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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
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.
Free market economies are able to go from child labor and sweatshops to banks
Examples ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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.
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.
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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."
There is something lacking in that train of thought. I think what is lacking is foresight and long-term thinking.
We know why children labor -- because the rich aren't willing to pay enough for a man to feed his family under his own pay. So what are the alternatives? Of course -- have more children who can them in turn, earn money. The problem with this? The children, and by extension, the workforce becomes very uneducated... even more than in places where the government controls education. Spending one's learning years at work means bad things for the future of a workforce and for a community. The whole point of child labor laws is to allow children to become educated and to decide for themselves what they will do with their lives when they are old enough.
Without this regulation against the free market, the market would drive its labor force to death and into animal-like stupidity.
Further, as you seem to believe in the free market, let's look at it another way -- by pulling workers out of the labor pool, we are making the labor resource more scarce making the resource more valuable and therefore raising the rates of pay for those who remain at work. So child labor laws might also serve to improve the amount of money that comes into individual families.
The very idea of nations "growing up" more quickly using the broken backs of 10 year olds is simply too repugnant to discuss. Even if this were viewed as a grand sacrifice, we know that only very few would benefit from this growth while the masses would remain in suffering.
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.
And he had to walk uphill to and from school with no shoes in winter too.
If my 15 yr old wants some spending cash you bet they can get their butt out on a paper route or babysitting or neighborhood yard work. I have no problem with "child labor" as a concept, it's a great idea on multiple fronts, teaching responsibility, the value of money, the benefits of being employed, etc.
The problem is it's so incredibly easy for big business to abuse, that it has to be outlawed for the most part. The idea is good, the practice is bad. Things like paper routes and babysitting tend to be self-limiting (due to the narrow window of time per day you can actually do them) so they're not really abusable. Manufacturing plants that can run 24/7 naturally are where the problems crop up.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
No one is arguing against a teenager getting a part time job in suburban U.S.A. What is being argued is what is wrong with child labor as in "this is what you will do for the rest of your life because you won't be able to go to school because this will stunt your mental growth" kind of thing.
As someone who grew up in a "3rd-world country" I have news for you. Most people are finished with school by age 12. A 15-year-old is considered an adult and often is married and has at least one kid by then. We treat teen-agers like children in the US and Canada and they fulfill that expectation spectacularly - in fact, you aren't a "real" adult until 21 and then insurance companies rape you and you can't rent a car, etc., until you are 25. We put up with and even encourage infantile behavior by our teens and young-adults. And then we impose our beliefs on the rest of the world.
If Apple wants to make it's world-wide policy match our expectations, fine. They talk about these companies hiring workers "as young as 15". Well, that 15-year-old, who very possibly is married with a family and obviously wanted the job (I didn't hear that they were rounding up workers at gun-point) and obviously capable of doing the job (what job was that? Taking out the garbage? Putting the manual and CD in it's sleeve?) otherwise they wouldn't have been hired.
I would applaud Apple for standing up for what they believe in, but I fear that it's more to appease the ignorant, myopic American public and their America-centric world-view than any real conviction on the subject. And I feel bad for the young adults who were fortunate to land an excellent, high-paying job (for that part of the world) who will now be unemployed.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
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.
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...
It's amazing that the mainstream public can be this economically retarded
Hmm, I'll say. But I don't think we're talking about the same group of people...
but it isn't very surprising given that their education is controlled by the government
Tinfoil hat time, here we go!
the very entity that benefits from these sorts of regulations.
The government benefits every time a child doesn't work, every time a pill doesn't kill someone, every time a student becomes a doctor or a scientist, every time a factory recalls tons of e. coli tainted beef... Well, in a sense, that's actually true, in the US, since We The People *are* the government.
Individuals, including children, choose to work in "sweatshops"
Bullshit. No child "choses" to work in a sweatshop. They are forced to by their parents, or by circumstances, but in no way do they think, "boy, I sure wish I could work 15 hours a day and get 2 pee breaks!"
Simply outlawing free market in labor will not make schools, hospitals, and personal wealth rain from the sky!
No. "Socialism" does this. The free market has never, and will never, provide schools, hospitals and personal wealth to reach the masses. A truly free market school system would leave the poor uneducated. A truly free market health system would leave the poor sick.
As for child labor, no free market on the planet would *ever* eliminate it. The only way to eliminate child labor is to outlaw it outright. This is because if it's legal, some company is going to engage in it, and some children are going to be forced by their parents or by circumstances into it.
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).
No free market has ever left child labor behind. You *are* correct that free markets will lead to banks and skyscrapers, however. You are wrong that socialism leads to poor nations. What you are thinking of is communism.
The trick is to gain the benefits of capitalism (banks, skyscrapers, etc.) while avoiding its negatives (exclusion of poor people, child labor, etc.). The way to do that is with laws (outlawing certain practices) and socialism (free education and health care) *AND* capitalism (skyscrapers and banks).
This is not about "culture" but about the rights of mankind. It's not that they have to go to school, it's that they have a choice. How about you ask your wife if she would have preferred the chance at education over working at crappy jobs?
We have the advantage in the "developed" world of not forcing our kids to work 12 hours a day in manual labour positions. We arrived at this advantage in part through exploitation of workers in other countries. Do you not think we have a moral obligation to try and correct this situation?
I have news for you. It's not that long ago that our countries had much the same system. Our ancestors fought long and hard to allow children to be educated rather than forced into working in factories to support their familes. The huge advances in our way of life in the last 150 years show that it was worth doing. Let's hope the leaders of your former country can be persuaded of that too.
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.
I'm not convinced you've thought about this very hard. I won't hold it against you, because nobody, least of all government schools, will teach you this stuff.
Having an opinion different from yours is not a sign of not thinking something through.
Your simpleminded Ayn Randian view of Capitalism vs Socialism is fundamentally delusional. You say things like, "There is no idelogical difference between socialism and communism. Both words mean: the state is absolute, and any individual can and will be made to sacrifice for the "good" of others." and "Socialism will always suppress the best a man has to offer because he will be forced act [or not act] contrary to his own wishes."
Such thoughts are easily disproven. You have this idea of Socialism as being where the state will absolutely tell you everything you can ever do, and that's simply not true. You have the notion that Capitalism means you are free to do anything you are physically and mentally capable of. This is simply not true either.
Additionally, every society that has ever existed has had both capitalistic and socialistic aspects. Simply being able to barter your goods and services, or being able to whittle a piece of wood for your own enjoyment, is Capitalism, and having any sort of government whatsoever is Socialism.
The intelligent society would be one where the two forces are used to best serve the people.
Your simplistic view is a result of not being able to hold two diametrically opposed views at the same time. Everything is either all out black, or all out white, and grey is a failure.
Socialism is great. Capitalism is great. Pure Socialism or pure Capitalism are both evil, although if I had to pick one to be pure, I'd most definitely pick Capitalism (if I were rich) or Socialism (if I were poor). Fortunately, I'm not an imbecile, and I can choose both in varying measures for varying things.
Oh, and to address your notion that Socialism and Communism are the same thing, the difference is that in Communism, everything is done for the state. In Socialism, everything is down for the people. The formal definitions are that the state owns/controls the means of production (Communism) or the people own/control the means of production (Socialism).
In Capitalism, those with capital own/control the means of production, but looking a it from the opposite direction, everything done is done for those with capital. If you don't have capital, Capitalism sucks.
You rail against public schools, but I can promise you one thing. In a purely Capitalistic society, education would be much worse unless you were rich. It's only by Socialism that everyone in America has access to school, and is able to, if they can, learn.