News: Report accuses Apple of condoning labour abuses at Foxconn

A disturbing exposé by the New York Times released this week alleges that the labour issues that have plagued one of Apple’s largest suppliers, Foxconn in Chengdu, China has been effectively condoned by the company for the past four years.

According to the New York Times, an anonymous Apple executive is quoted as saying: "We’ve known about labour abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on. Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

The alarming report elaborates that workers are subjected to onerous working conditions, including having to work for extremely long periods, such as twelve hours a day seven days a week, while being subjected to overcrowded living conditions.

However, safety issues were particularly highlighted after three people were killed and more than a dozen injured after an explosion occurred in Building A5 in May last year. The cause of the blast, according to the Wall Street Journal, may have been combustible dust in the polishing workshop.

Sadly this tragedy occurred despite a warning by a group called the Students and Scholars against Corporate Mismanagement (SACOM), which produced a detailed report of life in the Foxconn plant after a series of suicides by Foxconn employees.

That same report, entitled Foxconn and Apple Fail to Fulfill Promises: Predicaments of Workers after the Suicides also accused Foxconn and Apple of failing to keep promises previously made with regards to recruitment, wages, work hours, health and safety, and providing a means of addressing their grievances.

The report, which was issued on the 6^th of May, cited that workers were concerned that they “were not sufficiently informed about the chemicals in use”. Exactly two weeks later, the explosion in Building A5 still occurred.

Earlier this month, Foxconn made the news again, after it came to light that some 300 Foxconn employees, at a factory responsible for assembling Xbox 360s, were threatening to commit mass suicide after a compensation agreement was not honoured.

Apple’s comment however, has been the assertion that it has made “significant strides in improving factories in recent years” while a supplier code of conduct is in place to address labour and safety issues in its suppliers.

Even so, the New York Times notes that “Foxconn is one of the few manufacturers in the world with the scale to build sufficient numbers of iPhones and iPads.”

It also quotes Heather White, a research fellow at Harvard and a former member of the Monitoring International Labor Standards committee at the National Academy of Sciences, as stating that Apple was not likely to abandon Foxconn or China.

It leaves us cold to think what the real, human cost of a new iDevice may be if the allegations are true, and if Foxconn’s manufacturing is exacting a far higher price – human life – than any device would ever dare command.

In recent news, Apple released its Q1 annual results, posting a record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion as well as a record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion.

Report accuses Apple of condoning labour abuses at Foxconn

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