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Apple Investigates Claim That Illegal Student Labor Was Used To Assemble Apple Watch (bgr.com)
Apple is currently investigating a report that Apple Watch supplier Quanta Computer relied upon illegally employed students to help manufacture the company's exceedingly popular wearable. "Originally brought to light by The Financial Times, the report details how dozens of students were ostensibly working as interns, but in reality were working assembly line shifts, often throughout the night. Some students even reported working six days a week in 12-hour shifts," reports BGR. From the report: The allegations stem from a report put together by SACOM, a workers rights group based out of Hong Kong. In compiling its report, SACOM notes that it interviewed upwards of 28 students. The FT report reads in part: "The alleged abuses echo the labour violations uncovered last year in Apple's iPhone supply chain at its Foxconn Zhengzhou factory, where both Apple and Foxconn acknowledged that student interns had illegally worked overtime. The two companies said at the time that they would end the practice of student interns working extra hours." In a statement on the matter, Apple said that it is "urgently" looking into the aforementioned claims and that they have a "zero tolerance" policy for companies who try to skirt around Apple's workplace guidelines.
shut up.
I was an intern and made time-and-a-half overtime and double time on holidays. really helped with the college bills.
properly paid internship is a blessing.
Using interns for your main assembly labor force can be wrong, but for engineering students, assembling for a few weeks or so can be HIGHLY instructional. Exposing students to production processes, manufacturing tolerances, and QC and such is a great way to get them to think, truly, about design-for-manufacturing as a core belief rather than a check-box as the end of a design. I know more than a few factories in the US that require their engineers reach at least "B" level performance at each production stage before being allowed to start designing gear for this very reason. If you are not intimately familiar with the assembly process and procedures of your factory, you're going to have a hard time designing something that can be reliably and consistently built in any kind of quantities.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Actually, Apple is the leading watch brand by value. Rolex make and largely sell approx 800k-1m expensive watches per year (based on the number of chronometer certifications they receive). The Apple watch is obviously a lot less expensive, and they will this year sell something like 20 million pieces (depending on the market analysts between 15m and 25m) which is frankly quite impressive.