Apples and oranges. 1 day does not cover rent in a 2 bedroom/2 bath apartment but in a 8-person dorm with bunk beds and common bathroom. I read an article that one man in NYC rented from a roommate just a niche above the door with a matras for $200. Sure, this can be covered with 1-day NY salary.
Also a 12-hour work day 6 days a week is terrible even with 2 meal brakes. No time for web browsing and message board postsBTW a 12-hour work day became illegal in Soviet Russia back in 1918.
I work 16 hour days six days a week and often eat while I work... There again, I make much more in an hour than these workers make in a day.
But I find an interesting thing that the Foxconn executives are not using the dismissive language of say, a Best Buy when it screws up and writes a passive email to customers acting as if the problem is not theirs.
I have to give Apple credit for taking the flack that should be directed at the whole industry and using it as an opportunity to conduct a massive audit and hold everyone accountable.
I guarantee you that this was not taken sleeping, and that many managers and executives handling Apple's supply chain management had hopped on a plane immediately after a meeting called by Cook and were expected to take full ownership of the situation.
Having been born in India, and living here for thirty years... I find it's important to keep perspective about living standards. America and India both have a 50% poverty rate... but they define poverty very differently. In America, if you are a family of four earning $44,000 household income, that's poverty (by the federal definition). Even adjusted for cost of living, the kind of lifestyle that would equate to the purchasing power of that family in India is far from poverty in that culture's expectation of standard of living.
In the US, salaried and non-salaried employees are used to 60 hour work weeks. While the "average" in the US is 33 hours per week, 85% of men and 66% of women work more than 40 hours per week. 60 hours, which is pretty typical for a skilled worker here in the US, is basically 12 hour work days. Now imagine you come from a rural area of China, where you're not used to the lifestyle and you go for a job at Foxconn... these are some of the people who are having a very difficult time (and understandably so) with the rapid shift in China's standard of living in urban areas.
The same was true of tribal cultures being swept up by the agricultural revolution six thousand years ago... where people might have worked 8 to 10 hours a week for the same relative amount of happiness that we have today.
I'm not saying any of this as a "good" or "bad" judgment on Foxconn's practices. It's important that China strike a balance between economic growth and preservation of culture. But even without American involvement, they're going through what workers in Japan went through a few years ago.... students entering the workforce, doing 16 hour days seven days a week contributed to much of Japan's economic strength in the latter 20th century, but then a rash of suicides sprang up among young professionals. It's not healthy for any country any way you slice it, but it's not because $1.78 an hour is a horrible wage in that country.
At some point, some cultures have to decide, as the Mayans did, that all that glitters is not gold... and maybe they don't want to be dragged kicking and screaming into the kind of lifestyle that we take for granted in America. Apple didn't create that problem, and it's not their sole responsibility to solve that problem, but Steve Jobs' greatest contribution to this world was the concept of Apple Inc. itself: A forward-thinking company whose ideas break the mold of design by committee, whose thought processes demand creativity and innovation, whose product design goes well beyond selling people merely what they're willing to settle for, whose materials prove that you can transition to greener business AND be profitable, and whose labor practices could very soon set the gold standard for how companies all over the world function...
And some day they'll be teaching courses on it to future managers, just as John R. Commons, with funding from John D. Rockefeller following a bloody strike at a Rockefeller coal mine, established the first academic program teaching Industrial Relations - now understood as the pillar of Human Resources Management which never existed prior to the industrial revolution of the early 20th century.
What comes out of this will change labor practices in the industrialized world for centuries to come.
