China: police beat staff protesting over working conditions at iPhone factory

 

Footage shows security and police officers in China clashing with staff protesting over working conditions and pay at the world's biggest factory for iPhones, in Zhengzhou, China. Footage shows police beating protestors with poles amid riots. The Foxconn factory has been placed under strict lockdown restrictions, forcing factory staff to live and work on-site.

The highlighted segment above is the real reason for the unrest in China. It has nothing to do with a wage dispute

Frustration had been mounting over recent months at the plant over conditions, pay and the handling of positive Covid cases

When The Global Brands You Love Exploit The Vulnerble

In March 2013 more than 1,100 garment workers were killed in Bangladesh when the building they  were working in collapsed.  They garments they were sewing are sold by the worlds major retail outlets like the Gap, Walmart and Benetton.  Given the number of people killed you'd think these clothing retailers would work to change the conditions which these women work. Instead they stonewalled efforts to protect these workers. You'd be wrong as these women continue to be exploited by these corporations.

Apple the corporation beloved by liberals has been implicated in worker exploitation in the factories which under license to a Taiwanese corporation  has seen worker riots and suicides due to working conditions.

Consumerism marches on as they turn a blind eye to the abuses. What's more important, the appearance of a social conscience  or cheap consumer products? Cheap consumer products always wins.

Wishing not to be left behind in the exploitation circus and the race for higher profits the worlds major manufacturers of cosmetics have no problem with using child labor in Indian mines. 

 

Ugly truth behind global beauty industry

 Top cosmetic brands rely on Indian children working in illegal mines to extract mica, key ingredient in makeup products.

Koderma, India - Children toiling illegally in Indian mines are producing a key ingredient used in the products of some of the global cosmetics industry's most prominent names.
A report by campaign group DanWatch said child labour is being used in the eastern states of Jharkhand and Bihar to extract mica, which is then added to the make-up produced by at least 12 multinational companies.
At least 5,000 children may be producing mica - used to add glitter to natural cosmetics - which is bought by intermediaries and then exported to high-profile international customers such as L'Oreal and Estee Lauder.

Deadly work
The abandoned mica mines start shimmering under the rising sun in Koderma, Jharkhand, as a group of sleepy children trudges towards the Charki mine holding their tools.
Five-year-old Ajay Das hurriedly slips into a narrow hole and starts his day. His tiny hands can barely balance the hammer, but he still hits the glistening wall accurately.
Ajay works six days a week and after labouring for seven to eight hours each day in hazardous conditions,he manages to earn a paltry 20 rupees ($0.33) - barely enough to kill his hunger pangs.

It's all for the greater good. Of corporate profits and lower prices. 

The woman who nearly died making your iPad

Tian Yu worked more than 12 hours a day, six days a week. She had to skip meals to do overtime. Then she threw herself from a fourth-floor window

At around 8am on 17 March 2010, Tian Yu threw herself from the fourth floor of her factory dormitory in Shenzhen, southern China. For the past month, the teenager had worked on an assembly line churning out parts for Apple iPhones and iPads. At Foxconn's Longhua facility, that is what the 400,000 employees do: produce the smartphones and tablets that are sold by Samsung or Sony or Dell and end up in British and American homes.
But most famously of all, China's biggest factory makes gadgets for Apple. Without its No 1 supplier, the Cupertino giant's current riches would be unimaginable: in 2010, Longhua employees made 137,000 iPhones a day, or around 90 a minute.

What's most important here is that the western consumer have the latest in iPhone technology while caring little about those who manufactured it or their working conditions.

Yu was interviewed over three years by Jenny Chan and Sacom, a Hong Kong-based group of rights campaigners. From her hospital recuperation in Shenzhen to her return to her family's village, Chan and her colleagues kept in touch throughout and have published the interviews in the latest issue of an academic journal called New Technology, Work and Employment. The result is a rare and revealing insight into how big electronics companies now rely on what is effectively a human battery-farming system: employing young, poor migrants from the Chinese countryside, cramming them into vast workhouses and crowded dorms, then spitting out the ones who struggle to keep up.

It's like being a sharecropper:  working to provide a better life for yourself and your family but somehow remaining in debt and service to the company.

In her first month, Yu had to work two seven-day weeks back to back. Foreign reporters who visit Longhua campus are shown its Olympic-sized swimming pools and shops, but she was too exhausted to do anything but sleep. She was swapped between day and night shifts and kept in an eight-person dormitory where she barely knew the names of her fellow sleepers.
Stranded in a city far from her family, unable to make friends or even get a decent night's sleep, Yu finally broke when bosses didn't pay her for the month's labour because of some administrative foul-up. In desperation, she hurled herself out of a window. She was owed £140 in basic pay and overtime, or around a quarter of a new iPhone 5.

 Poor Tim Cook the CEO of Apple made a meager $4 million  last year one wonders if that was enough to house and feed his family.

After her suicide attempt, Yu received a one-off "humanitarian payment" of ¥180,000 (£18,000) to help her go home. According to her father: "It was as if they were buying and selling a thing."