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Apple ends contract with Chinese supplier over underage workers

Erica Ogg — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:41:09 +0000

It’s been a year since a New York Times investigation put the labor practices of Apple’s manufacturing partners under close public scrutiny, and the company is still rooting out human rights violations in its supply chain. In its 2013 Supplier Responsibility Report, Apple revealed that it ended a contract with a circuit board supplier that repeatedly contracted workers younger than 16.

Guangdong Real Faith Pingzhou Electronics Co. makes a circuit board component that Apple uses. “Our auditors were dismayed to discover 74 cases of workers under age 16—a core violation of our Code of Conduct. As a result, we terminated our business relationship with PZ,” Apple’s report reads.

It’s not clear which device or devices used the PZ circuit board. Apple said a third-party labor recruiter was bringing in underage workers to PZ. In the report, Apple said it reported the supplier to the proper authorities in China, and also regularly makes suppliers aware of agents or recruiters known to hire underage workers.

PZ is the only company terminated for labor violations named in the report. Apple also noted it “found no cases of underage labor at any of our final assembly suppliers.”

The 2013 report was a wider-ranging audit of its supply chain than Apple has done before. Apple says there were 393 audits (72 percent more than 2011) performed in 14 countries, covering 1.5 million workers.

The full report is available here. (PDF)

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Foxconn: Apple will help pay to make working here better

Erica Ogg — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:14:40 +0000

Credit: Bowen Liu/Apple Inc. via Bloomberg

A Reuters report Thursday says Apple will help defray the costs of improving the working conditions at the factories of its most important manufacturing partner, Foxconn.

Without saying how much of the costs Apple plans to cover, or even how much money overall he’s talking about, Foxconn’s chief executive Terry Gou told Reuters:

“We’ve discovered that this (improving factory conditions) is not a cost. It is a competitive strength,” Gou told reporters Thursday after the ground-breaking ceremony for a new China headquarters in Shanghai.

“I believe Apple sees this as a competitive strength along with us, and so we will split the initial costs.”

The working and living conditions of Foxconn employees, as well as excessive overtime requirements, brought intense scrutiny to both Foxconn and Apple earlier this year thanks to a now largely debunked story reported by monologist Mike Daisey as well as a multi-part investigation by The New York Times. Apple also released its own supplier report reflecting labor violations at Foxconn and other partners’ plants and later published the results of third-party auditors it sent to perform follow-up inspections.

In the aftermath of the negative public attention, Foxconn promised to cut down on overtime, improve facility conditions and raise salaries. It’s not entirely clear if these are the costs that Apple will help pay for, according to Gou.

I’ve reached out to Apple for clarification and will update the story if I hear back.

It should be noted that Apple’s relationship with its contract manufacturers hadn’t been really discussed publicly until Tim Cook stepped into the full-time chief executive role. Concern first arose over Foxconn’s labor issues several years ago with a spate of suicides among workers, but Apple had very little to say about that at the time.

Besides responding to outrage over worker mistreatment when these reports arose in January, overseeing the first public release of Apple’s supplier report and ordering third-party audits, Cook has tried to improve Apple’s image on this issue by other means. He spent a good chunk of his remarks at a February investor conference expressing his concern over working conditions at Apple’s contract manufacturing partners and offered details about Apple’s worker education initiatives. Apple also released a photo of Cook meeting with Foxconn workers on the factory floor during a trip to China in March.

But if this report pans out, this latest move is more than a photo opp or talk to impress investors or potential customers — this is starting to look like Cook’s mark on Apple.

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After audit, some Foxconn workers bristle at fewer hours

Erica Ogg — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:32:06 +0000

Apple CEO Tim Cook at Foxconn this week. (Credit: Bowen Liu/Apple Inc. via Bloomberg)

Though Foxconn has agreed to bring its working and overtime hours policies into line with Chinese law after an audit by the Fair Labor Association, not all workers at the electronics manufacturing giant are cheering the news. Some employees say Foxconn’s pledge to reduce hours will reduce their pay, and they’re not happy about it.

Here’s what one Foxconn employee told Reuters:

“We are here to work and not to play, so our income is very important,” said Chen Yamei, 25, a Foxconn worker from Hunan who said she had worked at the factory for four years.

“We have just been told that we can only work a maximum of 36 hours a month of overtime. I tell you, a lot of us are unhappy with this. We think that 60 hours of overtime a month would be reasonable and that 36 hours would be too little,” she added. Chen said she now earned a bit over 4,000 yuan a month ($634).

Foxconn factories were audited by the FLA at the request of Apple, its biggest and most important customer, who has come under fire for the conditions under which Foxconn’s 1.2 million employees work — though many other major electronics brands are also produced by Foxconn. The FLA’s report on three Foxconn plants, released Thursday, showed numerous violations of Chinese safety and labor laws. Violations included not paying workers proper overtime, working employees more than 60 hours a week (49 is the legal limit) and up to 80 hours of overtime (36 is legal). Some even worked nonstop for more than seven days, without the required day off in between.

These conditions, as detailed in previous Apple audits and a New York Times investigation, are objectively harsh. Of course some Foxconn workers — typically migrants from poor rural areas who come to Foxconn to live and work and make as much money as they can — do prefer to work as much as possible, like Yamei.

But it doesn’t mean there aren’t physical consequences. For example, some of these workers stand for so long at their job their legs swell, as the New York Times reported. While some may take extra hours because they’d otherwise get fired, others may be willing to push themselves as far as they can go physically if their chief concern is being able to support themselves and their families. Still, just because some are willing, it doesn’t mean repetitive tasks in a sometimes-unsafe environment should not be regulated for millions of other employees.

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“This American Life” says report on Apple labor “partially fabricated”

Erica Ogg — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 17:28:55 +0000

Updated. The radio program This American Life on Friday posted a note on its website retracting a previous episode of the show in which monologist Mike Daisey described the working conditions in factories in China that produce Apple’s most popular devices, saying it “was partially fabricated.”

The show’s website says Daisey “misled This American Life during the fact-checking process.”

Update: Chicago Public Media, which produces the program, said after checking with Daisey’s interpreter in China, that two of the most dramatic moments from Daisey’s reporting were fabricated: that he met underage workers in Foxconn factories and that he met met a man with a hand mangled from working on iPads.

The show’s press representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A link to a new report from American Public Media’s Marketplace describing the error-riddled This American Life episode is online now. In it, Marketplace China correspondent Rob Schmitz questions Daisey about the fabrications.

On his own blog, Daisey posted a statement standing by his work, but admitting that he is “not a journalist”:

I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by The New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue.

Chicago Public Media released a detailed account of the misrepresentations and inaccuracies found in Daisey’s report. In addition to lying about the number of factories in China that he visited, and the number of workers he talked to, he also misled the program about particular people he talked to:

In his monologue he claims to have met a group of workers who were poisoned on an iPhone assembly line by a chemical called n-hexane. Apple’s audits of its suppliers show that an incident like this occurred in a factory in China, but the factory wasn’t located in Shenzhen, where Daisey visited.

“It happened nearly a thousand miles away, in a city called Suzhou,” Marketplace’s Schmitz says in his report. “I’ve interviewed these workers, so I knew the story. And when I heard Daisey’s monologue on the radio, I wondered: How’d they get all the way down to Shenzhen? It seemed crazy, that somehow Daisey could’ve met a few of them during his trip.”

In the Marketplace interview, Daisey reportedly tells Schmitz, ”I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard.”

Despite Daisey’s fabrications of people he talked to, there has been plenty of other reporting on the working conditions at Foxconn and other factories in China. The New York Times published a series in January, near the same time the This American Life episode aired, with independently reported accounts demonstrating the human costs associated with the large-scale manufacturing of iPhones, iPads and other consumer electronics devices.

Update: The New York Times on Friday has corrected an op-ed by Daisey the paper published after Steve Jobs’ death in October.

Update: This American Life has released the transcript for “Retraction,” its episode devoted entirely to figuring out what went wrong with its involvement with Daisey.

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Apple labor protestors to target new iPad sale Friday

Erica Ogg — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 21:03:56 +0000

Hoping to attract the attention of Apple fans more interested in how their iPad is made than whether the Retina display in the new iPad is worth the upgrade or not, another coordinated, multi-store protest against working conditions in Apple’s third-party manufacturers’ factories is planned for Friday.

At 8 a.m. local time, the exact time Apple is planning to open the doors of its stores to sell the first of its third-generation iPads to hordes of customers — with plenty of news cameras on hand — Change.org will hold another demonstration, this time asking Apple to create “an ethical iPad.” They are petitioning Apple to create “a worker protection strategy” to prevent worker abuse and injury. Change.org so far has a little over 251,000 signatures on the petition.

The demonstrations are planned for Apple stores in Washington, D.C., New York City and San Francisco.

This follows a series of protests asking for “an ethical iPhone” last month at six Apple stores. Those attracted some media attention, but none were coordinated around an event like a new product sale. Apple typically has long lines of customers ready to buy new products at its stores the first day they’re available, so Change.org will definitely have a bigger audience and potentially better media coverage for Friday’s protest.

Apple has taken steps to assure its customers that it is trying to improve the conditions at its partners’ factories. Last month the company sent representatives of the Fair Labor Association, a trade group Apple joined in January, to inspect contract manufacturer Foxconn’s factory in Shenzhen, China. Audits are also scheduled for Foxconn’s Chengdu facility, and the factories of suppliers Quanta and Pegatron.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has acknowledged the outcry from concerned customers and investors, saying, “We believe that every worker has the right to a fair and safe work environment, free of discrimination, where they can earn competitive wages and they can voice their concerns freely. And Apple suppliers must live up to this to do business with Apple.”

The leader of this ongoing protest, Mark Shields, said he appreciates the steps Apple is taking, but wants to draw more attention to new products like the iPad.

“It’s great to see Apple taking important steps like the factory audit this month, and pay raises for the factory workers,” said Shields in a statement. “But Apple hasn’t crossed the finish line yet. New product releases, like the iPad 3 this week, have typically been the most dangerous for workers because of the incredible pressure they are under to meet release production deadlines.”

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