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Apple iPhone Plant Workers Protest Over Squalid Living Conditions

Apple iPhone assembly workers at a Foxconn plant in southern India endured crowded dorms without flush toilets and food sometimes tainted with worms in return for a paycheck.

The workers’ anger boiled over when the tainted food sickened over 250 of them, resulting in a rare protest that shut down the plant where 17,000 had worked.

Foxconn, a company central to Apple’s iPhone supply chain, was the site of the Dec. 17 protests, which shed light on Foxconn’s living and working conditions.

The turmoil has occurred as Apple ramps up production of its iPhone 13 and shareholders call for greater transparency about the conditions of labour at suppliers.

Reuters interviewed six women who worked at the Foxconn plant near Chennai. All requested anonymity for fear of retaliation on the job or from the police.

Five of these workers said they slept on the floor in rooms that housed between six and 30 women. A hostel they lived in had no running water or toilets.

One worker, a 21-year-old woman who resigned after the protest, told Reuters that people living in the hostels were always sick – skin allergies, chest pain, food poisoning. In the past, one or two workers had been affected by food poisoning.

Because we thought it would be fixed, we didn’t make a big deal out of it. But it is now affecting many people,” she said.

Apple places Foxconn on probation

On Wednesday, Apple and Foxconn announced that some dormitories and dining rooms used by factory employees did not meet the required standards.

A spokesperson for Apple said the facility has been placed “on probation” and the company will ensure its strict standards are met before reopening it.

The remote dormitories and dining rooms being used by employees do not meet our requirements, and we are working with the supplier to ensure a comprehensive set of corrective actions is put into place as quickly as possible.”

However, the spokesperson did not elaborate on the improvements or standards that will be made at the plant.

The laws governing housing for women workers in Tamil Nadu stipulate that each individual receives at least 120 square feet of living space and the housing must adhere to local standards for hygiene and fire safety.

Foxconn announced that it was restructuring its local management team and taking immediate steps to improve its facilities. While the company makes the necessary improvements to resume operations, all employees will be paid, the company said.

Foxconn contractor Venpa Staffing Services, which runs the dormitory where workers were sickened, declined to comment.

At least four state agencies in Tamil Nadu have also begun investigations following the food poisoning and protests. The state government has also privately told Foxconn to improve its conditions.

Thangam Thennarasu, the industries minister of Tamil Nadu state, told Reuters Foxconn is responsible.

Delta variant raging in India

The state government of Tamil Nadu said in a statement last week that the state had asked Foxconn to improve working and living conditions, including housing and water quality.

Foxconn has pledged to ensure that worker living conditions follow government recommendations and meet legal requirements, according to the statement.

The plant’s reopening date has not been announced by Apple or Foxconn.

Foxconn reportedly told state officials it had “ramped up production too quickly” though production was curtailed while the Delta variant of Covid-19 raged in India during April and May, a senior government official from the state’s industries department told Reuters.

Foxconn, which is headquartered in Taiwan, announced the opening of the plant in January 2019, a boost for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” campaign to create manufacturing jobs.

In Sriperumbudur, a town outside of Chennai where the factory is located, there are also factories that manufacture Samsung and Daimler products.

The factory is central to Apple’s efforts to shift production away from China because of tensions between Beijing and Washington. Foxconn is expected to invest up to US$1 billion (S$1.3 billion) in the plant over the next three years, according to Reuters.

Labour brokers staff Foxconn’s factories, and they’re also responsible for housing the workers there, who are mostly women.

An outbreak of food poisoning at Apple dormitory

Jegadish Chandra Bose, a senior food safety officer in the Thiruvallur district where the hostel is located, told Reuters that food safety inspectors visited the hostel where the outbreak of food poisoning occurred and found rats and poor drainage in the kitchen.

According to him, the samples analysed did not meet the required safety standards.

Women working at Foxconn’s plant earn about US$140 a month and pay Foxconn’s contractor for food and housing.

The majority of workers are between 18 and 22 and come from rural areas of Tamil Nadu, according to the head of a women workers’ union. State government guidelines indicate that the monthly payment at the plant is more than a third higher than the minimum wage for such jobs.

A 21-year-old worker who quit following the protest told Reuters that her parents are farmers who grow rice and sugarcane. Many people in her village sought city jobs, and she considered Foxconn to be a good employer.

Women recruited from farming villages to work at Sriperumbudur’s factories are seen by employers as unlikely to unionize or demonstrate, a factor that made Foxconn’s protests – which aren’t unionised – even more noteworthy.

159 women were hospitalized Apple dormitory

In Chennai, V. Gajendran, assistant professor at the Madras School of Social Work, said women employed in nearby factories typically come from “large, poor, rural families, which exposes them to exploitation and reduces their ability to organize and struggle for their rights.”

According to Reuters, 159 women were hospitalized because of food poisoning on Dec 15. The Thiruvallur district administration said last week that 100 more women required medical care but were not admitted to the hospital.

In the past, there was a rumour that some of the women who had fallen ill had died. This turned out to be untrue. Some of the sick workers did not show up for work at the factory two days later, prompting others to protest at the time of shift changes.

The worker told Reuters: “We were alarmed and decided to protest in the hostel. There was no leader.”

A district administration official said about 2,000 women from Foxconn hostels took to the streets on Dec 17 to block a key highway near the factory.

A new protest was held the following day by male workers, including workers from a nearby auto factory, Foxconn workers told Reuters.

A second protest resulted in police striking male workers and chasing and striking women who were involved, two workers and a local union leader who had interviewed workers told Reuters.

No Coronavirus guidelines

According to sources, police detained 67 women and a journalist, confiscated their phones, and warned their parents to get their daughters in line. This is according to the detainees, local union leaders, and a lawyer who is trying to assist the detainees.

Reuters was unable to independently confirm the police response descriptions.

Mr Sudhakar, a top police official in Kancheepuram, denied beating protesters, confiscating phones, and intimidating workers.

We strictly followed guidelines, complied with all rules, and respected those who were detained,” he told Reuters.

A village administrator who visited the hostel where the food poisoning incident occurred on Dec 16 to investigate living conditions found no precautions to prevent Covid-19 infection, he told police in testimony reviewed by Reuters.

I went to that place because there is a possibility that it could become a Covid cluster,” Mohan told police. Women were forced to stay in a hostel where there were no Coronavirus guidelines.”

Foxconn was the second Apple supplier in India in a year to be involved in labour unrest. A factory owned by Wistron Corp was damaged by thousands of contract workers in December 2020 over unpaid wages, resulting in an estimated damage of US$60 million.

After placing Wistron on probation, Apple said it would not award the Taiwanese contract manufacturer-new business until it addressed the treatment of workers.

At the time, Wistron said it had worked to raise standards at the factory and fix issues, such as the payroll system. Plant operations resumed in March. Reuters contacted Apple for comment on Wistron’s status, but the company did not respond immediately.

Source: Reuters

News

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.

According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.

Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.

Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.

Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.

To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.

Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.

On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.

In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.

Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

Pixa Bay

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.

TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.

When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.

And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.

Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.

A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.

google

Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.

But today, it feels more like reality.

Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.

Could we remember Google in the same way that we remember Yahoo or Ask Jeeves in decades? These next few years could be significant.

SOURCE | CNN

News

The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.

The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.

Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.

This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.

In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.

The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.

This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.

The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.

In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.

According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.

Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.

The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.

For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.

Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.

As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.

As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.

The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.

SOURCE: AP

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Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli, To repay $6.4 Million

Washington — The Supreme Court rejected Martin Shkreli’s appeal on Monday, after he was branded “Pharma Bro” for raising the price of a lifesaving prescription.

Martin appealed a decision to repay $64.6 million in profits he and his former company earned after monopolizing the pharmaceutical market and dramatically raising its price. His lawyers claimed the money went to his company rather than him personally.

The justices did not explain their reasoning, as is customary, and there were no notable dissents.

Prosecutors, conversely, claimed that the firm had promised to pay $40 million in a settlement and that because Martin orchestrated the plan, he should be held accountable for returning profits.

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

Martin was also forced to forfeit the Wu-Tang Clan’s unreleased album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” which has been dubbed the world’s rarest musical album. The multiplatinum hip-hop group auctioned off a single copy of the record in 2015, stipulating that it not be used commercially.

Shkreli was convicted of lying to investors and defrauding them of millions of dollars in two unsuccessful hedge funds he managed. Shkreli was the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals (later Vyera), which hiked the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill after acquiring exclusive rights to the decades-old medicine in 2015. It cures a rare parasite condition that affects pregnant women, cancer patients, and HIV patients.

shkreli

He defended the choice as an example of capitalism in action, claiming that insurance and other programs ensured that those in need of Daraprim would eventually receive it. However, the move prompted criticism, from the medical community to Congress.

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

Attorney Thomas Huff said the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling was upsetting, but the high court could still overturn a lower court judgment that allowed the $64 million penalty order even though Shkreli had not personally received the money.

“If and when the Supreme Court does so, Mr. Shkreli will have a strong argument for modifying the order accordingly,” he told reporters.

Shkreli was freed from prison in 2022 after serving most of his seven-year sentence.

SOURCE | AP