If you go to the website for the US Chamber of Commerce (USCOC), America's "voice of business" that claims to represent the interests of over 3 million businesses, it feels like you've found the site for a right wing advocacy group. There are clips from FOX News (that aren't making fun of them), attacks on healthcare and financial regulatory reform, and links to Wall Street Journal op-eds claiming that America has more to fear from the political influence of labor unions than from corporations with annual profits in the billions. The implication is clear -- American businesses have right wing values.
However, this assertion was challenged in 2009 when USCOC announced its opposition to attempts by the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. USCOC said that doing so would "strangle the economy", called for a "Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" as if human-caused climate change was yet to be proven, and threatened to sue the EPA if it decided to act without holding the trial. In response, Nike resigned from USCOC's board of directors, and major companies like Apple, Pacific Gas and Electric, PNM Resources and Exelon left USCOC completely.
It turns out that when it comes to climate change, US businesses aren't so conservative after all. That's why a group like American Businesses for Clean Energy (ABCE) is so important. And if you own a business and believe the US should be doing more to fight climate change and help support the clean energy economy (which is creating jobs at 2.5 times the rate as the rest of the economy), you should seriously consider joining ABCE.
ABCE represents over 2,500 businesses of all shapes and sizes, including big companies like Gap Inc. and Warner Music Group as well as small local businesses from Al's Painting in Ann Arbor, MI to Zoey's Pizza in Manchester, NH. You don't need to be a business that focuses on green products or services to join -- all are welcome. There are no fees or dues to pay, no meetings to attend, no further obligations, and ABCE will not engage in any lobbying on your behalf. You don't need to resign from any other business coalitions. All you have to do to join is visit ABCE's website and enter some basic information about your business.
That's it. You're done. But you will have done something incredibly important.
Two weeks ago, in this space, I wrote about hiring inequalities at Silicon Valley technology firms—mostly focusing on disparities in employment for African Americans and Latinos.
However, the lack of women in technology jobs is similarly striking. The San Jose Mercury News has been forceful in highlighting the issue. The newspaper conducted an analysis of ten of the Valley's largest companies. Their numbers are from 2005 but they still highlight a disturbing trend. In their analysis of these ten companies (including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco, eBay, and more), women made up just 33 percent of the workforce. This is even down from 1999, when women made up only 37 percent of all employees at these organizations.
Turning specifically to managers, the Mercury News found that "women slipped to 26 percent of managers in 2005, from 28 percent in 2000."
As seen in the chart below, that's been making the rounds, the stimulus is working. The Obama Administration, using numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is touting that the number of jobs lost is lessening.
This is great news, of course, but we must ensure that new jobs are equitably distributed. That's why it's discouraging to hear that five Silicon Valley companies successfully fought a Freedom of Information request for gender and race information on their employees.
Apple, Applied Materials, Google, Oracle, and Yahoo succeeded in rebuking the request from the San Jose Mercury News with the argument that "commercial harm" would be done and business strategy would be revealed to competitors.
The stance taken by the US Chamber of Commerce on climate change is damaging the confidence Americans have in business' ability to respond to current challenges. The Chamber has been fighting climate change legislation tooth and nail on behalf of the US coal industry that makes up a very small segment of their membership. Other business have taken notice, as the list of companies leaving the Chamber is growing. The Chamber chose to entrench its stance on the lead up to the Copenhagen climate conference and this resulted in the departure of Exelon Corp, Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources, Mohawk Fine Papers, and Apple.
Some American media outlets are reporting the apparent suicide of a young worker at Foxconn Technology Group, which makes iPhones in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong.
According to publications that include Shanghai Daily, Sun Danyong, a recent engineering graduate, jumped out of the window of his apartment last Thursday. The reports said Sun, who had been tasked with sending iPhone prototypes to Apple, had been under suspicion for stealing after one of the handsets went missing. Some publications reported that, in the days prior to his suicide, Sun had been detained and beaten by a senior official in the security department of the Taiwan-based electronics manufacturing giant.
"We are saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee, and we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death," Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet told CNET on Tuesday. "We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect."
This sounds like a few "bad apples" in Apple's otherwise humane and benevolent supply chain ran amok in faraway China, but...
Three years ago the Daily Mail published photographs and details of the harsh working conditions where iPods are made in Chinese factories.
One factory, owned by Foxconn in Longhua, housed 100 low-paid workers in each dorm room, with no visitors allowed.
The workers toiled for up to 15 hours a day and were ruled with an iron fist by their bosses.
So Apple was still in bed with Foxconn three years after their slave-labor camp in Longhua was exposed by the Daily Mail, and still claiming that "We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect."
Back in the late nineties, I was one of those odd souls who took what most would consider to be an inordinate amount of interest in Microsoft's antitrust troubles.
From the period 1997-2000 I can't say I cared more deeply about any other issue.
Of course, that issue faded from view as much more important things came to the fore, but it did lay in the back of my mind.
Now, this week, that part of my life has come back together full circle.
Let's start with a frightening New York Times article about the geometric growth of viruses, malware, and general criminal activity on the internet.
Yes, there's gloating galore in our Mac-happy household over the news that "even the briefest exposure to the Apple logo may make you behave more creatively," according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. No wonder we are just bursting with ideas that our cramped Manhattan apartment can barely contain; we've got more Macs per capita than you'll find anywhere outside of an Apple store. (My Mac consultant husband) Matt would put one in the bathroom if I let him, which I won't, because that's my one tech-free haven in our hyper-wired world.
The study, conducted by researchers at Duke University and the University of Waterloo, Canada, found that even a split-second glimpse of the iconic Apple logo is enough to inspire folks to "think different":
The team conducted an experiment in which 341 university students completed what they believed was a visual acuity task, during which either the Apple or IBM logo was flashed so quickly that they were unaware they had been exposed to the brand logo. The participants then completed a task designed to evaluate how creative they were, listing all of the uses for a brick that they could imagine beyond building a wall.
People who were exposed to the Apple logo generated significantly more unusual uses for the brick compared with those who were primed with the IBM logo, the researchers said. In addition, the unusual uses the Apple-primed participants generated were rated as more creative by independent judges.
As Duke professor Tanya Chartrand noted, "Apple has worked for many years to develop a brand character associated with nonconformity, innovation and creativity." IBM's logo, on the other hand, conveys an image to consumers that is "traditional, smart and responsible," i.e., safe and dull.
Apples have a long tradition of tempting mankind to flout convention-just ask Adam and Eve. And don't forget Johnny Appleseed, who was running around literally sowing the seeds of the conservation movement a couple hundred years ago, before voluntary simplicity and animal rights were even trendy.
The Beatles beat Steve Jobs by a few years, too, leading to a branding battle between Apple Corp. and Apple Inc., which rocked our collective world with their revolutionary music and machines, respectively.
That lawsuit was settled last year, but now Apple's gone and picked another fight, this time with the Big Apple, which unveiled a new apple logo for its GreeNYC campaign to inspire New Yorkers "to walk, bike and unplug appliances when not in use," as the New York Times reports.
Apple is reportedly concerned that the supposed similarity between the two logos could create "consumer confusion resulting in damage and injury." But as the Times notes, the two apples are decidedly distinctive varieties. Yeah, they're both apples, but New York City's hasn't had a bite taken out of it, and it's green, whereas Apple's trademark logo has evolved from its hippy-dippy rainbow phase into the more minimalist black/white spectrum.
Steve Jobs is reportedly worried that GreeNYC's logo is going to lead to "dilution of the distinctiveness" of the Apple brand. Will people really confuse the two logos? I doubt it, but I'd be happy if they did; after all, if just flashing folks with an image of an apple is enough to encourage our brains to be more receptive to new ideas, it can only boost GreeNYC's prospects for encouraging conservation. It seems only fair that the fruit that got us evicted from Eden in the first place should help us find our way back.
As Iraq burns, lots of other stuff is going on in policy-land. For instance, the propaganda campaign against a free and open internet has heated up. Here's the Washington Post's economics columnist, Steven Pearlstein, on net neutrality.
Perhaps this is the kind of economic illiteracy we should expect from people who get their information from "The Daily Show" and the Daily Kos. But isn't it time for the rest of us to move on and acknowledge that the days of the online free lunch are over?
Of course, what's actually happening is that Comcast is randomly cutting off paying customers for downloading 'too much' without telling them what the download limit is. Fortunately, shills like Pearlstein may soon become irrelevant in this fight, as Apple is considering making a game-changing move in our communications infrastructure. Steve Jobs is eyeing a piece of the spectrum we fought for earlier this year and helped set partially free.
So I left my iPod on a plane about a month ago, and I was about to replace it when I got wind that a new product line would be coming out today. As you may know, they released what amounts to an iPhone without the phone part, with a touchscreen, wi-fi, 16 gigs of storage for audio, video and photos, etc., for about $200 less than what they were selling the iPhone for. Thinking this is a great deal, I jumped on it, only to find out minutes later that they also cut the iPhone price by $200, which is just beyond bizarre. Apparently, people at the product launch thought so too:
The decision to cut the price of its most expensive iPhone to $399 from $599 - and phase out an entry-level iPhone that had sold for $499 - was clearly a shocker. Barron's tech writer Eric Savitz, who was in SF for Apple's product announcement, said "this was a move that no one in the room expected; people were truly stunned; and I mean jaw-dropping, mouths agape, stopped in their tracks stunned. The news almost erased all the good feeling in the room from the day's various product announcements, and replaced it with a sense of shock. You'd think a dementor had flown into the room." Why all the fuss? Well, how would you feel if you had spent hours, even days, waiting in line for a $599 iPhone just two months ago - and now find that it's being priced at $399?
