Chinese manufacturer FoxConn, a key supplier for the world’s largest technology company Apple Inc., today announced it will be raising workers’ wages by 16 to 25 percent in response to public outcry over reports of worker mistreatment. The move comes after nearly 250,000 individuals signed a petition on Change.org demanding Apple hold its suppliers accountable for violations of fair labor practices.

FoxConn is best known in the United States as Apple Inc.’s largest supplier, manufacturing the technology giant’s popular iPad, iPhone and signature Mac computer products, in addition to dozens of other gadgets for other technology companies. But it has also gained a reputation as a chronic violator of human rights and fair labor practices.

A widely-circulated cover story in Wired Magazine’s March 2011 issue looked at an alarming string of 17 suicides in the spring of 2010 by workers in the FoxConn facility, and a subsequent report conducted a year later showed how the conditions that were thought to have led to the suicides were still prevalent in the factory.

The petition on Change.org was created in reaction to the January 6 episode of popular radio show This American Life. The episode was an adaptation of a one-man show performed by Mike Daisey called “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”

In the report, Daisey — who traveled to China to learn about FoxConn and its employees firsthand — described a factory where managers turn the other cheek on child labor, and workers, some as young as 13, are forced to stand during 14 hour shifts and live in cramped dormitories on the FoxxConn campus. In the weeks since, Apple announced it was requesting that the Fair Labor Association conduct random searches of the FoxxConn plant for violations of Apple’s supplier policy.

As Think Progress has noted, Apple, which recently overtook Exxon as the world’s largest corporation in terms of market capitalization, has spent the last decade earning record profits while the workers who make its products continue to toil in potentially hazardous working conditions.

Our guest blogger is Brian Frederick, Executive Director of Sports Fans Coalition, the country’s largest nonprofit fan advocacy organization, which fights to give fans a voice on public policy issues.

In an egregious example of how professional sports can be little more than a “glorified real estate scam,” the owners of the National Football League’s Minnesota Vikings are about to fleece an unwilling Minnesota public for hundreds of millions of dollars, as they push to secure public subsidization of a new stadium. A deal is reportedly “imminent.”

Real estate developer Zygi Wilf and five partners bought the team in 2005 for a reported $600 million. (The franchise is now valued at $796 million.) From the get-go, Wilf and his partners wanted what every owner in the NFL wants: a new stadium.

The Metrodome opened in 1982 and is certainly not the newest and most lavish in the league, but there are eight stadiums that are older. And Minnesota voters clearly do not want to pay for a new stadium using public funds. A February 3 poll sponsored by KSTP-TV in Minneapolis found that a whopping 68 percent of Minnesota voters think the new stadium should be built “entirely with private financing.” Only 22 percent believed that any tax dollars should be used at all.

Even more astounding, these results came after a six-figure ad campaign paid for by the Vikings to try to drum up support for financing the stadium.

So leave it to Minnesota’s politicians to find a way around the public will. Gov. Mark Dayton (D) has been out front on the stadium issue and is doing everything he can to get a new stadium built. “We’re at the five yard line and its first and goal, and I think we’ve got a great opportunity,” Dayton recently said.

But in 1997, Minneapolis voters overwhelmingly passed a referendum stating that voters must approve any plan to spend more than $10 million on a sports facility. Given that a referendum today would obviously fail, how is the governor going to get a stadium built in downtown Minneapolis? By exploiting a loophole, of course.

In the latest stadium proposal, at least $300 million in Minneapolis taxes already devoted to paying off the city’s convention center would be diverted to pay the city’s share of the new stadium. And to circumvent the requirement that voters approve funding for the stadium, Dayton’s top stadium negotiator, Ted Mondale, explained that a newly created “stadium authority” would spend the city’s money, rather than the city itself.

So despite the fact that the Minneapolis public voted to require a public referendum before financing any new stadium, and has made it clear that it doesn’t want a new stadium in this case, Minnesota’s governor and state legislature appear poised to spend $300 million in taxes on one anyway by creating a new entity out of thin air that is not subject to the referendum law.

The NFL is making money hand over fist, but the public is expected to pay the costs of providing a (lavish new) place for NFL teams to play, socializing the costs of the sport while privatizing the profits.

Arizona Republicans introduced a slate of legislation earlier this month targeting public sector unions, earning Gov. Jan Brewer (R) the title of “the Scott Walker of the West,” an homage to the union-busting governor of Wisconsin who is now facing recall efforts. Though two of the bills, including one that would have essentially banned public sector unions, stalled in the state legislature, a bill that would end the practice of workers automatically deducting union dues from their paychecks is still proceeding.

Like Walker and his Republican colleagues in Wisconsin, Brewer and Arizona’s Republicans have presented the union “reforms” as a necessary step in bringing the state’s budget under control. But according to a new report from the state’s Joint Legislative Budget Committee, the bill would actually cost local and municipal governments — and Arizona taxpayers — hundreds of thousands of dollars, as Arizona Republic columnist E.J. Montini reports:

The Arizona Senate gave tentative approval Thursday to a bill that would prohibit deductions from government employees’ paychecks for unions, even after members were told by their own Joint Legislative Budget Committee that doing so would cost Arizona municipalities hundreds of thousands of dollars. [...]

According to a JLBC report, “Local governments estimated the impact to range from minimal to $300,000 in one-time spending and $85,000 per year in on-going expenditures.”

The bill would require workers to “expressly authorize” deductions on an annual basis. The additional costs would result from local and municipal governments “having to process annual renewals for union dues from all of its workers, rather than make changes only when specifically requested,” according to the East Valley Tribune.

The Republican argument that unions are costing Arizona taxpayers huge sums of money is already disingenuous. Arizona is a “right to work” state where state employees aren’t allowed to collectively bargain with their employer. Evidence that public sector workers are eating up state budgets is lacking, as states like North Carolina (which doesn’t allow collective bargaining) suffers from a larger budget deficit than New York (the most heavily unionized state in America). The share of state budgets that go toward state employee compensation, meanwhile, has actually decreased over the last two decades.

That Arizona Republicans continue to pursue the legislation despite evidence that it will actually cost taxpayers money is further proof that, like in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio before them, the GOP’s anti-labor crusade is about permanently crippling unions, not about “fixing” state budgets.

Mitt Romney has been launching a sustained attack against rival Rick Santorum for being allegedly “pro-union.” This week, Romney even sent out a press release entitled: “RICK SANTORUM: BIG LABOR’S FAVORITE SENATOR.” Today, the Romney press shop circulated an email headlined, “RICK SANTORUM: RIGHT FOR BIG LABOR,” claiming “when it comes to Big Labor, Santorum has been about as conservative as Barack Obama.”

While Mitt Romney’s union-busting credentials are unassailable, his attack on Santorum is false. Here are Santorum’s scores from the AFL-CIO during his years in Congress:

Byron York noted that Santorum’s scores are comparable to — and sometimes even lower than — those of Sen. Jim DeMint (R-NC), widely considered one of the most anti-union Senators ever.

The New Republic “reached out to a number of prominent union leaders from Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania, [and] they didn’t have many warm recollections about him to share.” Further, “no union, national, statewide, or local, appears to have ever supported his candidacies, and in 2006, the AFL-CIO’s vociferous support for his opponent Bob Casey factored prominently in Santorum’s 18-point defeat.”

Today marks the three year anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (i.e. the stimulus), signed by President Obama one month after being sworn in, at a time when the economy was hemorrhaging 700,000 jobs per month. Of course, the Republican spin machine has gone into high gear to portray the stimulus as a failure:

RNC CHAIRMAN REINCE PRIEBUS: “Three years ago today, President Obama signed his ‘Stimulus’ into law, and it’s clear, by Obama’s own standards, that his signature economic plan has been an abject failure.”

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH): “Today, there’s no denying the fact that his ‘stimulus’ policies not only failed, they made things worse.”

HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER ERIC CANTOR (R-VA): “The Obama Stimulus failed to create the jobs that Americans were promised and piled up mountains of debt that our children and their children will have to repay.”

And there are more where those came from. But as Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden explained, the stimulus did just what it was supposed to — slow and then reverse the economy’s dramatic decline:

In the second quarter of 2009, the first full quarter after the stimulus was passed, GDP still declines but at a much slower pace—just 0.7 percent—and then begins to grow again in the third quarter of 2009. Job losses also begin to slow down immediately. Leading up to the stimulus, we were losing more and more jobs each month. After the stimulus, fewer and fewer. And eventually we even start gaining jobs. And take a look at this. Private-sector layoffs actually peak in February 2009—the month the stimulus passed—and then begin a dramatic decline. By the one-year anniversary of the stimulus, private-sector layoffs are back down to pre-recession levels.

Watch Linden’s explanation:

As economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi wrote in their study “How the Great Recession was Brought to an End,” the effects of the stimulus were “very substantial, raising 2010 real GDP by about 3.4%, holding the unemployment rate about 1½ percentage points lower, and adding almost 2.7 million jobs to U.S. payrolls.” And there is literally no evidence backing up Boehner’s assertion that the stimulus made things worse. Try as they might, Republicans can’t make these numbers disappear down the memory hole.

As the Republican presidential nominating contest moves to Michigan, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) is touting his ties to the state — he was born there and his father is a former governor — and its auto industry. Romney wrote an editorial early this week re-upping his opposition to the 2009 auto rescue that saved Chrysler and General Motors, a sequel to the editorial outlining his original opposition, titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

The response to the editorial probably hasn’t gone as Romney hoped. Since it ran in the Detroit News Tuesday, auto industry insiders have repeatedly slammed it as “reckless,” “dishonest,” and “wrong,” noting that Romney either mistakes or ignores some of the basic facts surrounding the rescue. ThinkProgress compiled a sample of the reactions to Romney’s latest view of the rescue:

AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson: As far as Mitt piece in yesterday’s Detroit News it was truly reckless, detached from reality, and dishonest. … Mitt’s assertion that private financing “DIP” was available in fall of ’08 into ’09 is fantasy. Everyone knows we were in the midst of the greatest financial meltdown since the 1930’s. … The catastrophe in ’08 was so calamitous that government actions were necessary to avoid a great depression. Sometimes reality trumps principle and a courageous leader will understand that and will take the leap even when it is dramatically unpopular.

Yahoo! Autos reporter Justin Hyde: “Romney’s take just doesn’t square with the facts as I lived them. … Had the government not intervened as Romney suggests, GM and Chrysler likely would have been liquidated by their Wall Street bondholders. … One auto industry think tank estimated doing so would have led to 1.3 million job losses and threatened Ford, Toyota and other automakers.”

Reuters columnist Paul Ingrassia: “The government bailout was the only way to save GM and Chrysler, and thus was a critical element in preventing the Great Recession from morphing into Great Depression II. … The only alternative to a government bailout was the outright liquidation of both companies. Maybe the U.S. economy could have survived that blow, but maybe not. What’s clear is that it would have been foolhardy to find out.”

The Economist: “The course Mr Romney recommended in 2008 began with the government stepping back, and it is unlikely things would’ve turned out so well had this happened. … The credit markets were bone-dry, making the privately financed bankruptcy that Mr Romney favoured improbable. He conveniently ignores this bit of history in claiming to have been right all along.”

Romney’s view of the bailout isn’t even popular among his best friends in Michigan. Gov. Rick Snyder (R), who endorsed Romney yesterday, chastised Republicans who continue to criticize the bailout last November. “I would have had some differences on how they did it, but I’m not going to second-guess it,” Snyder told the New York Times. “The more important thing is the results. And the auto industry is doing very well today.”