a Taiwan manufacturer of touch-screens ordered a switch from wood alcohol as a cleaning solvent to n-hexane. Hexane is a petrochemical that’s more volatile than gasoline (octane) but won’t dissolve plastic and rubber like the in-between number heptane.
Think mono, di, tri, tetra, penta, hexa, hepta, octa as one through eight.
The reason for using the carcinogenic chemical, brain-cell eating chemical? It dries faster than alcohol. Not much, but some, and made a measurable difference in production.
Profit is everything, workers, well, they’re a dime a dozen.
The iPad markets $459 retail.
The 137 workers who had the “side effects” severely enough to require medical intervention, produced thousands of these every day. What percentage of the profit margin did they receive just for their work?
Those are the wage and safety issues the Bush-appointed-but-never-revamped Department of Labor Exploitative Practices say are “over regulated” and job killers.
As opposed to Worker Killers like toxic chemicals.
The Hexane evaporates faster than alcohol and tweaked production by about 20%. Just, you know, at the cost of Human Lives. Which, had the practice continued, it would have been deadly.
Apple, in their annual report, did say that they (text below) had ordered WinTek, the company which subcontracted the production, to switch back to alcohol, provide more ventilation and to provide better safety and health education and care, and compensation. Steve Jobs has somewhat of a reputation of being honest and actually giving a damn about environmental, worker safety and wage issues. Will it be enough? 137 workers signed a letter petitioning the Board of Directors at Apple to further enforce the directives given to their subsidiaries.
From Apple’s annual report

Apple acknowledged the incident.

“In 2010 we learned that 137 workers at the Suzhou facility of Wintek, one of Apple’s suppliers, had suffered adverse health effects following exposure to n-hexane, a chemical in cleaning agents used in some manufacturing processes,” the report read.

“We required Wintek to stop using n-hexane and to provide evidence that they had removed the chemical from their production lines,” it said.

Apple said it also asked the firm to provide adequate ventilation in the factory. It will monitor the plant and will reaudit the facility later this year.

Wintek also supplies components to a number of other companies, including Nokia and HTC.

These are the working conditions that the Tea Party Extremists hope to foist off on the Rest of Americans, those of us who aren’t lucky enough to be born rich. Those of us who FEED the rich. This is what we’re fighting for.
The “conservatives” Who Conserve Absolutely NOTHING tell us, DEMAND our obedience, that we are too stupid and ignorant to collectively bargain for our rights. Our DUE.
Some of their leaders, such as George Bush and Sarah Palin, pretend Christian Piety when they make these Imperious Demands that we, the workers, surrender our future and that of our children and grandchildren, to Them so they can rob us even more.

In the Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures, in the Law of Moses they’re so quick to cite when it means they Get To Kill Babies either in foreign countries or here in America, there are commandments equal to “Thou Shalt Not Kill” (you have to keep the whole law, in order to judge by the law… No eating lobster, y’all, or monkey spanking either…) concerning workers rights. Don’t delay paying the people who work for you, on payday you pay them. Not after sundown (Jewish measures of a day, sundown starts the new day, like Friday at sundown is the start of Sabbath) Killing a poor man is every bit as much murder as killing a rich man. In cases of accidental death, the poor mans life is worth the exact same as the Kings life. Stealing from a poor man (failing or refusing to compensate his injuries or underpaying him deliberately for instance) is every bit the same as stealing from the Rich…

Of course, the Bible is anathema to Capitalism, which is why the Church of Palin, among (many many many) others, don’t discuss those issues.
They get their Tea Party “conservative” Morons to go out in the streets and chant and scream that simple justice, recompense for the labor which we’re required to sell to their Masters at less than our cost to produce it, is somehow “theft”. That “over-regulation” of poisons being dumped on the workers in the jobsites and subsequently dumped into the general environment, into the same drinking water they use, into the same air They breathe, into the foods They eat… is “theft”.

Never minding that they sell their OWN children and grandchildren into the Corporate Slavery HELL they’re so quick to sell us, and ours, into.
Again, a challenge to the TeaPotty and the Republitards, and yeah I’m being insulting, what you jackasses gonna do about it? Your leaders more quietly but even more surely call you much worse and you turn and lick their boots in gratitude. You bastards must really BE every bit as stupid as your Bosses tell you you are.

But if taxation to the Public Treasury is wrong, what about using Public Funds and Government Power to break the Unions, to harass and imprison workers for demanding OUR rights, to force US to pay the Corporations a tax by a different name,
to pay OUR labor at less than it costs US to produce, to sacrifice our future, our rights, and those of our children to pay YOUR Corporate Whore-lords the “profit margin” tax which they say is Their due…

Isn’t THAT Taxation without Representation?

Eat the Rich. We might as well, we paid to fatten them up.