Article 43
Saturday, September 04, 2004
Welcome
Welcome to article43.com - a memorial to the layed off workers of (PRE SBC MERGER) AT&T, and the disappearing MIDDLE CLASS citizens of America. It is NOT endorsed or affiliated with AT&T or the CWA in any way.
In addition to INFORMATION, resources and opinion for former AT&T workers DEALING WITH the EFFECTS OF LAYOFF and looking for meaningful employment, some articles here are meant to bring into awareness the LARGER PICTURE of corporate dominance of the UNITED STATES’ political and economic policies which brazenly DISREGARDS, disrespects and EXPLOITS worker, citizen and HUMAN RIGHTS under masks like FREE TRADE and the PATRIOT ACT - resulting in a return to a society of very rich and very poor dominated by a few very rich and powerful - whose voices are anything but - for the people. If left UNCHALLENGED, the self-serving interests of those in control may result in the end of DEMOCRACY, the end of the middle class, irreversible ENVIRONMENTAL damage to the planet, and widespread global poverty brought on by exploitation and supression of the voices of common people EVERYWHERE, while the United States turns into a REINCARNATION of the ROMAN EMPIRE. Author Thom Hartmann shares some history and outlines some basic steps to return our country to “The People” in his two articles TEN STEPS TO RETURN TO DEMOCRACY and SAVING THE MIDDLE CLASS. I support CERNIG’S idea for a new POLITICAL MOVEMENT - if not a revolution to cleanse our country of the filth ruling it - as we EVOLVE into a GLOBAL community - assuming we learn the THE LESSONS OF OUR TIME and don’t DESTROY CIVILIZATION first.
Everything here can be viewed anonymously. Inserting or commenting on articles requires a free user account (for former AT&T employees with a real, non throw-away, email address.) Requests to the new user registration page are redirected to BLOGGED DOT COM’S site because all new signups I’ve been getting recently are from COMMENT SPAMMERS and their ilk, so if you want to contribute, contact me through email, phone, or some other way.
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Per U.S.C. COPYRIGHT LAW - TITLE 17, SECTION 107, this not-for-profit site may reproduce copyrighted material not specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such articles will either have a web link to the source, home page, and/or show credit to the author. If yours is here and you have a problem with that, send me an EMAIL, and I’ll take it off. Stuff I wrote carries a CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE permitting non-commercial sharing. In addition, this site’s owner forbids insertion and injecting data of any kind - especially advertisements - into ours by any person or entity. Should you see a commercial ad that looks like it’s from here, please report it by sending me a tcpdump and/or screenshot in an EMAIL, then READ UP about how the PARTNERING OF INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS and companies like NEBUAD are DESTROYING INTERNET PRIVACY.
Resumes of layed off AT&T workers are posted for free HERE.
Information on the Pension Class Action Lawsuit against AT&T is HERE. More pension-related articles are HERE.
Links to some Telecom companies’ career pages are HERE.
Click HERE to learn a little about Article 43 and why I loathe the CWA.
Click HERE or HERE to learn what the CWA did when given a chance to do the right thing.
Click HERE for a glimpse of undemocratic and hypocritical CWA practices.
Click HERE for an article on Corporate Unionism.
Click HERE for an article of AFL-CIO’s undemocratic history.
If you’re looking for telco nostalgia, you won’t find it here. Check out THE CENTRAL OFFICE, BELL SYSTEM MEMORIAL, MUSEUM OF COMMUNICATIONS, TELEPHONE TRIBUTE, and THE READING WORKS websites instead.
This site can disappear anytime if I run out of money to pay for luxuries like food, health care, or internet service.
Discernment of truth is left to the reader - whose encouraged to seek as much information as possible, from as many different sources as possible - and pass them through his/her own filters - before believing anything.
...the Devil is just one man with a plan, but evil, true evil, is a collaboration of men…
- Fox Mulder, X FilesNo matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as the truth.
- John F. KennedyToday my country, your country and the Earth face a corporate holocaust against human and Earthly rights. I call their efforts a holocaust because when giant corporations wield human rights backed by constitutions and the law (and therefore enforced by police, the courts, and armed forces) and sanctioned by cultural norms, the rights of people, other species and the Earth are annihilated.
- Richard L. GrossmanUnthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
- Albert EinsteinHe who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.
- AquinasIf you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
- Bishop Desmond TutuOur lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
- Martin Luther King JrThose who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- Benjamin FranklinIf we do not hang together, we will surely hang separately.
- Benjamin FranklinWe must be prepared to make heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war.
- Albert EinsteinSolidarity has always been key to political and economic advance by working families, and it is key to mastering the politics of globalization.
- Thomas Palley
Update 8/11/07 - As we head into the next depression, fueled by selfish corporate greed, and a corrupt, SOCIOPATHIC US government, MIKE WHITNEY has a solution that makes a lot of sense to me:
The impending credit crisis cant be avoided, but it could be mitigated by taking radical steps to soften the blow. Emergency changes to the federal tax code could put more money in the hands of maxed-out consumers and keep the economy sputtering along while efforts are made to curtail the ruinous trade deficit. We should eliminate the Social Security tax for any couple making under $60, 000 per year and restore the 1953 tax-brackets for Americans highest earners so that the upper 1%-- who have benefited the most from the years of prosperity---will be required to pay 93% of all earnings above the first $1 million income. At the same time, corporate profits should be taxed at a flat 35%, while capital gains should be locked in at 35%. No loopholes. No exceptions.
Congress should initiate a program of incentives for reopening American factories and provide generous subsidies to rebuild US manufacturing. The emphasis should be on reestablishing a competitive market for US exports while developing the new technologies which will address the imminent problems of environmental degradation, global warming, peak oil, overpopulation, resource scarcity, disease and food production. Off-shoring of American jobs should be penalized by tariffs levied against the offending industries.
The oil and natural gas industries should be nationalized with the profits earmarked for vocational training, free college tuition, universal health care and improvements to then nations infrastructure.
Sunday, February 05, 2012
It’s Not Just About Tires
Solidarity has always been key to political and economic advance by working families, and it is key to mastering the politics of globalization.
- Thomas Palley
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The Cooper Tire lockout and the lowering of US wages
By Jerry White
Worls Socialist Website
January 27, 2012
On the picket lines in Findlay, Ohio, important political questions are emerging as COOPER TIRE workers grapple with the issues posed by their nearly two-month struggle.
A question frequently put to reporters from the World Socialist Web Site by the workers, who are resisting the company’s wage-cutting demands, is: “How can the economy function if wages are driven so low that workers can no longer afford the commodities they produce?”
Workers approach this question very practically. The lowering of wages leads to falling demand and lower sales. Why would the corporations cut off their noses to spite their faces? It seems to defy common sense.
The first thing to be said is that the experience of the parents and grandparents of the Findlay workers, whereby a manufacturing worker, especially at a unionized company, could expect to earn a decent wage and have decent benefits, is by no means the historical norm in America. The ability of American industrial workers to have a reasonably secure and even comfortable existence was entirely the result of bitter, bloody and protracted struggles involving millions and spanning decades.
Without the struggles going back to the great railway strike of 1877 and culminating in the sit-down strikes of the 1930s and post-war strike wave, American workers would have remained in poverty. These struggles were, in turn, immeasurably strengthened by - and were an integral part of the international struggles of the working class, above all the victory of the Russian working class in the 1917 socialist revolution.
The all-out offensive of American corporations today to put an end to decent wages and conditions in manufacturing is an intensification of a process that has been underway for more than three decades. It has been MADE POSSIBLE by the TREACHERY of the official trade unions, including the United Steelworkers, which long ago repudiated any form of class struggle and joined hands with the employers and the government to make the working class pay for the decline of US capitalism.
If the downward spiral of workers is to be stopped, they must revive the class struggle and socialist traditions that made the initial gains in wages and benefits possible in the first place.
It is ultimately the class struggle that determines workers’ wages. Under capitalism, profits are determined not by the amount of goods that are sold, but by the extraction of surplus value, or unpaid labor, from the working class. The proportion of surplus value that goes to the worker in the form of wages and social benefits - and the proportion that goes to the capitalist in the form of profits - is determined by the struggle between the two classes.
Nearly one hundred years ago, in 1914, Henry Ford decided to pay his workers $5 a day for eight hours of work in order to help create a mass market for the hundreds of thousands of cars rolling out of his factories.
Ford was a ruthless capitalist and enemy of the working class. But the early 20th century was the period of the ascendance of American capitalism, which was based on revolutionary methods of industrial production such as the assembly line. Ford was able to reduce the price of a car from the equivalent of a years wages for the average worker to four months. Even though profit per vehicle fell, Ford more than made up for this through the unprecedented number of cars he sold.
Still, conditions for most American industrial workers, including Ford workers, remained intolerable. Even as a rising world economic power, American capitalism never ceded anything to the working class without a ferocious struggle.
The unions, like the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers, based themselves on the belief that the post-World War II economic boom would last forever. In 1958, UAW President Walter Reuther declared, “We reject Marxism and the class struggle which is about dividing up scarcity. For the first time in history, we can divide abundance.”
What happened? The boom was grounded on the post-war reconstruction of the world economy under the auspices of American capitalism, which was producing half of the worlds’ products after World War II. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, declining profitability in manufacturing and rising competition from America’s European and Asian rivals led to a turn by the American ruling class away from industrial production and toward various forms of financial manipulation and speculation.
This turn to financial parasitism led to a series of asset bubbles and crises, culminating in the Wall Street crash of 2008 and the ensuing world recession.
Having rejected any struggle against the capitalist system, the UAW, the USW and the rest of the official UNIONS decades ago ABANDONED even a nominal defense of the working class. Instead, from the nationalist standpoint of making US corporations more competitive, they SUPRESSED all resistance and COLLABORATED IN THE ATTACK on jobs, wages and working conditions.
Today, employee pay constitutes the smallest share of the economy since the government began collecting wage and salary data in 1929, while corporate profits account for the largest share since 1929.
Obama’s vision for the revival of US industry is predicated on dramatically narrowing the wage gap between American workers and their brutally EXPLOITED counterparts in CHINA and other low-wage countries.
This reduction in wages is fully backed by the UAW, the USW and other unions, which are praising corporations for ғin-sourcing, i.e., shifting production back to the US to take advantage of the poverty-level wages the unions enforce. In this way, the union officials hope to restore their depleted dues base and shore up their finances.
It must also be remembered that corporations are selling their products to the world market, not just America. If they can drive down wages, they can still make large profits even if the US market is contracting. Last year, General Motors, for example, sold as many cars in China (2.5 million) as it did in the US, even though only 37 out of every 1,000 people in China own a car.
Of course, driving down the ability of broad masses of people to buy goods creates problems for the capitalists. But a shrinking domestic market only intensifies the competition between rival capitalists to increase the EXPLOTATION of their workers.
The capitalist system did not arise out of a rational and conscious plan. It arose historically. The basic contradictions of the system - between the social character of production and private ownership of the means of production and between the global integration of the economy and the nation-state system create problems that find expression in glutted markets, overcapacity and ultimately trade conflicts and war.
If a return to conditions of dire poverty is to be prevented, workers will have to revive the great traditions of class struggle and socialism of the American working class, as part of a united struggle by the international working class against this failed economic system.
The unions, tied as they are to the profit system and economic nationalism, are worse than useless in this struggle. They stand on the other side. New organizations of industrial and political struggle are needed.
Economic life can be reorganized on a rational, scientific and egalitarian basis only when the working class organizes itself as an independent political force to take political power into its own hands. Only in this manner can workers exert democratic control over the allocation and distribution of the wealth they create. This is the fight for socialism.
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Saturday, February 04, 2012
Iphone’s Slave Labor
Is It Ethical to Own an iPhone?
By David Mielach
BusinessNewsDaily
February 2, 2012
Recent media reports and ongoing protests over the reportedly abhorrent working conditions at factories where Apple’s iPhones are produced have left socially conscious Americans with a dilemma: Is it ethical to own an iPhone?
For many Americans, even those who support socially responsible manufacturing and business practices, their iPhones and iPads have become must-have devices for both work and personal use. Now they’re being forced to ask themselves whether they are willing to ignore strong evidence that their beloved devices are being made by mistreated and underpaid employees.
The charges of mistreatment of the workers who create Apple’s products are not new. They have, however, gained mainstream momentum during the last months. The contradiction of Apple’s $13 billion in profits in the fourth quarter of 2011 juxtaposed against images and stories of worker rights violations have painted a less than shining portrait of the tech giant.
According to a Jan. 25, New York Times report, the Foxconn Technology factory, where Apple manufactures many of their products, has repeatedly been criticized for ethics violations and socially irresponsible working conditions. Violations included in the report included:
Crowded dormitories where many workers were forced to live.
Workers forced to stand until their legs were swollen and they were unable to walk
Underage workers
Improper waste removal.
Wages of less than $17 to $22 a day.
Multiple suicide attempts by workers, including a recent instance where 150 workers threatened to jump off a roof due to a work and pay dispute.
Apple itself acknowledges the violations. It conducted 229 audits of supplier factories in 2011 and found 93 violations of exceeding the 60-hour workweek limit and a similar number of workers working six or more days a week. More information can be found at the APPLE SUPPLIER RESPONSIBILITY WEBPAGE.
That does not take into account two separate explosions last year at factories producing iPads, which killed four people and injured dozens more. Another violation occurred in January 2010 at an Apple factory owned by Wintek in which 137 workers were injured when they were forced to use a known dangerous chemical, n-hexane, to clean glass screens. It was used anyway because it dissolved three times faster than rubbing alcohol, meaning that more screens could be cleaned in a day.
These violations have prompted a strong response against Apple, including a PETITION that as of Feb. 1 had 154,581 signatures asking Apple to protect workers making products in factories overseas. Another petition, started on Sumofus.org, also asked Apple to make the iPhone 5 ethically.
While Apple was mentioned in many of these reports, Apple is not the only company engaging in socially irresponsible manufacturing practices. According to the New York Times, it is estimated that 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics are made at Foxconn factories in China, where the company employs 1.2 million people. Hewlett-Packard, Samsung and Dell are among the many other companies that use Foxconn factories to produce their products.
The reality of the situation forces consumers to ask themselves where they stand on the issue. The question is: If you need electronic tools and devices, such as an iPhone or laptop, to run your business and no other brands offer a socially responsible and ethical alternative, is it ethical to own these products since they are needed?
According to Janice Lawrence, director of the Business Ethics Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the answer lies with one’s personal judgment.
“Technology has blurred the line between WORK AND HOME life,” Lawrence said. “For example, it allows us to receive email or phone and text messages after working hours. In the same manner, technology has blurred business ethics and personal ethics. This dilemma is a good example of that.”
“The advances in the functional capabilities of these electronic products make them ‘necessary’ in the workplace,” Lawrence said. “The decision to ignore the facts of the overseas production of the electronic tools is not necessarily unethical for a company using such products. CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY> is composed of economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibilities, in descending order of obligation. Economic responsibility comes first, and these products are needed to run the business. So using them is not unethical for the company.”
While businesses may not be unethical for using these products, people need to make individual decisions based on their own personal beliefs, Lawrence said.
“In the absence of company policy addressing the ethics of vendors, the personal ethics of the user comes in play and brings with it another layer of questions to consider,” Lawrence said. “To what extent is the user personally responsible for the production or in this case, encouraging the production - of these products? Can the user personally accept the circumstances of the production? What are the consequences to the user of refusing to use such products?”
The question is a difficult one for iPhone users. To iPhone user Barry Weinstein, owner of Pillowcase Studies, the problem is unfortunate, but in his opinion, true change will only come from a widespread transformation of the system, not a boycott of specific manufacturers.
“The situation in China is terrible, but boycotting products that assist the local economy will have little effect on the improvement of working conditions the Chinese labor force works under,” Weinstein said. “The best we can do is work to improve the global economy so that such conditions no longer exist. By boycotting large companies, not only are the conditions still going to be bad, but many factory workers will become unemployed.”
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In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad
By Charles DuHigg
NY Times
January 25, 2012
The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws.
When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.
Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.
Are you Lai XiaodongӒs father? a caller asked when the phone rang at Mr. LaiԒs childhood home. Six months earlier, the 22-year-old had moved to Chengdu, in southwest China, to become one of the millions of human cogs powering the largest, fastest and most sophisticated manufacturing system on earth. That system has made it possible for Apple and hundreds of other companies to build devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up.
He’s in trouble, the caller told Mr. Lai’s father. Get to the hospital as soon as possible.Ӕ
In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers as well as dozens of other American industries ח have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.
However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious sometimes deadly - safety problems.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apples products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.
More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers disregard for workersҒ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.
“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, thats reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.
Apple is not the only electronics company doing business within a troubling supply system. Bleak working conditions have been documented at factories manufacturing products for Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.
Current and former Apple executives, moreover, say the company has made significant strides in improving factories in recent years. Apple has a supplier code of conduct that details standards on labor issues, safety protections and other topics. The company has mounted a vigorous auditing campaign, and when abuses are discovered, Apple says, corrections are demanded.
And Apple’s annual supplier responsibility reports, in many cases, are the first to report abuses. This month, for the first time, the company released a list identifying many of its suppliers.
But significant problems remain. More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apples reports, and in some instances have violated the law. While many violations involve working conditions, rather than safety hazards, troubling patterns persist.
“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.
“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.
Some former Apple executives say there is an unresolved tension within the company: executives want to improve conditions within factories, but that dedication falters when it conflicts with crucial supplier relationships or the fast delivery of new products. Tuesday, Apple reported one of the most lucrative quarters of any corporation in history, with $13.06 billion in profits on $46.3 billion in sales. Its sales would have been even higher, executives said, if overseas factories had been able to produce more.
Executives at other corporations report similar internal pressures. This system may not be pretty, they argue, but a radical overhaul would slow innovation. Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every year.
“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”
“If half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?” the executive asked.
Apple, in its published reports, has said it requires every discovered labor violation to be remedied, and suppliers that refuse are terminated. Privately, however, some former executives concede that finding new suppliers is time-consuming and costly. “Foxconn is one of the few manufacturers in the world with the scale to build sufficient numbers of iPhones and iPads. So Apple is not going to leave Foxconn and they’re not going to leave China,” said Heather White, a research fellow at Harvard and a former member of the Monitoring International Labor Standards committee at the National Academy of Sciences. “Theres a lot of rationalization.”
Apple was provided with extensive summaries of this article, but the company declined to comment. The reporting is based on interviews with more than three dozen current or former employees and contractors, including a half-dozen current or former executives with firsthand knowledge of Apples supplier responsibility group, as well as others within the technology industry.
In 2010, Steven P. Jobs discussed the companyҒs relationships with suppliers at an industry conference.
I actually think Apple does one of the best jobs of any companies in our industry, and maybe in any industry, of understanding the working conditions in our supply chain,Ӕ said Mr. Jobs, who was Apples chief executive at the time and who died last October.
“I mean, you go to this place, and, its a factory, but, my gosh, I mean, theyҒve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools, and I mean, for a factory, its a pretty nice factory.”
Others, including workers inside such plants, acknowledge the cafeterias and medical facilities, but insist conditions are punishing.
“We’re trying really hard to make things better,” said one former Apple executive. “But most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”
The Road to Chengdu
In the fall of 2010, about six months before the explosion in the iPad factory, Lai Xiaodong carefully wrapped his clothes around his college diploma, so it wouldn’t crease in his suitcase. He told friends he would no longer be around for their weekly poker games, and said goodbye to his teachers. He was leaving for Chengdu, a city of 12 million that was rapidly becoming one of the worlds most important manufacturing hubs.
Though painfully shy, Mr. Lai had surprised everyone by persuading a beautiful nursing student to become his girlfriend. She wanted to marry, she said, and so his goal was to earn enough money to buy an apartment.
Factories in Chengdu manufacture products for hundreds of companies. But Mr. Lai was focused on Foxconn Technology, China’s largest exporter and one of the nations biggest employers, with 1.2 million workers. The company has plants throughout China, and assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, including for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung.
Foxconns factory in Chengdu, Mr. Lai knew, was special. Inside, workers were building Apple’s latest, potentially greatest product: the iPad.
When Mr. Lai finally landed a job repairing machines at the plant, one of the first things he noticed were the almost blinding lights. Shifts ran 24 hours a day, and the factory was always bright. At any moment, there were thousands of workers standing on assembly lines or sitting in backless chairs, crouching next to large machinery, or jogging between loading bays. Some workers legs swelled so much they waddled. “It’s hard to stand all day,” said Zhao Sheng, a plant worker.
Banners on the walls warned the 120,000 employees: “Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow.” Apples’ supplier code of conduct dictates that, except in unusual circumstances, employees are not supposed to work more than 60 hours a week. But at Foxconn, some worked more, according to interviews, workers’ pay stubs and surveys by outside groups. Mr. Lai was soon spending 12 hours a day, six days a week inside the factory, according to his paychecks. Employees who arrived late were sometimes required to writeconfession letters and copy quotations. There were continuous shifts, when workers were told to work two stretches in a row, according to interviews.
Mr. Lais college degree enabled him to earn a salary of around $22 a day, including overtime - more than many others. When his days ended, he would retreat to a small bedroom just big enough for a mattress, wardrobe and a desk where he obsessively played an online game called Fight the Landlord, said his girlfriend, Luo Xiaohong.
Those accommodations were better than many of the companys dorms, where 70,000 Foxconn workers lived, at times stuffed 20 people to a three-room apartment, employees said. Last year, a dispute over paychecks set off a riot in one of the dormitories, and workers started throwing bottles, trash cans and flaming paper from their windows, according to witnesses. Two hundred police officers wrestled with workers, arresting eight. Afterward, trash cans were removed, and piles of rubbish - and rodents became a problem. Mr. Lai felt lucky to have a place of his own.
Foxconn, in a statement, disputed workersג accounts of continuous shifts, extended overtime, crowded living accommodations and the causes of the riot. The company said that its operations adhered to customers codes of conduct, industry standards and national laws. ғConditions at Foxconn are anything but harsh, the company wrote. Foxconn also said that it had never been cited by a customer or government for under-age or overworked employees or toxic exposures.
“All assembly line employees are given regular breaks, including one-hour lunch breaks,” the company wrote, and “only 5 percent of assembly line workers are required to stand to carry out their tasks. Work stations have been designed to ergonomic standards, and employees have opportunities for job rotation and promotion,” the statement said.
“Foxconn has a very good safety record,” the company wrote. “Foxconn has come a long way in our efforts to lead our industry in China in areas such as workplace conditions and the care and treatment of our employees.”
Apple’s Code of Conduct
In 2005, some of Apples top executives gathered inside their Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for a special meeting. Other companies had created codes of conduct to police their suppliers. It was time, Apple decided, to follow suit. The code Apple published that year demands “that working conditions in Apples supply chain are safe, that workers are treated with respect and dignity, and that manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible.”
But the next year, a British newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, secretly visited a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where iPods were manufactured, and reported on workers long hours, push-ups meted out as punishment and crowded dorms. Executives in Cupertino were shocked. “Apple is filled with really good people who had no idea this was going on,” a former employee said. “We wanted it changed, immediately.”
Apple audited that factory, the companyԒs first such inspection, and ordered improvements. Executives also undertook a series of initiatives that included an annual audit report, first published in 2007. By last year, Apple had inspected 396 facilities including the companyגs direct suppliers, as well as many of those suppliers suppliers җ one of the largest such programs within the electronics industry.
Those audits have found consistent violations of Apples code of conduct, according to summaries published by the company. In 2007, for instance, Apple conducted over three dozen audits, two-thirds of which indicated that employees regularly worked more than 60 hours a week. In addition, there were six ғcore violations, the most serious kind, including hiring 15-year-olds as well as falsifying records.
Over the next three years, Apple conducted 312 audits, and every year, about half or more showed evidence of large numbers of employees laboring more than six days a week as well as working extended overtime. Some workers received less than minimum wage or had pay withheld as punishment. Apple found 70 core violations over that period, including cases of involuntary labor, under-age workers, record falsifications, improper disposal of hazardous waste and over a hundred workers injured by toxic chemical exposures.
Last year, the company conducted 229 audits. There were slight improvements in some categories and the detected rate of core violations declined. However, within 93 facilities, at least half of workers exceeded the 60-hours-a-week work limit. At a similar number, employees worked more than six days a week. There were incidents of discrimination, improper safety precautions, failure to pay required overtime rates and other violations. That year, four employees were killed and 77 injured in workplace explosions.
“If you see the same pattern of problems, year after year, that means the companys ignoring the issue rather than solving it,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “Noncompliance is tolerated, as long as the suppliers promise to try harder next time. If we meant business, core violations would disappear.”
Apple says that when an audit reveals a violation, the company requires suppliers to address the problem within 90 days and make changes to prevent a recurrence. If a supplier is unwilling to change, we terminate our relationship,Ӕ the company says on its Web site.
The seriousness of that threat, however, is unclear. Apple has found violations in hundreds of audits, but fewer than 15 suppliers have been terminated for transgressions since 2007, according to former Apple executives.
Once the deal is set and Foxconn becomes an authorized Apple supplier, Apple will no longer give any attention to worker conditions or anything that is irrelevant to its products,Ӕ said Mr. Li, the former Foxconn manager. Mr. Li spent seven years with Foxconn in Shenzhen and Chengdu and was forced out in April after he objected to a relocation to Chengdu, he said. Foxconn disputed his comments, and said both Foxconn and Apple take the welfare of our employees very seriously.Ӕ
Apples efforts have spurred some changes. Facilities that were reaudited ғshowed continued performance improvements and better working conditions, the company wrote in its 2011 supplier responsibility progress report. In addition, the number of audited facilities has grown every year, and some executives say those expanding efforts obscure year-to-year improvements.
Apple also has trained over a million workers about their rights and methods for injury and disease prevention. A few years ago, after auditors insisted on interviewing low-level factory employees, they discovered that some had been forced to pay onerous ԓrecruitment fees ԗ which Apple classifies as involuntary labor. As of last year, the company had forced suppliers to reimburse more than $6.7 million in such charges.
“Apple is a leader in preventing under-age labor,” said Dionne Harrison of Impactt, a firm paid by Apple to help prevent and respond to child labor among its suppliers. “They’re doing as much as they possibly can.
Other consultants disagree.
“Weve spent years telling Apple there are serious problems and recommending changes,” said a consultant at BSR also known as Business for Social Responsibility - which has been twice retained by Apple to provide advice on labor issues. “They don"t want to pre-empt problems, they just want to avoid embarrassments.”
We Could Have Saved Lives
In 2006, BSR, along with a division of the World Bank and other groups, initiated a project to improve working conditions in factories building cellphones and other devices in China and elsewhere. The groups and companies pledged to test various ideas. Foxconn agreed to participate.
For four months, BSR and another group negotiated with Foxconn regarding a pilot program to create worker ғhotlines, so that employees could report abusive conditions, seek mental counseling and discuss workplace problems. Apple was not a participant in the project, but was briefed on it, according to the BSR consultant, who had detailed knowledge.
As negotiations proceeded, Foxconn’s requirements for participation kept changing. First Foxconn asked to shift from installing new hotlines to evaluating existing hotlines. Then Foxconn insisted that mental health counseling be excluded. Foxconn asked participants to sign agreements saying they would not disclose what they observed, and then rewrote those agreements multiple times. Finally, an agreement was struck, and the project was scheduled to begin in January 2008. A day before the start, Foxconn demanded more changes, until it was clear the project would not proceed, according to the consultant and a 2008 summary by BSR that did not name Foxconn.
The next year, a Foxconn employee fell or jumped from an apartment building after losing an iPhone prototype. Over the next two years, at least 18 other Foxconn workers attempted suicide or fell from buildings in manners that suggested suicide attempts. In 2010, two years after the pilot program fell apart and after multiple suicide attempts, Foxconn created a dedicated mental health hotline and began offering free psychological counseling.
“We could have saved lives, and we asked Apple to pressure Foxconn, but they wouldn’t do it,” said the BSR consultant, who asked not to be identified because of confidentiality agreements. “Companies like H.P. and Intel and Nike push their suppliers. But Apple wants to keep an arms length, and Foxconn is their most important manufacturer, so they refuse to push.”
BSR, in a written statement, said the views of that consultant were not those of the company.
“My BSR colleagues and I view Apple as a company that is making a highly serious effort to ensure that labor conditions in its supply chain meet the expectations of applicable laws, the company’s standards and the expectations of consumers,” wrote Aron Cramer, BSRԒs president. Mr. Cramer added that “asking Apple to pressure Foxconn would have been inconsistent with the purpose of the pilot program, and there were multiple reasons the pilot program did not proceed.”
Foxconn, in a statement, said it acted quickly and comprehensively to address suicides, and the record has shown that those measures have been successful.
A Demanding Client
Every month, officials at companies from around the world trek to Cupertino or invite Apple executives to visit their foreign factories, all in pursuit of a goal: becoming a supplier.
When news arrives that Apple is interested in a particular product or service, small celebrations often erupt. Whiskey is drunk. Karaoke is sung.
Then, Apples requests start.
Apple typically asks suppliers to specify how much every part costs, how many workers are needed and the size of their salaries. Executives want to know every financial detail. Afterward, Apple calculates how much it will pay for a part. Most suppliers are allowed only the slimmest of profits.
So suppliers often try to cut corners, replace expensive chemicals with less costly alternatives, or push their employees to work faster and longer, according to people at those companies.
“The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper,” said an executive at one company that helped bring the iPad to market. “And then they’ll come back the next year, and force a 10 percent price cut.”
In January 2010, workers at a Chinese factory owned by Wintek, an Apple manufacturing partner, went on strike over a variety of issues, including widespread rumors that workers were being exposed to toxins. Investigations by news organizations revealed that over a hundred employees had been injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis.
Employees said they had been ordered to use n-hexane to clean iPhone screens because it evaporated almost three times as fast as rubbing alcohol. Faster evaporation meant workers could clean more screens each minute.
Apple commented on the Wintek injuries a year later. In its supplier responsibility report, Apple said it had required Wintek to stop using n-hexaneӔ and that Apple has verified that all affected workers have been treated successfully, and we continue to monitor their medical reports until full recuperation.Ӕ Apple also said it required Wintek to fix the ventilation system.
That same month, a New York Times reporter interviewed a dozen injured Wintek workers who said they had never been contacted by Apple or its intermediaries, and that Wintek had pressured them to resign and take cash settlements that would absolve the company of liability. After those interviews, Wintek pledged to provide more compensation to the injured workers and Apple sent a representative to speak with some of them.
Six months later, trade publications reported that Apple significantly cut prices paid to Wintek.
“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you dont give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety.”
Wintek is still one of Apple’s most important suppliers. Wintek, in a statement, declined to comment except to say that after the episode, the company took ample measuresӔ to address the situation and is committed to ensuring employee welfare and creating a safe and healthy work environment.Ӕ
Many major technology companies have worked with factories where conditions are troubling. However, independent monitors and suppliers say some act differently. Executives at multiple suppliers, in interviews, said that Hewlett-Packard and others allowed them slightly more profits and other allowances if they were used to improve worker conditions.
“Our suppliers are very open with us,” said Zoe McMahon, an executive in Hewlett-Packards supply chain social and environmental responsibility program. “They let us know when they are struggling to meet our expectations, and that influences our decisions.”
The Explosion
On the afternoon of the blast at the iPad plant, Lai Xiaodong telephoned his girlfriend, as he did every day. They had hoped to see each other that evening, but Mr. Lai’s manager said he had to work overtime, he told her.
He had been promoted quickly at Foxconn, and after just a few months was in charge of a team that maintained the machines that polished iPad cases. The sanding area was loud and hazy with aluminum dust. Workers wore masks and earplugs, but no matter how many times they showered, they were recognizable by the slight aluminum sparkle in their hair and at the corners of their eyes.
Just two weeks before the explosion, an advocacy group in Hong Kong published a report warning of unsafe conditions at the Chengdu plant, including problems with aluminum dust. The group, Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, or Sacom, had videotaped workers covered with tiny aluminum particles. “Occupational health and safety issues in Chengdu are alarming,” the report read. Workers also highlight the problem of poor ventilation and inadequate personal protective equipment.
“A copy of that report was sent to Apple. There was no response,” said Debby Chan Sze Wan of the group. “A few months later I went to Cupertino, and went into the Apple lobby, but no one would meet with me. I’ve never heard from anyone from Apple at all.”
The morning of the explosion, Mr. Lai rode his bicycle to work. The iPad had gone on sale just weeks earlier, and workers were told thousands of cases needed to be polished each day. The factory was frantic, employees said. Rows of machines buffed cases as masked employees pushed buttons. Large air ducts hovered over each station, but they could not keep up with the three lines of machines polishing nonstop. Aluminum dust was everywhere.
Dust is a known safety hazard. In 2003, an aluminum dust explosion in Indiana destroyed a wheel factory and killed a worker. In 2008, agricultural dust inside a sugar factory in Georgia caused an explosion that killed 14.
Two hours into Mr. Lai’s second shift, the building started to shake, as if an earthquake was under way. There was a series of blasts, plant workers said.
Then the screams began.
When Mr. Lais colleagues ran outside, dark smoke was mixing with a light rain, according to cellphone videos. The toll would eventually count four dead, 18 injured.
At the hospital, Mr. Lai’s girlfriend saw that his skin was almost completely burned away. I recognized him from his legs, otherwise I wouldn’t know who that person was, she said.
Eventually, his family arrived. Over 90 percent of his body had been seared. ԓMy mom ran away from the room at the first sight of him. I cried. Nobody could stand it, his brother said. When his mother eventually returned, she tried to avoid touching her son, for fear that it would cause pain.
“If I had known,” she said, “I would have grabbed his arm, I would have touched him”
“He was very tough,” she said. “He held on for two days.”
After Mr. Lai died, Foxconn workers drove to Mr. Lai’s hometown and delivered a box of ashes. The company later wired a check for about $150,000.
Foxconn, in a statement, said that “at the time of the explosion the Chengdu plant was in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations, and after ensuring that the families of the deceased employees were given the support they required, we ensured that all of the injured employees were given the highest quality medical care."After the explosion, the company added, Foxconn immediately halted work in all polishing workshops, and later improved ventilation and dust disposal, and adopted technologies to enhance worker safety.
In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that after the explosion, the company contacted the foremost experts in process safetyӔ and assembled a team to investigate and make recommendations to prevent future accidents.
In December, however, seven months after the blast that killed Mr. Lai, another iPad factory exploded, this one in Shanghai. Once again, aluminum dust was the cause, according to interviews and Apples most recent supplier responsibility report. That blast injured 59 workers, with 23 hospitalized.
“It is gross negligence, after an explosion occurs, not to realize that every factory should be inspected,” said Nicholas Ashford, the occupational safety expert, who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If it were terribly difficult to deal with aluminum dust, I would understand. But do you know how easy dust is to control? Its called ventilation. We solved this problem over a century ago.”
In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that while the explosions both involved combustible aluminum dust, the causes were different. The company declined, however, to provide details. The report added that Apple had now audited all suppliers polishing aluminum products and had put stronger precautions in place. All suppliers have initiated required countermeasures, except one, which remains shut down, the report said.
For Mr. Lais family, questions remain. “We’re really not sure why he died,” said Mr. Lais mother, standing beside a shrine she built near their home. “We dont understand what happened.”
Hitting the Apple Lottery
Every year, as rumors about Apples forthcoming products start to emerge, trade publications and Web sites begin speculating about which suppliers are likely to win the Apple lottery. Getting a contract from Apple can lift a company’s value by millions because of the implied endorsement of manufacturing quality. But few companies openly brag about the work: Apple generally requires suppliers to sign contracts promising they will not divulge anything, including the partnership.
That lack of transparency gives Apple an edge at keeping its plans secret. But it also has been a barrier to improving working conditions, according to advocates and former Apple executives.
“This month, after numerous requests by advocacy and news organizations, including The New York Times, Apple released the names of 156 of its suppliers. In the report accompanying that list, Apple said they account for more than 97 percent of what we pay to suppliers to manufacture our products.”
However, the company has not revealed the names of hundreds of other companies that do not directly contract with Apple, but supply the suppliers. The companys supplier list does not disclose where factories are, and many are hard to find. And independent monitoring organizations say when they have tried to inspect Apple’s suppliers, they have been barred from entry on Appleגs orders, they have been told.
“We’ve had this conversation hundreds of times, said a former executive in Apples supplier responsibility group. There is a genuine, companywide commitment to the code of conduct. But taking it to the next level and creating real change conflicts with secrecy and business goals, and so there’s only so far we can go.” Former Apple employees say they were generally prohibited from engaging with most outside groups.
“There’s a real culture of secrecy here that influences everything,” the former executive said.
Some other technology companies operate differently.
“We talk to a lot of outsiders,” said Gary Niekerk, director of corporate citizenship at Intel. “The world’s complex, and unless were dialoguing with outside groups, we miss a lot.”
Given Apples prominence and leadership in global manufacturing, if the company were to radically change its ways, it could overhaul how business is done. “Every company wants to be Apple,” said Sasha Lezhnev at the Enough Project, a group focused on corporate accountability. “If they committed to building a conflict-free iPhone, it would transform technology.”
But ultimately, say former Apple executives, there are few real outside pressures for change. Apple is one of the most admired brands. In a national survey conducted by The New York Times in November, 56 percent of respondents said they couldnӔt think of anything negative about Apple. Fourteen percent said the worst thing about the company was that its products were too expensive. Just 2 percent mentioned overseas labor practices.
“People like Ms. White of Harvard say that until consumers demand better conditions in overseas factories as they did for companies like Nike and Gap, which today have overhauled conditions among suppliers - or regulators act, there is little impetus for radical change.” Some Apple insiders agree.
“You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards,” said a current Apple executive.
“And right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China.”
Gu Huini contributed research.
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Friday, February 03, 2012
IT Skills Update
The IT certs that no longer pay extra—and the new skills that do
Overall employment in tech is improving, but the certs you could once count on for a job or extra pay are losing their special value
By Bill Snyder
Infoworld
February 3,2012
Premium pay for those hard-earned IT certifications CONTINUES TO DECLINE, despite an overall surge in high-tech employment. The latest quarterly survey by Foote Partners found that pay premiums (not overall pay) declined by 1.2 percent in the last three months of 2011. Although that doesn’t sound like much, the loss is part of a long-term trend, as it was the sixth straight quarter in which premium pay declined. In fact, premiums have lost value in 20 of the last 21 quarters, according to Foote Partners, which surveys 524 IT skills and certifications.
Of those, only one category of certifications—architecture/project management/process certifications—grew in overall market value; it rose by nearly 2 percent. And other data from Foote shows that businesses no longer value what are increasingly considered standard skills, and instead are putting their money both into a new set of emerging specialties and into hybrid technology/business roles.
The good news is clear in the overall tech employment picture: A year-end report by the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) put the IT unemployment rate for 2011 at 3.7 percent, down from 5.3 percent in 2010. By comparison, in December, the unemployment rate for the overall economy was 8.5 percent.
An estimated 83,000 IT jobs were created in 2011, according to the Current Population Survey data, based on monthly surveys of U.S. households. A different measure, that of job listings on Dice.com, the largest tech job board, showed an increase of 11 percent in January versus a year earlier. At the beginning of the month, Dice listed 75,404 jobs, compared to 68,206 a year ago.
The hidden job growth is in hybrid business/tech roles
That IT job growth may in fact be understated in such statistics, thanks to a key trend that points to where IT opportunities are emerging for career and pay growth: so-called hybrid jobs, says David Foote, CEO of Foote Partners. Because those hybrid jobs are scattered across different departments and lines of business, counting them is much more difficult than it was when nearly all IT jobs were found in the IT department.
Foote explains the hybrid role: “The broader trend continues to be employers hiring hybrid IT-business professionals with combinations of both business and technology knowledge, experience, and skill sets, unlike those found in traditional IT organizations. ... Clearly there is demand for a mix of specific technical skills along with business and communications skills.”
“Pure-play [tech] jobs are on the decline,” concurs Bill Reynolds, a partner at Foote. Where once the majority of tech jobs were in technology companies, now many organizations whose business is not directly related to tech have many openings that require different skills, he says.
The trend towards broader skill sets is not new. Historically, an IT pro might have been successful if he or she was certified in a specific application from a specific vendor, such as Microsoft, Cisco, or Novell. But as technology became less proprietary, people needed to certify in areas that encompassed more than one vendor, such as security. Now comes the next leap, which Foote says is learning about how technology is deployed in areas like finance, marketing, and accounting. IT employees are now embedded in departments and work groups, and when they are, they need to be able to speak about technical subjects to nontechnical people, he says.
The IT skills that are losing value—and the ones gaining value
That increased demand for hybrid roles doesn’t mean that specific technical skills aren’t also valued. It’s just that the ones that businesses value—and are willing to pay more for—are changing.
The IT labor market is very complex, and generalizing from a set of numbers can be misleading. But Foote’s analysis does indicate that some once-popular skill sets are losing some of their value to employers. What some of these skills have in common is that they are specialties that are now being thought of as legacies, while other areas have shifted into a maintenance mode as new technologies demand business attention and promise new business advantage. That’s not to say that all certs involving old-school technologies are hopelessly out of fashion. Some are still in high demand and pay accordingly.
In the last quarter of 2011, certified skills that lost 15 percent or more in market value included Oracle/Siebel 7.7 certified consultant, Microsoft certified database administrator, and IBM certified specialist in storage networking solutions. There was a similar decline in narrow noncertified skills sets, including SAP Business One, SAP Web application server, and ColdFusion/ColdFusion MX, according to Foote’s survey.
So which skills are becoming more valuable, gaining the pay premiums IT pros seek? Certified skills that jumped by 15 percent or more included EC-Council certified security analyst, certified wireless network administrator, CompTIA Server+, and HP accredited platform specialist. (Notice how these are broader skills sets than those losing value?) Noncertified skills that gained the same amount of market value included a variety of application development skills, including Groovy, Java, Drupal, and Ruby [5]—all languages used in hot areas such as cloud, mobile, and Web applications. Messaging-oriented middleware also gained, as did e-commerce skills like JavaScript, Joomla, and VBScript.
On Dice.com, the fastest growing skill sets included those related to Java, iPhone, Android, cloud, e-commerce, and mobile applications, although Oracle database and the combined category of C, C++, and C# software development accounted for the lion’s share of actual listings by skill.
The key is to evolve your skills with the demand
IT, like other parts of the labor market, is evolving. As employers look for tech hands with broader skills and knowledge of business, as well as those skilled in emerging technology areas, many of the old skill sets are become less desirable, even though overall IT demand is moving in the right direction.
“The biggest mistake job seekers make is looking at what they have instead of what the employer is looking for,” Foote says.
It is, of course, easy to preach about staying current in your job skills, thinking differently, being business-oriented, and so on. All of that is really tough, particularly for older workers. But two years ago, no matter how you tried, jobs simply weren’t there. Now they are. That’s a hell of an improvement.
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Chrysler Adding 1800 Jobs In Illinois
Chrysler adds 1,800 jobs to build Dodge Dart
By Brent Snavely
Detroit Free Press
February 3, 2012
Chrysler Group will add 1,800 jobs at its Belvidere Assembly Plant to build the Dodge Dart this year.
“You are the new Chrysler,” Fiat and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne told workers gathered at the plant to hear the announcement.
Last week, Chrysler said it would add 400 to 500 workers to two existing shifts, but yesterday was the first time the company released the total employment number.
Chrysler said all 1,800 jobs will be new hires and will be permanent positions. Five hundred of the jobs are specifically for the Dodge Dart. About 2,700 currently work at the plant, assembling the Jeep Compass and Jeep Patriot. When the workers are added, it will be the first time since 2008 that the plant will operate three shifts.
Marchionne said that the company’s Belvidere plant is one of the most productive of all Fiat and Chrysler plants. It ranked third out of 34 plants among many manufacturers in a recent study, Marchionne said, and is being used as a benchmark for Fiat’s plants in Europe.
“The truth is that you are working in a plant that is an example of the kind of mosaics that we are working to create,” Marchionne said. The Auburn Hills automaker also recently spent $600 million to build a new 638,000-square-foot body shop here.
“This significant investment will ensure this tremendous job engine for the Rock River Valley will be utilized for many years to come,” U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo, R-Illinois, said in a statement.
Chrysler’s Belvidere plant, which opened in 1965, has long been a cornerstone of the Belvidere and Rockford communities. In the early 1970s, the large Chrysler Newport sedan was assembled here. But in the late 1970s, the plant was transformed so it could build the smaller and more fuel-efficient Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon.
From 1994 to 2005, it built the Dodge Neon. From 2005 until 2011, the compact Dodge Caliber was produced here. Production of the Caliber ended in December.
Now, the plant’s future is resting on the success of the Dodge Dart, arguably the most important new car Chrysler has launched since it emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The compact sedan is expected to be the first credible small car for any Chrysler brand in years. Chrysler discontinued the Dodge Neon in 2005.
It also is the first car to combine Fiat and Chrysler technology, and is built on a widened and lengthened version of the Alfa Romeo Giulietta. The Dart was revealed at the 2012 North American International Auto Show in Detroit last month and is scheduled to go on sale this spring.
Chrysler’s announcement today also is the latest in a string of job commitments that illustrates the automaker’s growing confidence in its recovery. The Auburn Hills automaker has hired about 2,200 new hourly workers since 2009 when it emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That number will grow to 4,000 by summer.
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