Foxconn Exploits Workers: What Should Apple Do?

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Foxconn Exploits Workers: What Should Apple Do?
An independent review by the Fair Labor Association (FLA) issued on Thursday has found violations in wages and overtime at three Chinese Foxconn factories that make Apple products. The FLA found that hours for individual workers “exceeded” 60 per week; Foxconn said that, by July 1, 2013, workers will not work more than 49 hours.

Foxconn also makes electronic devices for other companies including Hewlett-Packard. Apple had requested the independent review after numerous media reports (including an extensive New York Times article) about hazardous working conditions and a notable increase in worker suicides.

Also last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook visited a newly built Foxconn’s factory that employs 120,000 people and met with Chinese government officials. He was also sighted in the Joy City Apple Store in Beijing, talking to employees and looking at products. While Cook did not elaborate about the purpose of his visit, Steven Musil on CNET notes that “speculation was rampant” that he was in China’s capital to “discuss the company’s next-generation iPhone with China Telecom and China Unicom, two of that country’s largest carriers.” Apple does not seem to be in any hurry to change its relations with China and Chinese companies.

Will the FLA report really make any changes in how Apple products are made?

Scott Nova, executive director of the labor rights watchdog group Workers Rights Consortium, points out to CNET that Apple and Foxconn have been “promising to end labor rights abuses like excessive overtime since 2006.” Debby Chan Sze Wan, the project officer with Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, also notes that the labor violations described in the report are hardly new discoveries but have been “mentioned a long time ago” and simply ignored by Apple. A consumer watchdog group, SumOfUs, says that the report is just “whitewash” written by a “business-funded group with a long track record of serving as a corporate mouthpiece,” notes CNET.

The Atlantic lists a number of “hard questions” that Apple still faces, including whether or not to allow the FLA to assess the 155 other suppliers for its products; whether it will actually force Foxconn and other suppliers to comply with recommendations; whether Apple’s example will force other tech companies such as IBM and Dell to see that similar investigations are carried out by their supplies. If Foxconn hires more workers to make the same amount of products, will Foxconn eat the costs? or will Apple? or will they be passed onto Western consumers in the form of higher-priced devices?

Complicating these issues are reports that Foxconn workers have not been so sure that the reforms are to their benefit, as working fewer hours means they will earn less. Reuters quotes 25-year-old Chen Yamei who has worked at Foxconn for four years and says that “We are here to work and not to play, so our income is very important.”

If Foxconn were to pay its workers more per hour, who would pay for those additional costs? Are Western consumers willing to pay more for their iProducts to ensure fair working conditions for people in other countries?

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Chinese workers who produce the iPad make only about $8 per unit, according to Korean Daily. That means, they make only 1.6 percent of the price of the cheapest iPad ($499) and substantially less from the most expensive one (which costs $829). In contrast, workers in Korea are paid about about $34 per unit among them, giving them 6.8 percent of the sales price. Apple has not responded to requests to comment, says Phil Muncaster on Channel Register.

In the wake of continued reports about dismal working conditions at Chinese factories operated by Foxconn, Apple has asked the Fair Labor Association (FLA) to audit Foxconn facilities in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China. After these audits are completed, Apple says that it will have the FLA review other of its production partners so that, in the end, some 90 percent of its products will have been inspected.

At an an investor conference on February 14, Apple CEO Tim Cook specifically said that “No one in our industry is doing more to improve working conditions than Apple.” He also spoke of child labor as “abhorrent” and said that such is “extremely rare” in the company’s supply chain.

Apple does seem to be responding to the reports about human rights abuses in its suppliers’ factories in the midst of more and more coverage about such issues. A recent CNN report about Foxconn workers included an interview with a “Miss Chen,” a young woman from rural China, who emphasizes the mind-dulling repetitive work of putting stickers on iPad screens:

“At Foxconn we have a saying, she says, women work like men and work like machines. A better way of putting it is that women work like men and men work like animals.”

“It’s so boring, I can’t bear it anymore. Everyday was like: I get off from work, and I go to bed. I get up in the morning, and I go to work. It became my daily routine and I almost felt like I was some kind of animal.”

“Miss Chen” makes about 1300 RMB — about US$200 — a month, including overtime.

The iPad and Ethical Concerns

Like many — and like many parents of children with disabilities and with autism in particular — I have sung the praises of the iPad. Muncaster calls the device a “shiny toy” (and a “fondleslab”) and that is what the iPad is for many of us. For my teenage son Charlie, who’s moderately to severely autistic, the iPad has been a device that he can operate independently, so that, for the first time in his life, he can listen to the music and see the photos and videos he likes (Charlie doesn’t seem able to read, at least not yet) all on his own. Many parents have described how helpful numerous apps have been for the children with disabilities; for Charlie, the touchscreen technology of the iPad has on its own been the key. Some individuals with disabilities use iPads as augmentative communication devices; while the cost of an iPad is beyond the means of many families, other kinds of communication devices are far more expensive.

Certainly I feel fortunate that we’re able to provide Charlie with an iPad.
But even while lauding it, I think it’s necessary to keep the human costs of producing the iPad, and all Apple products, in sight; to remember that the shiny technology that our society gloats over is made in conditions that we would find intolerable for any workers.

My husband and I hope that Charlie will have a job when he is an adult. Due to his disabilities, the sort of job that Charlie will have is likely to be somewhat similar to that of the workers at the Foxconn plant, repetitive and the kind of thing many would prefer not to do. Not only do we need to keep the pressure on Apple to ensure that employees in overseas factories work in humane and ethical conditions; we need to protect the rights of workers like Charlie, of workers with disabilities, and call for transparency and fair wages.

The “shiny toys” we buy at the Apple are smudge free when we take them out of the box. We need to remember they were made by human hands, whose fingerprints have been carefully wiped away.

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How Many People Died To Make Your iPad?

“iPhone demand helps Apple achieve record profit” read one headline about the $13.1 billion the company made in the last quarter. The iPhone 4s went on sale in the weeks following co-founder Steve Jobs’s death; Apple has now sold a record 37 million iPhones, up from the previous record, 20.34 million.

But Apple is able to churn out so many shiny products, and at a price that consumers are happy to pay, thanks to 700,000 people in Asia, Europe and elsewhere. None of these people are Apple employees: As the New York Times recently reported, Apple itself employs far fewer people, 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas. While Jobs boasted in the 1980s that the Macintosh was “a machine that is made in America,” and iMacs were made in an Elk Grove, California factory in 2002, Apple has now turned — like other tech companies — to foreign manufacturing under the guidance of Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s operations expert who became chief executive last August, six weeks before Jobs died.

Foreign manufacturers, and especially those in China, have a skilled workforce that works round the clock, lives in dormitories (sometimes 20 people in one apartment) far from their families and works 12-hour shifts six days a week in perilous conditions and without the workers’ protections people in the US would demand and rightfully. Foxconn Technology, which is one of China’s biggest employers and has 1.2 million workers, can call up 3,000 people in the middle of the night to churn out iPhones, iPads and iPods. If someone in Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, makes a last-minute change to an iPhone design, Foxconn can have its workers make that change and produce over 10,000 iPhones in 96 hours.

Foxconn’s workers also assemble an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics; its customers include Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung. The company has come under scrutiny, and Apple too, in the wake of worker deaths and injuries at an iPad plant an Chengdu in May of 2011. The New York Times has a lengthy report about the conditions in the factories and workers’ housing, including an interview with Li Mingqi, who used to manage the factory where the explosion occurred and was fired after seven years with Foxconn when he objected to being relocated.

Lai Xiaodong, an employee who died, suffered burns over 90 percent of his body. He was in charge of a team that oversaw the machines that polish iPad cases. In the weeks after the iPad went on sale, workers were told they had to polish thousands of iPads a day and the plant was filled with aluminum dust. Three others were killed and 18 injured. Seven months later, another explosion due to aluminum dust occurred at a Shanghai plant that also made iPads. 59 workers were injured, 23 of whom had to be hospitalized.
Apple recently released a list of 156 of its suppliers and has agreed to allow outside monitors to inspect its partners’ factories and become the first technology company to join the Fair Labor Association (FLA). But there is no such oversight of those who, further down the techno-industrial food chain, supply the suppliers.

The shiny products we so covet are made at huge human costs in far-away places so we don’t have to think about it. As Jobs said to President Barack Obama last February, there’s no way that iPhones would or could be made in the US. In the 1950s and 1980s, American companies like General Motors and General Electric created thousands of jobs for American workers and enabled them to enter the middle class. But now Apple and other tech companies see themselves competing in a global market and have abandoned US workers. “Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every year,” the New York Times observes and, based on those 37 million iPhones that Apple just sold, that observation is all too correct.

But customers need to be reminded that it’s very possible that someone breathed in aluminum dust, got hurt, even died, to bring them that immaculate, “amazing new,” tech device. Scrape a key across your iPhone screen and it will be smooth as ever, but dig just a little deeper into Apple’s business practices and you’ll see something far less pristine.

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74 Million iPads. 26 Suicides. Did Steve Jobs Know?

Since Steve Jobs passed away last month, there have been countless tributes to his undeniable creativity and genius. That’s the lighter side of Apple, but there’s also a darker side.

Care2 last week posted a blog from Adele Stan, of the AFL-CIO, which reported that in its fourth quarter earnings report released two weeks ago, Apple Computer revealed that 2/3 of its on-hand cash – some $54 billion — is squirreled away outside the boundaries of the United States, presumably to avoid paying its fair share of taxes.

And a new report, “The iSlave Behind the iPhone: Foxconn Workers in Central China,” examines conditions at the Apple Computer contractor’s plant since the suicides of several workers last year made big news. One thing that has changed: workers were given a raise — to all of $1.18 an hour.

The Life And Death Of A Foxconn Worker

Foxconn is the world’s largest electronic manufacturer, making products for Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Nokia.

One factory, situated in Shenzhen, central China, is so vast that walking around its outer perimeter takes two hours. The chefs slaughter 6,000 pigs a day to feed the company’s nearly 400,000 workers in this giant industrial complex, spread over 1.2 square miles.

Instal Netting To Prevent Suicides?

And at least 26 workers between the ages of 17 and 24 have committed suicide there. How has the company handled this? Therapy? Suicide mentoring? Improved working conditions? No, they’ve put up huge nets around the buildings, to make it harder for workers to kill themselves by jumping.

Mike Daisey is an actor whose current Off Broadway play is entitled “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” Daisey recently visited Foxconn and was shocked by what he found.

Institutionalized Dehumanization

From Yahoo! Finance:

“What I was really shocked by was institutionalized dehumanization,” he says. “The systems that are put in place are working and the objective of them working is to work people, basically, to death.”

He’s talking about “massive production lines” where people work “endlessly.” Workers are never rotated and end up doing the same task hundreds of thousand of times. “I met many workers whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from doing that work…. [Hands] literally swollen, literally deformed [and] permanently warped,” he explains.

Daisey is also clear that this situation cannot be compared to factory conditions in America at the turn of the 20th century, since these are inherently different scenarios: in the early 1900s, there wasn’t an outside country with established labor laws exploiting people who have no freedom. As he puts it, “We chose to export our jobs and none of our values.”

And without a question, Daisey believes that Steve Jobs knew exactly what the conditions were on the ground at Foxconn.

Steve Jobs Knew All About Foxconn Conditions

From Yahoo! Finance:

And the same goes today for Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook. “Apple is a company that believes in micromanagement. They pay attention to details,” says Daisey. “There is not question in my mind that they know what conditions are like on the ground.”


Next time you look at your beautiful Apple computer, iPhone, or iPad, think about the fact that everything in them was made by hand, in the institutional dehumanization of Foxconn’s factory.

How To Make A Difference

And if you are moved by that, Daisey has a couple of tips on how you can make a difference:

#1 — Stop upgrading your technology all the time. By doing so you’d prevent pumping money back into the electronic industry so often, which signals demand to tech companies that then rush to satisfy that demand and produce new products. On top of that, it will save you money, save the environment and lessen the human costs to make these techonologies.

#2 — Email Apple CEO Tim Cook and tell him how you feel. His email address is tcook@apple.com. But Daisey asks that you please don’t abuse this email address.