Calling The "Visionaries" In And Out Of The Education World What Many Of Them Truly Are - Sociopaths

Tony Schwartz in the NY Times on Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk:

The three leaders are arguably the most extraordinary business visionaries of our times. Each of them has introduced unique products that changed – or in Mr. Musk’s case, have huge potential to change – the way we live.

...

What disheartens me is how little care and appreciation any of them give (or in Mr. Jobs’s case, gave) to hard-working and loyal employees, and how unnecessarily cruel and demeaning they could be to the people who helped make their dreams come true.

...

Given the extraordinary success of these men, the obvious question is whether being relentlessly hard on people, and even cruel, may get them to perform better.

Like their biographers, I think the answer is no. Our research at the Energy Project has shown that the more employees feel their needs are being met at work – above all, for respect and appreciation – the better they perform.

Here's how these three "visionary" leaders treated their employees and/or others:

As Mr. Isaacson writes of Mr. Jobs: “Nasty was not necessary. It hindered him more than it helped him.”

...

Mr. Jobs drove around without a license on his car, and he regularly parked in spaces reserved for the handicapped. As Mr. Ive said of his attitude, “I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him.”

Amazon employees collected examples of Mr. Bezos’s most eviscerating put-downs, including, “Are you lazy or just incompetent?” “Why are you wasting my life?” and “I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?”

When Mr. Musk’s loyal executive assistant of 12 years asked for a significant raise, he told her to take a two-week vacation while he thought about it. When she returned, he told her the relationship wasn’t going to work anymore. According to Mr. Vance, they haven’t spoken since.

And of course all of this nastiness, this "I am the most special person on the planet and you will treat me as such!" stems from the egocentric belief these men had or have of their own so-called genius.

But Schwartz thinks there's another reason Jobs, Bezos and Musk act or acted so badly - out of fear:

People like these three visionaries deeply crave control. Each of them was far more likely to act out suddenly and behave poorly when he wasn’t getting exactly what he wanted — when he felt that others were failing to live up to his standards.

All three invested endless hours and energy in building and running their businesses — and far less in anything else, including taking care of the people who worked for them or even understanding what doing so might look like. To a large extent, people were simply a means to an end.

I understand what it is like to have one’s self entirely tied up with external success. No amount is ever quite enough. To a large extent, for these men, employees are simply a means to an end.

If you're a teacher these days, you know some of the drill that the people who work or worked for Jobs, Bezos and Musk know because some of the same personality types have been given the power to run school systems and schools themselves.

In the "visions" of the corporate education reformers, students are seen as "products," teachers are seen as a means to an end, control is the most sought-after goal and the only thing that truly matters is imposing an agenda and rigging the data to make it look successful.

Many education leaders these days are little versions of Bezos, Jobs and Musk - always without the "genius" or "vision," of course, though some education leaders think they have it - see Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, Cami Anderson, et al. for the same delusional arrogance and egocentric patterns that Bezos, Jobs and Musk displayed.

But it doesn't really matter whether the Kleins and Rhees of the world have the "genius" or "vision" of Bezos or Jobs or not because a truly successful leader shouldn't be treating people like "products" or a "means to an end," a truly successful leader shouldn't be so obsessed with control and fear that they run roughshod over everybody and everything.

Schwartz concludes:

The question their management style raises is not whether being tough, harsh and relentlessly demanding gets people to work better. Of course it doesn’t, and certainly not sustainably. Can anyone truly doubt that people are more productive in workplaces that help them to be healthier and happier?

The more apt question is how much more these men could have enhanced thousands of people’s lives – and perhaps made them even more successful — if they had invested as much in taking care of them as they did in conceiving great products.

“Try not to become a man of success,” Albert Einstein once said, “but rather a man of value.”

It is time we stop fetishizing so-called corporate geniuses like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and other so-called "visionaries" (you can add many others to the list - Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates come immediately to mind) and call them exactly what they are - sociopaths who in the end do a lot more harm than good.

The same goes for the little versions in education - the Kleins, the Rhees, et al. - who for years have lived on the press of their "visions" and "genius" (think the TIME cover with Rhee on it holding the broom.)

But remember, you can't decry the sociopathology of the Kleins and Rhees of the education world while praising the "genius" and "vision" of sociopaths like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates.

Gates is an easy one for people in the ed world to despise - his foundation's work to destroy public schools makes that an easy thing.

But Steve Jobs still gets fetishized by some for his "genius" and "vision".

Truly his "vision" was "@#$% you, I get my way or I destroy you!"

And that's the kind of vision we can do without these days - in or out of education.

For another example, see one Andrew Cuomo in Albany.

First Slave Labor, Now This

From the Post:

The billionaire widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs’ has reportedly hooked up with the divorcing, former mayor of Washington DC.

Laurene Powell Jobs, 49, and Adrian Fenty, 42, got their romance rolling in January when the former DC mayor announced his separation from wife Michelle, the Washington Post reported today.

The new power couple met in 2011 at an education conference.

Then in 2012, Fenty joined the board of College Track, a non-profit founded
  by Powell Jobs and dedicated to getting students from underserved high schools into college.

“Adrian Fenty is one of our country’s great advocates for education reform,” she said when Fenty joined the board. “His sense of urgency and record of accomplishment is unparalleled.”

Ugh.

Gates and Jobs' widow, both in the education reform game, both with more money than God to push their respective agendas.

And now Jobs' widow dating the man who brought Michelle Rhee to D.C.

I'm giving up computers and going back to the abacus and stylus.  

As far as I know, those technologies aren't owned by ed deformers, right?

Yes, But How Would He Score On Standardized Tests?

From the NY Times:

When David Karp was 14, he was clearly a bright teenager. Quiet, somewhat reclusive, bored with his classes at the Bronx High School of Science. He spent most of his free time in his bedroom, glued to his computer. 

But instead of trying to pry him away from his machine or coaxing him outside to get some fresh air, his mother, Barbara Ackerman, had another solution: she suggested that he drop out of high school to be home-schooled. 

“I saw him at school all day and absorbed all night into his computer,” said Ms. Ackerman, reached by phone Monday afternoon. “It became very clear that David needed the space to live his passion. Which was computers. All things computers.” 

Clearly. 

Now 26 years old, Mr. Karp never finished high school or enrolled in college. Instead, he played a significant role in several technology start-ups before founding Tumblr, the popular blogging service that agreed to be sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion this week. With an expected $250 million from the deal, Mr. Karp joins a tiny circle of 20-something entrepreneurs, hoodie-wearing characters like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, who have struck it rich before turning 30. 

It's interesting how the culture mythologizes the school dropouts who make it big in tech - from Gates to Jobs to Karp.

Yet the same culture promotes a one size school system for all that clearly Gates and Jobs and Karp and other so-called "geniuses" can't work with.

I think it's even more interesting that so many of these tech entrepreneurs promote the one size fits all school system through their philanthropic efforts.

No one has done this more than Gates.

Zuckerberg is joining that movement.

And Karp tells the Times "He intends to 'figure out something' with philanthropy."

Don't be surprised if this Bronx High School of Science dropout doesn't join his fellow techies in promoting a one size fits all school system for everybody else.

Apple - Just Like Walmart

We've already seen how Apple uses slave labor at Foxxconn and other overseas factories to make it's products.

Now the Times shows us how they exploit their workers here in America:

America’s love affair with the smartphone has helped create tens of thousands of jobs at places like Best Buy and Verizon Wireless and will this year pump billions into the economy.

Within this world, the Apple Store is the undisputed king, a retail phenomenon renowned for impeccable design, deft service and spectacular revenues. Last year, the company’s 327 global stores took in more money per square foot than any other United States retailer — wireless or otherwise — and almost double that of Tiffany, which was No. 2 on the list, according to the research firm RetailSails.

Worldwide, its stores sold $16 billion in merchandise.

But most of Apple’s employees enjoyed little of that wealth. While consumers tend to think of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., as the company’s heart and soul, a majority of its workers in the United States are not engineers or executives with hefty salaries and bonuses but rather hourly wage earners selling iPhones and MacBooks.

About 30,000 of the 43,000 Apple employees in this country work in Apple Stores, as members of the service economy, and many of them earn about $25,000 a year. They work inside the world’s fastest growing industry, for the most valuable company, run by one of the country’s most richly compensated chief executives, Tim Cook. Last year, he received stock grants, which vest over a 10-year period, that at today’s share price would be worth more than $570 million.

And though Apple is unparalleled as a retailer, when it comes to its lowliest workers, the company is a reflection of the technology industry as a whole.

...

By the standards of retailing, Apple offers above average pay — well above the minimum wage of $7.25 and better than the Gap, though slightly less than Lululemon, the yoga and athletic apparel chain, where sales staff earn about $12 an hour. The company also offers very good benefits for a retailer, including health care, 401(k) contributions and the chance to buy company stock, as well as Apple products, at a discount.

But Apple is not selling polo shirts or yoga pants. Divide revenue by total number of employees and you find that last year, each Apple store employee — that includes non-sales staff like technicians and people stocking shelves — brought in $473,000.

“These are sales rates for a consulting company,” said Horace Dediu, an analyst who blogged about the calculation on the site Asymco. Electronics and appliance stores typically post $206,000 in revenue per employee, according to the latest figures from the National Retail Federation.

...

Last year, during his best three-month stretch, Jordan Golson sold about $750,000 worth of computers and gadgets at the Apple Store in Salem, N.H. It was a performance that might have called for a bottle of Champagne — if that were a luxury Mr. Golson could have afforded.

“I was earning $11.25 an hour,” he said. “Part of me was thinking, ‘This is great. I’m an Apple fan, the store is doing really well.’ But when you look at the amount of money the company is making and then you look at your paycheck, it’s kind of tough.”

Read the rest of the article.

I found it infuriating.

Apple is much better at p.r. than some of the more notorious companies, like Walmart or Microsoft.

But when you look at how they make their products overseas and how they sell them here, you can see that at Apple, exploitation is Job #1.

No wonder Steve Jobs hated teachers unions.

He, like the Walton Family and Bill Gates, wanted to bring the Apple model to public education.

And Jobs may be gone, but we're getting that Apple model slowly but surely in the public school system.

The Neo-Feudal Economy

When the president or the captains of finance and industry blame education for why companies do not manufacture or make anything in the United States anymore, do NOT believe them.

This is why they don't manufacture or make anything in the United States anymore:

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Businesspeople blame education for the problem - they say that Americans are not trained in the mid-level skills that are needed at factories, so that's why they go overseas to make their products.

But take a look at just how the workers are treated overseas and ask yourself if THAT isn't the reason:

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

...

An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

Foxconn, in statements, declined to speak about specific clients.

“Any worker recruited by our firm is covered by a clear contract outlining terms and conditions and by Chinese government law that protects their rights,” the company wrote. Foxconn “takes our responsibility to our employees very seriously and we work hard to give our more than one million employees a safe and positive environment.”

The company disputed some details of the former Apple executive’s account, and wrote that a midnight shift, such as the one described, was impossible “because we have strict regulations regarding the working hours of our employees based on their designated shifts, and every employee has computerized timecards that would bar them from working at any facility at a time outside of their approved shift.” The company said that all shifts began at either 7 a.m. or 7 p.m., and that employees receive at least 12 hours’ notice of any schedule changes.

Foxconn employees, in interviews, have challenged those assertions.

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Ah, yes - the vaunted "More than a High School, But Not Quite a College Degree" engineer.

Can't remember the last time I heard Arne Duncan or Barack Obama talking about churning out tens of thousands of those.

Well, the U.S. could find lots of them anyway, train them pretty fast too - but companies like Apple prefer to hire these kinds of workers in China:

Middle-Class Jobs Fade

The first time Eric Saragoza stepped into Apple’s manufacturing plant in Elk Grove, Calif., he felt as if he were entering an engineering wonderland.

It was 1995, and the facility near Sacramento employed more than 1,500 workers. It was a kaleidoscope of robotic arms, conveyor belts ferrying circuit boards and, eventually, candy-colored iMacs in various stages of assembly. Mr. Saragoza, an engineer, quickly moved up the plant’s ranks and joined an elite diagnostic team. His salary climbed to $50,000. He and his wife had three children. They bought a home with a pool.

“It felt like, finally, school was paying off,” he said. “I knew the world needed people who can build things.”

At the same time, however, the electronics industry was changing, and Apple — with products that were declining in popularity — was struggling to remake itself. One focus was improving manufacturing. A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.

“We were told we would have to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays,” Mr. Saragoza said. “I had a family. I wanted to see my kids play soccer.”

Modernization has always caused some kinds of jobs to change or disappear. As the American economy transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing and then to other industries, farmers became steelworkers, and then salesmen and middle managers. These shifts have carried many economic benefits, and in general, with each progression, even unskilled workers received better wages and greater chances at upward mobility.

But in the last two decades, something more fundamental has changed, economists say. Midwage jobs started disappearing. Particularly among Americans without college degrees, today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.

Even Mr. Saragoza, with his college degree, was vulnerable to these trends. First, some of Elk Grove’s routine tasks were sent overseas. Mr. Saragoza didn’t mind. Then the robotics that made Apple a futuristic playground allowed executives to replace workers with machines. Some diagnostic engineering went to Singapore. Middle managers who oversaw the plant’s inventory were laid off because, suddenly, a few people with Internet connections were all that were needed.

Mr. Saragoza was too expensive for an unskilled position. He was also insufficiently credentialed for upper management. He was called into a small office in 2002 after a night shift, laid off and then escorted from the plant. He taught high school for a while, and then tried a return to technology. But Apple, which had helped anoint the region as “Silicon Valley North,” had by then converted much of the Elk Grove plant into an AppleCare call center, where new employees often earn $12 an hour.

There were employment prospects in Silicon Valley, but none of them panned out. “What they really want are 30-year-olds without children,” said Mr. Saragoza, who today is 48, and whose family now includes five of his own.

After a few months of looking for work, he started feeling desperate. Even teaching jobs had dried up. So he took a position with an electronics temp agency that had been hired by Apple to check returned iPhones and iPads before they were sent back to customers. Every day, Mr. Saragoza would drive to the building where he had once worked as an engineer, and for $10 an hour with no benefits, wipe thousands of glass screens and test audio ports by plugging in headphones.

...

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

What’s more, Apple sources say the company has created plenty of good American jobs inside its retail stores and among entrepreneurs selling iPhone and iPad applications.

After two months of testing iPads, Mr. Saragoza quit. The pay was so low that he was better off, he figured, spending those hours applying for other jobs. On a recent October evening, while Mr. Saragoza sat at his MacBook and submitted another round of résumés online, halfway around the world a woman arrived at her office. The worker, Lina Lin, is a project manager in Shenzhen, China, at PCH International, which contracts with Apple and other electronics companies to coordinate production of accessories, like the cases that protect the iPad’s glass screens. She is not an Apple employee. But Mrs. Lin is integral to Apple’s ability to deliver its products.

Mrs. Lin earns a bit less than what Mr. Saragoza was paid by Apple. She speaks fluent English, learned from watching television and in a Chinese university. She and her husband put a quarter of their salaries in the bank every month. They live in a 1,080-square-foot apartment, which they share with their in-laws and son.

“There are lots of jobs,” Mrs. Lin said. “Especially in Shenzhen.”

And why do Apple executives and the other captains of finance and industry prefer to hire overseas?

Very simply - money:

As Apple’s overseas operations and sales have expanded, its top employees have thrived. Last fiscal year, Apple’s revenue topped $108 billion, a sum larger than the combined state budgets of Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since 2005, when the company’s stock split, share prices have risen from about $45 to more than $427.

Some of that wealth has gone to shareholders. Apple is among the most widely held stocks, and the rising share price has benefited millions of individual investors, 401(k)’s and pension plans. The bounty has also enriched Apple workers. Last fiscal year, in addition to their salaries, Apple’s employees and directors received stock worth $2 billion and exercised or vested stock and options worth an added $1.4 billion.

The biggest rewards, however, have often gone to Apple’s top employees. Mr. Cook, Apple’s chief, last year received stock grants — which vest over a 10-year period — that, at today’s share price, would be worth $427 million, and his salary was raised to $1.4 million. In 2010, Mr. Cook’s compensation package was valued at $59 million, according to Apple’s security filings.

If Apple or some other company wanted to begin to manufacture back in the United States, wanted to begin training Americans to do the technological jobs they need them to do - they could.

But they don't want to pay them a living wage for this - or at least, not what is a living wage in the United States.

So instead they lay off Americans and go abroad to hire cheaper.

This is the shame of America, the consequences of globalism and free trade agreements and the increased power of the corporations - we live in a corporate state.

What is good for the corporation is now seen as what is good for America.

Even if tens of millions - indeed, hundreds of millions of Americans - are being hurt by this.

And the politicians in BOTH parties - bought by corporate money, owned by the captains of finance and industry - are aiding and abetting the feudalization of America.

The only way this stops is if millions of Americans finally stand up and say no to it.

The Occupy movements looked like the beginning of that.

Thus the response from the Obama administration, the corporate-owned media, and politicians in BOTH parties to quash that movement as quick as possible.

It is quite clear to me that the current trajectory of "innovation" in the economy is not sustainable - not economically, not environmentally, not socially, not politically.

But we'll see how long we have to go before these assholes running things - whether it's the assholes in Washington, the assholes on Wall Street,or the assholes in Washington State and Silicon Valley - get the message that squeezing Americans this way is not going to end well.

So far, they're not getting the message.

Indeed, the arrogance of a prick like Steve Jobs - who I dearly hope has been reincarnated as an Apple employee at FOXXCONN - shows why most of these assholes are not going to get the message until their absolutely hit over the head with it.

They believe their own propaganda, their own mythology about their greatness as 'innovators" to see that they are simply acting like feudal lords, plantation owners and slave masters.

Microsoft Employees Threaten Suicide At Xbox Plant Over Poor Treatment, Low Wages

Bill Gates like to play philanthropist in public.

He likes to go around making believe he actually cares about people and wants to help them.

But if he cares so much about people, why does he run slave labor factories to make his Microsoft products?

SEATTLE, Wash. (CBS Seattle) – Some 300 Chinese Foxconn employees who manufacture X-box 360 machines said they would throw themselves from their Wuhan, China, plant if demands for lost wages were not met.

China Jasmine Revolution, an activist revolutionary organization with a name borrowed from the Tunisian revolt that set off the Middle East unrest, reported that employees made their demands for a wage increase for 100 employees on Jan. 2.

Management at Foxconn — the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and a crucial link in the supply chains of Apple, Dell, Nintendo and Song — responded with an ultimatum. Employees could quit with one month’s compensation awarded for each year with the plant or go back to working.

Many employees quit, but Foxconn allegedly dishonored the agreement and awarded former employees nothing.

Around 300 workers returned to the plant in an uproar, and staged their protest on the plant’s roof on Jan. 3.

Wuhan’s mayor intervened through hours of negotiations, walking them back from the roof’s edge until 9 p.m. when workers agreed to return to work, according to China.com

So how did Microsoft respond to this?

With jive:

A Microsoft spokesperson wrote CBS Seattle a statement saying, “Microsoft takes working conditions in the factories that manufacture its products very seriously, and we are currently investigating this issue. We have a stringent Vendor Code of Conduct that spells out our expectations, and we monitor working conditions closely on an ongoing basis and address issues as they emerge. Microsoft is committed to the fair treatment and safety of workers employed by our vendors, and to ensuring conformance with Microsoft policy.” ­

Somebody needs to ask Bill Gates the next time he's pontificating about "bad teachers" and the need to fire them in order to help kids from low-income families rise out of poverty why it is he makes his Microsoft products in slave labor camps and factories in China which keeps people in poverty?

To be fair to Microsoft, Apple and other companies use FOXXCONN to make their crap too.

And to be fair to Gates, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs liked to play Buddha on TV, so Gates isn't the only hypocrite from the tech world using slave labor to make his products while acting "Holier Than Thou."

In Jobs' case, I do hope when he is reincarnated back to this world, he comes as an Apple employee at FOXXCONN making Apple products in slave labor conditions so he can get an inkling of the harm he caused during his life.

As for Gates, I'd like to see the media stenographers who spend all their time sucking up to him (or his wife, the equally villainous and hypocritical Melinda) ask him how he reconciles his "philanthropy" and "charity" notions with the plain fact that he runs slave labor factories that harm hundreds of thousands of people.

Seriously, read the drivel Melinda Gates "chats" about in the above Times blog I linked to and try and reconcile that with the FOXXCONN story.

The words that come to mind are "Bleeding Hypocrites!"

Steve Jobs Continues To Use Slave Labor To Make iPads

Bill Gates gets a lot of vilification on this blog for being an evil, slave-employing, egomaniacal monopolist - and rightfully so.

He's all of those things and more.

But you know, Apple's Steve Jobs isn't any better.

Last year seventeen workers committed suicide because the conditions in the Apple slave labor factory were so horrendous.

The owner of the factory in China promised to make conditions better and Jobs promised to hold them accountable for that.

Here is Think Progress on how bad that factory remains:

a new report from Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based advocacy and research group, finds that many of the practices that led more than a dozen workers committ suicide continue to live on. SACOM conducted a comprehensive study of practices at several Foxconn factories over the months of March and April and found that a number of shocking policies are in place. Here are some of the highlights of their study:

– Workers Are Being Asked To Work 80-100 Hours Of Overtime: Despite promises by Apple and Foxconn to limit overtime work to 36 hours a month, SACOM researchers found that in some factories, like in Chengdu, it is typical for workers to work 80-100 hours overtime instead. This is actually 2-3 times the legal limit of allowed overtime work.

– Workers Are Being Forced To Sign ‘No-Suicide’ Pacts: In the wake of a huge wave of suicides at Foxconn plants, the company began reforming its practices related to the suicides. Among these changes included installing anti-suicide nets to catch workers who attempted to leap out of company windows. Yet workers are also being forced to sign a non-suicide pact as a condition of employment. As part of the pact, the employees families have to promise “not sue the company, bring excessive demands, take drastic actions that would damage the company’s reputation or cause trouble that would hurt normal operations” in the case of a suicide.

– Employees Regularly Are Forced To Stand For 14 Hours A Day: SACOM found that workers in Chengdu “usually…have to stand for 14 hours a day.” “I don’t understand why we can’t sit. And we can’t bring our cell phone to the shop floor. Even the cell phone without camera is prohibited,” said one worker to the SACOM researchers.

– Employees Are Crammed Together In Dormitories With Squalid Living Conditions: In Chengdu, where almost all workers live in company-owned dormitories, the number of employees placed in a dormitory room range from 6 to 22. Employees’ living quarters are also under factory rules, and workers cannot even bring basic items such as hair dryers into their dorms. “Some of my roommates weep in the dormitory. I want to cry as well but my tears have not come out,” one 19 year-old employee told SACOM

Foxconn responded to the SACOM report with a statement given to the magazine PCWorld: “We have made tremendous progress over the past year as we work to lead our industry in meeting the needs of the new generation of workers in China and that has been confirmed by the many customer representatives, outside experts, and reporters who have visited our facilities and openly met with our employees and our management team.”

When Apple announced Jobs was stepping down to take care of his health, I read all over the Internets about what a spiritual guy Jobs is and how he really makes the world a better place by pursuing spiritual values as part of Apple's business model.

What kind of spiritual guy farms out his production to a factory like Foxxconn?

I only hope that after he's gone from this mortal coil, the Buddhist Jobs is reincarnated as a Foxxconn worker who makes iPads for 14 hours a day standing up and lives in a dormitory the size of an iPod nano with 10 other workers.

Really, that would be the karma Jobs deserves.

Just One More Reason To Hate Steve Jobs

Leave aside the teacher bashing and his insistence on employing slave labor in China for a few dollars a day to make his ipads - he killed the radio star:

Jon Bon Jovi has blamed Steve Jobs for shooting the music business through the heart.

In an interview with London's Sunday Times magazine, the 49-year-old rocker lamented the fact that young listeners no longer can buy an album "based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like," because iTunes has supplanted the traditional record store.

"Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business," Bon Jovi said.

The "Shot Through the Heart" singer called the days of records a "magical, magical time."

"Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album," he said.

Apple declined to comment.

I'm showing my age, but the loss of records and record stoes around the city has hit me hard.

Remember when Bleeker Street was full of record stores?

Remember when you could go look for imports at the small record shops and snag that import only Siouxsie and the Banshees 12 inch?

Remember when you actually had to pay for music but you got an album with it and it had art and liner notes and sounded really, really good?

I remember those days.

Now we have ipods, which sound like shit, and bit torrent, where you can steal your music for free, and fewer and fewer music stores by the year so that as far as I can tell, J&R and a couple of stores in the Village are the only ones left.

Yes, Amazon is too blame too, and so am I for buying from Amazon.

But the biggest reason the record store has died is digital media.

Not completely the fault of Jobs, but he certainly shares some blame.

Ironic thing is, I can think of few things that make music sound shittier than an ipod.

Nothing like lossy music files of records that used to be 2 GBs but have now been compressed down to 125 mbs.

As for the rest of the evil Mr. Jobs does, I can only hope that when he finally leaves this mortal coil (and I hope that is a long time from now), he comes back in the next life as an Apple factory worker in China working 18 hours a day to make Apple ipads.

That would be universal justice.

POSTSCRIPT: Regarding Bon Jovi, I would prefer to NEVER hear anything by this particular artist, but if I HAVE to listen to a Bon Jovi song, I prefer it to be lossy.

That's one set of songs I would rather not hear crystal clear.

Steve Jobs Takes Medical Leave Of Absence

Story here.

Apple overseers allowed the slave labor that Jobs employs in overseas factories to take a moment of silence in honor of their boss.

Well, the ones who are alive, at any rate.

The ones who committed suicide from working in the harsh conditions at Apple factories, not so much.

In any case, get well soon, Steve.

Consumer Reports: New Apple iPhone Piece Of Shit

Quick, where's the accountability for Steve Jobs, Apple's arrogant CEO/ chief bullshit artist, over this mess?

Consumer Reports said in a blog post and accompanying video on Monday that widely reported signal problems with the iPhone 4, Apple’s latest mobile phone, were a result of a flaw in the phone’s antenna design and that it could not recommend purchasing the phone. That contradicts earlier claims by Apple that the problems are a software issue.

The magazine said its engineers performed a series of tests on three separate iPhone 4s inside a controlled lab environment known as a “radio frequency isolation chamber.” They found that when the bottom left corner of the iPhone was touched, it could sometimes lose enough signal strength to drop calls.

Consumer Reports said the tests led it to conclude that it could not recommend the iPhone 4 to consumers until Apple fixes the hardware problem. It also questioned Apple’s honesty on the antenna issues:

Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4’s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that “mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.”

When reports first surfaced of a reception flaw in the new phone, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said to a customer in an e-mail that he was simply holding the phone incorrectly. Technology writers lambasted the company for this comment.

Earlier this month, Apple released a statement saying that it had looked into the signal problems and was “stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong.” The company also said it would release a software update to fix the issue and would make “bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see” on the phone’s signal display. It did not acknowledge any problem with the phone’s hardware.

Consumer Reports also tested several other phones, including the earlier iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre, and reported that “none of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.” The report also said AT&T’s network did not appear to play a primary role in the iPhone 4’s signal woes.

There are 14 pages of complaints about the new Apple iPhone over at Consumeraffairs.com.

Jobs - like his counterpart at Microsoft Bill Gates - is very big on getting "bad teachers" fired.

Turns out that just like Mr. Gates, Mr. Jobs is also a liar and a purveyor of shit products.

Maybe both Jobs and Gates should stay out of education reform and make products that, you know, work?

Or, if they continue to make shit products that don't work (and are made by slave labor in Chinese factories with high suicide rates), take responsibility instead of jiving about the problems.

Just saying...

Education "Reformer" Steve Jobs Caught Using Child Labor To Make Ipods, Iphones, and Macs

Not kidding.

And those are not the only horrifying labor practices factories that make Apple products are guilty of:

At least eleven 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple.

The company did not name the offending factories, or say where they were based, but the majority of its goods are assembled in China.

Apple also has factories working for it in Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, the Czech Republic and the United States.

Apple said the child workers are now no longer being used, or are no longer underage. "In each of the three facilities, we required a review of all employment records for the year as well as a complete analysis of the hiring process to clarify how underage people had been able to gain employment," Apple said, in an annual report on its suppliers.

Apple has been repeatedly criticised for using factories that abuse workers and where conditions are poor. Last week, it emerged that 62 workers at a factory that manufactures products for Apple and Nokia had been poisoned by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause muscular degeneration and blur eyesight. Apple has not commented on the problems at the plant, which is run by Wintek, in the Chinese city of Suzhou.

A spokesman for Wintek said that "almost all" of the affected workers were back at work, but that some remained in hospital. Wintek said n-hexane was commonly used in the technology industry, and that problems had arisen because some areas of the factory were not ventilated properly.

Last year, an employee at Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that is one of Apple's biggest suppliers, committed suicide after being accused of stealing a prototype for the iPhone.

Sun Danyong, 25, was a university graduate working in the logistics department when the prototype went missing. An investigation revealed that the factory's security staff had beaten him, and he subsequently jumped to his death from the 12th floor of his apartment building.

Foxconn runs a number of super-factories in the south of China, some of which employ as many as 300,000 workers and form self-contained cities, complete with banks, post offices and basketball courts.

It has been accused, however, of treating its employees extremely harshly. China Labor Watch, a New York-based NGO, accused Foxconn of having an "inhumane and militant" management, which neglects basic human rights. Foxconn's management were not available for comment.

In its report, Apple revealed the sweatshop conditions inside the factories it uses. Apple admitted that at least 55 of the 102 factories that produce its goods were ignoring Apple's rule that staff cannot work more than 60 hours a week.

The technology company's own guidelines are already in breach of China's widely-ignored labour law, which sets out a maximum 49-hour week for workers.

Apple also said that one of its factories had repeatedly falsified its records in order to conceal the fact that it was using child labour and working its staff endlessly.

"When we investigated, we uncovered records and conducted worker interviews that revealed excessive working hours and seven days of continuous work," Apple said, adding that it had terminated all contracts with the factory.

Only 65 per cent of the factories were paying their staff the correct wages and benefits, and Apple found 24 factories where workers had not even been paid China's minimum wage of around 800 yuan (Pounds76) a month.

Meanwhile, only 61 per cent of Apple's suppliers were following regulations to prevent injuries in the workplace and a mere 57 per cent had the correct environmental permits to operate.

The high environmental cost of Apple's products was revealed when three factories were discovered to be shipping hazardous waste to unqualified disposal companies.

Apple said it had required the factories to "perform immediate inspections of their wastewater discharge systems" and hire an independent environmental consultant to prevent future violations.

However, Apple has not stopped using the factories.

In 2008, Apple found that a total of 25 child workers had been employed to build iPods, iPhones and its range of computers.

Wow - there's a lot to unpack there.

So Apple uses factories that repeatedly use child labor and falsify their records to cover their tracks in the practice.

Apple knows about this but continues to use these factories.

Apple uses factories that poison its workers and pollute the environment by sending out toxic waste to companies unqualified to dispose of the hazardous material.

Apple knows about this but continues to use these factories.

Apple uses factories that repeatedly break work week laws, exploit workers and underpay/cheat them out their wages.

Apple knows about this but continues to use these factories.

Apple ought to run a new slogan for the company:

Apple Computer - using 21st century technology to bring the world back to the 19th century "Robber Baron Era."

And Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the darling of Wall Street and the hedge fund crowd, is of course on record saying that the biggest problem in education today is teachers unions:

"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said.

I guess what Jobs wants is for schools to be run the way his Apple factories are run - with 60 hour work weeks, exploited workers being cheated by their employers out of their wages, and hazardous work environments that save the employer/company money but poison the workers.

Steve Jobs of Apple Computer - criminal, toxic polluter and exploiter of workers, employer of underage laborers, and education reformer.