Malaysian blogger, lawyer and human rights activist Charles Hector is in court for a second day today. Good Electronics report that he’s being sued for $ 3.3 million in damages in a defamation case by electronics component manufacturer Asahi Kosei.
The case hinges on comments he made on behalf of a group of Burmese migrant workers in the country, who alleged they had been promised much better pay and conditions by the company than they eventually received. When they complained, they were threatened with termination and deportation.
Worryingly, the trial looks to be stacked against Hector, with the court issuing a statement in advance that the blog posting under discussion was factually incorrect, and refusing to allow the migrant workers affected to join the suit. Read the rest of this entry »
The union Faceban saga took a new and depressing turn this week, after many people found they were prohibited from sharing a link to the activist site supporting unions’ industrial action on the 30th June – j30strike.org – We’re now contending with Facebook pre-bans!
When they tried to post the link (and later also short link site redirects to the site, and even posts discussing the site), they got a popup message saying the site had been reported and they weren’t able to share it. This persisted for some time before Facebook relented and let the site be shared by users.
This isn’t a new development – vexatious complaints to Facebook (or indeed pretty much any other commercial social network) can be ludicrously powerful. Facebook’s revenue per user is pretty minuscule, so their legions of users can only be serviced on the cheap. A few years back they only had around 100 customer service operatives to moderate tens of millions of active users’ content, and I imagine if the situation’s changed, it’s for the worse. Read the rest of this entry »
Last month’s Make IT Fair campaign day called on Apple to give workers in their supply chains a larger bite at the iPhone & iPad apple.
That looks to have fallen on deaf ears though as the company are reported to be currently demanding 10% price cuts from their outsourced component suppliers, despite huge increases in sales.
The fact that Apple already have profit margins for iPhones far higher than any of their competitors – running nearly 60% – doesn’t seem to register. Apple are already squeezing their suppliers harder than other firms, and those suppliers are already squeezing their staff – with disastrous consequences.
What effect do they seriously think a 10% cost cut is going to have on the labour rights and safety concerns that Steve Jobs claims to be “all over”?
I am something of a phone geek. Oh okay then, I am rather obsessed by them, smartphones in particular. I’ve had 5 different smartphone handsets since ditching my standalone PDA for 2003′s splendid SonyEricsson p800, and whichever I’ve had, it’s always been my most treasured possession.
Worrying news from Iraq that four young leaders of the country’s recent waves of protests were arrested today and are being held in an undisclosed location. As students Ahmed Alaa al Baghdaddi, Moyaid Fasil al Taib and Ali Abdul-Khaliq, and worker activist Jihad Jalil – members of the 25 February protest movement – walked to join a peaceful mass protest in Tahrir Square in Baghdad this morning, plain clothes police in an ambulance seized them, beating them and threatening them with machine guns before taking them away. Read the rest of this entry »
Whodathunkit? A labor-sympathetic judge has used a technicality to strike down Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s bill to remove collective bargaining rights for his public sector workers.
Makes a nice change from the kind of court intervention in industrial disputes that we’re getting more used to on our side of the pond, where bizarre balloting technicalities are increasingly being used by employers to block union members’ attempts to take strike action. Read the rest of this entry »
Taiwanese smart phone manufacturer HTC has had an extremely successful year, on the back of a strong product line. Increased sales at the company have nearly tripled the share price and more than quadrupled the wealth of husband and wife top team Cher Wang and Wenchi Chen in the last year alone. Wang and Chen are now worth a very tidy $8.8bn, and are sitting right at the top of this week’s Forbes Taiwan Rich List.
Which makes it all the harder to work out why exactly they don’t seem to be taking any action over worker abuses at their outsourced touchscreen supplier Young Fast Optoelectronics, where there are allegations of union busting, forced overtime for low pay, child labour and poor safety.
With the world’s eyes on the problems facing an Arab Spring for Libya, Egypt, Syria and Bahrain, a fast moving crisis brewing in Iraq is in danger of slipping off the radar. As one of the region’s elected democracies, recent protests in Iraq have been about the pace of reform within the political system rather than a challenge to the legitimacy of the government, but with a recent dramatic crackdown on trade unions in the county, the country seems to be moving very much in the wrong direction.
The cabinet in Iraq is something of a carve up, with the governing coalition’s important minority faction the Sadrist party (the followers of the Islamist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr) holding sway over a number of departments, including the Ministry of Labour. It seems the Sadrists are keen to use their position to exert influence wherever possible, and to that end have staged something of a civil society coup by taking over the country’s independent labour movement.
Apple are the target here as they subcontract most of the work in making their hugely popular iPhones, and they don’t seem to be too fussy about how the work gets done. Read the rest of this entry »
I am something of a phone geek. Oh okay then, I am rather obsessed by them, smartphones in particular. I’ve had 5 different smartphone handsets since ditching my standalone PDA for 2003′s splendid SonyEricsson p800, and whichever I’ve had, it’s always been my most treasured possession.
Photos of the four detainees (via 
