At the Foxconn manufacturing facility in Wuhan China, where Apple products are made, a spate of suicides and a threatened mass suicide over working conditions have attracted a lot of embarrassing media attention.
Now, a week after working conditions at the Foxconn plant were featured in an sobering episode of the popular public radio show This American Life, Apple has released its 2012 Apple Supplier Responsibility Report. The report indicates that 69% of audited suppliers were in compliance with Apple policies on wage and benefit practices; while only 38% were in compliance with policies on work-hour practices.
In other categories, suppliers fared better:
- Antidiscrimination: 78% in compliance on practices
- Fair treatment: 93%
- Prevention of involuntary labor: 78%
- Prevention of underage labor: 97%
- Juvenile worker protections: 87%
- Freedom of association: 95%
In his report on This American Life, master storyteller Mike Daisy doesn’t dispute such findings, and he paints an appropriately conflicted picture of life in a Chinese manufacturing facility that employs half a million people. He interviewed several workers who claimed to be as young as 13. He saw the dormitories of workers – bunk rooms where up to a dozen people share a 12-foot x 12-foot space.
But they are proud of the products they make – even if many have never used them, or even seen them in completed form.
He talked a woman who was labeled a troublemaker and blacklisted from working by the independent labor board – which exists to address worker grievances – after asking it for help in getting paid for her overtime. He met a man who was fired because he couldn’t work quickly enough after losing the use of his hand due to long-term exposure to neurotoxins used (allegedly since replaced with alcohol) to clean iPhone screens. Sixteen-hour shifts and mandatory overtime routinely result in work weeks in excess of 70 hours for which one might be paid $50.
All of which, some workers say, is an improvement from life in the rice paddies or other places they may have worked.
The company has placed netting around the second floor of buildings on its fenced-in manufacturing campus in response to people who were jumping from roofs.
Here in America, we complain of the great divide between the 99 and the 1%. In Taiwan, where Foxconn is headquartered, Chairman Terry Gou entertained guests at a year-end party by telling them that managing a million animals gives him a headache and suggesting that he is working with the director of the Taipei Zoo to learn how to do it better.
But most surprising for American listeners may have been the revelation that the tiny electrical parts in your iPad, iPhone and MacBook were assembled by hand in a culture where people are simply cheaper than machinery.
For its part, Apple hasn’t commented on Daisy’s reporting. And despite whatever similarities Daisy found to our image of what a Chinese sweatshop is like, Apple isn’t necessarily the bad guy here.
For one, it’s not alone sending high-tech production to China – or even to Foxconn. Further, Apple sets a standard for transparency in its auditing (though its report does not mention name of suppliers where large numbers of violations occurred). HP also makes public the results of its supplier audit. It too deserves credit for the gesture.
At the same time, Apple’s business model demands that it use the lowest-cost manufacturing techniques no matter what the consequences. As a provider of premium products, Apple’s good fortune depends on two things:
- Introducing at least one or two breakthrough products every year;
- Achieving the ability to sell those products for a price that isn’t too much more than the lower cost competitors that follow it.
This because Apple serves a buying market that has been trained for years to value the lowest price above all other variables.
So to a great degree, Western consumers are responsible for whatever reprehensible labor practices are tolerated and institutionalized at places like Foxconn. That’s just one of the prices we pay for $99 gadgets.
Foxconn is not an aberration. And no matter how much effort Apple, HP and others put into monitoring labor practices in developing economies, it couldn’t possibly be enough.
Anyone who has done business in China knows that terms of a contract will often be considered the maximum level of service – and aggressive oversight is necessary to see that it’s achieved. Every time arsenic is discovered in drywall from China, or lead in toys from China, or poison in dog food, the failure belongs to Western manufacturers who outsourced at the lowest cost then winked before closing their eyes to the process. They may claim to be surprised, but none of this is new. Everybody knows.
Here at BigBadBiz, Apple products dominate the vast array of technological tools that are used. (Well, OK, it’s a couple laptops and an aging iPhone). Even if there was a choice, we admit that we wouldn’t give up these products for something else. But we’d be willing to pay more – even 50% more – if they were made in the United States under working conditions that don’t make us squirm.
Because in the end, everything we buy from China or other developing economies really does costs more than is reflected on the price tag.
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