How well does your favorite company compare?

[Link: venturebeat.com]

The article doe not make me dislike apple any less...

So after a bunch of bad press Apple decides to do something about it, whoopie! I'm sure when the other companies get the same bad press they will follow suit.

Didnt Nike and Kathy Lee Gifford do the same thing?

Question to the masses... Are any of you surprised that Chinese corporations treat their employees like slaves? To be quite honest i had assumed it was much much worse. I envisioned these slimy mud floors with dirty war torn children building things...like with other child/slave labor industries. These companies have much lower overhead because of their working conditions and "who cares" attitude towards employees.

Sad part is that we could eliminate this problem entirely by heavily taxing any imports. This would put an end (overnight) to everything being made in China.

Statement to the masses... Unions are why American corporations are not doing the same thing to their employees. They had their fun for a while but unions put an end to the company store.

but then our precious gizmos and gadgets will double in cost. Then everyone will decide to gripe about how expensive things are. I dunno what the solution is

Interesting considering they cover less than 13% of all American workers.

We are supposed to praise them because they might do something about this?

I dont know if that number is true but if it is... 13% was all it took to put an end to corporate slavery. The other companies now know that if they try it they will have a union to deal with.

Everyone knows that unions don't actually work..:)

This isn't necessarily true. The reality is that they still need to sell products. They may be able to get $600 for an iPhone (my first iphone was that much) from a percentage of their customer base but others wont pay that. So our $200 iphone will be $250. Our phone contract will go up a little and instead of apple having 100 billion in the bank they will have 50.

There are 2 key differences between building in the US vs China.

Environmental Concerns

Labor

The problem with waste dumping is that we share the oceans and air. How much longer can we let China just kill the planet so we can shave a $100 off the cost of a phone?

The problem with saving money on labor is that we have millions of un or under educated Americans crossing their fingers for the 2 available positions at the coffee shop.

Tax the corporations until their suits bleed. Bring the jobs back to the United States where Americans can be paid a fair wage. Let the boogie man "communists" find someone else to build things for.

Unions are a form of price control that increase the price on everything. Minimum wage laws are the same and have the same effects. Big companies avoid union states to the benefit of right to work states.

Price control? LOL. What else do they have you guys believing? How many of you get to live in the big house?


Okay so instead of us going 50 pages of right vs left lets just agree to disagree.

Just curious. Of those espousing opinions on unions.

How many have actually been in a union and how many have actually owned/ran a union shop where you employed union labor without being in a union yourself?

And, of course, how many are just regurgitating what they heard from some congolomerate owned talking head on television?

I haven't but I saw the damage of having union in an open shop. I was working in the oil field and spent some time in the plant seeing the stuff being made. I was watching them build a mud pump. There were 7 or 8 guys working on the pump but they all had to stop because the union welders were taking their time to get there to remove some lift tabs. All these guys had welding experience and could have removed these tabs. They had let the welders know when they would be needing them. The guys waited doing nothing for 45 minutes to an hour. The welder finally got there and was done in less than 10 minutes.