miriam_e | Apple -- bad employers

Crossposts: http://miriam-e.livejournal.com/289640.html

Apple -- bad employers

Do you use Apple products or are considering buying one of their pretty-looking machines? What you don't see is the ugliness beneath. For a couple of years workers at Apple factories in China have been trying to get Apple to end their awful work practices. Recently an online petition was launched to get Apple customers to pressure the company to become responsible corporate citizens.

In January Apple announced a record-breaking 44.1% profit for last quarter and are sitting on $100 billion in cash. But the success of Apple comes at a terrible cost - shocking details have emerged about the conditions under which iPhones and iPads are manufactured, with a rising count of employees dying from suicide, exhaustion and explosions.

Please read further about that and sign the petition here:
http://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/workers-rights/apple/sign-the-petition

Now some courageous people who worked at a factory manufacturing iPhone touch-screens and who ended up with permanent nerve damage from the toxic chemicals have written a letter imploring people to pressure Apple to fix this. Here is the letter translated from Chinese:

You don't know us but you have seen our work. Until recently, we worked long hours assembling Apple’s iPhone touch screens in Suzhou, China.

In early 2010, it was independently confirmed that 137 workers, including us, were poisoned by a chemical called n-hexane which was used to clean iPhone screens. N-hexane is known to cause eye, skin and respiratory tract irritation, and leads to persistant nerve damage. Apple admitted to gross labour rights violations more than a year later.

If more people know about what we went through, Apple will feel pressured to change so other workers don’t have to suffer like we did.

Can you share this letter with your friends, and ask them to join you in signing our petition calling for a reform of working conditions at their factories?

We have been pressuring Apple, and its new CEO Tim Cook, for years to compensate those of us who were injured working for them, and demanding reform of working conditions at their Chinese factories so that their workers don’t suffer like we do. Now we need your help as customers or potential customers of Apple.

You’ve already signed the petition, and 125,000 others have too -- for that, we thank you. Now we need to get the word out that the problem isn't fixed. Apple still has a lot of work to do to address our collective concerns.

It has been over two years since many of us were hospitalized and treated but our debilitating symptoms continue. Rui-Qiang still can't find work because he can no longer stand for the long hours most jobs require. Jing-Chuan has to spend nearly $100 a month on health supplements.

But with all of us working together to pressure Apple to change, we can make sure what happened to us doesn’t happen to others too.

- Guo Rui-qiang and Jia Jing-chuan

You can easily share this message with others using this page:
http://sumofus.org/share/apple-message-share/

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http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/

And, if you want to get down on electronics manufacturers for treating factory workers badly, Foxconn and their client Apple are a very long way down the list of offenders, especially as Apple really do take the ethics of their supply chain quite seriously. You can start with pretty much every other phone and computer manufacturer, and branch out into other electronics suppliers before you get to Apple.

Also, the suicide thing, seriously, it's FUD. The suicide rate at Foxconn is less than for other factory workers in China, and incidentally, that's less than the normal rate in some cities in the US. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/media-gets-its-facts-wrong-working-at-foxconn-significantly-cuts-suicide-risk/1356

It's a lovely meme, having a go at Apple. Unfortunately the vast majority of the having a go has very little actual fact around it.

Edited 2012-02-27 06:32 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer. It made me think more carefully about this.

The article you pointed to has a few problems though. One is that it considers only the elderly to be at great risk of suicide. I would have thought potential suicides would fall into 3 main groups

the elderly (as mentioned in the article)
those who are unemployed.
those seriously ill

The first and second would not be at those plants, and the third would be unlikely to be. This makes me think the suicide rate for healthy, young, employed people really is unnaturally high at Foxconn.

Another flaw with the article is that it ignores the other problems with Foxconn. Regardless of the suicide rate, poisoning your workers and getting them injured through unsafe working conditions (including explosions due to lack of ventilation) is not a good thing.

About a year ago Apple admitted to human rights violations. That is a step in the right direction, but they need to do better. The only way they will is if they see the risk of sales walking away to other companies. I am sure that you're right that manufacturers for Apple are not the only bad eggs here (though "others do it too" is not a good defense for Apple). However, unlike many of the other brands, we have some potential effect on things through Apple because they place such a high value on their image.

Almost a million people are employed at Foxconn. If Apple tells them to jump then they will. That will have a great impact on working conditions because once one company fixes things, then the others are more likely to follow suit. For that reason alone I believe this effort is worthwhile.

Edited 2012-02-28 23:06 (UTC)

The thing about harassing Apple on this issue is that it's like beating on a donkey that's already carrying your baggage in the direction you want about as fast as it can go.

The very reason you know about those industrial incidents is that Apple take the supplier responsibility chain very seriously.

This effort is wasted on Apple - they're already doing everything we could want to exert change in the right direction.

It's other companies that don't take it seriously that need the pressure.

Apple are making moves, though certainly not as fast as they could. The latest petition is for workers who have been trying to get their complaints heard for more than a year. Many people are still in a bad way. I've read that a typical employee might rise before dawn in a massive dormitory, and work in silence for more than 12 hours a day, six days a week with forced overtime.

Extending your simile, I think Apple is more like a talking donkey that says it is going where you want it to, when it is actually heading at an angle to the intended destination. When you scold it, it does edge closer, though reluctantly. If it could get away without you noticing then it likely would.

I expect you're probably right that other companies are worse, but other than getting Apple to move things in the right direction I don't really know how to affect them. Apple has invested so much in their image they are susceptible to being pushed to do better. Other companies don't seem to care so much about their image so the only way I can see to change them is by altering workplace expectations... and that can be done by Apple.

And how do those conditions compare to the usual working conditions in China? And how real is that report?

And what do you expect Apple to do, exactly, that they are not doing?
Their CEO (who used to be their COO and incidentally in direct charge of all this, including working in China) has publically stated that they don't approve of unfair work practices. They've also signed on with the Fair Labor Association who conduct external labor audits for a whole bunch of people. Incidentally, the FLA gives Foxconn a clean ticket.

That's not to say there aren't problems and no doubt some terrible industrial accidents. But those happen everywhere there's factories, including right here in Australia. The question is whether health and safety is being prioritised or ignored, and it's fairly clear that Apple are not ignoring the problem at any level.

Apple is the most transparent electronics company about this out there - you can get all the gory details from their own website, which I linked to already.

A petition to other electronics makers to sign up with the FLA and to be jut a transparent would be of far more use.

Whilst people keeping wasting their time beating on Apple for doing the right thing and reporting every incident publically, every other company is just sweeping the whole thing behind closed doors.

I've spent a few hours reading the Apple supplier responsibility pages you pointed me to. Thank you for that. It does make for very interesting reading. It certainly is refreshing to see a big company taking positive step like that.

I agree we need to find a way to make other manufacturers be responsible too. Unfortunately, unless they value a clean image like Apple does, petitions are not likely to have much effect on them.

I don't think it is a waste of time to keep the heat on Apple. They get a chance to prove to people that they are fixing things, and it leads the way to improving the lot for all workers there. Heavens! Ensuring good conditions there will help move some industries back here if they can no longer exploit defenseless workers there. We all win. :)

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Products/DB1170E48B2B7A98CA25788400127CCC?opendocument

We're at 10 per 100,000 (ignoring gender) in Australia.

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Products/226CA96C59DB14D0CA25788400127CDA?opendocument

Shows not that much change across age, with a small bell curve centred around 40, dipping around 65, then spiking at 85+ for men.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Foxconn_suicides

The foxconn suicide rate at its worst when it was reported on in 2010 is 3.11 per 100,000... that's lower than Australia, and it's lower than the Australian women-only suicide rate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_suicide
"Suicide levels are highest among the retired, unemployed, impoverished, divorced, the childless, urbanites, empty nesters, and other people who live alone."
Thus we would expect the suicide rate for those working at Foxconn to be lower than that in wider Chinese society.

As an aside, Australia has a scandalously high male suicide rate, especially among teen males, however I was surprised to find that we are not as bad as I thought when compared to the rest of the world in gross figures, being 46th in the top 100... though it is still horrible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate

Worldwide, males are more likely to suicide than females... except in China -- the only country where this ratio is reversed. Weird.

The suicide rate at Foxconn is lower than wider Chinese society, as you'd expect, lower by a factor of about 7 at the worst time of reporting. It's also lower than the suicide rate of females of all ages in Australia. It's not indicative of anything useful whatsoever, or if it's indicative of anything, it's that people are obviously mostly pretty happy to be working for Foxconn, rather than in some other even worse factory.

Yes. Comparing with Australian figures is not useful. The problem is you are not comparing like with like.

Reading accounts of what it is like inside Foxconn is downright depressing. The worst thing is that it is in many ways better than other factories.

We humans are so damn horrible to each other.

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