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Employers have been warned they could be missing out on top staff because they are rejecting candidates with tattoos.

The conciliation service Acas said negative attitudes about visible tattoos are outdated.

Employers could be drastically reducing the pool of potential recruits because so many young people now have tattoos, Acas said.

It said employers should be thinking about relaxing dress codes in general.

A Yougov poll in 2015 suggested that nearly a fifth of UK adults have had tattoos, with those under 40 significantly more likely to have them.

‘How stupid are you?’

Despite the fashion for tattoos in recent years, research commissioned by Acas from academics at King’s College, London, suggests that tattoos are still considered unacceptable in many workplaces.

Several of the 33 people interviewed anonymously for the research said tattoos could be a barrier to hiring in their profession.

For example, the research quotes a senior manager in the emergency services commenting on a potential new recruit:

“[The management] said ‘why have you got a tattoo there? No, we’re not accepting you’.

“She found herself without a job. I said ‘well how stupid are you, at what point did you think a tattoo on your head was going to be acceptable?'”

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Tidal wave

The research suggested there is a strict approach to appearance in the airline industry.

“We have to supply a picture, and also any piercing or any tattoos at all. That’s at the application stage and that is governed. [Someone with a visible tattoo] they won’t usually get through the application stage”.

Employers, including the manager of a removals firm and the regional director of an accounting firm told the researchers they would be reluctant to hire people with visible tattoos in case it put off clients and customers.

However academic Andrew Timming at St Andrews University, who has researched the role of tattoos in hiring practices, says a change in attitudes is inevitable.

“There’s a tidal wave of young people with tattoos these days and they’re not always going to be young.”

“Employers are going to have to accept that they’re integral to the fabric of society and accept that they may potentially have a place at work.”

Missing out

In his research Dr Timming found there were some organisations where a tattoo might be deemed an asset – those marketing towards younger people, including bars and clubs or in the creative industries where it can be seen as a sign of original thinking.

“Isn’t that what employers are looking for these days? Someone who doesn’t always toe the line?”

“Isn’t Richard Branson talking about disruptive talent in the workplace? This is the kind of person who would fit that bill, I would think.”

Stephen Williams, head of equality at Acas, said: “Whilst it remains a legitimate business decision, a dress code that restricts people with tattoos might mean companies are missing out on talented workers.”

“We know that employers with a diverse workforce can reap many business benefits as they can tap into the knowledge and skills of staff from a wide range of backgrounds.”

Legally businesses may require tattoos to be covered up in the workplace, if they have a business case for doing so, said Acas.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37419897

Although soccer officials have pleaded not guilty, prosecution says we are in ongoing plea discussions with several of these defendants

Several defendants in a wide-ranging corruption case involving soccers global governing body Fifa are in talks on possible guilty pleas, a US prosecutor said on Monday.

Assistant US attorney Evan Norris spoke in a court hearing in Brooklyn federal court after US district judge Pamela Chen set a 6 November 2017 trial date for seven former soccer officials and one former marketing executive.

All eight have pleaded not guilty, but Norris said: We are in ongoing plea discussions with several of these defendants.

The eight defendants are among the 42 individuals and entities charged so far in a case that has rocked the soccer world and Zurich-based Fifa.

US prosecutors accuse the defendants of participating in schemes involving more than $200m in bribes and kickbacks, both sought and received by soccer officials for marketing and broadcast rights to tournaments and matches.

To date, 16 people and two sports marketing companies have pleaded guilty.
The eight defendants facing the potential trial next year include former Fifa officials and executive committee members Jos Mara Marin of Brazil, Juan ngel Napout of Paraguay, Eduardo Li of Costa Rica, and Julio Rocha Lpez of Nicaragua.

Others include Miami-based sports marketing executive Aaron Davidson, Hctor Trujillo, a judge from Guatemala and ex-official with its soccer federation, ex-Cayman Islands soccer official Costas Takkas, and ex-Venezuelan soccer official Rafael Esquivel.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/sep/19/fifa-football-corruption-plea-deal

Human battery hens make Apples devices in China. The company, which has a bigger cash pile than the US government, symbolises a broken economic system

Soon enough, we will see the first obituaries for openness, free trade and globalisation. When those writers ponder how wealthy countries turned towards the politics of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, they should devote a large chapter to Apple. Because the worlds richest company is a textbook example of how the promises made after the fall of the Berlin Wall have been made a mockery of.

Whatever marvels have been shoved into the new iPhones, the devices serve to increase the gulf between the super-rich and the rest of us, bilk countries of rightful tax revenues, and oppress Chinese workers even while depriving Americans of high-paying jobs. Arrogant towards critics and governments, glutted with cash and yet plainly out of ideas, Apple is elegant shorthand for a redundant economic system.

None of this is how were meant to think of Apple, the multinational that is both on your side yet restlessly questing ahead. While launching the iPhone 7 this month, its marketing chief, Phil Schiller, explained why this model came without a earphone socket: It really comes down to one word: courage. The courage to move on, do something new, that betters all of us. Such patchouli-scented Californian dipshittery was lapped up by the 7,000-strong crowd and lightly mocked by the press but it also helps to obscure some of the less tolerable aspect of the iPhone business model, such as the conditions in which it is made.

If you own an iPhone it was assembled by workers at one of three firms in China: Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron. The biggest and most famous, Foxconn, came to international prominence in 2010 when an estimated 18 of its employees tried to kill themselves. At least 14 workers died. The companys response was to put up suicide nets, to catch people trying to jump to their death. That year, staff at Foxconns Longhua factory made 137,000 iPhones a day, or around 90 a minute.

One of those attempted suicides, a 17-year-old called Tian Yu, flung herself from the fourth floor of a factory dormitory and ended up paralysed from the waist down. Speaking later to academic researchers, she described her working conditions in remarkable testimony that I then covered for the Guardian. She was essentially a human battery hen, working over 12 hours a day, six days a week, swapped between day and night shifts and kept in an eight-person dorm room.

After the scandals of 2010, Apple vowed to improve conditions for its Chinese workers. It has since published a number of glossy brochures extolling its commitments to them. Yet there is no evidence that the Californian firm has given back a single penny of its gigantic profit margins to its contractors to ensure better treatment of the people who actually make its products.

Over the past year, the US-based NGO China Labor Watch has published a series of investigations into Pegatron, another iPhone assembler. It sent a researcher on to the assembly line, interviewed dozens of Pegatron staff and analysed hundreds of pay stubs. Among its findings are that staff still work 12 hours a day, six days a week one and a half hours of that unpaid. They are forced to do overtime, claims the NGO, and provided with illegally low levels of safety training.

The researcher was working on one iPhone motherboard every 3.75 seconds, standing up for the entirety of his 10.5-hour shift. Such is the punishment endured at Apples contractors to make a living wage, apparently.

The Shanghai local government has raised the minimum wage over the past year; Pegatron has responded by cutting subsidies on things such as medical insurance so that the effective hourly pay for its staff has fallen.

When questioned about these reports, Pegatron provided a statement that read in part: We work hard to make sure every Pegatron facility provides a healthy work environment and allegations suggesting otherwise are simply not true We have taken effective measures to ensure employees do not work more than 60 hours per week and six days per week.

At another of Apples major contractors, Wistron, a Danish human-rights NGO last year found extensive evidence of forced student labour. Teenagers doing degrees in accountancy or business management were sent for months to an assembly line at Wistron. This is a serious violation of International Labour Organisation convention, yet investigators for Danwatch found evidence that thousands of students were doing the same work and backbreaking hours there as the adults but costing less.

The teenagers told Danwatch that they were working against their will. We are all depressed, one 19-year-old girl said. But we have no choice, because the school told us that if we refused, we would not get our diploma. Despite several requests for comment, Wistron did not respond.

That investigation was not at a factory making iPhones, but Apple confirmed that Wistron and Pegatron were two of their major assemblers in China. While it did not wish to say anything on the record, Apples press officers pointed me to the audits it had commissioned into its supplier factories. Yet the inspections are almost conveniently skimpy.

Look at the report Apple commissioned into Foxconn in 2012, after those suicide attempts. Foxconn is the largest private employer in China, with around 400,000 workers at the Longhua factory alone. Yet the report for Apple, complementary to an investigation already being carried out by the Fair Labor Association, admits to looking at just three of those plants for three days apiece. Jenny Chan, one of the foremost scholars of Chinese labour abuses and co-author of the forthcoming Dying for an iPhone, calls it parachute auditing a way to allow business as usual to carry on. A very profitable way, as it happens. While iPhone workers for Pegatron saw their hourly pay drop to just $1.60 an hour, Apple remained the most profitable big company in America, pulling in over $47bn in profit in 2015 alone.

What does this add up to? At $231bn, Apple has a bigger cash pile than the US government, but apparently wont spend even a sliver on improving conditions for those who actually make its money. Nor will it make those iPhones in America, which would create jobs and still leave it as the most profitable smartphone in the world.

It would rather accrue more profits, to go to those who hold Apple stock such as company boss Tim Cook, whose hoard of company shares is worth $785m. Friends of Cook point to his philanthropy, but while hes happy to spend on pet projects, he rejects a 13bn tax bill from the EU as political crap while boasting about how he wont bring Apples billions back to the US until theres a fair rate It doesnt go that the more you pay, the more patriotic you are. The tech oligarch seems to think he knows better than 300 million Americans what tax rates their elected government should set.

When the historians of globalisation ask why it died, they will surely find that companies such as Apple form a large part of the answer. Faced with a binary choice between an economic model that lavishly rewarded a few and a populism that makes lavish promises to many, between Cook on the one hand and Farage on the other, the voters went for the one who at least didnt bang on about courage.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/19/your-new-iphone-features-oppression-inequality-vast-profit