[THOUSANDS of students in an east China city are being forced to work at a Foxconn plant after classes were suspended at the beginning of the new semester, it has been revealed.
Students from Huai'an in Jiangsu Province were driven to a factory in the city run by Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Company after the plant couldn't find sufficient workers for the production of Apple's much-anticipated iPhone 5, they said in online posts.
A student majoring in computing at the Huaiyin Institute of Technology said 200 students from her school had been driven to the factory.
They started work on the production line last Thursday and were being paid 1,550 yuan (US$243.97) a month for working six days a week, she said.
But they had to pay hundreds of yuan for food and accommodation, she said in an online post under the name of mengniuIQ84.
Several other students from at least five colleges backed up what she said, saying they were being forced to work for 12 hours a day.]
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=511136
2 United States.
Of course as purveyor of fiction, the Journal ignores underlying causes of households assuming debt--including homeowners who used equity build up to obtain loans--American companies stopped making stuff in the US of Arrogance through increasing profits by exploiting labor all over the globe, thereby avoiding costs imposed by humane measures to improve health of workers: keeping deadly toxins out of the work place, mandated overtime for over 40 hours work per week, and social security insurance against vicissitudes of old age or catastrophic injury or illness.
Do the math.
Apple exploits workers in China to make "high end" devices as cheap as possible and then sell at highest premium possible.
Buy an iPad; kill a puppy!
(Puppy used here because consumers care more about cute and cuddly puppies rather than human toll crushing people making consumer gadgets.)
[The U.S. and U.K. are two economies. That’s to say they’re each two economies. Both countries are divided into the finance-based asset rich minority and the rest.
The top slice, be it 10%, 1%, or one tenth of 1%, control a vastly disproportionate amount of resources relative to post-war history. By and large, they’ve had a good financial crisis as central banks have pumped up asset prices while governments have helped to reinforce their incomes through deficit spending.
The U.S. corporate sector’s profits make up the highest percentage of U.S. GDP ever.
This is the mirror of job insecurity, low earnings growth, and high unemployment among the majority. It has been made even worse in the U.K. by falling real earnings thanks to high inflation rates over the past five years.]
http://blogs.wsj.com/source/2012/07/25/a-tale-of-two-economies/?mod=wsj_nview_latest
