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
FMCDH(BITS)
A good start would be to get rid of all liberal democrats who overtax and over-regulate industry. And get rid of rino repubs who think along the same lines. Massively downsize government in all forms, federal, state and local. Downsizing will lessen taxes and regulations, giving an incentive for growth of local industry. Is that a plan or what?
Agree, but that has nothing to do with what Foxcom pays its employees in China. Like I said, entirely different issue.
Yeah, the raving lunatic is still around. While I know it’s uncharitable of me to say so, I sorta hope he’s going to meet his eventual demise by being run over by a classic Corvair. I’ve never forgiven him for that particular claim to fame of his.
You are as “full of crap as a Christmas Turkey.”
You can make you play on words but I am an American Manufacturer and my products are made in America by American workers......100%.
Take your definition and “stuff it.”
Whether or not you like it, if the product is not completely made in America....IT IS NOT AMERICAN! Regardless as some political definition!
I thought they were closing the Fort Worth plant.
(proper response) Apple to Ralph Nader — eat lead. (one silencered spark-arrested pop to the back of his head. I mean that in the nicest possible way of course)
You are the one who is "playing with words" when you claim I'm full of crap. You may be an American Manufacturer, but I've been an American CEO. I've had legal counsel at my beck and call on staff. I still have an attorney on my payroll.
Look, DH, you are an idiot if you make such a claim! I suggest you talk to your legal counsel before you put that label on YOUR products. Make certain you meet the criteria, or you may find yourself in hot water. It doesn't take much to fall below the threshold. Do you have certifications from you raw materials suppliers that 100% of what they provide you was produced in the USA? Do they them from theirs? You could be at risk if you claim it and can't prove it.
Those are NOT MY PLAY ON WORDS, but the Federal Trade Commission's legal definition of those terms. You can cry "political definition" as much as you want to, but if the hard drive or other major component in a computer is imported, the computer cannot be listed as "Made in America" or "Manufacted in America" or "Made in the USA" or "Manufactured in the USA," because by a legal definition it can't, even if every other part was manufactured in the USA. READ the FTC's definition again. Computer components come from dozens of countries these days. The MacPro is remarkable for the number of domestic US parts it does incorporate.
If you don't think these legal definitions are important, and think you're safe, Google "Gibson Guitar wood seizure". That was all about where exotic wood was machined. . . and a legal definition.
There are ZERO computers that contain 100% parts made in the USA, just as there are ZERO automobiles, ZERO televisions, etc. most products, especially electronics, incorporate some parts that are imported. The simple fact is that some of the rare earths used in making modern electronics are NOT EVEN MINED IN THE United States because there are no economically viable deposits here.
The definitions to use specific levels of labeling are prescribed in LAW. I quoted directly from the FTC citations and gave THEIR examples. You are an idiot to disagree just so you can continue to BASH Apple products. I can link to the FTC regulations if you choose. . . But I'm not going to bother, because you really don't care. You just want to spread FUD.
Now, as to the Apple MacPro, Time Magazine says the MacPro is Manufactured in the USA.
YouTube takes you on a virtual tour of Apple's plant where it is made in Austin, Texas, where the major components are manufactured from raw aluminum stock.
I'm sure you can see all the Asians manufacturing the MacPro. . . oh, wait a second, they're NOT Asian or Chinese workers, they're Texans! In Austin, Texas! And what are they doing? They are manufacturing the MacPro! Assembling chips onto the logic board (which was made in the USA) with ICs, many of which were ALSO manufactured in the USA as well as some from Japan, China, Singapore and Taiwan, and an Intel processor from the USA, case manufactured on site, P/S on site, packaging printed and made in the USA. So, DH, YES, it was indeed substantially made in the United States, and Assembled here from parts from all over the world that cannot all be 100% sourced from US manufacturers. So, DH, you literally DON'T know what you're blithering about. AND you are lying when you say that "Assembled in the USA" is merely me "playing with words!" And that I'm ". . . full of crap as a Chrismas Turkey," DH. Learn a little about your own business's legal environment before you throw stones! BAH!
And we all know that about 37% of the employees at Foxconn are "stearing" technology and intel (no pun intended) fro the factories 24/7.
That also is not true. The one case in which a FoxConn employee was caught stealing an Apple product / Apple technology occurred in 2009. After questioning he went back to his apartment and threw himself off his third story balcony. That was the only suicide associated with Apple at a FoxConn facility. Apple security is excellent except for leaks about the releases. Their technology is not being stolen by FoxConn. The owners of the company know what they stand to lose if Apple takes their business elsewhere because of such thefts. Samsung is slowly learning that lesson the hard way. . . and Samsung's stock is off 50% because of their technology thefts from Apple and Apple's subsequent removal of more and more memory chip, screen and Apple custom processor work from them .to alternate foundries. Apple switched all screen making to other makers. . . and the rest will follow as soon as they ramp up capacity to handle what Samsung has been doing.
Once more, Ralphie, pretty please. Please run third-party in 2016!
The Turd World needs you. Especially now that the Won is leaving office.
With your wise policies, those exploited Chinese workers will once again be pristine rice farmers out in the hinterlands.
Nader is a known liar who has done more harm to the US economy than anyone outside of government.
He lied about the Corvair. Liberals lie to win.
That we have an FTC is a shame.
I was in the Yucatan with a hard Left Mexican gal. She was out to show me all the harm US companies and their maquiladoras were causing in Mexico. She drove me out to the hut of the wife of one of the workers. They were both Mayan and had two kids, a little boy and girl.
This family of four lived in obvious squalor. Their stone hut was about 14 feet by 5 feet. The family slept on four hammocks. The front door was wooden slats and the rear just a cloth strung across it. The roof was thatch. My friend opened with a lament about the maquiladoras and asked the lady to tell me all about it.
The wife goes on to wax poetic about her husband’s job. My Lefty friend blanched. The wife showed us that they could now afford the electrical hook up. They had a mini television to watch and also a radio. Two items they’d never enjoyed, let alone the electricity. Her house was tidy and the interior, though small and rustic, was well-kept.
She then took us out the back door to a patio with a corrugated metal roof her husband had built out of his wages. It was constructed around a fireplace with a chimney used to cook outside. This was her real pride and joy. It used to be that her house was full of smoke from cooking and in bad weather with all of them in the home it was miserable. Now she never got smoke in the house and they had a space about half the size of their house in which to cook and eat and relax, even during heavy rains.
My friend was quiet the whole drive back. I hoped she’d learnt something, but she didn’t. She still clung to her beliefs (and that’s exactly what they were, a religious belief that capitalism is bad) and just ignored the evidence.
These kinds of incremental changes are what make life better. They lost no liberty at the hands of a welfare state. They lost no pride of self and sense of ability at the hands of government bureaucrats. Yes, they were strikingly impoverished relative to both of us and live in a way I’ve only seen in the deep countryside, yet they were happy and felt the direct influence of self-made progress.
Isn’t that what we really want for the poor?
“Apple has done more to raise conditions and pay for Chinese factory workers than any other company on earth.”
Written by someone that doesn’t know anything about China. HP ad other companies were there doing that long before Apple.
Actually, the author is right about that. HP and other companies were happy to accept the low pay rates and long hours. Apple was not. Apple put in Apple paid monitors p, literally Apple employees at each supplier to assure compliance with their wage wage and lower hour requirements, something none of those other companies ever did.
Is old “Unsafe at Any Speed” Ralphie Boy telling all the other brands being made in China the same thing?
Another Bingo. Ralphie is not telling the others that. He's shot his eye out.
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