Release of Apple’s ‘iSlave6′ Highlights Working Conditions

09/20/2014

The promised to be a premiere full of fans and buyers looking to get the new iSlave6 has been brought into reality by the protest of several members of the NGO Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, popularly known as SACOM.

Protesters of that organization have come to the premiere of the phone on the Apple store in Hong Kong to protest against the working conditions of Apple employees.

The protest has achieved its objectives as SACOM activists have hung a banner on which was written the name “iSlave 6″, referring to the working conditions endured by workers in the factories that produce the smartphone Apple.

Chicago: Warehouse sweatshops, no!

By Gavrielle Gemma

Joliet, Ill.

There are 150,000 workers toiling 365 days a year in sweatshop warehouses in the Chicago region. With dockworkers and truck drivers, they load and distribute most of the products we wear, eat or use. The gigantic, concrete, windowless warehouses hide the brutal and unsafe conditions inside.

Warehouse Workers for Justice are exposing this and fighting back.

In the warehouse or “logistics” industry, high-tech restructuring has meant fewer workers move mountains of goods to megafirms like Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Target. This has created super-profits for them.

With unemployment high in Illinois, corporations are using this to drive down wages. While manufacturing plants with good union wages are closed, the warehouse industry is expanding; it pays minimum wage and denies benefits like sick or vacation pay to workers.

WWJ says 63 percent of warehouse workers are hired through temporary agencies, which often pay piece rates. A worker might make 90 cents a piece for each refrigerator loaded off a truck; sometimes that 90 cents is split between two workers doing the job together.