Lexmark fires Mexico factory workers demanding $0.35 raise
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
... they might become less corrupt, and more responsive to the wishes of labor, as opposed to union leadership.
The workers are asking for the top band to increase by 5.3%, from 114 pesos to 120. They are currently making 163% of the minimum national wage of 70 pesos. I don't have any feel for how livable that is in Ciudad Júarez.
I grew up in Juarez and despite my parents making at least ten times that amount between the two of them, I would say we were only considered middle lower class for a household of four people.
The city has grown over the past 30 years considerably due to the manufacturing industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquiladora
Most of the jobs provided by the maquiladora industry are low wage jobs such as this one that attract a lot of struggling families or individuals from other Mexican states. Some of my old friends still live in Juarez given that they work as industrial engineers and their salary ranges between $30,000 - $40,000 USD. Just enough to buy a 2-3 bedroom home in a decent area of town. This is a comparatively high salary for the region as well.
Despite Mexico being cheaper than USA. About 50% cheaper I would say. $120 pesos A DAY (about $7.05 dollars) is an small amount to live with.
My interest is: "What is a lot in (that part of) Mexico?"
In Malawi, for example, $7/day would be life changing. Despite being American, I know far more about Africa and Europe and some parts of Asia than I do my own neighbors to the south and I would like to know more.
Exchange rates, which are the implicit basis of this article's concern, is a much worse metric than minimum wage.
I know you're asking if it's a lot for the workers, but the more relevant question is whether it's a lot to Lexmark, to which the answer is: it's thirty-five cents. So, no.
Side note, I print so little that I switched to a laser printer YEARS ago and I've only used like two toner cartridges. I got a $150 Brother multi-function black and white laser like 6 years ago and share it with my TP-Link router to all the machines on my network with very little issue. First page print time is pretty slow, but I usually don't even pick it up from across the house for a while.
I've had trouble with Brothers getting them to work in Linux, which is weird since they opensource much of their drivers, though no idea on licensing. And the scan/fax function never worked outside windows.
Then again, my current HP is about 3yo, and running strong... last one I have for 5+ years (and bought it used at a school auction) HP 4000, that was a wonderful beast. Prior to that was a Brother scanner/copy/fax laser, still running, with my ex-wife. Before that I had a few different inkjet printers of different makes and I hated them all... as I said, don't print often enough.
I wish OS drivers/printers for ink would print a test/flow page every 3 days that they haven't printed, assuming they have power, just to keep the jets lubricated.
I've refused to purchase Lexmark gear after they started using the DMCA to try and prevent third parties from manufacturing compatible toner and ink cartridges for their printers.
Trashed it and never looked back.
The shrimp we eat are farmed by slaves, FFS.
Places like the New York Times & Washington Post still seem to do research and actually employ real journalists. Unfortunately they get drowned out by the "entertainment news" companies who report things faster, and who really don't care about "facts" so much as condensed snippets of text.
OK guys, I have idea about cool startup, but since I am working on something else, here it goes - create a "Like" button that instead of liking, will say "Follow" - this will let you follow story. If any news outlet will post follow up, you will be informed. But then if after XX time the outlet will not post follow up - you will be notified to look for the end of the story elsewhere or you will be suggested some other outlets. With proper coding you can get huge thing in your hands. Do it. Do it now, I will use it. Even you Pocket - do it. Whatever do this, just give me 1% stock so I can support some charity with it in exchange of idea.
Your options are: 1. Stick to the same source, crawl the pages for updates
2. Figure out the topics of the story, and do a sort of "Google Alerts" for those topic, and filter to things that are relevant.
3. Go user generated. You submit a story you're interested in, other users can look through lists of "un-updated" stories, and if they find an update they can get "points", since everybody loves internet points.
Good luck, if anyone manages to do it, let me know, my dad would love to use it.
>In a statement Jerry Grasso, company spokesman, told the Guardian: “We take our values of mutual respect and employee satisfaction very seriously. We are committed to engaging in open and honest conversations with our employees to ensure Lexmark continues to be a rewarding place to work.”
I doubt Lexmark will comment further on the specific case in any way as it sounds like there will be legal action following the article:
>An unfair dismissal complaint will be lodged before the Board this week, said Prieto Terrazas.
Covering only one side of a story is dangerous, particularly when that coverage is used as a source or inspiration for further coverage, which then itself gets used, and then eventually edited into Wikipedia articles because all these reputable news sources are reporting it and that's all that's required for "truth" over there, and so on, and so on.
So, there you have one trivial counter-example. Hence, your assertion is false.
To reiterate what I've stated: not every topic has more than one side. This circus-like setup is especially deceiving if you let popular opinion pick them - this apocryphal rule not only manufactures false dichotomies, but also allows for nonsense to challenge well-established science.
Especially when it comes to the so-called hard sciences - some topics are not under discussion - we can choose to discuss and argue all day whether the fundamental theorem of calculus is true or not, but since it's a theorem it's already been proven well beyond any opinion's reach.
In the US, labor protections have been continuously eroded since at least the 80s, as the US Republican party has worked tirelessly (and overtly) to promote corporate interests at the expense of workers, and the Democratic party has often joined them without advertising it (for both parties, that’s where the money is).
On an international scale, international agreements, including both bilateral agreements & large multilateral treaties and various trade deals, erode state sovereignty replacing local worker protections with unaccountable judicial and quasi-judicial arbitrators who tend to side with corporations against consumers or workers, and sparking a race to the bottom when it comes to all sorts of national regulations.
For individual companies, there’s no downside in ignoring any unregulated external harms to workers, consumers, the environment, etc., right up to the point where a scandal gets so big that it sparks mass boycotts. The “free market” is utterly incapable of self policing, and as citizens we should continue to fight in our separate republics for systems which clamp down on corruption and abuse.
In Mexico in particular, the government is weak and corrupt, relies excessively on oil money for revenue, and has been fighting a war against drug cartels across half the country; enforcing better wages and working conditions is far from their top priority.
It's really how it has to be. Collective bargaining ultimately stifles innovation. It's really hard to come up with new business concepts if there's this giant body of law, regulation, and tradition that governs every way someone can contribute to an economic venture. I personally would hate for web development to become a unionized field, ultimately that would reduce my options rather than increase them. Every job becomes pretty much the same.
Given a choice between US-style employment and European-style, I'd pick US. There is a lot I can do to alter the terms of my employment. I can contract, start my own firm that hires only me, I can accept full-employment and negotiate perks. No relationship is unalterable and sacrosanct. To put it succinctly, I prefer to retain my bargaining ability rather than delegate it to someone else.
Obviously I have a very privileged position in society and the less-privileged would probably choose more stable unionized jobs. But I wasn't born rich. I didn't graduate college. My options really do come from the society I live in rather than the circumstances of my birth within that society.
The problem is that it's all or nothing, and once you start going in one direction, it's really hard to turn the ship around. I think ultimately Anglo-style fungibility of labor will, over time, find market solutions to the problems of the lower class, and not have to resort to political solutions except to retain worker mobility.
Freedom of information makes it really hard for abusive practices to stay in the shadows, and also allows the social norm to shift over time. It offers most of the advantages of collective bargaining without the stifling political intrusion. So we get a pendulum effect in which things get worse in one direction, but public attention forces things to get right again, and everybody benefits from the norm shift.
I enjoy being skilled as a software developer, but it's still not relatively as good as it was in the mid-late 70's accounting for inflation. The problem is we have a lot of pro-business combined with protectionism that inhibits the pro-competition that's meant to offset monopolistic tracks.
My company's IT personnel are all full-time employees, with decent salaries and medical coverage. I'm actually underpaid relative to my peers, but I've managed to negotiate certain perks that are pretty important to me.
But social inequality has always existed, you have to compare rungs on the ladder to what those rungs looked like 10-20 years ago. I'd argue that if you look at it that way, life is only getting better and better for people.
The union movement was a response to a particular time frame where the world was rapidly industrializing and the nature of work was very different than it is today. Factories used to lock the doors during the workday so workers couldn't sneak out. That period of time is over.
> Unions are for those that don't have your bargaining position.
This is not true at all. There are player's unions for each of the major sports. In Hollywood, entrance into your profession's union is a key marker of status and increases your earning potential, so long as you do it right. The medical field has professional organizations that act as unions.
There are unions for each of the construction fields as well as a substantial non-unionized sector. Both sectors cater to different parts of the market.
In all fields and sectors in which collective bargaining is a thing, innovation is stifled. Professions remain static, decade after decade, the union doing its damndest best to keep the status quo.
> And there's a difference between "I wasn't born rich" and making it and "I'm born into a deprived circumstances."
I was 1 step away from what they call "poor white trash." My mom's parents struggled a lot, and though my father's father had a stable union job with the railroad, my father was an alcoholic. My mom threw him out when I was around 3 or 4 and we were the very definition of poor. My mom has told me numerous stories of the ugliness of the people and the near-desperation in which we lived most of the time.
I don't remember much of it because my mom managed to escape the hell of southern Louisiana by marrying a Marine. Soon after, he got posted to various other parts of the country, and south Louisiana was ancient history.
I was born into the so-called 'working poor'. We didn't stay that way. Hell, south Louisiana didn't stay that way, it's a lot different now. It wasn't cushy union jobs that did it, it was the willingness to be mobile and to take advantage of the economic opportunities that being in the most powerful nation of the world afforded us.
More concretely, I think the market mechanism has its place, but I think states need a diversity of economic power & political representation, a reasonable level of wealth/income equality (far more than the current USA at any rate), enough enforced transparency to catch fraud and corruption, and widespread civic engagement at every level from neighborhoods on up, so that political discourse stays informed and productive and the interests of the few aren’t able to trample on the basic rights and needs of the many.
State supported markets and money and property rights are tools, not ends in themselves. Their purpose is to efficiently allocate resources and encourage innovations, so that the economy continues to produce the infrastructure and goods we need to support human flourishing, not to build feudal empires for wannabe aristocrats. At the point they stop serving their proper purpose, they should be guided back by additional institutional structure.
There was no currency printed for TARP (the Treasury can't print money; that's the Federal Reserve's domain) - it was financed via the sale of T-notes/bills/bonds. The government issued debt to raise the TARP money, and the rate of return on the assets purchased with that debt has exceeded the yield on Treasury securities, resulting in a net real profit.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-10-20/bailout-of...
>Discontent among its workers had been brewing for months, with reports of harassment, unfair wage deductions and unsafe work conditions as well as poor wages.
So this guys organize, demand a raise, and when it was denied call for a strike. Most people that was fired is precisely the same people that had signed formal paperwork to get a union started. The government agency in charge of seeing it through was legaly bounded to keep the list private until after the process was completed, yet the names were mysteriously leaked and the union busted before it had a chance to get started. They never had a chance.
I know people around here are pretty much anti-labour, so I am goint to explain in terms you can empathize with. Imagine your startup was hit by a pattent troll. You hire a lawyer, go to court and there you find out the pattent troll has mysteriously prepared to counter your whole strategy, as if they knew all the private stuff you had revelead in confidence to your lawyer.
It's not about the 35 cents, as it would not have been about whatever royalties the troll was demanding. It is about being stabbed in the back by the very people that was supposed to defend your case.
We should depend on mechanisms, not decency.
It's like when Ron Paul says we don't need government subsidies in healthcare because in his day, physicians helped people out of decency. Like we should depend on that for policy?
If the workers demanded a $1000 raise, is Lexmark just in firing those workers and hiring workers that are willing to work for less?
The best we can do in the long-run to increase working conditions is to increase demand for labor. In the short-term, all they can do is strike.
It's my understanding that immigration often results in large gains for the immigrants, so it may be more effective than other forms of help.
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120 employees * 40h * 52w * $0.35 = $87K, not "over a quarter million dollars"
And then? To add insult to injury, they weren't asking for 35c/hr more, but 35c per DAY:
120 employees * 5 days/week * 52 weeks * $0.35 = $11K.
Ten thousand dollars a year lead to the firing of 120 employees.
Hiring and training 120 replacement worker is going to cost a lot more than $10K.
EDITED to remove some untoward hostility.