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Apple and Foxconn win permission for 12-hour shifts for women in India

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201–210 of 267 posts

Re: Apple and Foxconn win permission for 12-hour shifts for women in India

#201
post #87

I don't get this. Why push your work force like this? It's clearly very bad for the workers. And also for the factory, surely having 3 shifts is more efficient because your workers are not as fatigued so will work faster with fewer mistakes?

For 24x7 production operations, 12 hour shifts make a lot of sense. You work 12 hours, hand off your role to the next incoming shift, and 12 hours later they hand off back to you. You do this for 3 days one week, 4 days the next. 4 hours of OT every day. I did this for 2 years at an LSI fab in Colorado Springs and it was great.

Why would this make more sense than three 8 hour shifts per day, for anybody but the employer?

Re: Apple and Foxconn win permission for 12-hour shifts for women in India

#202

I don't get this. Why push your work force like this? It's clearly very bad for the workers. And also for the factory, surely having 3 shifts is more efficient because your workers are not as fatigued so will work faster with fewer mistakes?

I don't think it is the rational to come into a situation and assume that everyone but you is wrong and incapable of judging what is best for them. in India there are hundreds of millions of workers that would love to work 12 hours shifts for more pay and a better quality of life. I'm sure there are advantages to the factory as well.

The reason it's wrong is that if you work for 12 hours per day, and sleep for 8 hours per day, that leaves you with only 4 hours per day for living your ONE AND ONLY life

Re: Apple and Foxconn win permission for 12-hour shifts for women in India

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of when people in China were expected to work on Saturdays back in 1999. Developing countries often require 48 hours a week as a way of catching up.

A way of "catching up"? Demanding an inhumane amount of work out of people doesn't help those people catch up, it uses up their one and only life to create wealth for a few elites in their country, and shareholders outside their country.

That could be true, but America and Europe did the same thing before they got rich. Isn't it a bit hypocritical to wag our finger at developing countries now for doing the same thing that our countries did?

Re: Apple and Foxconn win permission for 12-hour shifts for women in India

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you considered that both state and capital are the problem?

Capital follows the state. The fact that capital also often guides the state is a flaw of the state. Capital is just people doing the job they were hired to do, often in a corporate framework, legally obliged to maximize profit and shareholder value. There’s definitely a feedback cycle, but the source of all control and governance is the guys with the guns and prisons.

> Capital is just people doing the job they were hired to do

No, that's the people that are employed by the capital. If you do entertain this worldview, then at the very least do it correctly.

The few people usually described as capital are the owners of the vast majority of wealth in the developed world.

And they're most assuredly not following the state. They're constantly pushing for unequal legislation and exploit as much as they can get away with. That's how they gain this kind of wealth

Re: Apple and Foxconn win permission for 12-hour shifts for women in India

#205
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a American, I write it as vice.

A vice is a bad habit, a vise is a tool that clamps things together.

*in American English. Both are ‘vice’ in English English (UK/NZ/AU) as far as I’m aware.

‘Vice’ in American English, still has alternative meanings, like ‘vice president’.

Re: Apple and Foxconn win permission for 12-hour shifts for women in India

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when a bunch of that extra income just goes to childcare and services to make up for having less time to manage the house. And then much of the rest is eaten in competition for housing, with prices increased by all the extra money from those second incomes. I'm skeptical that we'd be much worse off, in actual experienced fact, if the norm were single-income households. I wouldn't be surprised if measures o…

Any ideas on how to ensure women retain financial independence?

Not at a policy level, really. Women could prefer stay-at-home spouses, to protect their own financial independence, though, even in a world so extremely into single-income households that such arrangements were somehow legally mandated (which isn't workable and probably isn't desirable anyway, but, even in that extreme, there'd be options, provided regulations weren't, themselves, sexist).

It's all hypothetical, anyway. We're not going back to that. Outside chance a few other countries do (some are still much farther that direction than we are) but the US never will, barring tyrannical theocracy or something like that. I do think we're buying rather less happiness than one might hope, for all this extra paid labor, but I also doubt that's a solvable problem, realistically.

Re: Apple and Foxconn win permission for 12-hour shifts for women in India

#208
post #75

The HN headline is incorrect. It’s not “12 hour shift for women”. It’s “12 hour shifts AND night shifts for women”. Night shift were not allowed earlier most likely because of safety reasons considering India’s not so great women safety record. Not saying it’s justified but that was the reason most likely.

That’s just made it even darker. Holy crap.

At the headline itself: only literally. For example, I (and many others in Canada) work graveyard. I only have to work 4 days a week (which is fantastic), and it's apparently echoed in this legislation as it "...limits the maximum workweek to 48 hours". Graveyard can limit ones health, but I think it gets a bad rap, and could wax poetic about other reasons I prefer it.

Sent during day two of my long weekend :)

Re: Apple and Foxconn win permission for 12-hour shifts for women in India

#209
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A vice is a bad habit, a vise is a tool that clamps things together.

*in American English. Both are ‘vice’ in English English (UK/NZ/AU) as far as I’m aware. ‘Vice’ in American English, still has alternative meanings, like ‘vice president’.

> ‘Vice’ in American English, still has alternative meanings, like ‘vice president’.

Does that count as English? I though it is borrowed Latin, like de facto, et cetera or per se.

Re: Apple and Foxconn win permission for 12-hour shifts for women in India

#210
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dcow says this in a discussion about a company that has to put suicide nets in their factories to prevent their workers from killing themselves.

this was in china and not a thing anymore

Oh, all right then!
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