Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Tom Beard,
Would the assembly lines be appreciably more delightful to work on if they were in Wiri or Detroit? Most of us here are privileged enough that we’ve had plenty of career options beyond being cogs in the Fordist machine, so that being trapped in such a tedious job would seem degrading and mind-numbing. But for most of the people making most of our stuff, that has been a reality since well before the Chinese boom.
And yet, there's a massive difference between working in the meat processing industry in New Zealand versus the US. The jobs are essentially the same -- the conditions are vastly different.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Ross Mason,
It is the LABOUR that is cheap. The future will be more and more chinese middle class wanting more and higher wages, less wokring hours and …….recreation time. Shock horror. And then, the price will have to go up
Yep, but there's nothing wrong with moving that process along a bit quicker.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to 3410,
I don’t know about all this. At least, I don’t find the argument that there are even worse jobs in the world tremendously convincing.
That wasn't really my point though. It was more that the West should also look to itself.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to andrew r,
And those that are on the assembly line? They sound particularly delightful. I dunno, the things that we seem to find acceptable from a far. Hmmm.
Every gadget you own involves an assembly line. And until robots get better that will continue to be the case. The key is to enforce standards of welfare.
As the Times story notes, there are any number of small things that can be done – rotating shifts so that people don’t get debilitating repetitive strain injuries from constantly performing the same actions seems a really obvious and achievable one.
And as the Southern Weekly's reporter put it: "The workers definitely need beer, romance, and slightly higher pay. To put it simply, just make them happy."
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to DexterX,
The good thing about that Business Insider story is that it's based on a report from a leading Chinese newspaper, which indicates that conditions are being debated within China. And it makes it clear that even some relatively small changes would substantially improve the welfare of workers there.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to DexterX,
Shouldn’t that be titled getting to the bottom of the barrel
To be fair, underage labour is the front where Apple has been most willing to take strong action where it finds breaches.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to andrew r,
Gee Foxconn employees – a job there, or dire poverty. Awesome choice. Bleak. Who the fk would want a job in that dump.
Loads of people, and understandably so. Not every job at Foxconn is on an assembly line. The company provides training and education, conducts R&D, subsidises offsite housing and provides a career path for many thousands of people.
You don't want it to go out of existence. You want to be able to hold it to its public commitments to the welfare of the workers at the bottom of the ladder.
As to being a meat processing wker in the USA …sad very very sad.Clearly the country that is, with haste, giving up on it’s poor.
It's genuinely hideous. The people who work in those plants seem to have roughly the status of the meat they're handling. In some ways, it's far, far worse than the Chinese electronics industry.
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Had to check before I posted it, but I love this pic. My buddy Andy, after Big Day Out 2012.
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Hard News: Finally, the Teapot Tape?, in reply to Kumara Republic,
NZ drops 5 places in RSF media freedom index. Should anyone be surprised?
No, no one should be surprised. Although I'm sure David Farrar will have some rationalisation that says it's okay.
I'm presuming the ranking period covers the teapot investigation, but not the current NZ On Air debacle.
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Hard News: Finally, the Teapot Tape?, in reply to linger,
Or to put it another way: in this case, cock-up seems far more likely than conspiracy theory.
I wholeheartedly concur.
Apart from anything else, the major beneficiary of the whole affair is Winston Peters, whose vote doubled in its wake.
