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Apple workers deserve iDorms as good as the technology
- throwup238 3y agoThey could make Apple branded living pods for them. Like those cute little dystopian pod hotels. iPods, if you will. Apple should just give them all iPods.
- lurkersince2013 3y agoHomePods?
- throwup238 3y agoDepending on your dialect, iPad would work as well. Apple is nothing if not a reliable source of dark humour.
- pxmpxm 3y agoHomePad!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- taspeotis 3y agoWhen was the last time Apple launched a new product with the i prefix? 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 (Yes I know it’s meant to be a joke but it’s too outdated to be funny.)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.
- zabzonk 3y agopod people? as in "invasion of the body snatchers".
- TheNorthman 3y agohttps://archive.md/bVTJv https://archive.md/bVTJv
- radicaldreamer 3y agoApple cares a lot about its corporate employees but that does not extend to its manufacturing partners like Foxconn and Pegatron (or the hundreds of parts suppliers). 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.
- troupo 3y agoYou do realize that Foxconn is a separate company that also produces stuff for such small companies as Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, Google...? It looks like Apple already goes above and beyond in comparison to many western companies
- paulryanrogers 3y agoApple can demand better conditions, they can certainly afford to pay for them.
- EPWN3D 3y agoThey do that. They document infractions and corrective actions in their annual supplier responsibility report. https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2023_Progress_Report.pdf https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2...
- olliej 3y agoApple does demand better conditions. 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.
- weichsel 3y agoOlivetti had a work & live campus, starting in the 50s of the last century: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/t-magazine/olivetti-typewriters-ivrea-italy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/t-magazine/olivetti-typew...
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoOoh I love my lettera 32!
- gav 3y agoSteinway & Sons piano company built a company town, which is now part of Astoria, NYC. I lived for a few years in a house that was for factory workers, streets west of me were bigger houses intended for management. https://americanhistory.si.edu/documentsgallery/exhibitions/steinway_4.html https://americanhistory.si.edu/documentsgallery/exhibitions/...
- advisedwang 3y agoNo matter how nice you make it, a company town is a company town and is dangerous for the workers. 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.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoWhat exactly are you decrying as "dangerous" here?
- callalex 3y agoThe existential risks that residents of a company town face. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
- calamari4065 3y agoHistorically, companies would build towns for their workers, and pay them in company script that is only valid at company stores. This was effectively a fancy form of slavery with all that entails.
- dabluecaboose 3y agoSorry, this is a pet peeve of mine. The term is "Scrip"[1], not "script" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
- olliej 3y agoCould be autocarrot - I know in the past for me this was a "correction" they wanted to make, though just now in this thread I didn't have to fight it.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoThis isn't an Apple facility, and it will undoubtedly make products for rivals. 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.
- anyonecancode 3y agoCan't read the article as I don't have a subscription, so maybe they talk more specifics in the article, but I'd say that the housing shortage in places like the bay area is so acute that I think even a flawed approach that builds more housing is better than alternative proposals that never happen.
- ioblomov 3y agoWorth mentioning that Walt Disney intended EPCOT to be his version of the company town. He only reluctantly agreed to build the Magic Kingdom as a way to fund it. After he died before the latter was finished, the board decided they didn’t want to be in the town-running business. Nevertheless, the company retained the autonomy the state of Florida had granted Walt as a condition of going ahead with the project. Florida gave Disney full municipal control, retaining only the power to tax. Today, as a result of DeSantis’ campaign against Disney, the ultimate fate of the Reedy Creek Improvement District is in the courts’ hands.
- akira2501 3y agoThe complete unhinged insanity to pine for a _modern_ scrip town in India owned by a Chinese company that makes disposable consumer goods mostly for The United States. 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.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoFoxconn is not Chinese. It is Taiwanese. 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.
- akira2501 3y ago> Your stance is essentially: “how dare they give jobs and homes to those workers!” 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.
- zeroCalories 3y agoI don't care if it's a company town. Affordable housing is far more important than any risk posed by company towns in our current market. If the government isn't willing to take drastic measures to increase the supply of housing, then we should applaud any attempts by industry to fill the gaps. We need to crash the housing market, with no survivors.
- milesvp 3y agoI applaud your sentiment. If I didn’t already fear a general collusion from the big players I too could get behind this idea. Sadly, the logical outcome of company towns in the kind of monopsonistic environment we’re in in the US is that there will be even less incentive to making housing easier to build outside of these company towns, and wages will continue to be depressed, with less mobility for workers.
- zeroCalories 3y agoYou're worrying about second or third order problems when we have a massive problem right now. There are no solutions to housing affordability that don't have risks or hurt someone. Not acting and allowing for this insane market to continue would be far worse than dealing with problematic company towns in the future.
- Turing_Machine 3y agoSt. Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRh0QiXy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRh0QiXy