Interview with “China Labor Watch” activist

January 26, 2012

Questions for Li Qiang of China Labor Watch

By DAVID BARBOZA, http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/q-and-a-with-li-qiang-of-china-labor-watch/?hp

Li Qiang, 39, is the founder of China Labor Watch, a nonprofit group in New York City that seeks to improve labor conditions in China. In the late 1990s, while studying law in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, he began supporting striking workers and taxi drivers. Later, he moved south, to China’s biggest factory zones near Shenzhen. He worked at several electronics, toy and shoe factories, where he investigated labor conditions, and tried to expose what he saw as unjust and inhumane conditions.

Now, Mr. Li works from a small office near the Empire State Building, employing a team in China that sneaks into factories, smuggles out photographs and publishes reports of illegal or abhorrent labor conditions at suppliers to some of the world’s biggest corporations. David Barboza, the Shanghai bureau chief of The New York Times, interviewed Mr. Li after doing the reporting reflected in his article, “In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad,” written with Charles Duhigg.

Q. For years, labor rights groups like yours have described sweatshops and how factories serving global companies have abused and mistreated workers. What is the situation today?

A. They’ve improved a lot, but labor conditions are still poor. One reason is the local economy is directly related to the well-being of the factories. So the local government regulators don’t want to enforce a high labor standard and force the factories away.

Q. But many big factories are audited by independent firms, hired by multinational corporations. Hasn’t that improved working conditions in China?

A. Every year, 30,000 factories in China are audited. But there’s corruption in the auditing process. The factories need to pass an audit, but fixed factory costs are high, so the factory bosses bribe auditors, that is less costly. If a factory has 500 workers, to improve standards you might need to pay each worker another $20 a month. But 500 workers times $20 times 12 months is $120,000 a year. It’s much cheaper to bribe auditors.

For the international companies that had an audit done, they get what they consider to be an advertisement, or certification that they comply with all the standards. But this isn’t a true reflection of what is happening. Last year, we investigated 100 factories in China. And we found that only about 10 percent of the factories can pass the their own the international labor standards of their clients — the multinational corporations.

Q. What are some of the key problems you see when you visit the factories? What are they doing wrong?

A. The pay is the biggest issue. Based on our investigation, most workers have signed a labor contract so there is some improvement. But then the factories conceal their treatment of the workers, like they’ve shortened the lunch break from one hour to 40 minutes, so the workers lose one day a month.

Another trick for factories to lower the payment is a system called “overall working hour system.” As we know, the normal working hours are 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. If workers work overtime on weekdays, the overtime wage should be 1.5 times the original salary. If they work on the weekends, the wage should be 2 times the original salary. What the factories do is to let the workers work 6.7 hours a day, 6 days a week. So when the workers work on Saturday, they only get the original salary rather than the 2 times salary required by law. And often, they don’t only get paid with the original salary when overtime for working on Saturdays or Sundays, when you should pay double salary to them. This is the way the factories reduce the salary and increase productivity.

Q. What is your impression of Foxconn, which has some of the world’s biggest factories and is China’s biggest export machine?

A. Foxconn is not good. But if we compare all industries, electronics, textile, toys, Foxconn is one of the best. The biggest problem for Foxconn is the workers are working under a lot of pressure. They’re standing 10 to 11 hours a day. Foxconn treats the workers like they are machines.

They think about how many products they can produce, not about giving the workers a rest. But in the electronics industry all the companies are the same.

They say they’ve increased salaries, but Foxconn doesn’t say the workers have to produce more products per hour. So they have to work even harder. And the worst thing is that Foxconn is the biggest company in the industry. So they set the standard in the industry. And the working intensity has already been audited by the multinational companies, thus meeting the standards set by Foxconn’s clients.

Obama Blew a Kiss to Apple

by Jeff Ballinger, Workers Rights Consortium

President Barack Obama blew a kiss to Apple in the State of the Union speech, praising the entrepreneurial spirit of its founder, the late Steve Jobs, as the cameras panned to his widow in the audience.

Obama’s timing couldn’t be weirder. In the last month, Apple has released a damning audit which found that almost 100 of Apple’s supplier factories force more than half their workers to exceed a 60-hour week. The company announced responsibility for aluminum dust explosions in Chinese supplier factories that killed four workers and injured 77. Hundreds more in China have been injured cleaning iPad screens with a chemical that causes nerve damage.

Apple was just subjected to a “This American Life” radio special reporting on its abysmal factory conditions in China (Jon Stewart gigged ‘em on the issue, too). Last weekend a front-page New York Times story asked why the company offshored all of its manufacturing, mostly to China. (The answer is found in the what its executives call “flexibility.” Tens of thousands of workers there live in factory dorms on-site, where, the Times reports, they are woken in the middle of the night and forced onto 12-hour shifts when Apple decides a product needs tweaking.)

In the face of all this bad press, the tech darling’s response has been to reveal its supplier factories and to announce a partnership with the Fair Labor Association to do stepped-up factory inspections. The FLA is the partly corporate-funded group that until now only monitored apparel factories, and which Nike helped establish after its own scandals in the ’90s.

In sum, Apple is now doing what Nike has been doing for nearly 15 years: the apology-plus-transparency formula, straight out of the manuals offered by “reputation management” consultants.

This was certainly enough for most mainstream media and even some activists. Some were a bit more dubious but still pinned their hopes for stemming the abuses on the chimera of “consumer pressure.”  For those who may believe that rich-country consumer pressure should not be so summarily dismissed, I believe that it’s useful to turn to Jeffrey Swartz, until mid-2011 the CEO of Timberland, who says that consumers don’t care at all about workers’ rights.  In a late-2009 article he wrote, “With regard to human rights, the consumer expectation today is somewhere in the neighborhood of, don’t do anything horrible or despicable… if the issue doesn’t matter much to the consumer population, there’s not a big incentive for the consumer-minded CEOs to act, proactively.”  In a 2008 interview he mused about his desire to “seduce consumers to care” so that Timberland’s CSR report was not mere “corporate cologne”.

Nepal: Land to the Peasants, or returned to the Landlords?

[Feudal landlords and reactionaries have always and everywhere claimed that revolutionary land reform--the seizure of lands for cultivation by landless peasants--is not an expropriation for liberation, but is a criminal theft by undeserving peasants.  It was shocking when the Maoist party in Nepal [(UCPN(M)] abandoned the People’s War and adopted a bourgeois-constitutional path–and then promised to return the peasant-liberated lands, in order to make peace with the landlords and capitalists.  Inevitably, struggle inside the Maoist party ensued, which continues, and which has led to the Party ordering its leadership (which has taken government positions) to reverse its capitulationist deal of returning liberated lands to the landlords.  Prime Minister Bhattarai and Party Chairman Dahal (Prachanda) are juggling the opposing goals of maintaining their influence in the Maoist party, while continuing to make unprincipled concessions to the bourgeois parties in the government.  Revolutionaries have forced the issue out of the smoke-filled back rooms and into the open for all to see–and continue to press the issue.  We shall see. — Frontlines ed.]

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landless squatters

by redstar

Kathmandu, January 26: The secretariat of the standing committee of the UCPN-Maoist urged the government, not to withdraw its decision to legalise land transactions carried out by Maoist-formed ‘people’s government ‘ during the period of people’s war.

In a meeting held at party Supremo Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’s newly residence at Lazimpat on Thursday, they advised the Maoist-led government not to annul January 12 decision.

Dr. Baburam Bhattarai’s Cabinet had decided that all the land and property transactions carried out by Maoist people’s council during the great people’s war, would be given legal status.

Because of the drastic decision of the government, opposition parties the Nepali Congress and the Communist party of Nepal United Marxist and Leninist has condemned it.

As they have been obstructing House since January 17 demanding that the government revoke its January 12 decision, the impending tasks in peace and statute have been severely affected.

Australian PM stumbles before rowdy protest crowd

The Associated Press:  Australian prime minister stumbles as riot police escort her through 200 angry protesters, January 26, 2012

Australia Prime Minister Julia Gillard is escorted out for safety by body guards and police through a crowd of rowdy protesters following a ceremony to mark Australia‘s national day in Canberra, Australia, Thursday Jan. 26, 2012.

Some 200 supporters of indigenous rights surrounded a Canberra restaurant and banged its windows on Thursday while Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott were inside officiating at an award ceremony. (AP Photo/Lukas Coch) AUSTRALIA

Australia’s Gillard dragged away from Aboriginal rights protest

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard is rushed to a car by security after some 200 rowdy protesters surrounded a restaurant where she was speaking in Canberra, Australia. Msnbc.com’s Dara Brown reports.

By msnbc.com staff and news services

CANBERRA — Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was dragged away by security guards Thursday after she was trapped in a restaurant by rowdy protesters demonstrating for indigenous rights following a ceremony to mark Australia’s national day.

A closer look: Obama’s hypocritical claim of the Apple/Steve Jobs allure

[A comment from Revolutionary Frontlines:  "Capitalist Crisis and Empire Quandary leads to media hyperbole, political hypocrisy, empty promises and false claims of better days ahead"

Barack Obama, the political leader of US imperialism, is heading into a re-election campaign with growing discontent and opposition across the country, including among traditional supporters of the Democratic party.  In his State of the Union address this week, he made a string of new and repeated promises to re-capture these drifting and angry voters,   as he promised to bring jobs back from overseas and support domestic innovation and business.  Apple electronics and Steve Jobs got special mention and praise from the President.  Apple, making record profits from its popular iPhone and iPad products, produces most of its goods overseas--the largest part being made by Foxconn in China and India, in factories holding hundreds of thousands of workers being paid $1 an hour.  If Foxconn increases pay rates and regulates safety and working conditions, China's global edge in maintaining  cheap labor pool will lose its allure.  If the cost of production rises, Apple's profit edge and competitiveness will suffer.  Therefore, every Foxconn adjustment in pay and conditions is matched by increased demands on productivity.  The NY Times article, below, details the situation at Foxconn.

The Chinese workers are caught in the middle of this.  They are not the enemies of workers in the US--they suffer from the same exploitation for profits, at the hands of the same crisis-wracked and bankrupt capitalist system, as we, and people worldwide, are suffering from.  There is no solution in workers fighting each other for a place in the exploiters' production line.  The path forward is made with solidarity, with finding the ways to support each other and to unify our struggles against the capitalist-imperialist system.  With each day, millions more are seeing that the capitalist system, in its ever more vicious and desperate turns, is losing its credibility and legitimacy as a leading or organizing force in human affairs. -- Frontlines ed.]

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Click this link to see video:  Made in China

An explosion last May at a Foxconn factory in Chengdu, China, killed four people and injured 18. It built iPads.

January 25, 2012

In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad

By CHARLES DUHIGG and DAVID BARBOZA, New York Times

The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws.

When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.

Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.

“Are you Lai Xiaodong’s father?” a caller asked when the phone rang at Mr. Lai’s childhood home. Six months earlier, the 22-year-old had moved to Chengdu, in southwest China, to become one of the millions of human cogs powering the largest, fastest and most sophisticated manufacturing system on earth. That system has made it possible for Apple and hundreds of other companies to build devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up.

“He’s in trouble,” the caller told Mr. Lai’s father. “Get to the hospital as soon as possible.”

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.

After a rash of apparent suicide attempts, a dormitory for Foxconn workers in Shenzhen, China, had safety netting installed last May. Foxconn said it acted quickly and comprehensively to address employee suicides.

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.

“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”

Apple is not the only electronics company doing business within a troubling supply system. Bleak working conditions have been documented at factories manufacturing products for Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.

Current and former Apple executives, moreover, say the company has made significant strides in improving factories in recent years. Apple has a supplier code of conduct that details standards on labor issues, safety protections and other topics. The company has mounted a vigorous auditing campaign, and when abuses are discovered, Apple says, corrections are demanded.

And Apple’s annual supplier responsibility reports, in many cases, are the first to report abuses. This month, for the first time, the company released a list identifying many of its suppliers.

But significant problems remain. More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apple’s reports, and in some instances have violated the law. While many violations involve working conditions, rather than safety hazards, troubling patterns persist.

On the “State of the Union” address: Obama Pledges to Maintain the Empire

Glen Ford, interviewed on the Real News Network: “Obama defends Iraq war saying it made the US safer and more respected”

Bio — Glen Ford is a distinguished radio-show host and commentator. In 1977, Ford co-launched, produced and hosted America’s Black Forum, the first nationally syndicated Black news interview program on commercial television. In 1987, Ford launched Rap It Up, the first nationally syndicated Hip Hop music show, broadcast on 65 radio stations. Ford co-founded the Black Commentator in 2002 and in 2006 he launched the Black Agenda Report. Ford is also the author of The Big Lie: An Analysis of U.S. Media Coverage of the Grenada Invasion.

Transcript:  PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Washington. Now joining us to talk about President Obama’s State of the Union speech is Glen Ford. Glen is the cofounder and current executive editor of the Black Agenda Report, and he joins us from New York. I—New York or New Jersey, Glen?

GLEN FORD, EXEC. EDITOR, BLACK AGENDA REPORT: In New Jersey.

JAY: New Jersey. Thanks for joining us.

FORD: Thank you for the invitation.

JAY: So what’s your first take on the speech?

FORD: Well, it was all about banking and empire, because that’s what Barack Obama is all about. Most of the other stuff were con games and smoke and mirrors, not too much worth talking about. He led and he ended with his foreign policy. So here we have a president who claimed to be a peace candidate but really is showing his oats by telling people how many people he has killed and how he’s quite ready to kill again.

Critics of the State of Obama speech say “Not A Peep About The President’s Praise of Military”

by Laura Flanders, on the Counterpunch blog

The grades for the president’s State of the Union are in and the critics have been kind. In fact, it’s chilling to see just how few hits the President takes for couching his entire address in unqualified celebration of the US military.

US Marines' infamous descration of dead Taliban fighters

Speaking of the troops, Obama began: “At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations.”

Post-show pundits on cable news praised the president’s comfort with his Commander in Chief role but none saw fit to mention recent news of marines urinating on Afghan corpses, say, or Staff Sgt Wuterich walking free after participating in the killing of 24 unarmed men women and children in Haditha. Accompanying Obama’s next phrase, “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example,” no one thus far has played the vile video. The critics have been kind.

The President chose to celebrate the military; the press chose not to raise a peep about the spread of militarism, yet US targets proliferate — abroad – with unmanned drones assassinating unconvicted suspects in innumerable undeclared wars. And militarism spreads at home. The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act makes indefinite military detention without charge or trial a permanent feature of the American legal system.  It’s kind of the critics not to mention that – or his four-year-old pledge to close Guantanamo, and to restore the “rule of law.”

Haditha massacre--These Ishaqi children were among the 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians killed by US Marines

“They’re not consumed with personal ambition… They work together,” continued the president (again, speaking of the troops.)

There are surely plenty of troops who would disagree. The tally is long of commanders and pigeon hawk commanders-of-commanders who’ve dodged responsibility, fingered underlings and permitted rank-and-file “bad-apples” to take the heat for US war crimes.

“Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn a thing or two from the service of our troops,” the President concluded.

There are indeed things we can learn; things that many US troops have begged us to learn in fact. Namely, that war dehumanizes the killer and the killed, and that war tactics have a habit of spreading from the war zone to the home. Successive generations have told us that military recruiters lie, and that “rules of war” exist only in legal minds. (Ninety percent of casualties in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were civilians.) Troops have begged us to learn just what we are celebrating when we celebrate “winning” and war.

Clearly we have yet to learn.

LAURA FLANDERS is the host of The Laura Flanders Show coming to public television stations later this year. She was the host and founder of GRITtv.org. Follow her on Twitter: @GRITlaura.

The Battle for Public Space: The Squares and Streets of the Egyptian Revolution

[As oppressive systems face growing challenges, they utilize many tools in preserving their hold on power.  Vicious and brutal police, mounds of disinformation, a wide range of false prophets and demagogues, these are standard tools.  But essential to their survival is the preventing of places where the opposition can meet, draw together their experience and unify for the streggle at every turn.  These places are halls, squares, newspapers, radio and television, internet, tweets, and streets filled with public demonstrations.  If the people are prevented from  access to all such resources, overturning such regimes becomes impossible.  And so, the people grab each and every place they can for their struggle to grow.  The people of Egypt have illustrated this struggle in so many ways, breaking the restrictions and suppressions which have been laid at every step in their path. -- Frontlines ed.]

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January 25, 2012 — by Ahram Online

Over the course of the first year of the January 25 Revolution, some public squares have become symbols of revolution, while others have come to represent support for the transitional military regime.

“]

Protesters standing on a tank in Tahrir Square. Image from Hossam El-Hamalawy Archive.

Space is never something that people simply use; we make meaning out of space through how we use it. And Egypt’s revolution has seen a transformation in public space. That it is no longer surprising to see public walls adorned with political graffiti—even those of Cairo’s Supreme Court or administrative Mogamma building—speaks powerfully to this geographic transformation and to public space both as a site and an instrument of revolutionary struggle.

This transformation has taken place against a backdrop of urban planning that sought to limit the availability of open spaces in which citizens might congregate, while deveoping gated communities for the wealthy that, along with exclusive parks, have constituted a tend towards the privatisation of space.

Emergency laws in place since Mubarak came to power and renewed periodically (most recently in September by the ruling military council) criminalize gatherings of more than just a few people. So, in this sense, public space does not belong to the public at all. The January 25 Revolution can be seen in part as a re-appropriation of public space, indicative of the public’s refusal to concede the streets and squares to the dictates of the security apparatus.

People all over the world have by now heard of Egypt’s Tahrir Square, which has become a symbol not only of Egypt’s revolution but of the resilience of “the people” against state power. References to Tahrir in banners seen at Madrid’s 15 May demonstrations, at Occupy Wall Street, and even on a street sign at Occupy London reflect this awareness. And Tahrir continues to be a site of demonstrations and sit-ins, as well as state brutality against protesters.