Slashdot Mirror
Apple Enforces "Supplier Code of Conduct" After Child Labor Discovery
reporter writes "Since 2006, Apple has regularly audited its manufacturing partners to ensure that they conform to Apple's Supplier Code of Conduct (ASCC), which essentially codifies Western ethical standards with regard to the environment, labor, business conduct, etc. Core violations of ASCC 'include abuse, underage employment, involuntary labor, falsification of audit materials, threats to worker safety, intimidation or retaliation against workers in the audit and serious threats to the environment. Apple said it requires facilities it has found to have a core violation to address the situation immediately and institute a system that insures compliance. Additionally, the facility is placed on probation and later re-audited.' Apple checks 102 facilities, most of which are located in Asia, and these facilities employ 133,000 workers. The most recent audit of Apple's partners revealed 17 violations of ASCC. The violations include hiring workers who were as young as 15 years of age, incorrectly disposing of hazardous waste, and falsifying records. In Apple's recently released Supplier Responsibility 2010 Progress Report (PDF), they condemned the violations and threatened to terminate their business with facilities that did not change their ways."
The kids get free black turtlenecks to wear after 10 years of employment. Sounds good to me.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
It's amazing that the mainstream public can be this economically retarded, but it isn't very surprising given that their education is controlled by the government - the very entity that benefits from these sorts of regulations.
Individuals, including children, choose to work in "sweatshops" because that is better than other alternatives available to them: backbreaking subsistence agriculture, crime, prostitution, etc. Simply outlawing free market in labor will not make schools, hospitals, and personal wealth rain from the sky! Free market economies are able to go from child labor and sweatshops to banks and skyscrapers in just a couple of generations, while the "well-intentioned" socialist cesspools remain poor except for the handouts of others (often too through government force).
Hiring 15 year olds is illegal? Quick, someone tell the authorities about McDonalds!
It's the chinese manufacturers who are doing this, apple is cracking down on it and fining them for it you moron. (And I hate apple BTW)
In these countries, many families struggle to put food on the table. By allowing their children who are able to work go to work in the factories, these families are better able to care for each other.
These are dangerous smelting factories or weapons manufacturing plants. They are electronics assembly lines. Lines which could essentially be replaced by robotics except that humans are cheaper. No kid is in danger of having his arm sliced off.
Enforcing Western-style regulations in Western countries makes sense, but in poor countries, having an extra set of hands working besides mom and dad is a real boon.
I can't believe I'm reading about Apple, of all companies, enforcing regulations like these overseas. It's more White Man's Burden than Protect The Children. But really, when you think about it, those two concepts are essentially the same, and it reeks of condescension.
The problem is that the countries that still have it as a problem also have a government-business relationship that is "too friendly". Those factories could willfully ignore law and kill their critics.
Just because it may be their only practical choice does not invalidate that it is a bad one. Rewarding those businesses for pursuing that government policy is not going to make it any better.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Different cultures have different ages where they need to become self-sufficient, or become responsible to help out with the family income. This whole 18 or 21 year old "western" ideal of adulthood is destructive to our own development in many ways, and should not be forced onto other countries with drastically different ways that the people grow up.
From page 13 of the summary report:
[quote]During most of our audits, suppliers stated that Apple was the only company that had ever audited their facility for supplier responsibility.[/quote]
IOW, other companies don't give a shit about abusive labor practices from their suppliers. They might pay lip service but no one's really doing any audits to actually check. Apple, OTOH, is going out there and digging around to make sure their suppliers are in compliance with labor and environmental standards.
New low? This is leadership in defining a more responsible way to do business.
Whenever I hear underage employment I always wonder is it really all that bad?
In countries that practice it they have children starving on the streets, so no matter how bad the conditions are relative to how we would want the conditions to be I am sure the children would rather work for cents a day then to starve to death on the streets.
Now I am sure in many cases it is doing the children a favor to stop underage employment, but I always wonder how many children have starved to death because of Western ethics.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
That is, does one expect them to actually follow the rules? No. The ASCC is a whitewash given that it has no real ability to exact meaningful punishments.
Those are about 133,000 jobs on the wrong side of the US and Western Europe - where they might actually respect the law for once.
Apple has threatened to terminate its business relationship with these companies. If the companies fail to satisfy Apple, and Apple makes good on its threat, I'd call that a meaningful punishment.
If Apple stop doing business with a company that won't ensure a safe working environment for its employees, will the root of the problem get fixed? No, of course not, not right away. Apple will switch to another company, and the first company will have one less (rather large) customer. But they'll be able to find other customers, perhaps who are less scrupulous, and the employees will still have unsafe working conditions.
Or maybe, they won't be able to find other customers. Or the other customers they find, will have similar policies in place. Maybe the owners of the company will realize that if they want to continue to attract Western business, they need to make some changes - not due to respect for their employees, but because they need to pass these inspections in order to keep their customers happy.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
except you know, they dont charge any more than anyone else. There IS NO APPLE TAX anymore. Stop comparing POS computers to a standard Apple configuration and actually you know configure a Dell to match a Apple. You WILL be surprised.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
"In general," Apple said in the report, "annual audits of final assembly manufacturers show continued performance improvements and better working conditions."
Or translated into English, "it used to be we didn't care, but now we have announced once a year inspections, we find that each time they get better at hiding violations from us".
I wonder what the Toyota scandal will do with all of this however. They are paying the price for random outsourcing to safe some bucks and it is costing them a fortune and decades of good will as the most reliable cheap car maker are shot to hell. (And yes I am aware that the problems occurred in the US, but that is a low wage country compared to Japan.)
When you outsource everything, what is left of your company? And once you put in place all those checks to make sure people half way across the world are working as you want them, how much have you actually saved?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In its annual supplier report, Apple has admitted that its Chinese factories have employed children to build its gadgets. "Ones with a particularly refined sense of aesthetics."
Apple revealed the sweatshop conditions inside the factories it uses. The child workers were found in a facility with high vaulted ceilings, elegantly crafted marble work benches and a classical quartet playing in the background in a corner of the floor. Young geniuses sat in their Aerons and levitated components into place with the powers of the mind, burning the famed Apple logo into the back of the assembled device with but a glance of terrifying but controlled power. Some lunches, with only an hour's break, would involve wines of less than ten years' vintage.
Competitors were outraged. "We are shocked, shocked to hear of Apple's ruthless exploitation of the chilll-drennn," said Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. "But then, what do you expect when they actually ask their suppliers about this stuff. Don't ask, don't tell! That's what made the 360 great!"
Apple's Chinese manufacturing facilities were the site of controversy last year when one young worker at Foxconn, who had teleported an iPhone home overnight, was found to have committed suicide by leaping from the top of the building, first breaking his own neck, and tearing out all his own fingernails on the way down. He was found with Apple logos carved into his back, obviously also self-inflicted. "A tragedy," said the report.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I love cracking jokes about children being forced to make our crap and defending sweatshop labour as much as the next guy, but some of the comments on this story have my stomach turning. If the choice is between having families out of work and having them work for little money, then fine; run the factories. But that is a very selective framing of this issue and is utterly uninformative. The developed world (not "the West", which is a meaningless term) and our corporations interact with the third world in an extremely complex way which the above scenario completely oversimplifies.
Between extremes of us taking advantage of cheap labour, and us setting the scene for that cheap labour to exist, we are far closer to the latter option. See the progress of the IMF and the World Bank for examples.
I know the rebuttal: Well, how would you feel about paying 10x as much for your electronics !11!!1 But even if costs would escalate that high - and they wouldn't because employing our own workers instead would have loads of offsetting, positive effects for our economies and increasing salaries for impoverished workers by a factor of 10 only increases total costs by a portion of that - I'm more comfortable with that than saying that some people's lives are essentially worthless because of where they're born. And I suspect that if consumers were forced to really consider how their dollars 'supported' poor economies, maybe if all stores had to show in-store videos of their factories chugging along, then paying a little more for a higher quality product and higher quality lives wouldn't seem so bad.
Hey mate, spare a sig?
So Apple is to give a new code of conduct for it's suppliers, I too have a code of conduct, "Don't buy Apple products." I think mine trumps Apple's code of conduct, whatever their PR department says.
So you buy your computer hardware from companies that do not have an enforced code of conduct for labor overseas thereby contributing to horrible human rights abuses? Seriously, I want to know who you buy hardware from and why you think that is less evil.
Ummm, seriously? Assuming the average fully laden cost of a US worker is $50,000 a year, you are talking about $6-$7 billion dollars in direct labor costs here in the US. But now your factories need to be built here in the US, you need US land, factory equipment and machines sourced in the US (these can be 3-4 times more expensive than the equivalent sourced in China), you raw materials have to be sourced here, and you need to maintain larger inventories of components that are still only made in Asia. I would imagine that this would add at least $12-15 billion dollars in total cost to Apple's business, perhaps even more (direct labor costs usually are less than half the cost difference between manufacturing in the US and manufacturing in Asia). Their EBITDA is currently around $14B, and net income is about $9B. You have now taken a highly profitable company and made it into another large American manufacturing company selling lots of product but hemorrhaging *billions* of dollars a year. Just like our auto industry.
Anyway, just pointing out how the economics work. There's a reason relatively little manufacturing is done in the US anymore, except for highly taxed and protected industries like defense or aerospace, high end or luxury niches, and products where the value/volume ratio makes it unprofitable to manufacture abroad and ship to the US.
In Rand Land profit is the Prophet and the Prophet says greed is the only good.
No, I was talking about the *average*, *fully laden* cost of your staff in a manufacturing operation. I'm assuming an average salary of something like $35k. By the time you finish paying payroll taxes, health insurance, benefits, and so on, you are easily at $50k. The standard practice is to add about 50% to the base salary to account for these other costs when doing budgeting, probably slightly more now that health insurance costs have gone up so much.
Even in rural areas where manufacturing still occurs in the US, I'd say $25-30k is the minimum you can pay a semi-skilled, decent factory worker. And you need a mix to make a factory run of manufacturing engineers, skilled technicians, HR personnel, managers and the like who all get paid more like $45k-$75k depending on their background (again, not including benefits, etc.). So that's where I get $35k as an average figure.
Maybe the average would be slightly lower in Canada, but I'm not really confident that's the case when taxes and everything else are taken into account. And in any case, the point here was about US labor costs vs. Asia labor costs and what it would cost a company to move this scale of manufacturing to the US.
They did cut off a factory for falsifying records to cover up violations. Also, when was the last time ANY company did this? I guarantee you that a great deal of products in your home were made by sweatshops, child labor, indentured workers, etc. What are all these other companies doing about it?
I don't care what the reasons are. I'm glad that SOMEONE is doing something and that hopefully this will galvanize other companies into doing the same.
Oh how I wish I could mod you up, but I used my points yesterday. Also honestly I don't think dell's quality of components is as high as apple's.
except you know, they dont charge any more than anyone else. There IS NO APPLE TAX anymore. Stop comparing POS computers to a standard Apple configuration and actually you know configure a Dell to match a Apple. You WILL be surprised.
And you *still* won't get the Dell to match the Mac in terms of screen quality, battery life, thinness, sturdiness, etc.
But I guess those things are simply the "aesthetics" and "form over function" that people keep trying to pretend are unimportant or something...
15 year old "kids" working is child labour?
I also worked in the school holidays at that age.
Anyone even considered that they may already have finished school?
Depending on the school-system (entering at age 5 and having 8-9 years of school) they may well be lucky to get a job straight after school.
Except South Korea doesn't have a history of using child labor. What they did do is work extremely hard to build a strong export-led industry combined with high import duties that ensured domestic production would remain high. Oh and most of those industries were given state funding (as the banks were all nationalized), and were not grown in a laissez faire free market economy.
Prior to Japanese colonization, Korea would have used children to help in the farms (much like on American farms), but not in factories, because they were primarliy an agrarian society.
You do realize that they did nothing to these suppliers?
Wrong.
Do you also realize that Dick Durbin is all over them about this right now, hence the audit?
Them, and 29 other high profile companies.
It has been almost 4 years since they started this 'code of conduct' BS.
Wait, I thought you said they just started this right now in response to Durbin?
Yet the violations continue..... think about that for a minute.
Of course they do. It's China. But they don't continue with Apple's consent. It's like saying, "there are laws against murder, yet murders still continue... think about that for a minute."
They audit, it gets Durbin off of them.. he is happy.
Again, they've been at this for four years. It's very clever of them to have allocated precious resources to their time machine to go back to 2006 and start this process, all to appease one Senator.
Business goes on as usual.... what has Apple actually DONE here but make some baseless threats, the same ones they made back in 2006.
You're absolutely correct. A Code of Conduct is an unassailable mechanism that instantly forces all who are subject to it into compliance. It's truly magical that way.
Here's the thing. This Code of Conduct applies to other companies. Sure they may agree to it, but that doesn't mean they are going to follow it. That's why Apple audits them, and takes action as necessary. But don't forget, this are independent third parties, who operate in a different nation with a different culture than Apple's, and are not going to change their standard practices just on someone else's say so. It's going to have to harm them financially (or legally, but in China, we can pretty much ignore that aspect regarding the current topic). Apple can only do so much, and what they *can* do, they are doing *something*, which is far more than can be said for their competitors.
It's ironic that Apple is being taken to task for doing the right thing and looking into the human rights practices of their suppliers, instead of turning a blind eye like everyone else. It's like blaming a doctor for finding cancer, because he actually performs the tests, and giving the doctors who don't a pass...
I'll bet the same people so eager to condemn Apple for actually trying to live up to its responsibilities on a voluntary basis would also decry a government regulation that attempted to regulate this on a less-than voluntary way. And anybody want to bet that the low-cost manufacturers would be the worse offenders? The race to the bottom, indeed. The truth is, Apple does all right in any neutral ranking. Could be better, but they've made a lot of progress. http://www.rankabrand.com/
Outside the US this is a different matter. I can get something pretty much equivalent to the 17" macbook Pro from dell (the dell will have a better screen RGBLED) for about half the price of the macbook, as Apple plays funny games with the exchange rate..
http://store.apple.com/au/configure/MC226X/A?mco=MTM3NzYzNjY
http://configure.ap.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=s541210au&c=au&l=en&s=dhs&cs=audhs1
What about Korea?
South Korea has historically retarded the entry of younger peoples into the workforce via an emphasis on compulsory education.
If anything, South Korea is would be one of the better examples for why widespread child labor is not a necessary stage for rapid industrial development. In 1955, South Korea had a per capita GDP lower than that of most African nations. 55 years later, it is among the largest economies in the world and one that is knowledge based, at that.
All without a significant child labor as a path out of poverty phase.
you do understand the difference between a laissez faire free market economy and a market economy don't you? This is basic Korean history post-Korean war. Park Jung-Hee nationalised the banks and directed capital flows to the companies he thought had the best chances of producing products for export in a competitive manner.
North Korea has no export led industry, and no market economy at all (actually that's not entirely true, there is a very very very small internal market experiment being conducted, but it is only at farmer's market level).
And the power plug for the laptop is kinda fragile for my liking.
Are you referring to that magnetic connection? It depends on the person, I think. I'm not much for it, but I've got a friend who RAVES about it, it's probably her favourite feature. She's tripping over the cord almost every time she gets up off the couch, and assumes - probably rightly - that it's saved her laptop some serious damage by now. Not owning one myself, I don't have an opinion of my own but I think it's a pretty clever design and it does fit into that "just works" ideal that Apple keeps presenting.