Thursday, November 3, 2011

a great man---my foot!

I had noted with increasing cynicism the hagiography surrounding the recent death of a computer guy who allegedly had given us this or that toy to play with.

I do not believe that computers or the internet have made my life better. The low quality of my life is due to enormous job insecurity, excessive supervision by managers, supervisors, and such --usually persons less well educated and less well read....

(And today, while doctors surely know things I don't know, they are over-generous with recommendation of an extremely vague nature, whose practical consequences involve my labor in the home. If there's a real problem with my elderly and frail father--if, for example, he happens to fall over while reaching for something--I shall have to deal with it, and there will be no doctors or nurses present....So, I class the so-called "health professionals" among the professional busy-bodies who have stolen the beauty out of my life....)

However, all of that ignores the more fundamental fact that Apple products are created in the most disgusting, immoral fashion, as I began to fully realize after I had read something at the "Monthly Review", from which I now select the following two paragraphs:

Apple’s enormous, complex global supply chain for iPod production is aimed at obtaining the lowest unit labor costs (taking into consideration labor costs, technology, etc.), appropriate for each component, with the final assembly taking place in China, where production occurs on a massive scale, under enormous intensity, and with ultra-low wages. In Foxconn’s Longhu, Shenzhen factory 300,000 to 400,000 workers eat, work, and sleep under horrendous conditions, with workers, who are compelled to do rapid hand movements for long hours for months on end, finding themselves twitching constantly at night. Foxconn workers in 2009 were paid the minimum monthly wage in Shenzhen, or about 83 cents an hour. (Overall in China in 2008 manufacturing workers were paid $1.36 an hour, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.)

Despite the massive labor input of Chinese workers in assembling the final product, their low pay means that their work only amounts to 3.6 percent of the total manufacturing cost (shipping price) of the iPhone. The overall profit margin on iPhones in 2009 was 64 percent. If iPhones were assembled in the United States—assuming labor costs ten times that in China, equal productivity, and constant component costs—Apple would still have an ample profit margin, but it would drop from 64 percent to 50 percent. In effect, Apple makes 22 percent of its profit margin on iPhone production from the much higher rate of exploitation of Chinese labor.44