, working 11-hour shifts, and sleeping eight to a room in the Jabil Circuit corporate dormitories in Wuxi, China.” But, no matter how you spin it on the iPhone packaging, you continue to turn away from the horrid working conditions and miserly pay at your Chinese factories. Just last month, while you displayed through a two hour event on the insandouts of tiny iPhone 6 and Apple Watch design breakthroughs how capable your company is of solving problems it cares to solve, China Labor Watch and Green America revealed in their newest report, “Two Years of Broken Promises” how you have failed to apply even a modicum of the problemsolving focus you bring for product design to the “serious health and safety, environmental, and human rights violations” at Chinese factories assembling the iPhone.
“That’s the price of affordable phones,” says the corporatist argument. This could be the case, if Apple was just barely profitable. But, as revealed in a recent letter responding to Carl Icahn’s call for more stock buybacks (you respond to billionaire’s pleas much more often than workers’ pleas), Apple is planning to have repurchased $130 billion of its own shares by the end of next year. In short, Apple is so profitable, that it does not know what to do with $130 billion except buy back stock from its shareholders to maybe boost its share price.
There are many alternate ways could have spent its surplus profits. For example, what if Apple decided to invest that excess $130 billion in dignified working conditions and living wages, instead of unproductively using their surplus to buy stocks back from the wealthy? Estimates differ, but according to Chinese labor watchdogs, factory workers in Apple’s supply chain make average salaries of, estimating at the high end, about $500 per month for about 80 hours of work per week. Doubling monthly salaries and cutting hours in half reforms that would make great strides towards having Chinese factories meet modern, dignified standards of a living wage from a 40hour work week would cost ~$1500 per month (~$18,000 per year) for each factory worker. To have achieved these reforms for the 300,000 Foxconn workers who assembled the iPhone 5s would have cost Apple about $5.4 billion annually.
If instead of buying back stock, Apple had used its excess $130 billion to endow a foundation to achieve these reforms, it would have paid out at a conservative five percent interest $6.5 billion annually, enough to double wages and ensure a 40-hour workweek for hundreds of thousands of iPhone workers, while leaving a $1.1 billion surplus as an annual budget for ensuring topnotch health, safety and environmental standards at Apple factories. The technology company that leads the way in profits and product design could, without changing anything but the amount of excess, unproductive money it uses to repurchase stock from wealthy shareholders, could also lead the way in dignified working conditions, hours and wages. Finally, some of Apple’s Chinese factory workers may become able to buy the iPhones they manufacture.
This goes to show that tolerating poverty wages is not the price we pay for affordable phones. Rather, poverty wages and harmful conditions are a consequence of tolerating outrageous stock buybacks. You had a choice for the $130 billion: living wages for workers or stock buybacks for millionaires? You chose buybacks. Here’s a challenge for the present and future use of surplus profits: why not let the customers decide? Just as they have consumer interests in thinner iPhones and sleeker MacBooks, they also have humane interests in more dignified working conditions and more liveable wages for the workers that make their products. And you, more than any other CEO, have the technological ability to poll your customers about who Chinese workers or millionaire shareholders should receive Apple’s excess money.
Are you scared that they might Think Different™ about this issue than Carl Icahn?
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
MacDailyNews Take: A few points:
For more info, Apple Inc.’s Supplier responsibility website is:
Apple Supplier Responsibility Website
You know we should have a like or dislike button on free republic it would save a lot of posting time. By the way I agree with your statement.
I don’t know.
China is now the world’s premier producer.
Not America. China.
We need to start to build up America once again. “WE”.
As in, conservatives. I don’t know exactly how, but building up China will eventually mean, China takes over.
That is not a goal, which I want.
I don’t believe that is a goal which anyone wants, except for of course Chinese. They are all for that. Yet it is where we are headed.
America needs to bring back production, right here.
Conservatives, we need to formulate a plan which does that.
Not sure how, but that is important.
OUR investment in China? You’ve invested in China?
America doesn’t want those businesses in America. Assuming that they can get past the EPA and various other regulatory agencies, the NIMBY crowd will make sure that there is no place where the factories can be built, except, maybe, in your back yard.
At least in China, and other Asian countries, the officials can be bribed.
Perfect!
Tim Cook said Apple mission is Global Warming while products are made in China and Obama never mentions Apple for outsourcing.
“Designed by Apple in California
Computer Assembled in USA
Other Items as Marked Theron”
Notice that the word “MANUFACTURED” is not on the tag.
When companies state that their products was assembled in the USA that normally means that all of the parts and sub-assemblies were manufactured in foreign countries.
The word “assembled” is simply there to confuse those who are easily fooled to think it was “made” in the U.S.A..
I've been thinking that, too.
Nader is still unsafe at any speed.
He got some notoriety bashing mid sixties Chevy corvairs, which I always
thought were kinda cool.
A dollar an hour and 11 hour shifts? Well at least now we know what it takes to compete.
Sorry, no, you're wrong. There are strict legal guidelines on what can be used in this designation. Assembled means that major components are made in the country listed. If I recall correctly, that figure is 85% for Assembled. The FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION States the following:
" REQUIREMENT FOR “ASSEMBLED IN USA” CLAIMSThe MacPro and IMacs Assembled in the USA, meet those less than 15-20% imported parts requirements, so they are entitled to be labeled "Assembled in the USA." The last time I had this argument with an Apple basher, I had an entire list of the components of the Apple MacPro and their US states of origin. It blew him out of his toy boat.“A product that includes foreign components may be called ‘Assembled in USA’ without qualification when its principal assembly takes place in the U.S. and the assembly is substantial. For the ‘assembly’ claim to be valid, the product’s last ‘substantial transformation’ also should have occurred in the U.S.”
Example: A lawn mower, composed of all domestic parts except for the cable sheathing, flywheel, wheel rims and air filter (15 to 20 percent foreign content) is assembled in the U.S. An “Assembled in USA” claim is appropriate.Example: All the major components of a computer, including the motherboard and hard drive, are imported. The computer’s components then are put together in a simple “screwdriver” operation in the U.S., are not substantially transformed under the Customs Standard, and must be marked with a foreign country of origin. An “Assembled in U.S.” claim without further qualification is deceptive.
The FTC's higher standard of "Manufacted in the USA" or "Made in the USA" require an almost impossible to reach standard:
"REQUIREMENT FOR “MADE IN USA” CLAIMS“A product advertised as Made in USA be must be ‘all or virtually all’ made in the U.S.“
No modern computer can do it. None. Well maybe an Abacus.
Thanks for playing. Better luck next time in your Apple bashing attempts.
Ralph may be onto something - I’d love to be paid 40X my wages and have my hours cut to 1 a week - Two or three jobs would leave me rolling in the dough and with lots of time to enjoy it...
And it isn't true. That's the prevailing factory wage in China, but workers on Apple assembly lines get $2.80 an hour and cannot work more than ten hours. . . including overtime. They are also limited in overtime. . . which they were quite upset about. The workers want to work overtime.
A shift of workers threatened mass suicide when they learned their overtime was going to be limited to twenty hours a month!
As a freshman at the U of Minn in ‘69, I picked up a copy of “Unsafe At Any Speed” in a used bookstore for 25 cents. Only because I had picked up a ‘65 Corvair Spyder for a few hundred bucks. The only sporty vehicle ever made under the Corvair nameplate.
A few months later, a 35 year-old Nader — known only for his BS book — was going to be speaking on-campus at Coffman Union, the main “student center” and a major venue, it seated maybe 2,000. So, out of curiosity, I showed up. Hung around afterwards and met the guy as a bunch of admirers were asking him questions. I wasn’t impressed.
He spent most of his time yapping about “PIRGS” — public interest research groups — and sure enough, by the next year MPIRG (M for Minnesota) existed. Soon, they were whacking students for mandatory fees every quarter. Now, they’re everywhere, sucking up student and public money.
Ralph passed his sell-by date 40 years ago, but he never stops with his liberal BS. When he stroked-out years ago, I thought he might hang it up. No such luck, he’s still at it at age 80. Most people get smarter as they get older. Not Ralph.
Nader?
Isn’t he a loud mouth who never has and never will produce anything useful?
Just like a certain president.
..., triple your prices, and, go out of business. Samsung is all we need.
That reminds me that Nader's run in 2000 splitting the leftist vote won the election for Bush. Without that, Gore would have won Florida and likely New Hampshire, won the election and been president during 9/11. Thank you, Ralph, for your service to our country preventing that.
http://www.wnd.com/2002/02/12665/
Ralph Nader is a hypocrite
Published: 02/06/2002 at 1:00 AM
author-image Paul Sperry About | Email | Archive
Paul Sperry, formerly WND’s Washington bureau chief, is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington.”
WASHINGTON – Ralph Nader takes little stock in corporate America – convinced, as he is, that big business is the root of all societal ills.
Or at least that’s what he says.
His personal investment portfolio, worth millions of dollars, tells a far different story.
But before I tell you about all the corporate stock he owns, let me tell you why I’m even bothering to expose such a cartoon-caricature of an unreconstructed market-bashing liberal for the hypocrite he is.
Nader has always been more of an entertaining sideshow to me than anyone to be taken seriously. I actually derive some secret pleasure from the supposedly anti-establishment gadfly’s shtick of puncturing the self-righteous rhetoric of the stuffed-shirts in both parties, because it injects a refreshing honesty – perverse, misguided and, as it turns out, phony, as it may be – into the otherwise stale presidential campaigns of poll-tested platitudes. I had hoped he’d run again for kicks.
But recently Nader has become the liberal media elite’s go-to guy for bashing corporate management in the wake of Enron’s pension-robbing collapse. And, frighteningly enough, he’s starting to make sense to reasonable people – particularly scared pre-retirement workers who normally would have turned him off before he could plunge into another of his eye-twitching fulminations against capitalism (and not just Enron’s corrupt brand of crony capitalism).
On ABC’s “This Week,” Nader charged that Enron is not a bad apple, but “part of a corporate crime wave.” On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he again attempted to demonize all corporations by arguing that “Enron is symbolic of the corruption of corporate politics,” whatever that means.
His host, Tim Russert, a former aide to liberal Democrat Mario Cuomo, just nodded, giving him an open field, whereby Nader demanded that government crack down on corporate “crooks” and “crime in the [executive] suites.”
This was bad enough.
But then I found out that my uncle, whom I’ve always admired, even idolized, was one of the 2,882,955 Americans (2.7 percent of the total turnout) who voted for Nader in 2000.
That blew my mind.
After playing professional football for the Patriots (congratulations, by the way, to the franchise and all its players, past and present, and its long-suffering fans, such as myself, on the Pats’ first national championship), my uncle made a small fortune on Wall Street as a senior executive with Merrill Lynch.
So what’s his fascination with Nader? I’m not quite sure, but the fact that he studied socialism – er, sociology – at Dartmouth could explain part of it.
Still, there’s no doubt Nader holds some weird attraction for many Americans, who clearly aren’t all environmental wackos picketing World Trade Organization summits. And that attraction is growing amid the mushrooming Enron scandal. At this rate, Senate Democrats may invite Nader to testify.
My uncle and other Nader fans, however, might be surprised to learn that Ralph the Mouth doesn’t put his money where his mouth is. At the same time he’s bad-mouthing corporations, he owns stakes in them. Most of his money, in fact, is parked in stocks and commercial paper – not Appleseed Foundation or other bleeding-heart groups that defend the downtrodden.
That’s right. After hearing Nader cast one too many corporate aspersions, I marched down to the Federal Election Commission headquarters here and pulled a copy of the financial disclosure report he filed in 2000, knowing full well that Nader was no pauper.
In it, I found the tweedy do-gooder’s pin-striped underbelly.
On page 15 of Schedule A, Nader was forced to disclose his shares of Cisco Systems, valued at the time at $1,158,750; Fibercore Inc., between $15,000 and $50,000; Iomega Inc., $15,000-$50,000; 3 Com Corp., $50,000-$100,000; and Ziff-Davis Inc., $50,000-$100,000, among other corporate holdings.
Those were just his direct investments.
Nader held an additional $2 million-plus in Fidelity and other mutual funds.
You’d think that someone who so loosely throws around epithets like “corporate criminals” and “corporate crooks” would never trust corporate brass with so much of his own money.
But having said that, where did millionaire Nader get so much money to invest in the first place? Answer: by publicly demonizing the supposedly evil, greedy and exploitative corporate system that he uses to further enrich himself.
Turn to page 1 of his income statement.
There, you’ll find the start of a long list of payola Nader got from various lefty groups, colleges and media to bash corporations in speeches and columns from 1999 through the summer of 2000. Total: $378,726.
Is that all of his income, besides the $100,000-plus he made off his corporate investments in that reporting period? We don’t know for sure. Nader refused to release his income-tax returns.
But he did say this in an addendum to his filing: “Monies I earn are for strengthening civil society.”
Really? Looks like a lot of those “monies” have helped strengthen, in the form of stock investments, the very corporations that he claims are hurting society.
Truth is, Nader benefits from the same corporate establishment he condemns, while his acolytes suffer on the sidelines and agonize on the fringe, sacrificing personal wealth for “social justice” and forgoing the American dream for his fake dream.
Buy a Moto X Droid phone. Made in Texas.
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