The Washington Post - 20.10.2019

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE G3

state of Michigan have lost $313 million and $18 million in tax revenue, respectively, according to estimates from the Anderson Economic Group, an East Lansing consultancy. Parts suppliers to GM facilities across the country laid off thou- sands of employees and reduced the hours of many more, sending unemployment claims skyward in states like Michigan and raising fears that the prolonged stoppage could t ilt economically vulnerable areas into local recessions. The full cost of the strike won’t be known for weeks. And if the UAW’s rank-and-file vote down this contract offer, it will continue. “It had to happen — it needed to happen,” said GM worker Gary Zanetti, 58, picketing outside the Hamtramck Assembly plant in Detroit, a smoldering g arbage can fire keeping him warm. “Since the last contract, [GM] made $40 billion.” The Hamtramck plant was one of four that GM scheduled for closure, b ut as part of the contract negotiations, GM agreed to pro- duce an electric truck there. Za- netti and co-workers Allan Vro- man, 63, and Chris Viola, 36, were skeptical it would protect jobs, aware that electric vehicles re- quire less labor than internal- combustion engines. “What does that mean?” Vro- man asked. “A re they telling you they’re going to build seven electric trucks and call i t a day? Are we going to build little electric scoot- ers?” Vroman scoffed at the $11,000 bonus GM was offering full-time workers w ho signed the contract. “The more money they throw at you, the more you get suspicious,” he said. “We’re going to throw 11 grand at you. Maybe you won’t read Page 2 .” About a half-mile away at another entrance, another picketing employee, Sherwood Reason, 64, said the s trike was worth the p ain, even if the compromise it yielded was imperfect. He spoke about watching jobs get automated away in the plant’s paint shop in his 21 years at t he company. “To even get what we’re looking for is kind of unrealistic because the world is changing,” he said. “There are certain things you just can’t d o anything about. [email protected]

members of her union, many of whom had shown up to support UAW picket lines across the Mid- west, had watched the GM strike deal with issues such as health care and temporary workers that have affected school employees, as well. “The UAW GM strike and the Verizon strike the CWA did in 2016 are all indicators that working people think government offi- cials should put more power in their hands and rebalance the power that corporations currently hold in our democracy,” s he said. The GM strike has not been without costs. The company has lost more than $1 billion in earnings, workers have forfeited $835 million in wages — they do not receive their paychecks during the strike — and the federal government and the

benefits, but there’s a risk to doing those things. But as more and more of these things happen and people win, then more people get on board.” About 25,000 teachers in Chi- cago went on strike last week, potentially building on momen- tum from t he West V irginia teachers strike in 2018. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees Interna- tional Union, said that its public service d ivision, which represents more than 1 million government and school employees, had seen more strikes in the past two or three years t han any other time in the past four decades. That group represents 7,500 school staff — aides and special education assistants, custodians and security guards — who are striking in Chicago. Henry said

work days lost — and counting — the strike is one of the largest in the private sector in the past 20 years. And there is a sense that the contract deal — a win for workers, because it maintained provisions GM tried to trim and added im- provements — could inspire other workers. “In social movements, you see waves of working-class activity as people learn from each other,” said Josh Murray, a sociology pro- fessor at Vanderbilt University and the co-author o f a recent b ook that argues that American auto companies destroyed their capac- ity to compete in the 1960s because of the way they sought to ward off strikes. “There’s this idea of the politics of the possible. Most working people aren’t against unions or having more money and

energy in the world of organizing, as attention has turned to former middle-class strongholds in the Midwest, such as Lordstown, where workers say they feel left behind. Strikes are at their highest lev- els since the 1980s. And a hybrid form of activism that has expanded to include workers organizing across different workplaces has emerged as a scrappy but effective way to pressure companies and local governments for change on issues such as the minimum w age. The UAW fight for a better contract with GM was in many ways a throwback to the decades when large numbers of autoworkers regularly shut down production at f actories for better contracts. It is the longest strike at GM since 1973, w hen a stoppage lasted 100 days. At more than 1 million

In the lobby of the Renaissance
Center, the futuristic complex
that is GM’s headquarters in
downtown Detroit, Piroch and
other workers shouted “No vote!”
and “Invest in Lordstown!” as
union executives walked by.
The tentative contract agree-
ment addresses many of the cen-
tral issues of the dispute, picket-
ing members said. It provides
some temporary employees with a
path to full employment. And it
reduces the eight-year “grow-in”
for new employees to be brought
up to full wages of about $32 an
hour to about four, before abolish-
ing it completely by 2023.
The lower starting pay of $17
was a concession made in the
years a fter the recession.
But with the absence of provi-
sions to reopen the plants in Mich-
igan, O hio a nd Maryland t hat GM
shuttered in 2018, the deal is in
some ways a reminder of the larg-
er economic forces that have erod-
ed the status of manufacturing
workers in recent years — which
the union, despite its numbers, is
relatively powerless to address.
“I need something in Lords-
town,” Piroch said. “There’s no
reason there isn’t a product in
Lordstown. [GM CEO] Mary Bar-
ra made $22 million with a prod-
uct in Lordstown.”
Workers said they felt their
strike was worth it, both for the
compromises it helped obtain and
as a show of force at a time when
unions had been left f or dead.
“We understand that we’re
fighting for working-class people
— it’s bigger than just the UAW,”
said Martin Tutwiler, 42, a GM
worker in Detroit. “It’s about hav-
ing a living wage. So you don’t
have to work multiple jobs to pay
bills.”
Union participation has been
on the wane for decades, its de-
cline paved by “right to work” l aws
passed by Republican state legis-
latures that have chipped away at
unions’ strength and succeeded at
demonizing t hem. Meanwhile, in-
equality continues to widen — its
line charted almost perfectly w ith
the decline in union membership.
Only about 10 percent of Ameri-
can workers are in labor unions —
a percentage that has halved since
the Bureau of Labor Statistics be-
gan tracking the number in 1983.
But there has been a surge of

GM FROM G1

BY REED ALBERGOTTI

san francisco — Helen Glaze
didn’t think anything of it when
her two sons told her they were
looking for ways to get around
Screen Time, Apple’s built-in tool
that gives parents control of their
kids’ phones. Then she discov-
ered her 9- and 12-year-olds
watching “Minecraft” videos at
2 a.m. during their annual trip to
Chautauqua, N.Y., this past Au-
gust.
“I was horrified and really felt
betrayed,” s he said. And she real-
ized she can’t count on Screen
Time to keep her kids off their
phones. “It really doesn’t work,
and that’s really frustrating.”
Kids are outsmarting an army
of engineers from Cupertino,
Calif., home to Apple’s headquar-
ters in Silicon Valley. And Apple,
which introduced Screen Time a
year ago in response to pressure
to address phone overuse by kids,
has been slow to make fixes to its
software that would close these
loopholes. It’s causing some par-
ents to raise questions about Ap-
ple’s commitment to safeguard-
ing children from harmful con-
tent and smartphone addiction.
When Screen Time blocks an
app from working, it becomes
grayed out, and clicking on it does
nothing unless parents approve a
request for more time. Or, at l east,
it’s supposed to work that way.
On Reddit and YouTube, kids
are sharing tips and tricks that
allow them to circumvent Screen
Time. They download special
software that can exploit Apple
security flaws, disabling Screen
Time or cracking their parents’
passwords. They search for bugs
that make it easy to keep using
their phones, unbeknown to par-
ents, such as changing the time to
trick the system or using iMes-
sage to watch YouTube videos.
“These are not rocket science,
backdoor, dark Web sort of
hacks,” said Chris McKenna,
founder of the Internet safety
group Protect Young Eyes. “It
blows me away that Apple hasn’t
thought through the fact that a
persistent middle school boy or
girl can bang around and find
them.”
McKenna said he is miffed that
Apple doesn’t fix the loopholes
faster, despite its size, its massive
hoard of cash and its copious
profits. “In one day, I’m confident
Apple could clean up all these

loopholes,” he said. He recently posted a list of loopholes, which he informed Ap- ple of when Screen Time first launched and which he has been compiling in an effort to warn parents and help them close the loopholes when possible. Apple spokeswoman Michele Wyman, in a statement, said the company is “committed to pro- viding our users with powerful tools to manage their iOS devices and are always working to make them even better.” Wyman did not comment on specific bugs and workarounds in Screen Time or the speed with which Apple addresses them. The problem has bedeviled parents who have struggled to strike a balance between allowing smartphone access for school work and basic social interac- tions and protecting their children from the pitfalls of the mo- bile world. “I think there will always be ways that really innovative, criti- cal-thinking children get around the controls,” said Christine Elg- ersma, senior editor of parent education for Common Sense Me- dia, a nonprofit focused on how children use media and technol- ogy. “They’re usually ahead of us technologically.” Companies with wildly popu- lar and profitable consumer products don’t usually offer tools to help people use them less. But in early 2018, a pair of major shareholders urged Apple’s board of directors to do something about youth screen addiction, arguing that addressing the issue would be good for Apple’s bottom line in the long run. Nine months later, Apple launched Screen Time as part of iOS 12. It gave parents the ability to lock down their kids’ iPhones and iPads, limiting the amount of time kids could spend using the devices overall, as well as individ- ual apps. Google offers a suite of similar Digital Wellbeing tools, and Amazon has a kids-only sub- scription service called FreeTime that comes pre-installed on its kids-edition tablets. (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Almost immediately, kids started finding ways to get around the controls, the same way they might look for a way to sneak out of the house while the parents are sleeping.

And parents started reporting that their kids were circumventing the newly added Screen Time restrictions. A widely publicized Reddit post, “My kid managed to pass Screen time limit,” accumu- lated more than 400 comments. On that post, parents reported their kids deleting and reinstall- ing apps and changing the clock to avoid time restrictions and using the iMessage app to watch prohibited YouTube videos. On Apple’s discussion board, there were titles such as “Child ‘hacked’ screen time limits on iOS12. Will Apple fix?” But more than six months later, some parents were still reporting their kids using the same bugs, such as the time-change work- around. Some weren’t fixed until the new operating system, iOS 13, was launched a year later. Others, like the ability to watch YouTube videos inside iMessage, still work on the latest Apple phones and the most recent updates. On forums hosted on Apple’s website, parents can be seen com- plaining for months about the same issues and the lack of response from Apple. After the community was unable to help them with their Screen Time glitches, at l east two parents were

offered a nontechnical solution: punishing their kids for exploit- ing the bugs. “I understand that there are ways, such as enforcing conse- quences, to manage my children’s usage without software help,” one commenter wrote. “However I am not seeking parenting advice, but reporting a limitation of the software which claims to perform a function that it does not.” Some parents struggle because the Screen Time controls aren’t intuitive, tucked several layers deep into menus under Apple’s settings. And the default settings are often permissive, such as allowing adult websites unless a parent specifically blocks them. The problem has turned Brian Walker, a 41-year-old sales engi- neer for an automotive supplier in Michigan, into a part-time de- tective. Walker has seven kids, three of whom have cellphones. To keep track of what they’re up to, he and his wife use myriad tools to monitor them. But despite his vigilance, the recidivism in his household is high. A few weeks ago, Walker no- ticed his 13-year-old son sitting quietly on the couch in the base- ment for hours, a long time for a kid who is “kind of X-Gamish”

and likes to be outside. “I was suspicious because there’s a handful of apps where he will literally just melt his brain,” Walk- er said. When he walked over to check, he saw his son using Tik- To k, an app he thought was blocked. It turns out that because the phone was a hand-me-down from an older sister who was allowed to use that app, the 13-year-old was also able to download it and use it, despite the Screen Time restrictions. “Even with an elec- trical engineering background, there are still things I don’t understand about how the software works,” Walker said. Adam Pletter, a child psycholo- gist who founded iParent 101 to help parents with screen-time addiction issues, said the danger for parents who use Apple’s s ervice is that it can lull them into a false sense of security. Parents can use alternative apps to control their kids’ smartphone usage, but those services don’t have the same access to Apple’s operating system that Screen Time enjoys, and Apple has been criticized for limiting their functionality. Apple’s treatment of third-par- ty screen-time apps has come

under scrutiny from congres- sional antitrust investigators, who last month requested infor- mation from Apple on the sub- ject. When Helen Glaze, vacation- ing with her kids in New York, discovered they had hacked their phone, she confiscated it, and they confessed to their methods: While Screen Time blocked You- Tube videos in Safari, the kids found that if they expanded the video to full screen before the Screen Time limit kicked in, they could watch videos continuously. She eventually gave them back their phone, and Glaze is still using Screen Time. But she has stopped thinking she has any way to truly control her kids’ smartphone usage. “I’m not going to engage in the cat-and-mouse game,” she said. “I’m going to have to trust them to use their best judgment to know what we expect from them as kids and as people.” Rebecca Shelp, a stay-at-home mom in Littleton, Colo., bought her 14-year-old son a used iPhone 7 in April and set up Screen Time to limit his use of social media and other apps. But her son figured out workarounds almost immediately. By Memorial Day, he simply reset the phone, set up a new Apple ID and used whatever he wanted for as long as he wanted. Shelp found out when she in- spected his phone. She hadn’t realized that Screen Time didn’t block kids from simply resetting the phone. But the subterfuge didn’t end there. She says her son figured out how to make Screen Time glitch out by turning the phone off and on constantly until it stopped working properly. Her son even coined a term for this: “colliding the system.” Last month, while her son was at a sleepover, Shelp was monitor- ing his usage on her phone. The timer kept jumping wildly, from two hours to seven hours and back. Her conclusion: He must be “colliding the system” again. “I can’t e ven tell you how many hours I spend trying to figure out what he did,” s he said. After a long back-and-forth with Apple cus- tomer support, she was finally told that her son had found a known bug. Apple wouldn’t tell her whether it planned to fix it. [email protected]

Kids and teens find circumventing Apple’s parental controls to be child’s play

TIMOTHY NWACHUKWU FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Rebecca Shelp bought her 14 -year-old son, above, an iPhone 7 and set up controls via Screen Time. Her son, whom The Post is not naming in accordance with Shelp’s wishes, was able to bypass them.

UAW’s long strike against GM may inspire other workers

REBECCA COOK/REUTERS Striking UAW members, seen at GM’s headquarters in Detroit, said they felt the strike was worth it, in part for the show of union force.

The Washington Post - 20.10.2019

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