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Apple Inc’s decision to suspend new business with a key supplier highlights just how hard it is for the world’s biggest tech company to find partners that are both reliable and do the right thing by their workers. The problem may be of its own making.
Pegatron Corp won’t get any new contracts after the Taipei-based company was found to have committed labour violations related to its student workers’ program at factories in China. According to Apple, some were misclassified and allowed to do night shifts and overtime, in contravention of the Cupertino-based company’s rules, Bloomberg News reported.
Its statement is telling: We have a rigorous review and approval process for any student worker program, which ensures the intern’s work is related to their major and prohibits overtime or night shifts. The term student worker program should ring immediate alarm bells for anyone who cares about labour rights. Getting college or vocational students to work factory production lines is an accepted practice in China that foreign clients including Apple and Samsung Electronics Co have signed onto for years.
Apple at least asks its manufacturing partners to ensure that the work relates to their studies. Under the pressure to churn out product, though, such programs are vulnerable to abuse.
Pegatron said it fired the manager responsible, whom it said “went to extraordinary lengths to evade our oversight mechanisms.†Still, we need to question what conditions incentivised employees to work so hard to not only break Apple’s labor code, but also make such efforts to cover their tracks.
This isn’t the first time Pegatron has appeared in print alongside allegations of labor violations. As far back as 2014, China Labor Watch named the company, alongside Catcher Technology Co, Jabil Inc and Foxconn Technology Group, for failing to undertake corrective action related to labor and safety standards. Apple attracts the most criticism in the technology industry over labour and environmental standards. This partly reflects ever stricter rules that the company has imposed on its supply-chain partners, the results of which Apple publicises in its annual Supplier
Responsibility Progress Report.
Critics may argue that this is a marketing exercise designed to make consumers feel more comfortable about buying shiny gadgets produced by cheap labour — which helped to yield $57 billion of profit for Apple last year. Yet incidents like this show that for all its talent and money, the US company doesn’t control its suppliers as much as it might wish. For example, it continues to find workers who were forced to pay recruitment fees to get a job — a contravention of its standards. Apple repaid $1.3 million to 462 partner employees last year, according to its supplier report.
—Bloomberg