Remembering Steve Jobs’ record on workers’ rights

Mike Elk, In These Times:

The labor practices in most of those countries manufacturing Apple products would shock most liberal appraisers of Jobs' legacy. Apple has continued to use a Chinese contractor, Foxconn, to produce its iPads and iPhones, despite allegations of the company's horrific workers’ rights abuses. Foxconn routinely forces it workers to work two to three times the legal Chinese limit and to work in brutal and often unsafe conditions that have led to many accidents, as Michelle Chen reported for Working In These Times. These working conditions led to 10 Foxconn worker suicides at the company's Shenzhen facility in 2010 alone.

The suicide problem at Foxconn’s Chinese factories became so bad that the company put up steel wire to prevent workers from jumping and killing themselves. In June 2010, the same month that Jobs unveiled a new version of the wildly successful iPhone, the UK's Daily Mail newspaper published a disturbing undercover report on conditions within Foxconn's massive factory complex in Shenzhen.

Instead of cancelling its contract with Foxconn and moving production back to the United States, Apple hired a team of suicide prevention specialists to make recommendations including “better training for hotline staff and care center counselors and better monitoring to ensure effectiveness.”

Apple routinely uses factories overseas that have track records of violating workers’ rights, but rarely cancels contracts with those factories and moves production back home. According to Apple’s own “Supplier Responsibility” internal review released in February, less than one third of all Apple factories obeyed Apple rules about not forcing factory workers to work more than 60 hours a week. According to its own internal review, only 57 percent of its factories complied with the Apple’s policies on occupational injury prevention. The review found that 95 factories did not do regular safety inspections and 54 failed to give their workers adequate safety equipment.

Apple could have moved work back home under its own direct supervision to guarantee acceptable working conditions—or at least acknowledge that an overseas supply chain network of contractors inherently depends on cheap exploitable labor and lacks meaningful oversight. Instead, Apple’s response to the systematic violations of workers’ rights throughout its supply chain was to cancel contracts with only two factories.

Continue reading here.