Thanks to gerrymandering and clustering, political and cultural affiliations are pretty much locked in, making competitive races and “purple” states less common. Therefore at the national level, the Presidential candidate who gets the white swing voter will get the job. So in effect, about 12 states make all the difference.

http://www.270towin.com

Part of being liberal is steadfastness and standing up for one’s principles, no matter what the consequences are. So if they continue to alienate working class white male voters, they should accept the consequences. Everyone should vote their conscience and let the chips fall where they may.

I agree, I find the idea that Apple should give Charity to workers working 80+ hours a week simply outrageous. If one of their hands is ruined, well that’s why they have two of them.

What, indeed, does Apple owe the workers working 80+ hours a week, who make their products? I say, nothing.

Contrast the workers in those factories with the people starving in Ethiopia. Who is better off? There’s your answer, ladies and gentlemen. There is always someone worse off; one must be grateful.

Now to the only substantive point I could identify. China has a long history of protest, strikes and uprisings. Such activism also has roots beyond working conditions, for example, corruption, ethnic tensions or shortages. But that is besides the point. Let us take it as given that these working conditions are as bad as you believe. This does not mean that there are many workers who would want to benefit from receiving outsourced US jobs. And it does not negate the fact that the arrival of these outsourced jobs more often than not improves the working conditions of those workers. Who are you — who is anyone — to say that some poor foreign worker should not be able to have that choice?

Instead of liberating that accumulated dollar reserve to send a flow of American goods back to Chinese shores where those goods would improve the living standards for Chinese workers, the Chinese government chooses to hold it captive to maintain a persistent trade surplus.

If I were a Chinese worker, I’d be furious at my own government.

It is to laugh: a bunch of privileged white men gabbing TO EACH OTHER about how they are standing up for the disadvantaged workers of China, by attacking people who protest their shoddy working conditions. You should get out more. Oh, but you probably are not the type. In that case you really really really should read what folks in the Chinese labor movement say (when they’re not in prison).

You could start here. http://www.clb.org.hk/en/

But the deal is, if you can put aside your distaste, one browse is not enough. To be familiar, read something from the front lines by worker activists every day for a year. Maybe that steady slow drip of reality will be enough to wear off the western white male privilege. Maybe!

In other words, there are larger-scale, longer-term issues to consider here. In the short run, for instance, markets tend to come up with a “fair” price, given the current supply and demand, for any given commodity; include wages. However, the emphasis here is on short run: the inputs to this computation are mostly local; that is to say, prices respond primarily to local fluctuations in supply and demand. Although in theory they could factor in longer-term considerations, this doesn’t, I would argue, usually occur with any degree of thoroughness, because considering very large-scale or long-term consequences of setting price is both too complicated to compute in many instances, too uncertain, and too easy to ignore in the face of short-term “hard” constraints.

A simple case would be the price of helium: at present, helium is extremely cheap. We use it to fill party balloons. What is less well-known or commonly understood is that helium is a nonrenewable resource. There is a finite amount of it and every time we use it to fill a party balloon, the helium escapes up into the upper atmosphere and eventually leaks into space. We are currently on track to run out of helium in about 25-30 years. And it is an irreplaceable element used in many high-tech applications:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/why-the-world-is-running-out-of-helium-2059357.html

The price of helium is ridiculously low. Markets do not fix prices, however, based on long-term considerations, for the most part.

Similarly, I would argue that both for the Chinese and for us, there are potential long-term ramifications for wages and working conditions, even if they are better at Foxconn than they might be in other jobs in China, to be depressed far below the level they would be if they same components were manufactured in the US. For the Chinese, it means a generation of workers who might otherwise go on to raise children in more stable homes, who can eventually afford to purchase the high-tech equipment they are building, etc. As Ford famously remarked, he wanted to pay his workers enough so they could afford to buy one of the cars they built. This builds long-term economic prosperity. It helps elevate wages in the US. It opens a market for goods and services from the rest of the world to be purchased by the Chinese, which can only help the balance of trade.

Of course, these arguments ought to be examined rigorously to see if they really hold up, theoretically and empirically. But one need not simply resort to “moral” arguments here: I would argue the problem with economics isn’t that it isn’t “moral” enough but that it is too focused on short-term or local optimization. The global economic system is more complex than that, over the long run.

The anti-globalization articles that highlight the decline of American manufacturing competitiveness are appealing to our worst fears.
People are afraid of the competition, that is the competition of millions of poor workers who are voting with their feet to say, yes we will accept a lower standard of living. As highlighted by your first commenter anon, people are afraid of what values they may be importing by outsourcing jobs to people willing to work long hours in tough conditions.

It would be refreshing to see leading newspapers such as the NYT advocate that, even if this outsourcing will lead to a lower standard of living for us (let’s leave aside whether it truly is a zero sum game), it’s a good thing because others less fortunate are having a better life. Even if that better life stills falls well short of our standard of living.

But how many people are willing to accept a lower standard of living in order to facilitate improved living standards for poor people halfway around the world? Since advancing this doesn’t seem feasible in politics, the most effective way to promote this type of rebalancing, or even sharing as one might call it, is the outsourcing corporation.

But a line will be drawn somewhere. People feel suspicious about the rapacity of capital seeking out cheap labor. If it were solely up to capital, who knows what kinds of working conditions would be tolerated? Therefore the corporation’s profit motive is constrained by PR and political debate. Right now this debate seems to be dominated by the people with the most to lose, i.e. the Western middle class, than those with lots to gain, the poor foreigner. We need more advocacy, such as yours, for this disadvantaged poor.

This seems to be rosy way of saying there is no need to keep people below the threshold because there are plenty of poor people to exploit elsewhere once higher wages are demanded….that is, if you are allowed to demand higher wages.

Wages, however, aren’t the issue in the NY times article. Apple is there because the Chinese government essentially provides free factories, engineers, and dorms with a huge amount of labor that can be roused at midnight to move units within 30 minutes–they will give them time to eat a muffin and drink some tea. I would say Apple cares less about the wages as compared to the lack of freedoms afforded to the Chinese labor pool–complete control of the employee is where productivity is gained. American manufacturing can’t compete because of our legal and philosophical hangups: freedom and free-market capitalism respectively.

In part the joke is on us because it seems global “free-market” capitalism means going where labor is heavily subsidized and controlled by a centralized government thus keeping the costs of production artificially low and continuously moving.

Also: “This also makes the questionable presumption that it is corporations rather than shareholders who should be engaging in charity.”

But corporations are people – are they not?

I’d divide it this way: (a) those who think miserable conditions are okay because they are an improvement over the previous situation, and (b) those who think there’s a welfare threshold (something like “decent life”) and no large system (which will naturally be self-preserving and have lots of inertia) should be built relying on keeping lots of people below that threshold.

A big part of the problem is that China does not have a robust rule of law. The limit on weekly hours in China is supposed to be 49. The Apple standards’ limit is 60. Neither are enforced!

I realize that for a believer in the free market/trade, it may be hard to accept that positive political change does not necessarily flow from strictly economic relationships. Political change happens because of politics. What is happening with regards to this bad publicity (which Apple richly deserves, as it is one of the worst of the tech companies) is politics that may well lead to change.

In my view the brutal conditions for workers in China is as much a moral issue for anyone who benefits (western consumers) as apartheid in South Africa was. And if it continues, there should be consumer boycotts and more.

I agree with Anon. My first reaction upon reading the Times article was that we, as American labor, were being chastized for not being as compliant and cheap as Foxconn employees and we’d better shape up and get with the program if we want to keep our jobs.

Additionally, the premise that we must use cheap labor to save Apple assumes that the process of empire-building and exploitation of labor is desirable in the first place. While group efforts are obviously more beneficial to the group in some instances, that becomes less apparent when the endgame seems to be to make a whole lot of money for a very few people at the expense of many, many others.

But I suppose as long as we can explain away a mass exploitation of labor as a justifiable means to the end of a relative few being able to launch a bird into pigs whenever they want, we’ll continue to do so.

The reality is somewhere in between, and everybody has a part in the process. Activists are *necessary* to the process – as the necessary dialog provides consumers with more information, allowing them to make far more transparent decisions. (Think cosmetics and animal testing. Some people really don’t care, some don’t want to know, and some change their minds once they do know)

After one of his visits, my sister, then a very promising young Progressive who was horrified that my father liked going to South Africa, wrote an impassioned letter to the editor of the local paper, which also happened to be the paper of the city in which the company’s headquarters were located. Although it was more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger – my sister’s not a hysterical type – the focus was clearly that it was just wrong, wrong, wrong for this company to be supporting the vicious, evil regime which ran the place.

The COO of the company took the extraordinary step of writing a letter to my sister setting forth some of the financial details of the company’s business in SA. I forget the details, but in essence, about 90% of the company’s disbursements there went directly to its work force, and the company had a facility outside the city and employed a very large number of black workers, who were some of the highest paid black workers in Africa at the time. Had they pulled out of SA, hundreds of well-paid blacks would have lost their good jobs and the SA government would have lost a piddling amount of tax money.

I often think of this event when I read stories like this one.

P.S. The company no longer maintains a large presence in SA because of the economic and social disruption brought on by the current government. Way to go, do-gooders.

http://marketwatch666.blogspot.com/2012/01/get-your-kindles-iphones-ipads-xboxes.html

The problem is that poor working conditions and no democracy in China are coupled to poorer working conditions and less democracy in the U.S.: US workers either accept more abuse or are out of the job.

As such China is exporting dictatorship to the US, both at the workplace and in politics. It is in the self interest of the majority of US citizens to vounter-balance that.

No.

http://www.monbiot.com/2008/11/18/clearing-up-this-mess/

The turnover in gov’t jobs is much less; therefore the gov’t workers are overpaid.

Suggested Policy: longest serving government workers should be moved into half-time jobs, at half-pay, allowing more new people to be hired. And likely increasing the turnover among those who want more money and have skills which are actually valuable in the peaceful economy.

The government should lead on creating more half-time jobs, to reduce the attractiveness, but also to increase the participation possibilities.

Their number one objection basically boils down to coordination problems. In other words…they have no idea how the invisible hand works. In this blog entry you can read through a gazillion snippets of people’s responses…

http://pragmatarianism.blogspot.com/2012/01/unglamorous-but-important-things.html

So Karl, and anybody else, what do you think? Given that we’re in a democracy…does it matter if voters do not understand how the invisible hand works? Is asking somebody whether taxpayers should be allowed to directly allocate their taxes the most accurate and efficient way of establishing whether they truly understand how the invisible hand works?

People at FEMA would be paid the same amount as people at the Red Cross…because…if you valued disaster relief…why allocate your taxes to FEMA if you could get more bang for your buck donating to the Red Cross?

Taxpayers, just like donors, would be less inclined to allocate their taxes to a government organization that spent too much of their money on overhead…to include wages.

In regards to determining appropriate compensation, I think you have the heterogeneity thing backwards (i.e. “most overpayment coming for workers with less than a bachelors degree., e.g. those that are least likely to have heterogeneous skills that extra wages can buy”)

The skill levels and compensation of people with Ph.D.s are really pretty narrowly distributed – I’d estimate the 25th-75th percentile range is $80 – $120k in the sciences

The skills and compensation of people with HS educations can vary from Walmart greeter (a pulse and a smile, minimum wage, no benefits) to skilled machinist/industrial electrician/aircraft engine mechanic (years of training, 10x minimum wage, good benefits).

This heterogeneity requires valid comparisons between HS educated groups to be very carefully controlled, something I haven’t seen in any of the govt pay studies.

Good work, people!

http://bonddad.blogspot.com/2011/11/no-virgina-cragses-didnt-cause.html

Hah! Is that your attempt at a comedy routine? No – Fannie and Freddie own $6 TRILLION worth of U.S. mortgages… and at its peak the residential mortgage market was $11 trillion. This isn’t a problem because of synthetic mortgage tranches that weren’t worth half of what they were trading for, and this isn’t a problem because of an unregulated CDS market — BOTH of those issues are symptoms of the real disease, and the real disease is poor gov’t policy: HUD, FHFA, and the secondary mortgage market players that bought up everything from a mortgage on a dilapidated 100k mortgage in a run down urban area with $0 down and a misleading teaser rate, to a 750K McMansion no-doc mortgage sold to someone with piss poor credit history and annual income of 35k a year. Those secondary mortgage market players were Fannie and Freddie, and they were (and still are) the genesis of the problem.

Laws in economics…honestly.

Also, when is job security motivational and when is it not? Having only worked in the private sector as a programmer, I find the rampant job insecurity *de*motivational (nothing I can do will save my job when they close the office and movie it all to India, for example).