Apple Enforces "Supplier Code of Conduct" After Child Labor Discovery 249
reporter writes "Since 2006, Apple has regularly audited its manufacturing partners to ensure that they conform to Apple's Supplier Code of Conduct (ASCC), which essentially codifies Western ethical standards with regard to the environment, labor, business conduct, etc. Core violations of ASCC 'include abuse, underage employment, involuntary labor, falsification of audit materials, threats to worker safety, intimidation or retaliation against workers in the audit and serious threats to the environment. Apple said it requires facilities it has found to have a core violation to address the situation immediately and institute a system that insures compliance. Additionally, the facility is placed on probation and later re-audited.' Apple checks 102 facilities, most of which are located in Asia, and these facilities employ 133,000 workers. The most recent audit of Apple's partners revealed 17 violations of ASCC. The violations include hiring workers who were as young as 15 years of age, incorrectly disposing of hazardous waste, and falsifying records. In Apple's recently released Supplier Responsibility 2010 Progress Report (PDF), they condemned the violations and threatened to terminate their business with facilities that did not change their ways."
Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's amazing that the mainstream public can be this economically retarded, but it isn't very surprising given that their education is controlled by the government - the very entity that benefits from these sorts of regulations.
Individuals, including children, choose to work in "sweatshops" because that is better than other alternatives available to them: backbreaking subsistence agriculture, crime, prostitution, etc. Simply outlawing free market in labor will not make schools, hospitals, and personal wealth rain from the sky! Free market economies are able to go from child labor and sweatshops to banks and skyscrapers in just a couple of generations, while the "well-intentioned" socialist cesspools remain poor except for the handouts of others (often too through government force).
Wait a minute (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent poster ignores the Third World cronyism. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the countries that still have it as a problem also have a government-business relationship that is "too friendly". Those factories could willfully ignore law and kill their critics.
Just because it may be their only practical choice does not invalidate that it is a bad one. Rewarding those businesses for pursuing that government policy is not going to make it any better.
15 year olds in 3rd world countries NEED jobs (Score:2, Insightful)
Different cultures have different ages where they need to become self-sufficient, or become responsible to help out with the family income. This whole 18 or 21 year old "western" ideal of adulthood is destructive to our own development in many ways, and should not be forced onto other countries with drastically different ways that the people grow up.
Re:Make it in the Third World, what do you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is, does one expect them to actually follow the rules? No. The ASCC is a whitewash given that it has no real ability to exact meaningful punishments.
Those are about 133,000 jobs on the wrong side of the US and Western Europe - where they might actually respect the law for once.
Apple has threatened to terminate its business relationship with these companies. If the companies fail to satisfy Apple, and Apple makes good on its threat, I'd call that a meaningful punishment.
If Apple stop doing business with a company that won't ensure a safe working environment for its employees, will the root of the problem get fixed? No, of course not, not right away. Apple will switch to another company, and the first company will have one less (rather large) customer. But they'll be able to find other customers, perhaps who are less scrupulous, and the employees will still have unsafe working conditions.
Or maybe, they won't be able to find other customers. Or the other customers they find, will have similar policies in place. Maybe the owners of the company will realize that if they want to continue to attract Western business, they need to make some changes - not due to respect for their employees, but because they need to pass these inspections in order to keep their customers happy.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Got to love weasels (Score:3, Insightful)
"In general," Apple said in the report, "annual audits of final assembly manufacturers show continued performance improvements and better working conditions."
Or translated into English, "it used to be we didn't care, but now we have announced once a year inspections, we find that each time they get better at hiding violations from us".
I wonder what the Toyota scandal will do with all of this however. They are paying the price for random outsourcing to safe some bucks and it is costing them a fortune and decades of good will as the most reliable cheap car maker are shot to hell. (And yes I am aware that the problems occurred in the US, but that is a low wage country compared to Japan.)
When you outsource everything, what is left of your company? And once you put in place all those checks to make sure people half way across the world are working as you want them, how much have you actually saved?
Re:Wait a minute (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, I recall I was voluntarily working from as young as 13, and in fact I've worked basically every year since then. I just wanted to, it just seemed like the natural thing to do, as I've always loved making money. Gee, it never even occurred to me that I'd stumbled into being a 'victim' of child labor. I'm glad nobody "saved" me; the money I earned helped contribute to my cost of living while studying at university.
Bring back the jobs to the US! (Score:1, Insightful)
This is all nice of Apple, but why not giving 133,000 jobs to Americans that need them.
I am happy a 15 years old is not going to be exploited in China, but I would be happier seeing Apple being a true American corporate and not a hypocrite firm that outsources jobs overseas
Re:Age restrictions work against them (Score:3, Insightful)
And how many of those countries had a minimum employment age of at least 16 in order to avoid being accused of employing child labour by the West?
Re:Age restrictions work against them (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a violation of an employment law, but it's not an egregious child slavery operation. 15 year olds working when the minimum employment age is 16 is very different from putting 8 year olds in effective slavery in factories. I think that was the GP poster's point.
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:3, Insightful)
this isn't "child labor", it's teenage labor. if a 15 year old can earn some money, let him. in our culture we have 15 year old babies that can't do a thing for themselves, high school is doing nothing for them.
Re:Age restrictions work against them (Score:5, Insightful)
These conditions are enforced to maximise profit. When citizens of countries working under conditions like these seek redress there is an inevitable violent corporate sponsored government led retaliation against those seeking better conditions. If after extended period of revolution violence better conditions become available, corporation simply shift t the next country to exploit their population.
Trade should not occur upon a basis of exploitation, you are importing those working conditions along with those products, don't think so, then why are corporations and their political puppets continually saying that first world workforces has to compete, not once but over and over again. Are you ready to compete, no sick pay, no holiday pay, 50 cents an hour and, unsafe work conditions as normal practice including toxic chemicals.
It is disgusting to think anyone deems it appropriate to sponsor conditions on workers in other countries that they themselves would not accept. It reeks of greed and lies to assume that somehow poor people in other countries are born to work in poverty, they are bred to be mindless factory drones from birth, cheaper than robots.
Yet look around you, at your fellow migrants, people who escpaed from those conditions who managed to gain a better life, according to you, they couldn't possibly exist because they are happy to be factory slaves so why would they leave.
This is pretty callous, even for Slashdot. (Score:3, Insightful)
I love cracking jokes about children being forced to make our crap and defending sweatshop labour as much as the next guy, but some of the comments on this story have my stomach turning. If the choice is between having families out of work and having them work for little money, then fine; run the factories. But that is a very selective framing of this issue and is utterly uninformative. The developed world (not "the West", which is a meaningless term) and our corporations interact with the third world in an extremely complex way which the above scenario completely oversimplifies.
Between extremes of us taking advantage of cheap labour, and us setting the scene for that cheap labour to exist, we are far closer to the latter option. See the progress of the IMF and the World Bank for examples.
I know the rebuttal: Well, how would you feel about paying 10x as much for your electronics !11!!1 But even if costs would escalate that high - and they wouldn't because employing our own workers instead would have loads of offsetting, positive effects for our economies and increasing salaries for impoverished workers by a factor of 10 only increases total costs by a portion of that - I'm more comfortable with that than saying that some people's lives are essentially worthless because of where they're born. And I suspect that if consumers were forced to really consider how their dollars 'supported' poor economies, maybe if all stores had to show in-store videos of their factories chugging along, then paying a little more for a higher quality product and higher quality lives wouldn't seem so bad.
Re:Code of conduct? (Score:4, Insightful)
So Apple is to give a new code of conduct for it's suppliers, I too have a code of conduct, "Don't buy Apple products." I think mine trumps Apple's code of conduct, whatever their PR department says.
So you buy your computer hardware from companies that do not have an enforced code of conduct for labor overseas thereby contributing to horrible human rights abuses? Seriously, I want to know who you buy hardware from and why you think that is less evil.
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:3, Insightful)
No one is arguing against a teenager getting a part time job in suburban U.S.A. What is being argued is what is wrong with child labor as in "this is what you will do for the rest of your life because you won't be able to go to school because this will stunt your mental growth" kind of thing.
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:3, Insightful)
Addendum: of course, we had to outlaw child labor, and do dirty socialist public education and infrastructure projects to get here. ;)
Re:Wait a minute (Score:5, Insightful)
I started out at 15 making $5/hr assembling 386's. There's a problem here, but it's not strictly about the age. It's *what* you have 15yo's doing and under what conditions.
Re:Exactly the opposite, genius (Score:3, Insightful)
IOW, other companies don't give a shit about abusive labor practices from their suppliers. They might pay lip service but no one's really doing any audits to actually check. Apple, OTOH, is going out there and digging around to make sure their suppliers are in compliance with labor and environmental standards.
New low? This is leadership in defining a more responsible way to do business.
See, and that's the new low - that's just Apple marketing to make the others look bad.
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:5, Insightful)
If my 15 yr old wants some spending cash you bet they can get their butt out on a paper route or babysitting or neighborhood yard work. I have no problem with "child labor" as a concept, it's a great idea on multiple fronts, teaching responsibility, the value of money, the benefits of being employed, etc.
The problem is it's so incredibly easy for big business to abuse, that it has to be outlawed for the most part. The idea is good, the practice is bad. Things like paper routes and babysitting tend to be self-limiting (due to the narrow window of time per day you can actually do them) so they're not really abusable. Manufacturing plants that can run 24/7 naturally are where the problems crop up.
Re:What a surprise! (Score:3, Insightful)
In Rand Land profit is the Prophet and the Prophet says greed is the only good.
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:3, Insightful)
*shrug* my wife is from Cambodia, she had 8 hour job at 14 selling cigarettes, umbrellas and fruit juice in restaurants. Eighth grade education normal for fortunate women there. For that matter, even my grandfather in USA had eighth grade education and went to work after that, normal at the time in part of country where he lived. How about we quit ramming our stupid culture down every other culture's throat?
Re:Apple reaches a new low (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't care what the reasons are. I'm glad that SOMEONE is doing something and that hopefully this will galvanize other companies into doing the same.
Re:Apple reaches a new low (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:15 year olds in 3rd world countries NEED jobs (Score:3, Insightful)
Your tirade would carry more weight if the country in question did not set a minimum work age at 16. Basically, the company was breaking the law. Your 18-21 straw man is not applicable in this argument.
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have news for you. It's not that long ago that our countries had much the same system. Our ancestors fought long and hard to allow children to be educated rather than forced into working in factories to support their familes. The huge advances in our way of life in the last 150 years show that it was worth doing. Let's hope the leaders of your former country can be persuaded of that too.
Yes, let's look at Korea (Score:5, Insightful)
What about Korea?
South Korea has historically retarded the entry of younger peoples into the workforce via an emphasis on compulsory education.
If anything, South Korea is would be one of the better examples for why widespread child labor is not a necessary stage for rapid industrial development. In 1955, South Korea had a per capita GDP lower than that of most African nations. 55 years later, it is among the largest economies in the world and one that is knowledge based, at that.
All without a significant child labor as a path out of poverty phase.
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not convinced you've thought about this very hard. I won't hold it against you, because nobody, least of all government schools, will teach you this stuff.
Having an opinion different from yours is not a sign of not thinking something through.
Your simpleminded Ayn Randian view of Capitalism vs Socialism is fundamentally delusional. You say things like, "There is no idelogical difference between socialism and communism. Both words mean: the state is absolute, and any individual can and will be made to sacrifice for the "good" of others." and "Socialism will always suppress the best a man has to offer because he will be forced act [or not act] contrary to his own wishes."
Such thoughts are easily disproven. You have this idea of Socialism as being where the state will absolutely tell you everything you can ever do, and that's simply not true. You have the notion that Capitalism means you are free to do anything you are physically and mentally capable of. This is simply not true either.
Additionally, every society that has ever existed has had both capitalistic and socialistic aspects. Simply being able to barter your goods and services, or being able to whittle a piece of wood for your own enjoyment, is Capitalism, and having any sort of government whatsoever is Socialism.
The intelligent society would be one where the two forces are used to best serve the people.
Your simplistic view is a result of not being able to hold two diametrically opposed views at the same time. Everything is either all out black, or all out white, and grey is a failure.
Socialism is great. Capitalism is great. Pure Socialism or pure Capitalism are both evil, although if I had to pick one to be pure, I'd most definitely pick Capitalism (if I were rich) or Socialism (if I were poor). Fortunately, I'm not an imbecile, and I can choose both in varying measures for varying things.
Oh, and to address your notion that Socialism and Communism are the same thing, the difference is that in Communism, everything is done for the state. In Socialism, everything is down for the people. The formal definitions are that the state owns/controls the means of production (Communism) or the people own/control the means of production (Socialism).
In Capitalism, those with capital own/control the means of production, but looking a it from the opposite direction, everything done is done for those with capital. If you don't have capital, Capitalism sucks.
You rail against public schools, but I can promise you one thing. In a purely Capitalistic society, education would be much worse unless you were rich. It's only by Socialism that everyone in America has access to school, and is able to, if they can, learn.