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Chinese Supplier Gets Dumped By Apple For Fraudulently Using Underage Labor
jones_supa writes "Another report from Apple regarding Chinese labor practices surfaces. After conducting its 2011 audits to 339 sites, the company found that cases of underage labor had jumped from 6 to 74 in one year. It was concentrated in a single circuit board manufacturer, which Apple says was willfully conspiring with families to forge age-verification documents. According to a new report, Apple didn't find any cases of underage workers at its final assembly suppliers in 2012, but it plans to continue going deeper into the supply chain to ferret out violators. We are talking about Guangdong Real Faith Pingzhou Electronics Co., with which Apple has now terminated its relationship."
Indeed. The choice in places like this isn't slaving away for 22 hours a day in a Dickensian nightmare vs. kicking balls around in a field with butterflies and songbirds.
It's working in a factory vs. living in grinding poverty that makes Appalachian nightmares look like Bill Gates' guest house. The West lifted themselves out of this, now China is.
Imagine someone from the Galactic Federation pulling into orbit in 1850 and hauling out vicious criticism of England. No friend of humanity, that's for sure. If what you care about is actual measurements of well-being, which exploded thanks to factories at that time...vs. grinding poverty, not vs. imaginations of butterflied fields.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
how old were they, if poor teenagers want to help their families by earning some extra coin, better that than being punks in a street gang
Some other hungry family gets to eat only this time an impressionable and vulnerable child isn't exploited in the process. There is a lot of need in the world, even right here in the United States.
Did anyone who's already posted even read the article? Apparently, the children are placed back at home and their education is completely financed by the violator. Apple follows-up regularly to make sure they are complying.
The child probably went to work in the first place because the family could not afford an education, so they had to choose between sending the child to school or putting food on the table. So now they can put the child back in school, and someone else in the family can work to put food on the table, and not have to worry about paying for an education for the child anymore.
While it is undeniable that a combination of superior machinery and fossil fuels kicked off an era of unprecedented prosperity for humans on average, there are a couple of complicating factors to consider, both boiling down to distribution issues:
The most obvious one is that child labor(since it is usually cheaper, and since children in the workforce raise the total supply of labor) tends to depress wages and reduce the slice of the industrial prosperity that accrues to the workers(especially in per-labor-hour terms). Certainly, it will generally be the case that a given household will be better off with an additional salary(especially if something prevents one or both parents from working, like being unskilled, infirm, dead, etc.); but workers as a group are better off if children are removed from the labor force, reducing labor supply and allowing children to accrue education and other human capital. Part of the "West lifted themselves out of this" process was precisely the eventual success of the working class and any allies swayed by moral sentiment in legally forcing restrictions on child labor across the board. Since, structurally, such restrictions are essentially a cartel arrangement(since any individual defector will be better off through violating the agreement; but the group as a whole wins if nobody violates it), it more or less had to be done by force of law.
Second consideration involves looking at whatever conditions in the agricultural sector are sucking so much that a ready supply of child factory workers exists. England had its 'Enclosure Movement', which helped swell the supply of impecunious urbanites. I'm less familiar with the Chinese case; but the disparity between urban and rural conditions there is pretty remarkable.
Read the article idiot!
When new violations are found, Apple requires its suppliers to return the workers back to a school chosen by the family and finance their education. "In addition, the children must continue to receive income matching what they received when they were employed. We also follow up regularly to ensure that the children remain in school and that the suppliers continue to uphold their financial commitment," wrote Apple in its latest report.
No, that sounds right. It has the city name and the type of business. Some of the words in company names describe abstract concepts that don't translate very well. If you shove them, they'll translate, but then you end up with Chinglish-y sounding names like this.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
OK, why is the angle on this story not "Apple caught using child labor"? It was the last time this story happened.
Would be a bit unfair considering that the information comes from a report created by Apple. Not that that would stop anyone...
Nice. ... (Wait for the Apple labour inspectors)
1) Forge your child's birth certificate (maybe bribe a local official, not uncommon)
2) Send your kid to work at a supplier to Apple
3)
4) Profit! (Tuition paid and a monthly stipend for the family)
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
2) Send your kid to work at a supplier to Apple ...which does not work because policies like this make most suppliers check for age before hiring anyone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
China is a bit behind, but it isn't in the 1850's. Child labor (defined as employment of people under 16 years of age) is illegal, and there exists compulsory education for children (as best as can be implemented in practice, of course), the same as any modern country* I'm quite certain that Apple and the Chinese government are on the same page with regard to their moral/legal stance on child labor. What bugs me is that there's no mention of the local government taking charge on the issue, and that Apple is tasked with doing what the government should be doing.
*Translate with your preferred service:
http://china.findlaw.cn/laodongfa/zhuanti/tonggong/
http://baike.baidu.com/view/63809.htm
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
1. Very few arguments apply 'without limit', and this one certainly doesn't. In broad strokes, it starts to break down once the supply of jobs available(given the narrowed definition of the labor pool) falls below the number of economic entities who need incomes(depending on the prevailing social arrangements, such entities might be individuals, nuclear families, extended families, or other). Exactly what equilibrium point is reached in practice is mostly empirical: child labor, at least outside the family, seems to have few moralists on its side and tends to significantly retard education, so it often gets the chop. Limits on working hours are another means of reducing the labor supply that has achieved broad adoption and popularity.
Restrictions on individuals within the adult population definitely exist; but tend to be carved out by much more idiosyncratic means; formally-illicit-but-common discrimination against certain groups, various professional exams and licenses, that sort of thing. Because they tend to badly fail the 'number of jobs roughly equals number of economic entities' rule, wholesale restrictions typically only achieve support if the group excluded is supposed to be a member of some already employed entity(exclusion of women, say, becomes deeply problematic if single-income families are not the ideal and the norm) or if the exclusion is from a specific profession rather than from the workforce entirely.
2. As with sellers of any other good, sellers of labor who wish to maximize their slice of the pie are striving to hit the optimal compromise between units sold and price per unit: If you simply gave labor away, you'd sure see a lot of new factories; but it wouldn't help you much. If you charge $1,000/hr, you probably won't have a job. Some number of new factories is clearly beneficial to workers; but the returns aren't unbounded: If the additional demand for labor produced by lowering its price doesn't make up for the lower price(and loss of time you could be using for other things) it isn't terribly helpful. Exactly how many factories constitutes a local optimum is, naturally, a messy empirical question.
Companies paying a living wage, here and in China.
2012 was another record year for corporate profits, and a record for how little the people who actually do the work share in those profits.
Since 1979, worker productivity has increased by several hundred percent and their incomes didn't measurably increase. Somebody benefited from that increase in productivity.
Governor Romney, you know you shouldn't be drinking this early on a Sunday.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There's no "pie" to slice from, unless that pie dynamically shrinks and grows (it's not a zero-sum-game.) If you're a regular slashdot reader, I'm sure your familiar with the concept that a pirated song isn't a lost sale. If somebody didn't want to spend the money to buy it anyways, they still wouldn't have bought it. When you lower the price, you increase demand. In the case of a song, free is a pretty low price. As an anecdote, I recall one time a soda machine was misconfigured to sell sodas for 5 cents, and when people in my class found out, they all went to buy a soda where they wouldn't have otherwise. Anyways, if you accept that principle, then lets carry it over to physical luxury goods (which are what these factories produce, such as iphones.)
These same rules apply to labor, and likewise, decreasing the supply of labor doesn't (typically) result in higher wages when it comes to luxury goods, rather it most often results in lower supply, therefore higher prices, and therefore less demand (remember, people who already didn't want to pay the cheaper price still wouldn't have bought it anyways, and now even fewer people will buy it.) Overall, your revenue declines, and you still have the same number of employees, so you can't raise their wages even if you wanted to (and remember, you have lower demand, so your demand for more workers is also reduced.)
Often times even in short supply, the price won't go up. A real-world example of that is when e.g. the iphone, or the nexus 4 as a more recent example, although there isn't enough supply, they don't raise the prices because the demand will fall (that and it spells bad PR for the company.) And remember, these are Chinese made, so taking the kids out of the workforce again doesn't help wages any.
Now increasing the supply of labor does lower the prices for necessities that people are willing to buy with almost no concern of the price, like petroleum, but China doesn't deal in many of those goods. And if they did raise the price that much, they wouldn't hold their position very long. The reason why is because China holds their position entirely due to how cheap they can make stuff, and if they couldn't make stuff as cheaply, then other countries would compete (and readily so due to the west's general distrust of Chinese goods.) So in any case, you still don't increase the wages.
To add to that, in rural China there isn't much in the way of education.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Companies paying a living wage, here and in China.
That's what Apple is doing already.
Apple is the ONLY company to give workers in China bonuses, and to make sure they don't work too much overtime. Workers in China are making less here, yet they are providing not just for themselves but for whole families.
Just how ignorant do you have to be to not understand that a living wage can differ drastically between countries?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Limits on working hours are another means of reducing the labor supply that has achieved broad adoption and popularity.
At initial glance you'd think something like that increases wages and reduces unemployment, but in practice it does neither, and in fact results in the opposite in all cases of implementation. It's pretty easy to see why when you consider a few things:
As I explained in another post, the economy, and even resources in general, aren't a zero-sum-game. There is no "pie". By artificially decreasing the supply in labor, you're also decreasing the supply of goods produced. For necessity goods, this generally results in higher prices and therefore lower demand. In the end, the supplier will probably see the same revenue as they did before, only now there are fewer goods produced. But that's just for that one closed system; it also impacts the economy in other ways.
Due to lower availability of necessity goods, say capital goods like construction equipment, the construction companies will now find that it is harder to get contracts due to higher prices that fewer people can afford. This means that they have to lay off employees. Now that we have increased unemployment, we also have reduced consumer spending, which eventually ripples back around to the original company that made the construction equipment.
Now you might say that since these people work less, surely other people will take over where they stopped working. It doesn't work out that way in practice. I'm sure you've run across your fair share of people who either simply don't want to work, or just downright do their job half-assed. What you're doing is pushing these people into jobs that they otherwise wouldn't take, and likewise your production doesn't increase in the same way it would if the other workers could simply work as many hours as they wanted to.
This is why, for example, after France instituted the 35 hours a week limit, their GDP saw a decline and their unemployment rate increased. It absolutely did not result in what they had planned on.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
From TFA
âoeWhen new violations are found, Apple requires its suppliers to return the workers back to a school chosen by the family and finance their education. "In addition, the children must continue to receive income matching what they received when they were employed. We also follow up regularly to ensure that the children remain in school and that the suppliers continue to uphold their financial commitment," wrote Apple in its latest report.â
Sorry to rain facts on your parade.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Months ago, when talking about underage workers was all the rage, people were decrying Apple for profiting from child labor. Now that Apple is taking a strong stance against it, they're causing the children to suffer. Right, that's not biased.
Apple gets a lot of flak for 'letting it happen', but Apple is the only company I know of that is actively trying to do something about it.
If this is happening to Apple, you KNOW it's happening to everyone else. And I have yet to hear a single report of Samsung doing a similar thing to what Apple is doing now.
OK, let me spell out exactly what I meant since everyone missed the point.
No matter what Apple does they are going to be criticized here.
Was it really that difficult?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Or it discourages them from employing underage workers.
Hooray, instead of working they now can live on the street and starve to death.
Gotta love Slashdot. Its hatred is for Apple runs so deep, there are many here who would rather children be forced into labor than admit that Apple does something non-evil, or even (dare one say it!) something *good*.
However, the GP's metric of "prosperity" is not solely dependent on increasing wages and reducing unemployment, and the popularity of limits on working hours isn't necessarily because of a belief it will promote the latter two metrics. Other factors apply, particularly health, safety, quality of service and quality of living. There are numerous professions where sleep deprivation due to long work hours is an immediate hazard to life and limb of themselves and/or others, and other assorted professions where long work hours can have long-term health consequences.
Or to nutshell it: the popularity of making sure your neurosurgeon is properly rested has nothing to do with their wages. :)
They're not looking harder for illegal labor practices now because it is the right thing to do, they're doing it to cover their own asses because other people caught them using contractors who break every rule imaginable.
Even though every other tech company also uses those same Asian contractors. What computer did you use to post? For sure it was made using those same contractors.
Apple's the company doing the most to get the child labour problem fixed. But because you hate Apple (going back to the 80s), rationality no longer plays a part in this for you. You still believe Apple is the problem. You are a hypocrite.
Did they fire the company when they caught them with only 6 child laborers? THAT would have been doing something non-evil.
In other words, whatever they do, you just define "evil" as that. Got it.
They're not looking harder for illegal labor practices now because it is the right thing to do, they're doing it to cover their own asses because other people caught them using contractors who break every rule imaginable.
Blah, blah. They are go far above and beyond what anyone else does to try to do the right thing, but to you it's them breaking "every rule imaginable" (really? I can imagine quite a number of rules they aren't breaking. Perhaps your imagination only works in one direction?).
And dislike for Apple predates Slashdot for a lot of us. Chronically malfunctioning Apple II floppy drives were enough to turn me against his highness Jobs back in the 80's.
By "a lot of us", you mean "almost none of us". Of course that's neither here nor there. The fact remains there are plenty of you that hate Apple and don't really care much about the facts when they get in the way of that hatred. It's quite sad, really. Apple's just a company. Better than most, but not perfect either.
The odd thing is you are confusing opinion with evil. They do things you probably don't prefer, but others do. Stylistically and practically. But instead of just realizing, "hey, I don't like X" (walled gardens, slimmer products, non-removable batteries, whatever it is you dislike), you think, "oh, they are evil!"
Then, when they do something good, like this, you need to find a way to twist it into something bad. It's truly laughable. Your example for why you *HATE* Apple? Because a floppy drive failed on you? My god man, you are truly odd.
Did they fire the company when they caught them with only 6 child laborers? THAT would have been doing something non-evil. They're not looking harder for illegal labor practices now because it is the right thing to do, they're doing it to cover their own asses because other people caught them using contractors who break every rule imaginable.
You could have read the article. It happens quite often that someone under the age of 16 tries to get a job by forging papers showing their age (whether it's the child, or the parents, or some agency being the driving force), and Apple educates companies how to spot this and avoid hiring anyone under 16. Mistakes happen. Apple conducted a few hundred audits and found about 30 underage employees at 10 companies, plus another 74 at _one_ company. _All_ the kids were sent back to school, with the companies paying plus paying them income as you may have read. For 10 companies where it can be assumed that the hiring was due to mistakes at the company, there is more training to improve things. At the one company Apple found there were no mistakes made, but the hiring was intentionally. So their contract was cancelled.