Foxconn Sued By Family of Brain-Damaged Worker

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Trying to cut off funding to a kid that lost half his brain in a workplace accident to save a few bucks? Stay classy Foxconn. :(

His plight came to light after Reuters reported that Taiwan firm Foxconn sent telephone text messages to his family telling them it would cut off funding for his treatment and other expenses if they did not remove him from hospital in Shenzhen city and submit him for a disability assessment 70 km (43 miles) away in Huizhou, where the company says he was hired.
 
Yes, it's a dick move, but it's no different than the crap insurance companies and other large businesses try to pull here in the US. Amongst the things law school teaches you is that there are a lot of a-holes out there.
 
Sounds like Foxconn may be pulling some real shenanigans here.
Labor activists say Zhang's case highlights a common practice among large companies in China, which sign work contracts with employees in inner Chinese cities, where wages and compensations levels are relatively low, and then deploy them to work in more expensive cities.
Hire in low cost area, move to high cost area, then pay benefits based on where they were hired, not where they were employed. I bet they get nominated for a humanitarian award. :rolleyes:
 
Not really shenanigans (I'm not defending Foxcon here, I'm evaluating it rationally). Legally, it obviously works out, at least once the proper bribes are paid to the governing bodies and the judges and enforcement officers. It does expose the need for something like a federally mandated minimum wage like we have in the US, but then again, they'd find loopholes for that like internships, etc. Even in the US you can get around that by hiring someone as a salary employee as people are free to contract as they wish.
 
Do we forget this is China?

Reason enough right there.

I'm not saying this is right by any level, but you need to look at the local conditions and cultural values and apply those to this situation... not the United State's values.

Of course, Foxconn wants to protects it ass too and pinch pennies where it can.
 
Glad my parents never bought me a MAC. I learned everything 10 years ago from hardocp.com and tweak3d.com (wow that site is old now).
 
Not really shenanigans (I'm not defending Foxcon here, I'm evaluating it rationally). Legally, it obviously works out, at least once the proper bribes are paid to the governing bodies and the judges and enforcement officers. It does expose the need for something like a federally mandated minimum wage like we have in the US, but then again, they'd find loopholes for that like internships, etc. Even in the US you can get around that by hiring someone as a salary employee as people are free to contract as they wish.
Why are all of these manufacturing jobs available in China in the first place?

Why not in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philipines, or any other nearby country with a large population?

The answer is that the Chinese have a rapidly developing advanced infrastructure with equally cheap labor. If labor becomes too expensive, then you will see a shift of jobs elsewhere and more outsourcing just like in the West.

Its how a global economy works, so minimum wage laws kinda suck when it means that you go from having a job to NOT having a job.
 
Just like when they banned slavery! All those folks went from having a job to not having a job!

I know some folks believe the government should never intervene. Most of those people are working class people. Most of those working class people would be significantly worse off and have a lower quality of life were it not for things like an established minimum wage and federally protected rights that some states, like my own, Alabama, would otherwise have little to no interest in enforcing.

I understand how the basics of how the global economy works, and I also know that things do not remain static, including pay rates.
 
I know some folks believe the government should never intervene. Most of those people are working class people. Most of those working class people would be significantly worse off and have a lower quality of life were it not for things like an established minimum wage
I'm pretty sure I am working class, and have never worked for minimum wage in my life.

Its also a stupid concept, how can you decide what the minimum is that a college student working hourly on the side is and a father of three trying to support his family on? And how do you differentiate between an hourly-rate job that doesn't require your full attention, where you can do other things on the side and thus it makes sense to be low (say having to constantly monitor an email queue to respond to questions, but only actually having to answer 20 questions a day... great for a stay-at-home mom to make a couple bucks on the side)

Besides, if you want to improve wages for the lower-class, what you'd do is close the borders, give out less greencards, and crack down on illegal immigration with random traffic stops and immediate arrests and escalating punishments rather than just setting them back on the other side of the border and saying "please don't jump the border again, and again, and again." Supply and demand would dictate that a decreased unskilled labor pool would naturally drive up wages. I used to make bank as a tweener mowing lawns/hedges/etc, until a bunch of non-english speaking illegals came around and undercut me to where I didn't even think it was worth my time.
 
Besides, if you want to improve wages for the lower-class, what you'd do is close the borders, give out less greencards, and crack down on illegal immigration with random traffic stops and immediate arrests and escalating punishments rather than just setting them back on the other side of the border and saying "please don't jump the border again, and again, and again." Supply and demand would dictate that a decreased unskilled labor pool would naturally drive up wages. I used to make bank as a tweener mowing lawns/hedges/etc, until a bunch of non-english speaking illegals came around and undercut me to where I didn't even think it was worth my time.

Tell me more fairy tales based on isolationism!

You think punishments are going to stop people from coming here when they have a family to feed and face desperation back home? Net migration from Mexico is negative right now (for the first time in many years), because opportunities here are eclipsed by those at home (weakening economy and related opportunities from 2005-now).

Add to that the fact that a reduced minimum-wage (or lower, which isn't something I condone) worker base causes the cost of many products to go up. This ends up impacting the middle class, as prices on food and other commodities increase.

You want to fix the problem? Don't close the borders and try yet another prohibitionist policy, doomed to fail. Open the border to people without violent criminal records and provide easy access to any immigrant who desires to exercise their human right to travel and freely associate. Make the cost of this immigration procedure low enough to undercut the coyotes. After, and only after, this is done, institute penalties for employers paying below minimum wage to anyone, financed by the immigration fees. Take those penalties and place them into a fund for job placement and skills training of (hopefully formerly) exploited workers.

Closing the border didn't work to keep people from moving between East and West Germany, and they had a wall with armed guards! Why would we expect it to work any better here?
 
The federal minimum wage doesn't evaluate the worth of the labor. The purpose of the minimum is to ensure that someone without the education or skills to go find a great job can go work at McDonalds and still afford to put a roof over their head and food in their mouth. I guess they don't deserve those things because, hey, they didn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps, so f 'em, let 'em starve.

If you've never worked a minimum wage job in your life, go try it out for a little while and see how hard it is to live on that, then come tell me employers should be able to pay people less.

Your argument that closing borders, etc is the solution to low wages ignores the complexity of the situation. Hell, Alabama passed legislation that cause many undocumented immigrants to flee the state, then our produce sat rotting in the fields because even probationers facing returning to jail without a job and prisoners on work release would rather go back to jail than work that hard for as little money as they make getting paid by the bushel or basket. I'm pretty sure being white makes your time worth more than other people's, which is why you quit mowing lawns and trimming hedges, but such is competition. There will always be someone willing to undercut you, whether it's the vastly increased pool of older laborers that can't find a job in skilled labor and so are competing for unskilled labor jobs or another tweener that just wants it more.

I would counter that more and more effective education would be a more effective way, in the long term, to improve wages, for for lower and middle class people, and you don't have to be a bigot to do it.
 
Also, I like how you pretend immigrants are a plague on the US now that your family has been here few generations. In case you forgot, unless you're 100% Native American (in which case, sorry about that whole genocide and relegation to desolate reserves thing that was perpetrated upon your people), you're only a degree or two away from being an immigrant yourself.
 
We have to stop Guatemalans from coming here so Foxconn can stop lobotomizing their employees. Check.
 
Also, I like how you pretend immigrants are a plague on the US now that your family has been here few generations. In case you forgot, unless you're 100% Native American (in which case, sorry about that whole genocide and relegation to desolate reserves thing that was perpetrated upon your people), you're only a degree or two away from being an immigrant yourself.

What if my family has been here long before it was the united states? Does that mean I can run a casino?
 
The federal minimum wage doesn't evaluate the worth of the labor. The purpose of the minimum is to ensure that someone without the education or skills to go find a great job can go work at McDonalds and still afford to put a roof over their head and food in their mouth. I guess they don't deserve those things because, hey, they didn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps, so f 'em, let 'em starve.

If you've never worked a minimum wage job in your life, go try it out for a little while and see how hard it is to live on that, then come tell me employers should be able to pay people less.

Me thinks you do not understand economics and have been listening to Obama and the democrats too much. If you raise the minimum wage (or set one at all) you in turn will raise the cost of EVERYTHING (read: inflation) which then causes your buying power to stay the same...

And yes, these people need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and take some personal responsibiltly... we all did.
 
Tell me more fairy tales based on isolationism!

You think punishments are going to stop people from coming here when they have a family to feed and face desperation back home? Net migration from Mexico is negative right now (for the first time in many years), because opportunities here are eclipsed by those at home (weakening economy and related opportunities from 2005-now).

Add to that the fact that a reduced minimum-wage (or lower, which isn't something I condone) worker base causes the cost of many products to go up. This ends up impacting the middle class, as prices on food and other commodities increase.

You want to fix the problem? Don't close the borders and try yet another prohibitionist policy, doomed to fail. Open the border to people without violent criminal records and provide easy access to any immigrant who desires to exercise their human right to travel and freely associate. Make the cost of this immigration procedure low enough to undercut the coyotes. After, and only after, this is done, institute penalties for employers paying below minimum wage to anyone, financed by the immigration fees. Take those penalties and place them into a fund for job placement and skills training of (hopefully formerly) exploited workers.

Closing the border didn't work to keep people from moving between East and West Germany, and they had a wall with armed guards! Why would we expect it to work any better here?

You should think more carefully. What does it mean, to have a world without borders?

It means that we may as well be the United States of Earth already. That every shitty country in the world, well, they're America too. All the pathologies of Third World shitholes will be reproduced here, and as you say, the minimum wage workforce will be available, straight from their slums and hovels, ill behaved and none too bright. You can't keep them far away, say, commuting from Mexico, Africa, or China as that would most probably negate the cost advantage, I think :)

And there is no cost advantage. For massive subsidies enter the immigrant population - just imagine the incredible amount of taxpayer money and environmental resources used to uplift Third World peasants to our standard of living. And the policing!

Sure, if you're a treacherous super rich fellow who evades his taxes, all is well and good. But for the rest of us it is hardly a bargain. The end result will be the destruction and enslavement of the middle class, the dirty Third Worldization of America, with poverty, crime, and pollution everywhere.

Of course, for some, that is a bonus
 
Now, if East Germany didn't close its borders, it would have disintegrated. A smart move, for self preservation of the workers' paradise.

Israel gets to close its borders too. How can smart jews be so dumb?
 
Methinks you don't understand what this conversation was about. I was not advocating raising the minimum wage in the US. Hell, that hasn't kept pace with the rising cost of living anyway. You contention that raising or setting a minimum wage resulting in buying power remaining the same is faulty. While it may result in some rise in price mitigating the wage increase, without statistics derived from multiple studies done by nonpartisan research groups like the Pew Research Center to prove that even when wages rise buying power remains the same your claim that buying power remains the same is baseless.

Tawnos stated that reducing the minimum wage causes prices to go up, which is debatable. However, I can tell you that passing laws meant to cause immigrants to self deport from my state resulted in a rise in the cost of food products despite the fact that farmers were desperate for laborers and there was a high unemployment rate.

But, increasing the minimum wage is and was not what I'm talking about because I never stated that the US minimum wage should be increased. Attempting to project attribute such a statement or position to me is misguided, however much of a platform it might be for you to talk.
 
What's the answer to America's economic problems? Give companies free reign to open sweat shops here instead of having to use sweat shops overseas! Down with minimum wage and safety regulations! Then, make it so that rich people don't have to pay taxes and place the burden squarely on the middle and lower class, who are now making 10 cents an hour to compete with China! </sarcasm>
 
Tawnos stated that reducing the minimum wage causes prices to go up, which is debatable. However, I can tell you that passing laws meant to cause immigrants to self deport from my state resulted in a rise in the cost of food products despite the fact that farmers were desperate for laborers and there was a high unemployment rate.

Er, no I didn't. I said a point similar to yours, that removing a large portion of the labor pool willing to work for minimum wage would raise prices.
 
You should think more carefully. What does it mean, to have a world without borders?
Could you point out where I advocated a world without borders? I'm pretty sure I specified a simple path to immigration for anybody who isn't a violent criminal. That, to me, still implies borders. More than that, I made an argument based on human rights which are constitutionally protected here in the US (freedom of association via the 1st amendment as affirmed in NAACP v. Alabama and freedom of movement via the privileges and immunities clause as affirmed in US v. Wheeler). If I were talking about "one world", such an argument wouldn't stand, as different countries recognize and protect different rights, with different histories.
 
Now, if East Germany didn't close its borders, it would have disintegrated. A smart move, for self preservation of the workers' paradise.

Israel gets to close its borders too. How can smart jews be so dumb?

What a load of crap. You love crazy examples eh? Either you're trolling or brainwashed imho.
 
Also, I like how you pretend immigrants are a plague on the US now that your family has been here few generations. In case you forgot, unless you're 100% Native American (in which case, sorry about that whole genocide and relegation to desolate reserves thing that was perpetrated upon your people), you're only a degree or two away from being an immigrant yourself.

I had ancestors on the mayflower... I also have some Native american in me.. lol.
 
You think punishments are going to stop people from coming here when they have a family to feed and face desperation back home?
Punishments are implemented universally around the world as a deterrent to crime, including of course poor people that have families to feed stealing or otherwise breaking the law to their benefit.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make a basic risk/reward rough calculation in their head. Robbing banks for example has a great reward, but since the penalty and risk for getting caught is so high, bank robberies are a fairly rare occurrence.

And yes, they are stealing jobs from Americans, and the whole "Americans don't want those jobs" is absolute nonsense, especially in this economy. They may not want to work for minimum wage, or less since they often have to compete with illegals paid in cash that have no tax burden whatsoever, but even things like being a garbage man were once quite respectable jobs because it was hard work but it paid well.

This is very simple supply and demand. Low-skill labor will always be needed even in first world highly industrialized nations, and every nation will have people that lack the capability or motivation to better themselves beyond being able to just do low-skill tasks. If the labor pool far outweighs the available jobs, wages and benefits fall. We don't need illegal immigrants or to be issuing permits with wages this low and unemployment this high.

And it hurts the poor in other ways, as importing poverty places a strain on social services since illegal-aliens typically never break the net-tax equilibrium barrier, and will cost more than they contribute in taxes.
 
Social research would indicate that the reason people don't commit crimes has very little to do with the threat of going to jail.

Its how people raised, their socio-economic background, and a number of other things, not the threat of prison.
 
What's the answer to America's economic problems? Give companies free reign to open sweat shops here instead of having to use sweat shops overseas! Down with minimum wage and safety regulations! Then, make it so that rich people don't have to pay taxes and place the burden squarely on the middle and lower class, who are now making 10 cents an hour to compete with China! </sarcasm>
The middle-class in the United States will never compete for 10 cents an hour jobs.

The middle-class is completely unaffected by minimum wage laws, because they aren't making minimum wage which is poverty level income. They don't make minimum wage because natural market forces of supply and demand for their skillsets sets a range of mid-tier compensation.

Minimum wage is nothing but a bandaid covering up the root of the problem, too many unskilled laborers in your economy. The American ones deserve to be here, and they deserve our assistance as fellow countrymen. The illegal ones do not, and the Democrats need to stop blatantly lying to the American people and fess up that the only reason they support opening the floodgates is for the minority votes they hope to gain, strengthening their power grip, and the huge campaign contributions they get from big business that loves how overcompetition in the labor pool drops wages increasing their profit margins.
 
Social research would indicate that the reason people don't commit crimes has very little to do with the threat of going to jail.

Its how people raised, their socio-economic background, and a number of other things, not the threat of prison.
You're absolutely right, we really don't need police or all these laws, as people will just do whats right..... :rolleyes:

People generally do what they can get away with, and worry about moral justification later. The only reason I don't drive 85mph to work in the morning is because of the threat of a patrol car beyond the next overpass that is going to hand me a $250 ticket, not because of a moral dilemma I struggle with, lol!
 
I am sorry, but you are completely wrong.

and after reading some of your other posts, you're wrong about a lot of assumption and opinions beyond why people commit crime.

Twisting my words won't help your argument be true or valid. Have a good one.
 
I said social research points to you being wrong, read some of it. Your reply that " we really don't need police or all these laws, as people will just do whats right...." as a counter to social research indicating your opinion was wrong was enough for me to realize you aren't worth the time trying to debate with.
 
Punishments are implemented universally around the world as a deterrent to crime, including of course poor people that have families to feed stealing or otherwise breaking the law to their benefit.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make a basic risk/reward rough calculation in their head. Robbing banks for example has a great reward, but since the penalty and risk for getting caught is so high, bank robberies are a fairly rare occurrence.

Actually, punishment and deterrence are two of the three reasons people are put in prison for committing a crime, the other is to rehabilitation. You seem like the sort to advocate punishment, as most people who feel that they are superior to someone that has committed a crime typically feel. These people also typically fail to differentiate between a crime that is a crime because it is inherently wrong, such as rape or murder, and a crime that is a crime because it is deemed to be so by statute. This is most often the result of a complete disconnect and failure to underdstand the realities of someone desperate enough to commit a crime, or who's grown up being mentally an physically abused to the point that their moral compass is so far from society's that they don't see what they are doing as wrong, or at least see it as necessary.

Punishing people isn't going to help that. Education and rehabilitation will. The same education the democrats have been advocating supporting. The same education that the republican hopefuls advocate slashing to pay for us to bomb some more folks.
 
You're absolutely right, we really don't need police or all these laws, as people will just do whats right..... :rolleyes:

People generally do what they can get away with, and worry about moral justification later. The only reason I don't drive 85mph to work in the morning is because of the threat of a patrol car beyond the next overpass that is going to hand me a $250 ticket, not because of a moral dilemma I struggle with, lol!

Laws are the only thing keeping you from being a menace to society? :eek:
 
Punishing people isn't going to help that. Education and rehabilitation will. The same education the democrats have been advocating supporting. The same education that the republican hopefuls advocate slashing to pay for us to bomb some more folks.

Please, tell us more about how federal education spending make our education system better...
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/09/does-spending-more-on-education-improve-academic-achievement

Images from that article:
http://www.heritage.org/static/reportimages/796DF8C7C231CFFE366308277E88CF57.gif
http://www.heritage.org/static/reportimages/57EAC2158291FB1057F142C86F169A7F.gif

Education is important, but it seems blindingly obvious that our strategy of throw more money at the problem isn't fixing it. I'm no fan of the Republicans, but the Democrats aren't really offering a better solution on this front, one look at the numbers is telling.

Immigration is hardly a problem though. People wanting to come here is a good thing - the fact that there is a net loss right now is not good, it means they're better off in Mexico and that is sad. We shouldn't necessarily be encouraging immigration, particularly with our unemployment rate, but we shouldn't be turning them away either, there needs to be an affordable, legal path for honest people who want to come here and work. Generally it makes our economy stronger because you have more people spending their money here.
 
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