Apple and its manufacturing partner Foxconn were among the companies behind a landmark liberalization of labor laws in the Indian state of Karnataka last month, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Their successful lobbying for new legislation means two-shift production can take place in India, akin to the two companies’ practices in China, their primary manufacturing base. The law gives the southern state one of the most flexible working regimes in India as the country aims to become an alternative manufacturing base to China.
12 hour days at the factory sounds progressive to me /sarcasm
Workers in the west should consider themselves lucky, companies would do it here too if they could get away with it. Then again, western safety nets may be eroding. Congress is currently debating increasing the retirement age and reducing social security and medicare benefits. Combine the loss of benefits with insanely high inflation spells very bad news for the middle class. I fear that homelessness will swell into the millions.
Companies do do it here, and they do stranger things. E.g. I’ve worked with a “fly in, do 12 hour shifts for 7 days straight, fly out, have an entire week off, with some night shift” arrangement before (for a mining company). Honestly, “less days, more hours per day, same total hours per fortnight” is better because you spend less time getting ready for work and travelling to/from work, and a larger block of time off is a lot more useful than the scraps after an 8-hour shift (when you’re worn out and mostly just waste your time off relaxing).
Note that for a factory using 12 hour shifts the logical schedule would be “84 hours per fortnight, 4 days one week then 3 days the next week = an average of 42 hours per week”; because it’s a lot easier (for both employer and employee) to keep track when every fortnight is the same; but you need “48 hours in a week” to be legal to achieve that “average of 42 hours per week”.
Of course factory work is probably shit (tedious, repetitive) regardless of whether it’s 84 hours spread over 7 days per fortnight, or 84 hours spread over 10 days per fortnight.
Brendan,
They didn’t say what the work days were did they? According to this article, this foxconn employee was working seven days a week, but only 10 hours.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/24/business/foxconn-offer-protests-china-covid-intl-hnk/index.html
So I’m not sure what the real numbers are, but regardless I suspect it’s probably not a good work/life balance over at foxconn. That translates to $579-$724 including overtime. Still I suspect there’s an abundance of labor available to take that deal, which is why corporations are so keen in manufacturing products in those countries.
In my experience 10 hour days 5 days a week is fairly normal for IT jobs here in the US. Deployments / rollouts often take place after hours & weekends. My gripe is that computer professionals are generally exempt from all federal overtime laws and many companies don’t pay a single dollar in overtime regardless of how many hours one works.
I can see how a 12 hour shift may be convenient at times, but I don’t think a 12 hour shift is necessarily good for you (or your work) though. I’d hope people aren’t doing 12 hour shifts regularly when safety and accuracy matter.
I agree. Also, I suspect the job has no future, if employees ask for too much they may be at genuine risk of automation taking the job away.
No, workers in the west cannot consider themselves lucky, they see manufacturing jobs constantly moving to Mexico and Asia, which means fewer manufacturing jobs for them. And then there is automation that’s eliminating jobs too. I don’t know how this can be resolved. I got a CS degree and have a CS job so I won’t have to worry about it, but I really don’t know how this can be resolved. One solution could be high import tariffs, that way you can reduce work hours as automation eliminates jobs without worrying about how lax the labour laws of Mexico, China, or India are.
kurkosdr,
That is true, but are those jobs you’d want yourself or your kids to have? In the “old days” a factory job was good, you’d have a job for life that paid well and fed your family and even paid your retirement, but it isn’t the case any longer. In modern times foxconn and other cheap labor workers are notoriously driven to suicide.
Even with the 10-25% Chinese tariffs still in place, US workers are not competitive with the foreign labor and there’s no mistaking that we are getting clobbered by inflation. I guess tariffs of 75%+ might do the trick of bringing back manufacturing, however my prediction is that this would just increase the automation rather than jobs.
On the one hand, automation ought to be good for humanity. But on the other hand, it increases the economic imbalance stemming from corporations holding all the money and not needing to pay workers.
I honestly think economic mismanagement is going to collapse the country in the long run. The federal government faces major budget shortfalls every year and it’s not even due to the lack of wealth in the US. The problem is that trillions of corporate dollars aren’t being taxed even at the level individuals are paying. The corporate tax cuts are creating massive shifts of wealth enabling corporations to reach sky high trillion dollar valuations, but it comes at the cost of increasing our collective national debt and a real risk of social programs including medicare and social security collapsing. We’re already on track for this to happen.
The US has mountains of wealth, but I fear the failure to distribute it to the lower and middle classes will only contribute to more suffering and turmoil in the coming years. I’m kind of going O/T, but I don’t see how this imbalanced doesn’t eventually lead to a social flashpoint.
The reason factory jobs in the west aren’t good anymore like they used to be is precisely because the workers are forced to “compete” with the workers (or even slave labour) in other countries.
Which is a good thing. The increases in automation will drive the change for fewer working hours, , just like the first industrial revolution gave us the 8-hour workday. But it’s not gonna happen if corporations can find cheap or even slave labour overseas.
The above thinking is why higher tariffs are again considered a good thing by many people in the US, despite considerable effort by the US media cartels to convince people of the opposite.
kurkosdr,
There’s a multitude of factors. Companies jumped onto the offshoring bandwagon in the first place because it increased their profits hand over fist. I don’t oppose bringing stuff back, but it’s much easier said than done. Who’s going to pay for it, realistically speaking? Most companies aren’t going to willingly dig into profits to start paying more without being forced to do so. And thanks to corporate influence over government, they’re not going to side with workers. Almost all poverty and national debt would be solved if corporations were paying their fair share, but instead corporations are paying some of the lowest taxes on record. And they’re further lobbying for everything to be privatized for more profit. They’ll do anything for more profits at everyone else’s expense.
I support your cause in principal, but I’m skeptical that we could realistically return to progressive economics for middle class workers. It goes without saying that you can get millions of people on board with “making america great again” because it appeals to them at face value. The problem is too many politicians including trump are authoritarian con men who don’t give a crap about the common family if we’re being honest. They’ll dismantle worker rights, voter rights, free press, unions, social security, health care, child care, etc in a heartbeat. Politics are too corrupt and favor the corporate elites, how do we go about changing that without the country first falling into turmoil and sparking a revolution?
Once again I agree with your ideal, but that’s not what happens. Instead people get laid off while those fortunate enough to keep their jobs only get modest pay gains that are not commensurate with their newfound productivity.
Take a good look at this graph, it shows what happens when automation and technology improves our productivity at work…
https://www.bls.gov/productivity/images/labor-compensation-labor-productivity-gap.png
Bare in mind this is a log graph, so the discrepancy between curves is exponential.
This is what most people on the left don’t understand: It doesn’t matter how “progressive” your laws are if there is very little domestic demand for manufacturing workers because all jobs have gone overseas. Best case scenario you will have a few manufacturing workers with good jobs and lots of unemployed manufacturing workers. Even with today’s laws, jobs are going overseas. BTW this massive loss of blue-collar jobs is partially compensated by tons of welfare, which in turn is funded by massive amounts of deficit (aka new debt). Which is about to come to an end as the FED and ECB are hiking interest rates and governments will start facing problems servicing their existing debt, much less adding more.
Also, I do find it weird that it’s right-wing politicians that brought tariffs back into the conversation, not the left. For example, say what you want about the Trump administration, but Trump did introduce some new tariffs and did clip Huawei’s wings big time (which was eclipsing US and EU companies in 5G infrastructure technology, which means that those Silicon Valley tech jobs aren’t safe either).
Again, this is happening because workers have no bargaining power. Automation and wage stagnation is what keeps whatever few manufacturing jobs that haven’t gone overseas from doing so. If the overseas competition is eliminated (via tariffs), then workers can demand higher wages and fewer hours without fear of losing their jobs. Yes, your smartphone will cost 100-150 bucks more, but your country will be better off. It’s not possible for a country to prosper by becoming an import-only nation.
kurkosdr,
Who says there’s a misunderstanding though? I don’t wish to overstate it because of course people should be free to form their own opinions, but for the record people who are better educated are statistically more progressive leaning. Naturally opinions vary, but calling this a misunderstanding by progressives seems without merit.
It’s a chicken and egg problem. A lot of the government programs came about to fill gaps where corporations themselves fell short. You can’t truly measure one in isolation from the other. To decrease government services without depriving people of housing/healthcare/food/etc, corporations would have to pick up the tab somehow, but it’s not something that aligns with their profit motives. Take health care and retirement pensions, these have been waning for years placing greater burden on employees. New employees in particular often don’t get the same level of benefits as older employees grandfathered into an older plans when greater benefits were promised. This has a macroeconomic impact that can either be addressed or ignored.
I do understand people who want less government involvement and TBH sometimes I feel the same way when it comes to personal liberties…but I don’t think we should be in denial over what happens to lower & middle class quality of life when we simply hand the reigns over to corporations to have their way. In fact we don’t even have to speculate here since we can already see what corporations are doing calling the shots in chinese factories. It’s naive to think they wouldn’t be doing the exact same thing here if they were free to do so.
You’re right it is weird. However if you’ll recall, conservative right wing politicians were actually against trump’s tariffs. Tariffs are not the policy of their party, quite the opposite.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/05/firingsquad-gop-1354652
With the exception of electronics, arguably trump stepped over his authority in passing tariffs in the name of national security. It’s supposed to be done by congress and it’s doubtful congress would have done so with republicans in control. Notice also that democrats haven’t repealed the tariffs.
I agree.
Unless the humans are exceptionally cheap, human labor tends to be a huge cost center for companies:
Cost of human training & salaries to do work manually
vs.
Cost of hardware & maintenance & human operators to automate.
This speaks directly to what we said originally, forcing companies to switch to a more expensive labor market isn’t likely to shift many jobs because companies will run the numbers and decide that switching to automation instead is cheaper. In short, the bulk of these jobs are simply not going to come back. I think we are in agreement on this. We need to factor this into the idea that we could bring back good factory jobs for the masses.
For the reasons already brought up (aka automation), I find it unlikely these manufacturing jobs are coming back in any case. We’ll have some machine operator jobs, but it’ll be much fewer than those replaced. I think as a country we have to think long and hard about how we’re going to address companies needing less and less labor to get by. Sure, those who remain will have decent jobs, but as the data has been showing for a while, year over year less trickles down to the masses with the top keeping the lion’s share of wealth for themselves. Is your view that we shouldn’t do anything about this? I guess some people feel that way, but it does mean the country will get worse for more and more people.
Humans are exceptionally cheap in places like China, and even free if they are Uyghur slave labour. India is trying to “compete” with that, which is how the above article came to be. I don’t think it’s worth trying to try and compete with that though.
Count those machine operator jobs and set work hours accordingly.
I outlined what can be done above. But if you are hinting at punitive taxation, no I don’t believe in it. First of all it’s unfair to punish people when they haven’t broken any laws, and secondly France tried punitive taxation (aka to “tax the rich”) and the rich left to Monaco and Luxembourg along with their wealth, since the price of admission to those countries was less than the tax. Eventually, France had to take that measure back after it resulted in less income for the government from “the rich”, not more.
kurkosdr,
Yes, we’re in agreement here.
Do you concede that automated factory jobs will be less than human labor factory labor jobs? Maybe you just don’t care and say “Oh well, too bad. Corporations have no responsibility to those who become redundant” but this is exactly why governments are forced to step in.
Well, what do you think a tariff is? Make no mistake that a tariff is a tax. And using tariffs to specifically punish companies that use offshore labor is quite literally a form of punitive taxation.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tariff.asp
You’re entitled to justify this however you wish, but I just can’t help but notice that your solution is yet another government taxation solution. Ultimately I agree there are pros and cons, but as you’ve conceded earlier, the tariffs we have today have not been enough to make a drastic dent in offshoring behavior. Maybe tariffs of 75% would be, but we can’t ignored the cons tariffs, it’s consumers who inevitably pay for this. Inflation is already hard to swallow, applying more tariffs to get corporate compliance would become that much more crippling for many families. Also, for the reasons discussed above, companies would only create a fraction of the jobs. So there’s a very real possibility that the price hikes would harm middle class wealth more than automated factory jobs would help.
I’d like to ask you do to something: think of a year when US jobs/wages/benefits/etc were good for blue collar factory workers. Then go look at the corporate tax rates for those years. This is the thing the “laissez-faire” people forget, they try to make the case for pro-business policy including tax cuts to help corporations create stable good paying jobs. But trickle down theory is a fantasy debunked by history. Give corporations more money, and they’ll increase their profits for sure, but the workers keep getting a shrinking share of the pie along the way. Strong corporate profits today have come at the expense of what was once an exceptionally strong middle class. Since corporations carry more weight in US politics than workers, economic policy keeps favoring the corporations for better or worse.
I’m a CS too, and I feel CS is the new factory job. Only this time they want your brain, and it’s not because you are smart…
stereotype,
My prediction is that high tech & programming jobs will not be safe from automation, It’s only a matter of time. Some new jobs will be created but there will be a net job loss, as is often the case with tech giants consolidating the market. It’s very unclear to me what will be replacing these jobs a decade from now? One of the biggest growing needs today is in elder care, which practically guaranties a job, but it’s hard to support a family in such an expensive world with low pay.
I did 12 hour days at a factory, its not illegal here in the states. Usually it was 4 days on with 12 hour shifts and 8 hours overtime, then three days off. Decent pay, but hazardous working environment with heavy metal carcinogens in air and lax use of n95’s. .
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Yeah, in the US all the work hour rules seem to be industry specific like this.
railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/fra_net/2189/RSIA_Pub.%20L.%20No.%20110-432%20in%20pdf.pdf
http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-hours-service-regulations
But, let me ask you, do you feel you were fully alert those 12 hours or were you running tired on zombie-like auto-pilot some of the time? Obviously risks will vary from job to job.
US workers are generally expected to put in more annual hours than our european counterparts, but less than china/india/korea. I didn’t find similar data broken down per day. Still in researching this further, I did come across some interesting working hour data points between countries.
ourworldindata.org/working-hours
Low pay countries like China and Mexico put in way more hours with way less GDP to show for it.
But Norway and Switzerland make more GDP while working much fewer hours. IMHO if the US cared about it’s workers, we’d be trying to mimic them. I’m convinced, that we could all work a lot less with as much productivity if we just fixed useless overhead. But unfortunately a lot of these long hours are baked into the corporate culture, which affects me personally and I guess most of us here. I’ve even been told by some project managers to be more creative at inventing billable work for a government contract. It’s insane and infuriating if you look at it as a tax payer, but there are huge incentives to be extremely inefficient while appearing to be productive 🙁
hbr.org/2015/04/why-some-men-pretend-to-work-80-hour-weeks
Yeah, I feel like I was fully alert and oriented through out it. I was 18 at the time, with no responsibilities other than work. It was third shift which meant that I was getting decent sleep during the day because my friends were working, then when they wanted to stay out past 10, I had to go to work so as awful as it was, I was getting decent sleep. I have no idea how the 40 year olds with wife and kids were managing their lives. But each job there was different, some were on 8 hour shifts. And some machines had a lot of downtime for the operators, only requiring batch movement of parts with occasional interventions, measurements, etc. I was on a constantly moving belt machine requiring fast moving fingers. So no opportunities to fall asleep.
But I can just imagine how they dealt with covid, they didn’t even wear masks that prevented inhalation of heavy metals. I’m guessing a deadly virus didn’t move the needle for them.
Somewhat OT, but my first reaction to the general tone of that quote (namely, the way it describes the changes in terms that are strangely positive/approving, to the point of bordering on damning-with-faint-praise) was to mouse-over the link, then immediately become confused. My literal first thought was “ArsTechnica, WTF? That must one of their Conde Naste-manadated crossposts of FT articles” – then I opened the link & spotted the byline:
“John Reed and Katherin Hille, Financial Times”
Ah, FT – thank goodness they’re around to uncritically stick up for the amoral profiteers of the world.