Apple is back under the spotlight over labor conditions in its supply chain following an explosive report from The Information on Thursday that revealed new details about the company’s reluctance to cut ties with suppliers who violate its ethics policies.
According to the report, Apple learned in 2013 that Suyin Electronics, a China-based company that (at the time) made parts for its MacBooks, was employing underage workers, and despite telling Suyin to address the issue or risk losing business, Apple discovered additional workers as young as 14 years old during an audit just three months later.
But rather than immediately cutting ties with Suyin for violating its supply chain ethics policies — which prohibit child labor and which Apple claims are the “highest standards” — Apple continued to rely on the company for more than three years, according to The Information.
Any company – and their executives – knowingly and willingly using child labour, slave labour, or forced labour anywhere in the world should be tried as if they are committing these heinous acts in their home countries. The body of evidence that Apple is fully aware of its extensive use of child labour and forced labour in e.g. China’s Uighur concentration camps is extensive, and the fact Tim Cook can get away with this without ever having to face the consequences is disgusting. Tim Cook’s fellow Americans get life sentences for less.
Of course, Apple is far from the only company guilty of this – just look at Nestle or Nike, for instance – but being the largest company in the world with the biggest, most arrogant mouth about how “ethical” they are should be the first to end up in court.
It’s easy to judge from the outside.
Let’s assume that some critical component for cellphone manufacturing (say lithium cells or a certain chemical needed to manufacture the Gorilla Glass displays) is only made in China (which is true btw), and somewhere along the opaque production process, there is some child labor or some horrible environmental crimes involved. China refuses to budge and put an end to the practice in order to keep its low-cost electronics products cheap and competitive. What happens then?
China has been on the receiving end of this in the past, having being forced to join the WIPO and pass laws giving copyrights many decades of protection in order to secure the flow of chips and software which back then were manufactured in the West. Now it’s the West’s turn to be on the receiving end by having to accept labor and environmental practices the West considers abhorrent.
Again, what would you do Thom, if the Chinese component was critical?
It’s a similar thing with electronics assembly. There are just a couple of factories that can assemble something like an iPhone, all of them in China, and if you were to take a deep look in the production process of all of these factories, I guarantee you’ll find some things you won’t like at all. Apple is just playing a game where they switch between suppliers every couple of years in order to give their hipster demographic the impression that the new partner is better than the last.
kurkosdr,
You are right, china has become unavoidable, especially now days. But it doesn’t completely absolve western companies from the guilt of being the enabler. China wasn’t built in a year or even a decade. We are the ones who slashed western manufacturing capacity over several decades and sent mass production to manufacturers with these poor labor standards. As you say, “it’s easy to judge…” but we don’t have the right to be shocked, not even for a moment! It’s more a case of “we want our partners to do the right thing…(keep those costs low *wink*)”.
I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest Thom would be a hypocrite if he were in charge… he could well hold the company to higher ethical standards. Yet at the same time he’d be unlikely to ever get the opportunity because wallstreet’s primary criteria for executives are those who maximize profits at any cost. It’s rare that corporations are genuinely progressive, they’re typically more interested in propping the image of progressiveness for marketing purposes. Meanwhile they neglect meaningful steps to improve conditions.
Consumers are also to blame because by far and large we don’t show a preference for companies with better labor practices when we vote with our wallets. Ironically even when we show a willingness to pay a premium for high end brands, we still don’t show much preference for working conditions, we’re practically blind to it. As a result corporations that don’t partake in mass offshoring face a serious competitive disadvantage. In the long run I don’t think what people say matters in the least, only their actions. If we keep buying products procured through cheap/abusive labor practices (and history suggests that we will), then there is every reason to believe these practices will continue indefinitely.
China has become inevitable only because regulations in the west allow companies to exploit child labor abroad and get away with it (while happily reaping the profits). Close that loophole and either China gets rid of child labor or it won’t be critical anymore.
And it would cause a shortage of lithium cells bigger than the shortage of crude oil in the 1970s. Remember the West needs all those Lithium cells (which are actually rare-earth cells) for their electric vehicles in order to reduce dependence on Middle Eastern crude oil. Priorities.
Good point but we can have a reduction of child labour and coming off oil and institituting more egalitarian regimes inetrnationally all at the same time. These improvements can work in parallel.
There was something I watched somewhat recently that basically said the reason why everything is now made in China is becauae it happens to be where a huge amount of rare minerals is found. If it weren’t for that, the world would most likely be dealing with other countries. Kind of nuts to think about, but if we could start .ining the same from Asteroids or the moon, things may change.
“Remember the West needs all those Lithium cells (which are actually rare-earth cells)”
Most of the rare earth minerals and Lithium come from Australia. If some international company wants to invest in Australia and build some factories then you would not have this problem.
Even if we assume it isn’t a monopolistic case like that and ignore the profit-driven aspects, companies cannot realistically change suppliers overnight. They need to find a new supplier, get samples of the item from them, verify that they meet the requirements (potentially going back and forth with the prospective supplier multiple times to get things just right), and then actually test the new components in actual otherwise production equivalent systems. This process can very easily take multiple years to complete even for very big companies with lots of spending power.
And that’s still ignoring other potential mitigating factors (maybe Apple had a long-term contract with this supplier and they judged legal implications of early termination of that contract would be worse than just letting it run to completion and not renewing it).
ahferroin7,
Obviously you are right that you can’t change suppliers quickly, but I don’t feel we should give corporations this excuse because they’ve allowed it for decades. While specific instances of worker exploitation may be new, we must recognize the long term systemic nature of the problem. Our corporations have allowed this to happen in the name of their profits. As usual, they conveniently externalize blame and sweep their involvement under the rug, but in the meantime will they use the trillion dollar fortunes they built in part off the backs of these poor workers to improve future working conditions? Or are they going to continue to profit from this cheap source of labor while neglecting responsibility?
http://www.theverge.com/2018/1/16/16897648/apple-catcher-technology-suqian-jiangsu-worker-human-rights-labor-conditions
http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-chastised-for-unsafe-working-conditions-in-supplier-factory/
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30532463
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract
http://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/chinese-factory-employees-forced-to-work-in-noisy-and-toxic-conditions/news-story/df59507cb85a7db286076c76aa7a88d5
Of course it’s easy for our multinational corporations to distance themselves from worker welfare with outsourcing contracts and then claim it’s not their fault and not their problem. But these MNCs are so cutthroat that the only way to win a bid is by depriving workers of higher standards of living. They won’t openly admit it, but the truth is that this is exactly why these corporations are in china. Poor labor conditions isn’t an unfortunate side effect of offshoring, sadly it is the unspoken goal of offshoring in order to increase corporate profits back home. And to top it all off, they funnel money through countries where they don’t conduct real business to avoid paying their share of taxes.
https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/apples-double-dutch-irish-sandwich-with-a-side-of-tax-avoidance,9434
Our corporations are a big cause of world suffering. It’s mostly legal, but still disppointing to see (at least for me).
Well, people will be horrified to buy something made by child labor, but then they’ll go buy something from a family farm and think nothing of it.
They’ve never been poor. They don’t consider that maybe the child labor is what keeps the whole family from starving. Yeah, I’d like everyone to make a living wage and I’d like children to go to school instead of working. But, everything in the world is not so nice and rosy all the time. I was lucky to grow up lower middle to middle class in America. My wife… well she grew up in Mexico with no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no phone, and going to a well to get water.
moronikos,
Yeah that’s a good point. I worked when I was ~15 after school and for summers, I wasn’t even old enough to drive. And far from being something I found shameful I was actually proud of that at the time.
To be absolutely clear, I’m not going to pretend I faced brutal labor conditions or anything of that sort, far from it so I don’t want anybody to accuse me of equating my work experience to real sweat shops. But you are right “child labor, therefor bad” may not be the whole story. Is the company using child workers while depriving them the opportunity to go to school? Is it an after school job? We don’t know any specifics in this case in large part because the article completely glosses over these details. Hypothetically if these were children like me going to work after school for a little cash and experience then I’d be hard pressed (and a hypocrite) to forcefully condemn it when I personally benefited from my early working experience. Honestly I was not paid well, but I did gain experience and got exposure to technology that I never would have otherwise. And it probably kept me out of trouble 🙂 So you make a good point, it is a blurry line. Morally there is a world of difference between systemic exploitation of children in sweat shops versus offering early work experience and the article comes up short on factual details.
Yes, this is a hard topic to discuss.
On one hand, we would want everyone to just start their lives at the comfort of modern countries.
On the other hand, the alternative for these kids is probably working in the fields, or just peddling on the streets. There is unfortunately no easy way to skip multiple steps in economic development.
It’s a complex issue with varying studies and anecdotes. Child labor is bad, but what is the alternative if the child is not working?
I think it was in Bangladesh where they first ran into this. There was a huge push against child labor especially in textiles. The result was that a lot of these kinds ended up in child prostitution.
It’s not like these parents are sending their kids to work in factories for the fun of it. Even if you’re an absolutely selfish and exploitative parents, you’d still want your kid to get an education and be a doctor so you could exploit them even more 🙂
Personally, having grown up in the developing world, I’d suggest a much better solution is to work with factories and include education programs. Like, Apple working with a factor to include educational programs for a few hours after work.
And if I might be so political, the original sin in this whole debacle was Western countries deciding to abandon the rule of law as they often did within their own borders. My favorite example is the United States. As minimum wage laws started to come about, different US states adopted different minimum wages; some even didn’t want any minimum wage. This naturally led to tension. If New York had a minimum wage, while Georgia did not. It didn’t take a genius to see where labor and jobs would flow.
So what did they do? Something downright obvious and legal. They had the Commerce Clause that governed inter-state trade and established a federal minimum wage. Theoretically Georgia could still have no minimum wage if the activity stayed within it’s own border. But if it produced goods and services that would cross state lines, it would have to obey the federal minimum wage.
The question I have is what happened to the obvious common sense of this wisdom as the USA started signing trade deals with other countries? If the USA signed a trade deal with a much poorer country, why would that country not have to obey some minimum wage of some kind; at least for those good destined for export?
It looks to me like in the interest of cheap goods and pushing globalization, these common sense laws were thrown away. The foreign minimum wage didn’t need to be exactly the US federal minimum wage. It could have been a bit less to promote trade and let the other country develop, but you wouldn’t end up with massive gaps where it’s all but impossible for domestic workers to compete.
But wouldn’t requiring trade partners subscribe the US level wages cause the exact same issue?
The “neutral” state of a human is not somebody who brings in at least a minimum wage.
The “neutral” state in nature is you are good hunter / gatherer, or you die.
This will become more apparent in the near future where more jobs are taken over not by foreigners, children, or slaves, but machines.
Then there would be a huge population of people not producing at the level of those machines (real machines, or AI, whatever). Then no amount of political pandering or minimum wage requirement will fix that.
You are right about education, though. Let those kids, or even the people in US, enter the job force at low wages, but have them quickly ramp up their skills so that they can earn a better wage.
@sukru
Being dead is neutral if you want to use rocks as a baseline! Even “back in the day” hunter-gathers were more egalitarian. We have moved on a bit since then and built a civilisation. To a large degree poverty and famine are manufactured and dog eat dog survival creates more problems than it is worth. There is no law of nature saying a machine must displace a person so they immediately find themselves in a survival situation. Also laws and tarriffs and aid can level things up.
The EU treaties aren’t just about security or trade but also freedom of movement and social policy and human rights. Subsidiarity and regional development is a thing.
In all honesty the US is not the centre of my universe and I am fed up hearing about the place. Now the orange menace is out I hope the volume gets turned down a lot more.
As for the UK? Sigh…
@HollyB,
Thanks for the response. I like the discussions here, and hope you are not pestered by my responses.
I know US is not the center of the world, but the topic was on Apple, which happens to be a US company.
And we know “Orange Man Bad”. However he is out, and for all her shortcomings, US is still doing many things right. Compared to EU as a whole (which has similar size, population, and diversity) has better per-capita income, lower unemployment, lower poverty, but of course not everything is better. For example life expectancy is trending down.
Back to topic…
One thing US is terrible at doing is “bringing democracy” or prosperity to a nation that is not ready. That is why I mentioned the “natural” state of men. Yes we are no longer living in caves, but unfortunately some parts of the world are not much better.
Previous US interventions, like toppling dictators, flooding dictators with money, funding infrastructure projects, sending “aid”, etc, clearly do not work. They are actually counter-productive.
However, once again, as you mentioned too, education is key.
Another great option is improving natural economic development. So outsourcing, if done right, helps.
However if we request the US level of employee standards, then outsourcing will not happen in the first place.
Yes, we can ask higher standards. Slavery, forced labor, not having fire access, etc are terrible.
But that is a very difficult line to walk. It just needs to be right. I cannot assume we can find answers here, or actually anywhere, yet.
@sukru
Most of the technical issues of human rights and trade and development are known knowns and have been for some decades now. The big problem is headline politics and poor quality media getting in the way. That is being addressed to some degree so better late than never.
I find the whole topic boring as I have been following this kind of thing for years now. It’s interesting and I’m glad it’s happening. I’m just burned out with the topic and letting people with more energy have their say. Politically and socially it’s really a case of letting people discover it for themselves and add to the general shift in priorities. Young people are the leaders and managers and technical people of tomorrow and also the old people of tomorrow as it were.
Things are changing.
HollyB,
I’m not sure about that; “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. The power structures never really change. Sure this may seem contradictory with current events and the orange man’s political finale, but our bipartisan political structure hasn’t changed in any significant way. You need these two parties to appease the people and make them believe democracy is working, but honestly a political duopoly is only marginally better than a political monopoly.
Granted, the US is going to be much better with the authoritarian out of office, but realistically long term, Biden will bring about more of the same and I expect the middle class will continue to shrink. While Obama was a decent guy and I don’t subscribe to any of the ridiculous attacks on him, his administration had a revolving door with tech industry executives giving them more and more power they shouldn’t be entitled to under democracy. It’s an example of systemic corruption that plagues the government. Both parties are guilty of it. People who consider themselves independent like myself have had practically 0% representation in federal elections. Sure, independents can vote, but they’re stuck voting for other people’s candidates and not their own. There’s no way to vote against all corruption, we have to vote for this corruption or for that corruption. And although one may be much better than the other, it’s still a terrible compromise.
@Alfman
Yes I do know what you mean. In the UK there is certainly more and growing support however slight for a written constitution, PR, and getting rid of the monarchy or mothballing it off as ceremonial only for tourists. There are a lot of scientific and legal arguments and historical reasons for this. Opportunities were there but have been fumbled for short-term reasons which many who have covered the cynical aspects of the left-right ding dong have articulated. The EU isn’t perfect either but at least takes the law seriously and did serve as a backstop before the idiot Brexit came along.
I’ve got my own things to be getting on with and in all honesty I am tired. I’m not spending my time with my politicians who aren’t up to the job. The kids have the energy and a life ahead of them. I have decided I am technically retired so putting my energies into building a meangingful and happy life which may involved different places and people. I have interests and side gigs to keep me busy.
The UK is following a particularly nasty streak of evil at the moment.
No, it would not cause the same issue.
I’m Canadian. Consider US-Canada trade. Canada was for a long time the ‘cheap’ labor for the US. It’s a big part of how we built our huge auto sector. We were like 25-50% cheaper. It’s a lot but not impossible to compete. It was enough for many US companies to set up shop in Canada expanding free trade and globalization, but not so vast a gap that you’re looking at totally different labor standards.
It’s all a matter of degrees. If the US signed a trade deal with say China. They should have had some minimum level of labor standards. It will never be perfect, but it has to be in mind. Just think of the US commerce clause. The US federal minimum wage is not the same as the highest state minimum wage. Just expand that to the next layer up. The global minimum wage for inter-country commerce should be X. Even if the US itself has a high minimum wage.
I always emphasize this. But while you have to pay attention to long term trends, people still live in exist in the present. Throughout the 90s and 2000s, people kept saying that robotics and automation are the real threat. Don’t worry about cheap labor.
That’s 20-30 years now. That’s someone’s entire working life. Someone could get a job, raise a family, and retire in all the time they’ve been told robotics would take their field.
It’s just insane to talk about eventual automation when entire new fields have even been created (like smartphone manufacturing for example) that employ people in developing countries and probably will for their entire working life. Yet, all the while, we’ve told Western manufacturing workers don’t even consider those jobs as they’d be automated. I hope you see how ridiculous this looks to people at the level of society. Eventual automation is a long term goal. Meanwhile companies were moving factories to Mexico or China… building factories there and hiring workers there. They’re not losing their jobs to automation. They’re losing them to cheaper labor.
Yes, even if the automation happens in 20 years. Never lose sight of the reality that job could employ someone for their whole life… which is the life people are actually living right here and now.
Even in the US where we like to raise a fuss about exploiting children, it’s legal to employ minors. It may be distasteful, but it’s completely legal. In Oregon for instance, a child as young as 9 can potentially be employed to pick berries and beans for up to 10hrs a day/60 hrs a week with parental consent. If the farm is family owned, the family children can be “employed” at ANY age. Hello farming toddlers!
Also don’t forget in the US chain gangs are still a thing as is using prison labour to subsidise corporate profits or lighten the taxpayer load. Millions are without any form of healthcare and not insignificant numbers are homeless. I know plenty of US citizens are aware of and oppose these things so won’t tar everyone with the same brush. The US has a Tory problem as much as the UK does although, thankfully, UK establishment cruelty is a bit more low key and on the face of it more civilised.
Let’s make MADE IN [insert your country here] mean something again.
I think this is important for national wellbeing. Everyone needs their anchors as well as to protect strategic issues and culture and their own development. It doesn’t need to be nationalist at all as long as there is mutual respect and give and take.
I was working construction when I was 14. I don’t consider I was either a child or being exploited. “Child labor” invokes to me an 8 year old working, not a teenager. Words matters!
Scientology gets away with it, why not Apple?
This article in the Atlantic covers a few interesting points relevant to the topic. The biggest one is the big headed attitude of whoever wrote this article bigging up America and slamming Europe. Well, the writer is entitled to their opinion but I dismiss it as a nationalistic propaganda piece so am ignroing it. The other news in the article is that yes Europe is carving out its own position and inked a deal with China which attaches human rights and development to trade. The EU spends a lot of its time working on directives and trade deals and has got quite good at it now.
America has been caught with its pants down and its fingers in the till and left embarassed they are behind the EU on human rights and trade. In other news covered elsewhere post American presidential election John Kerry is getting quite big headed and slagging off Europe too and in his own arrogant way wanting to claim leadership on environment. Oh, really? Get back in your box!
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/01/joe-biden-europe/617753/
And survey says: NOTHING WILL BE DONE ABOUT IT. Money talks. Most of the sheeple will buy those shiny M1 Macs, iphone 12s, etc, with will further drive them deeper onto their recurring payment ecosystem. A;so businesses purchasing the Mac Pros for marketing and animation, thus embolding them to keep it up. On the flipside. if PR or law still matters to them, cutting ties to a major supplier is a logistics nightmare. You have to source a new supplier, or update another, secure that they can take the workload, create, or update contracts, and gradually integrate that workload before cutting ties with the former. So 3 years in this instance is pretty fast.
Calling people “sheeple” may give you a buzz but labels tend to obscure more than they reveal, and “in-group” memes don’t port very well to the audience you are intending to influence.
Historically a lot of these big companies got where they are by producing products which were attractive to technical experts or the public. Since then a lot of the structures and media which supported this have been dismantled and they are now relying on monopoly status and advertising. The audience you need to win over are the same technical people (and you’re pushing on an open door with this) and ordinary people. And ordinary people are just going to hear an insult even if the majority is amenable.
That said I agree three years is pretty fast for large organisations given the paperwork and other nonsense to be navigated. Government is the same. With that in mind it’s always useful once one change has got underway to work on the next to keep up momentum and expand the discussion landscape.