Labor related posts.
Strengthened? Well, kinda sorta. Union strengthening in China is off to a slow start. The mighty Foxconn has bowed to union pressures to reduce mandatory overtime from the normal 15-20 hours per week (sometimes exceeding 40 hours per week during busy seasons) to the national standard of only 9 hours per week. And this...
This American Life (TAL) is an awesome program that Ira Glass and company have been producing for years. This week, for the first time, they ran a retraction of one of their recent stories: Episode 454, Mr. Daisy and the Apple Factory. But the facts about Chinese labor conditions at Foxconn persist.
New York Times: ”Over the next few years, American astronauts will be competing for a handful of slots on the International Space Station, flying there on Russian Soyuz capsules.”
Today, April 15, is normally called “Tax Day” in the United States; it’s the day when thousands of people across the nation stand in long, long lines outside their local post offices to mail their tax returns in at the absolute last minute. This year, though, the filing deadline is delayed until Monday the...
The so-called “uncanny valley” is a phenomenon associated with the development of life-like robotics and androids. The idea is that a poor approximation of a human or animal, something that is perhaps 20% realistic, is seen as a 20% likeness. A 50% realistic likeness is seen as better than 20%, but still a non-threatening...
Are you a Call Center worker who answers Customer Service phone calls? Do you hate your job because for your entire shift you never know who’s going to yell at you next? Don’t worry! The good people at IBM are working to bring Watson into the Customer Service arena, displacing you from your job. ...
I wrote more than a year ago about the imminent development of having robots replace humans in management situations. Now, a story from the New York Times that explores this idea. The boss isn’t so much a robot, but is instead using robotic telepresence devices.
Free-Market ideology holds that the solution to every problem in the social, economic, and political spheres is to allow markets unfettered reign so that they can solve all problems in their natural course. Including slavery, which is not nearly as efficient as “remote workforces.”
“Even if migrant workers still do not know the specific details of each of their legal rights, far more came to realize that they have rights and there are laws protecting them.”
Could it be that Chinese workers are getting wise to the way that transnational corporations have been abusing them for decades?