The horrendous human costs of your beloved gadgets

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So you like your iPhone, do you? And your iPad? And maybe you're even one of those Apple cultists. (I'm not, but I do love my iPod Touch. I go Samsung/Android with my phone.)

Maybe you love all your gadgets. Maybe you think technology has made your life so much better, so much more fun. Hey, I hear you.

But there's a cost to be paid, and not just whatever low, low, ridiculously low price lured you into your local Best Buy. No, there's a human cost. Actually, many human costs. And it's important that you (and I) know about it (and make decisions accordingly):

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple's products, and the company's suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers' disregard for workers' health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning. 

And then there's that whole suicide problem. (Yes, a very serious problem. In addition to the suicides themselves, workers at Foxconn, a manufacturer for Apple and others, have threatened mass suicide to protest the horrible working conditions.)

Now, sure, it's easy to pick on Apple and it's huge profits and cash, but it's hardly alone in this. Pretty much every major (and not-so-major) consumer electronics company is implicated.

Will this stop me, or you, or most anyone else from lapping up the latest wonder-gizmo? Maybe not, but, then, what are we to do? Not have these gadgets at all? Please. We need our superphones and tablets and laptops and PCs. I'm on them all the time at home, at work, pretty much everywhere.

But maybe we should at least think twice (or more) about what we're doing, and maybe, if Apple (to take but the most obvious example) is one of the most egregious players in this horrific system, it should pay -- and pay by losing customers, by having customers demand better of it. And perhaps, too, our attention and habits, should we change them in a meaningful way, and the attention this human toll is getting, will turn this into a political issue with governments demanding, and requiring, meaningful change.

Maybe I'm hoping for too much. Actually, I'm sure I am. And I know I'm a hypocrite. Most of us are. But I do know I look at Apple quite a bit differently now, and if making a choice means choosing the less bad of some generally bad options, well, that's something, at least.

Food for thought next time you're playing Angry Birds.

Gingrich says "really poor children" don't know how to make money unless "it's illegal"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You'll recall that Newt Gingrich came out a couple of weeks ago in support of child labor as a way to deal with poverty. Well, now he's making gross generalizations about poor children that feed right into the right-wing view of poverty not as a systemic problem implicating a greed-oriented socio-economic structure and those on the top (the 1%, including Newt himself) but as individual and community failure (particularly when "poor children" is just another way of saying black children):

"Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday," Gingrich said.

"They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of 'I do this and you give me cash' unless it's illegal."

Gingrich said every successful person he knows started working at an early age in explaining his position that schools should hire poor children in their neighborhoods for part-time jobs as assistant librarians or assistant janitors. 

Again, there's a difference between saying all young people benefit from working part-time jobs, like having a paper route or something, and picking on poor children and saying they should be forced to work. And what Newt, supposedly the GOP's in-house intellectual, is saying about poor children isn't just misguided, it's utterly despicable. He probably believes it, but of course he's also playing right to the conservative prejudice against the poor, the deeply entrenched conservative view, dominant throughout the GOP, that the poor are a bunch of violent criminals out to take your stuff -- and that the poor are deservedly poor for not being better people, people like Newt and his ilk. Here's the WaPo's Jonathan Capehart:

A lot can be said about the plight of families unlucky enough not to make $60,000 for a half-hour of bloviation or about their equally unlucky children who are deprived delightful cruises through the Greek isles. But Gingrich's blanket condemnation of "really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods" is unbelievably disgusting. And it's disrespectful of the overwhelming majority of those children and their families who live their lives with far more integrity and far less cash than Gingrich ever will. 

Newt is all about the 1% and against the 99%. And especially against those on the very bottom who usually through no fault of their own are struggling just to find food and a roof over their heads.

Truly disgusting, indeed. But all too believable coming from such a "know-it-all" piece of plutocratic shit.

And so very telling, as Laura Clawson writes at Kos, that "[t]his is what a Republican presidential candidate on the upswing chooses to help him continue his ascent." In the Republican Party, after all, race-baiting and pissing on the poor can take you right to the top.