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And the so called "leader of the free world" with a "democratic" system brought us an illegal war over Iraq with thens of thousand of innocent deaths.

How is it an illegal war? I didn't like the war in Iraq either, but it was perfectly legal.
 
Foxconn has committed to bring its factories into full compliance with Chinese legal limits and FLA standards on working hours by July 2013

Why do they need more than a year to simply start following the law? In any civilized country, you don't get to decide when you follow the law; you either follow the law or suffer the consequences. No legitimate company in a country with a modern economy and rule of law would announce that it has been breaking the law and will continue to break the law for another 15 months, and, by the way, please congratulate us for doing so.

Don't buy into the hype about China. The tech manufacturing sector is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, driver of its "miraculous" economic development. And stories like this lay bare how "modern," "high-tech," and "21st century" it truly is.
 
Wirelessly posted

It's all well and good until the FLA starts pushing them to allow / form labor unions. It'll be interesting to watch them contribute to the eventual destruction of the Chinese economy much like they've done here in the US.
 
Chinese workers work harder, longer hours, for less pay and in harsher conditions, and notably they are far more desperate or motivated than Detroit or Chicago workers.

Rob Emanuel (Obama's first Chief of Staff) wants the Feds to pay him $7.2B for infrastructure, that if he happened to believe in the constitution, he would insist be paid by the state or county or city.

He is Obama's former chief of staff and the current Mayor of Chicago. The 10th amendment of the Constitution is dead to him.

Rocketman
 
The 49 hour per week limit including overtime is interesting. Are there any laws in the US regarding maximum hours like that? I have a wage job where we aren't forced to work overtime, but it's strongly encouraged where it feels like you're being forced and people work well over 60 hours a week. The only US law I know of is that you have to be paid at least time and a half over 40 hours per week.

Right now we are strongly being encouraged to volunteer our time (non-paid) because it will help us get a promotion (promotion meaning to a very similar wage job with slightly more pay per hour). I was just about to look up whether that's legal when I saw this article.

Oh, how badly I wish I could tell people where I work.
 
60 hours a week doesn't seem like all that much to me.

However, study after study has shown that working over forty hours a week is actually counter productive. A person working 60 hours a week for six weeks and a person working 40 hours a week for six weeks have exactly the same productivity - not same productivity per hour, but same total productivity. However, after those six weeks you have one person who is exhausted, and one who is fresh. After the six weeks, the person doing fewer hours will actually do more work.

The 49 hour per week limit including overtime is interesting. Are there any laws in the US regarding maximum hours like that? I have a wage job where we aren't forced to work overtime, but it's strongly encouraged where it feels like you're being forced and people work well over 60 hours a week. The only US law I know of is that you have to be paid at least time and a half over 40 hours per week.

Not in the software industry. Especially in the games industry, where people work 80 hour weeks at no additional pay. Kids, if you think becoming a games developer is fun, think twice.
 
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Wirelessly posted

Sounds like a Chinese government problem not Apples. The Chinese people should revolt if the Government won't enforce labor laws.
 
there? Is everyone happy? Can we please stop this now?

UPDATE: We can see from the negative votes that people still want to argue and make noise

We can see from your original comment, that some consumers just want to do this…

hear-no-evil_see-no-evil_speak-no-evil.jpg
 
swingerofbirch said:
The 50-60 hour per week limit including overtime is interesting. Are there any laws in the US regarding maximum hours like that? I have a wage job where we aren't forced to work overtime, but it's strongly encouraged where it feels like you're being forced and people work well over 60 hours a week.
I was offered a job as a manager of a Carl's Jr. restaurant requiring a minimum of 50 hours a week with the upside of 80 hours a a week consistently. I declined based on the hours.

The Chinese workers are BEGGING for hours to make more overtime and these new outside motivated requirements prevent many folks from utilizing all the hours they are avaiable for work on the basis it might be risky for them to work that many hours per week. They disagree but the extralegal media motivated control system enforced by this "firm" eliminates that.
 
I was offered a job as a manager of a Carl's Jr. restaurant requiring a minimum of 50 hours a week with the upside of 80 hours a a week consistently. I declined based on the hours.

The Chinese workers are BEGGING for hours to make more overtime and these new outside motivated requirements prevent many folks from utilizing all the hours they are avaiable for work on the basis it might be risky for them to work that many hours per week. They disagree but the extralegal media motivated control system enforced by this "firm" eliminates that.

A few years ago Apple published one of their first reports, and the press reported "most workers' complaints were related to overtime". It turned out the actual wording in the report was "the largest number of complaints was that workers couldn't always get as much overtime as they wanted". That said, it has been known for a long time in the Western world (but apparently has been forgottten since) that working more than 40 hours a week is costly and inefficient.
 
I was offered a job as a manager of a Carl's Jr. restaurant requiring a minimum of 50 hours a week with the upside of 80 hours a a week consistently. I declined based on the hours.

The Chinese workers are BEGGING for hours to make more overtime and these new outside motivated requirements prevent many folks from utilizing all the hours they are avaiable for work on the basis it might be risky for them to work that many hours per week. They disagree but the extralegal media motivated control system enforced by this "firm" eliminates that.

Interesting point of view. In small business of course, many owners have to work far in excess of 40–50 hours per week. Only last night, I met up with a couple of mates who run small businesses, and one of them said (to our surprise) that he worked a half-day today. 'Really?' my other friend questioned. 'Yeah' he said, '12 hours. That's half a day.' And that's the reality of running your own business sometimes!

Now sure, running a small business in Australia (and I'm sure the US) can be tough. But I bet working on a Foxconn production-line is tougher, just because of the absolute monotony of the job. Many of us could cope with a 60 hour week doing what we do in our own countries (especially if there's a real financial incentive), but how many of us could handle the same 60 hours on a Foxconn production-line? Hour for hour, I don't think it's a fair comparison.

A few years ago Apple published one of their first reports, and the press reported "most workers' complaints were related to overtime". It turned out the actual wording in the report was "the largest number of complaints was that workers couldn't always get as much overtime as they wanted".

That may be true, but the desire to work longer hours is probably born out of necessity, where a worker is trying to provide for a family (possibly even extended family), and the standard wage simply doesn't cover it. It's not a healthy situation for the workers surely. And like you say, even in the west, where working conditions are usually much better, working long hours isn't always good for the individual or the organisation.
 
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Why do they need more than a year to simply start following the law? In any civilized country, you don't get to decide when you follow the law; you either follow the law or suffer the consequences. No legitimate company in a country with a modern economy and rule of law would announce that it has been breaking the law and will continue to break the law for another 15 months, and, by the way, please congratulate us for doing so.

Don't buy into the hype about China. The tech manufacturing sector is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, driver of its "miraculous" economic development. And stories like this lay bare how "modern," "high-tech," and "21st century" it truly is.

Your assumption here is that every Foxconn worker will be happy about these changes which is rather suspect. As people have said already, most of the workers are migrants who are looking to make the most money in the shortest amount of time so limiting overtime hours will severely limit it.

Also, the article is heavily skewed in that it makes it sound like Foxconn is actively trying to screw over the workers in overtime pay which I somehow doubt. Overtime pay for these workers are a major part of their income and such systematic abuse will surely have caused protests. Chinese workers are not as docile as you might like to think especially with the current labor market in China.

Now as to you question, why wait. Maybe because workers who signed up to work this year may not be working at Foxconn if their overtime is capped. No one is forced to work there and competition for workers is actually quite fierce despite some of the general misconceptions on "forced" labor that is prevalent on this forum. Are there forced labor in China? Sure. Look up "kidnapped children forced labor china" via Google. But that is not the issue here. Foxconn can be an amazing place to work at but at the end of the day the employees want $. It makes sense to delay any significant rewrite of the rules.

The one good point you make is that it may be "illegal". However "illegal" in China is an extremely grey area (certainly not as black and white as an association with an agenda to push would like for you to believe).
 
Kids, if you think becoming a games developer is fun, think twice.

No, no, no.

Being a games developer is fun - witness the vast hordes of them who are self-employed writing games for the iOS store.

Being a games developer working for Zynga or EA is not fun, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish.
 
The confluence of the report, Apple's response, and trends in China itself means that they will need to hire 20% more employees to conform to the per worker hourly reduction pledge. Wage prices in China reliably go up 15% per year and the Chinese Rimimbi currency is all but locked against the dollar.

Now this does have the offset of paying less overtime by about 10-15%.

But overall we should see a labor component cost increase of about 15% per year with it being a bit front loaded as compliance ramps.

The single easiest way to have things cost us less is to borrow and spend less at the Federal government level. It is causing currency destruction at a rate of about 7% a year reliably under the Obama Presidency. We currently deficit spend at the shocking rate of about $250B a MONTH and we were promised stimulus would be one time and about $866B with a then ANNUAL deficit of about $450B.

The TARP, Fed actions, and such are large in scale to the tune of about $7T, about the same scale as the liquidity lost when home prices vaporized $7.5T in about a year and a half. The Fed has "sterilized" those actions, but they are real, have to be unwound some day and there are hard costs to real people to keeping interest rates ridiculously low. Also most of TARP and bank liquidity has been paid back with over $100B in net profit paid into the treasury already.

All of that stuff together makes it cost us more for gasoline (30% since Obama's budget was passed on currency destruction alone, no issues from oil speculation or Iran included in that), food, commodities, and payments to China.

In the CNBC interview the FLA President characterized the forward leaning of Apple and Foxconn on labor issues in China as likely to lead to a "race to the top". For those of us critical of Chinese policies of various types, this is only good. It is also having direct impact on large parts of Chinese society.

So I call it a mixed picture but far more good than bad, and slightly bad for forward earnings of AAPL.

Rocketman

Is this really the thread for trying to bash american politics????? I'm glad that some progress has been made on this issue, now let's wait and see if any changes are really made.
 
Is this really the thread for trying to bash american politics????? I'm glad that some progress has been made on this issue, now let's wait and see if any changes are really made.
Wait and see? You are the sovereign and it is your responsibility to do things. You delegate limited federal power to congress critters but the other 95% is YOUR DEAL! I am betting you do not agree or receive this data. Which was right.
 
Wait and see? You are the sovereign and it is your responsibility to do things. You delegate limited federal power to congress critters but the other 95% is YOUR DEAL! I am betting you do not agree or receive this data. Which was right.

I follow the political ramblings of this country much more than the average person and trust me it's not tied to one person or administration so you must have me mixed up with someone else you know. Sorry I don't fall into that 1%. Whether I agree/disagree was not the point.
 
Your assumption here is that every Foxconn worker will be happy about these changes which is rather suspect.

The one good point you make is that it may be "illegal". However "illegal" in China is an extremely grey area (certainly not as black and white as an association with an agenda to push would like for you to believe).

I don't assume anything about how the Foxconn workers feel; it's immaterial to my critique. My only point, and it's a big one, is that law in China apparently means nothing. Imagine if an American steel mill, German car plant, or Japanese squid processing plant said, "We have decided to start obeying the law in a year and a half." Lawyers, regulators, and the public would be all over them the next day--and rightly so. No company would get away with this in the first world (unless it traveled in time back to 1890). As this denonstrates, China's pretenses to be at the fore of the 21st-century economy are just that.
 
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