Apple workers deserve iDorms as good as the technology
ft.com
ft.com
After the last few years, tech workers should see that great pay, benefits and working conditions last only as long as the market makes companies provide them. Even if a company town is great today, by accepting that world more power is handed over to business which will use it to squeeze workers hard when times eventually change.
I don't want to see any benevolence from companies. I want to see workers and democratic state institutions making companies behave.
It's just a situation everyone should want to avoid.
Company towns don’t always remain company towns.
Surely China has along way to go here, although things are much better than they were 20 years ago.
It's not about companies owning and renting out/selling property, it's about directly tying your housing to a specific employer.
But if there was a formal recognition that the housing is employer-provided, there might be a greater incentive to uphold standards than letting the employee live under a bridge.
People in USA already worry about losing their health care, but what about also losing your home?
As long as the mindset is right that this is free rent, it might not be worse than many apartments in the area that can only be afforded through that job anyway.
It's similar to company scrip (a thing Facebook tried to reintroduce a few years back), and in fact the two concepts support each other.
The net effect of both is to give the company extraordinary control of the lives of its employees beyond the time they're actually at work, and that power lets them functionally reduce compensation, and limit the freedom to work elsewhere (you can't get a new job without also moving, but it's also been made difficult to live outside of the company town while working for the company, etc).
I also don’t see how this is more dangerous than the status quo.
But with company owned housing you could have setup of them giving discounts to employees. And this discount effectively being part of compensation.
So when you change job, you would need much higher change in compensation or you would have to leave...
Tenant protections of not being immediately kicked out when you are laid-off or resign could be circumvented in many ways...
https://americanhistory.si.edu/documentsgallery/exhibitions/...
I do think Foxconn should do what's proposed here, however.
What Apple should have done recently is stepped up to give actors and writers the protections they need to keep their professions viable. They would have been the only media company back in business for a time, and would have set an example that they could easily have afforded to set.
But no... they sat back and let the people who create their media get screwed again. That's pretty disgraceful.
They go a long way to keep photos and documentation of conditions in manufacturing facilities private and only show off staged facilities in Cupertino etc.
It looks like Apple already goes above and beyond in comparison to many western companies
https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2...
For the last decade+ most reports of child/illegal labor conditions in factories that manufacture apple products have sourced apple's own supplier audits, which is super great as a message for other corporations: if you audit companies and discover and report illegal conditions (and terminate contracts due to them, which apple also does) all the reporting will be "this company employed child labor"[1] etc.
You also get failure to understand scale of companies like Foxconn. Recall a few years back when everyone was attacking apple due to a spate of suicides at Foxconn factories, despite the suicide rate being lower than the rest of china, and iirc most US cities. The problem being the reports were "X suicides at this factory" but not including "this single factory has 400 thousand employees". On the plus side the reporting meant apple forced Foxconn to address this "problem", but that involved things like suicide nets, so I don't know if that included steps like providing counseling, real therapists, etc.
So most of the suppliers/manufacturers apple uses (esp. Foxconn) work for _every_ tech company, but apple is the only tech company that does supplier audits, and requires suppliers to compensate victims (and for kids, requires them to them support the kid's future education), and so is the only company providing regular reports that let reporters produce sourced articles saying "Apple employs children". Note of course that if apple and google use the same supplier, but apple is the one doing an audit, and publishing a report, those articles will not reference any other company.
Now all that aside I want to be clear: do not think I am saying (nor think) Apple is a spuriously "good" tech company. Most studies basically say all corporations are psychopaths if you analyze them as if they're person, and Apple is a corporation. 15-20 years ago there were lots of reports of apple suppliers being terrible (abuse, child labor, etc, etc) which apply to every other company but articles about apple get press so that's the reporting. It would be naive to think that absent that reporting apple would have started its audit system. The reality is Apple is more acutely aware of (and maybe impacted by?) its market image than other tech companies, so Apple started audits to ensure it does not get that bad publicity. That reducing child labor, reducing worker abuse, etc is a "good" thing for the victims is just happenstance in this context.
It's depressing that despite the clear overlap in suppliers only a few companies perform any audits (a quick check of the big tech cos seemed to only find apple and google publishing supply change reports, though there's a lot of overlap between the two).
[1] The child labor thing is fun when you look at the republican states in the US that are aggressively pushing for child labor to protect those poor businesses from the invisible hand of the market requiring them to pay market rates for labor.
Which is all bad enough, but then to paint historical company towns as enduring well meaning projects of generous "philanthrocapitalists" without honestly considering their negative consequences or the fact that none of them would legally be allowed to exist in this country is vomit inducing.
Another morally vaporous article by an apologist for the neo-colonialists, Andrew Hill.
Your stance is essentially: “how dare they give jobs and homes to those workers!”
Company towns are like baking a fancy baked good. If someone else gets it wrong or you get it wrong, doesn’t mean you can’t try again.
Precisely. Workers get jobs and earn money. Companies stay out of the rest.
> Company towns are like baking a fancy baked good.
What's that old phrase.. "to make a good omelette you have to break a few eggs?" The import of which could never be greater. These are workers lives you're playing around with, without supervision, and often with an underprivileged and thus less educated class that may not be sophisticated enough to understand the type of exchange they're entering into.
> doesn’t mean you can’t try again.
Well.. it is India. There are billions. Your failed experiments cost you nothing; apparently, and neither are you obligated to take note of history.
iPods, if you will. Apple should just give them all iPods.
They’d be called Apple Pods.
(Yes I know it’s meant to be a joke but it’s too outdated to be funny.)
The article should have suggested Apple Dorms rather than iDorms.