Audiobook: America's Assembly Line
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Vocal Characteristics
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
the world's largest electron ICS manufacturer was not in the United States or Japan, but in Taiwan. Fox Cons. 1.2 million employees many in mainland China assembled products for Nokia, Sony, Hewlett Packard, Apple and other well known companies. General Motors had employed half a 1,000,000 Americans in the 19 seventies. In contrast, Apple, the world's most valuable corporation in the winter of 2012 at only 40,000 US employees while its foreign and subcontractors had 700,000. Apple had once prided itself on making products domestically. But eventually, like Nike, Apple chose cheap Asian labor. In 2011 President Barack Obama asked Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, why that work couldn't be in the United States. Steve Jobs replied, Those jobs aren't coming back. Apple's executives, The New York Times reported, believe the vast scale of overseas factories, as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced to their American counterparts that made in the U. S. A. Is no longer a viable option For most Apple products. The situation looked considerably different from Labour's perspective, as the New York Times observed Chinese workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions amid serious, sometimes deadly safety problems that included excessive overtime, seven day work weeks, child labor exposure to toxic chemicals and occasional explosions. In 2011 an explosion at an IPAD factory killed four and injured 77. Apple wasn't uniquely reprehensible. Dell, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and most other electron ICS companies also tolerated exploitation of workers by suppliers. Indeed, Apple arguably was one of the better Cos it established a code of conduct, demanded annual reports from its suppliers and inspected their operations periodically. Nevertheless, Fox cons, wages, Libre conditions and a dormitory style living conditions were so poor that in the years 2009 to 2011 14 workers committed suicide by jumping from the tops of Foxconn buildings. The rural migrants who worked in such factories were not only putting in long hours and a live in cramped together in corporate dormitories, they also were suffering because they're really wages scarcely changed between 2000 and 2008 when China's real GDP per capita doubled. Chinese workers had known real wage growth during the 19 eighties and the early 19 nineties, according to Yeh Hsiang when a professor at M. I. T. S. Sloan School of Management. Some in the media have questioned the sanity of those workers at the electron ICS company, Foxconn, who committed suicide. But maybe these workers New farm, or about the divergence between GDP and personal income than the media commentators in 2011. In response to continuing protests, the company raised wages somewhat. But it also announced that it would install robots to do many routine jobs. Protests continued, and early in 2012 150 Chinese workers at Foxconn threatened to commit suicide by leaping from their factories, roof in protest at their working conditions. The assembly line ran very fast, one worker complained, and after just one morning, we all had blisters and the skin on our hands was black. The factory was also really choked with dust, and no one could bear it. Apple had been informed of such conditions by outside monitors and knew from its own audits that Foxconn violated its code of conduct frequently. Yet the violations persisted in 2011 when Apple made profits of $26 billion on revenue of $108 billion. Poorly paid workers at Foxconn sometimes put in 72 hours a week