Students Used as Slave Labour

[Left Leanings]

Look at this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/01/apple-iphone-china-factories-forced-interns

Apple's iPhone plant in China, is using students as slave labour, according to campaigners. If they want to graduate, they have to work as 'interns'.

Nice.

[ВАЛТЕР]

Great. Now I bet this will be viewed as "communism" by people and now we have to defend our beliefs on yet another front.

Thanks a lot China...you dick.

[NewLeft]

This practice is not solely in China.. Think migrant workers. Here's a popular example today.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/17/student-guestworkers-at-hershey-plant_n_930014.html

[Bostana]

Not surprising,
ever sense those reforms hit China corrupt businesses have been taking advantage of the Workers of the people's republic.

[Ocean Seal]

Apple's iPhone plant in China, is using students as slave labour, according to campaigners. If they want to graduate, they have to work as 'interns'.
Nice.
There are universities in the US which do this as well, its probably not as shitty though. Not defending China at all, but the US has its own ways to fuck its students (ie: debt which turns many of them into slaves).

[Mr. Natural]

As Ocean Seal began to imply, Western students are "slaves," too. He mentioned the astounding debts they accumulate while in college. Then they take their captive labor power and go into a lifelong indentured servitude to The System.

We all now live, work, and think on capitalism's global plantation, and our living, laboring, and thinking is consequently lousy. Capitalism is a system, and its inhuman, anti-life institutions, values, and practices have now become the "life" of the human species. And not for long. Capitalism is cashing us in.

I am most sensitive to these malign developments, and I find "higher education" to be among capitalism's most malignant institutions. Western colleges are instruments of capitalist job training and indoctrination and are almost entirely lacking in critical thinking. Their administrators are not educators but CEOs, and the professoriate has become conservative as hell.

All of this reflects capitalism's systemic envelopment of life on Earth. I have a lifelong love of learning, and now harbor a deep hatred and fear of "education."

It is universally true now, as Helen Keller suggested almost a century ago, that "College is not the place to go for ideas."

[Left Leanings]

There are universities in the US which do this as well, its probably not as shitty though. Not defending China at all, but the US has its own ways to fuck its students (ie: debt which turns many of them into slaves).

Students in the UK go through the same shit. My course was just academic, and three years. But some peeps did four year 'sandwich' courses, in which they spent a year working in industry.

Also, there are these exploitative 'intern' arrangements, where graduates work for no wages for a year or even longer, to gain 'work experience', to help them get a foot on the career ladder. They are told they will probably end up working for the company, but surprise, surprise, there are often no vanacies when the internship is finished. They go and work for free elsewhere, or sign on the dole, or take any shitty job they can find. And guess what? When the intern leaves, another intern takes their place.

Internships - otherwise known as capitalists ripping people off, slave labour and taking the fucking piss.

[Left Leanings]

"I am not a machine"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2126198/I-machine-The-face-Chinese-worker-making-Apple-iPad-150-month.html

Here is the personal story of one Chinese worker, who is manufacturing the Apple iPad.

[Avocado]

This is not limited to developing nations either.

Look at the US - the Internship aka slave labour


Look at Australia - Child labour - propping up the profits of the likes of McDonalds, Hungry Jacks (BK), Coles, Woolworths - kids do the same work as adults and get paid from half the hourly rate. These kids put their education at risk for a few bucks a week.

Profiteering through child labour.

[dodger]

It seems I have lived too long. Student use to debase themselves, decrying middle class privilege. Oh dear, how did we allow this state of affairs to come about? It seems we only learn our lessons the hard way. Yet still we have some who talk of white or middle class, when it is in the interests of all that education is free , universal. The cost? Definable. The cost of ignorance is indeterminate. Students are working class. They must fight for education and fight to keep education. It is a struggle that concerns all.

[Left Leanings]

It seems I have lived too long. Student use to debase themselves, decrying middle class privilege. Oh dear, how did we allow this state of affairs to come about? It seems we only learn our lessons the hard way. Yet still we have some who talk of white or middle class, when it is in the interests of all that education is free , universal. The cost? Definable. The cost of ignorance is indeterminate. Students are working class. They must fight for education and fight to keep education. It is a struggle that concerns all.

Very true.

As a UK student in the late 80s/early 90s, there were no tuition fees. These were met by your local education authority, even if your parents were millionnaires. The principle of free education was accepted and practiced.

And student grants were still in place. I got a full grant, cos I came from a low income family. If you came from a more affluent family, there was a sliding scale that determined how much grant you could be paid, the rest being made up by parental contributions.

Students could also claim social security during the long summer holidays.

Those who came before me, had it even better. They could claim benefits during the Christmas and Easter holidays, and got a travel grant, to move back and forth, between their place of Higher Education and home.

I actually had more money saved when I left university, than before I started. And I never took a job throughout my three year course. I only knew one student who worked, and that was cos he was an exchange student from America, and my uni was charging him the fees he would have to pay to his domestic college.

Contrast that to today's students: tuition fees, maintenance loans, having to take a fucking job while trying to study, coming out up to your eyeballs in debt, and trying to find decent employment, juggle rents and mortgages etc.

It makes me fucking sick what's happening. How easily the gains made by previous generations were wiped out, starting with Thatcher, and then rolled out at an alarming speed under Blair. Now there is worse to come still with the increase in tuition fees and unemployment.

[human strike]

All students are simply labourers who are compensated with debt rather than wages.

[Firebrand]

Check this out
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/16/work-free-tesco-job-advert

And they wonder why there are no paid jobs. Sometimes I think the ruling classes are really thick. Then I remember that they aren't, they just think we are.