Not Just Foxconn: Looking Into the Shadows of Apple's Factory Empire

Apple’s power over China’s workforce extends to many other suppliers. A new report drills down to the lesser-known plants that piece together our hand-held devices.

July 8, 2012

The following article first appeared at Working In These Times, the labor blog of In These Times magazine. For more news and analysis like this, sign up to receive In These Times' weekly updates.

 Our gadgets and tablets make our lives easier, but those palm-sized miracles of convenience are built by hard work in a metastisizing global chain of low-wage labor. Apple has received much criticism lately over the exploitation of workers in China, particularly at the manufacturing behemoth Foxconn, where several worker suicides have stirred public outrage.

But Apple’s power over China’s assemblyline workforce extends to many other suppliers. A new report by China Labor Watch drills down to the lesser-known plants that piece together our hand-held devices. China Labor Watch surveyed ten factors and uncovered abuses in various aspects of production, from grinding work schedules to anemic labor protections. The findings indicate that often in these factories:

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Man lives to tell of Florida "Shoot First" horror

By Tom Brown

MIAMI | Fri Mar 23, 2012 6:12pm EDT

(Reuters) - On June 5, 2006, not long after Florida enacted the first "Stand Your Ground" law in the United States, unarmed Jason Rosenbloom was shot in the stomach and chest by his next-door neighbor after a shouting match over trash.

Exactly what happened that day in Clearwater, Florida, is still open to dispute. Kenneth Allen, a retired police officer, said he shot Rosenbloom because he was trying to storm into his house.

Rosenbloom told Reuters in a telephone interview this week he never tried to enter the house and was in Allen's yard, about 10 feet from his front door, when he was shot moments after he put his hands up.
Now living in Hawaii, Rosenbloom said he had been unaware of the growing outrage over last month's shooting in Sanford, Florida, of an unarmed black teenager by a neighborhood watch captain.

Trayvon Martin, 17, was shot by George Zimmerman on February 26 while walking back to the house where he was staying with his father in a gated community. Sanford police have not arrested Zimmerman, largely because Stand Your Ground requires them, without clear evidence of malice and in the absence of eyewitness testimony to the contrary, to accept Zimmerman's argument he was acting in self-defense.
Allen was not arrested in the shooting of Rosenbloom. Sergeant Tom Nestor of the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office said Allen was found to have acted in self-defense when he pumped two rounds into Rosenbloom with his 9mm semi-automatic pistol.

"He meant for me to be dead and he never called 911," said Rosenbloom, 36, adding that Allen, now 65, bent over him and using an expletive, warned him not to tangle "with an ex-cop" as he lay bleeding on the ground.

"The police closed it on his words alone," said Rosenbloom, explaining how the case that began with a complaint about him leaving eight trash bags on the curb instead of the regulation six, was closed after what he described as only a summary investigation.

"They made me the bad guy," he added.    READ MORE

Why Was No One Punished for America's "My Lai" in Iraq?

 The U.S. military presence in Iraq was marked by the callous American attitude toward civilians, and the thorough lack of accountability in the military justice system.

February 12, 2012

The plea bargain in the last Haditha massacre case handed down in January is a fitting end to the Iraq war. In the most notorious case of U.S. culpability in Iraqi civilian deaths, no one will pay a price. And that is emblematic of the entire war and its hundreds of thousands of dead and millions displaced.

Sergeant Frank Wuterich, the squad leader who encouraged and led his marines to kill 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha in November 2005, was the last of eight originally charged in the massacre. The others were let off on technicalities, or to help the prosecution. One officer, not involved in the killing but the coverup, was acquitted in a military trial.

The responsibility for these killings came down to Wuterich’s role, but he never actually went through a full trial. The military prosecutor opted for the slap-on-the-wrist of demotion to private for the 24 civilian deaths. Wuterich, who admitted to much more in a “60 Minutes” interview in 2007—including rolling grenades into a house filled with civilians without attempting to make an identification—copped only to “dereliction of duty.”

The episode was often compared with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which some 400 civilians were executed by Lieutenant William Calley and some of his army unit in 1967. While the scale and circumstances are quite different, they do bear one striking similarity, and that is the reaction of officials and the American public alike.

The My Lai massacre was uncovered by an enterprising journalist, Seymour Hersh, who had to overcome official disavowals to get the story. When Hersh managed to publish via a small wire service, the story exploded, with many Americans expressing horror and outrage that something like that could be done by American troops.  READ MORE