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."
Age restrictions work against them (Score:5, Interesting)
In these countries, many families struggle to put food on the table. By allowing their children who are able to work go to work in the factories, these families are better able to care for each other.
These are dangerous smelting factories or weapons manufacturing plants. They are electronics assembly lines. Lines which could essentially be replaced by robotics except that humans are cheaper. No kid is in danger of having his arm sliced off.
Enforcing Western-style regulations in Western countries makes sense, but in poor countries, having an extra set of hands working besides mom and dad is a real boon.
I can't believe I'm reading about Apple, of all companies, enforcing regulations like these overseas. It's more White Man's Burden than Protect The Children. But really, when you think about it, those two concepts are essentially the same, and it reeks of condescension.
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:2, Interesting)
In fact, wealth does "rain from the sky" in the form of humanitarian aid.
Of course, undercutting the local farmer put him out of business too, but he can get his free rice from the nice NGO people like everyone else.
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:5, Interesting)
Free market economies are able to go from child labor and sweatshops to banks
Examples ?
underage employment (Score:3, Interesting)
In countries that practice it they have children starving on the streets, so no matter how bad the conditions are relative to how we would want the conditions to be I am sure the children would rather work for cents a day then to starve to death on the streets.
Now I am sure in many cases it is doing the children a favor to stop underage employment, but I always wonder how many children have starved to death because of Western ethics.
Re:Age restrictions work against them (Score:3, Interesting)
> I can't believe I'm reading about Apple, of all companies, enforcing regulations like these overseas.
Really? Every time there's even a hint that Apple's subcontractors are hiring underage workers, or not paying them enough, or have dangerous conditions I see a dozen articles about how soul-suckingly evil Apple must be to allow this to go on (behind their back). Of course they're going to enforce the regulations...
I'm inclined to agree though. Addressing the issue of child labor in poor countries by firing all the children is not a solution. A much more useful response would be to examine the situation of these 15 year olds (are they pushed into it by a family that's just being greedy, or by circumstances) and to resolve the underlying cause, not just ban the situation and hope everything works out.
Reminds me of a lot of the arguments against prostitution (that the women are forced into it by being poor, which clearly leads to the conclusion that making prostitution illegal will stop people being poor).
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:5, Interesting)
There is something lacking in that train of thought. I think what is lacking is foresight and long-term thinking.
We know why children labor -- because the rich aren't willing to pay enough for a man to feed his family under his own pay. So what are the alternatives? Of course -- have more children who can them in turn, earn money. The problem with this? The children, and by extension, the workforce becomes very uneducated... even more than in places where the government controls education. Spending one's learning years at work means bad things for the future of a workforce and for a community. The whole point of child labor laws is to allow children to become educated and to decide for themselves what they will do with their lives when they are old enough.
Without this regulation against the free market, the market would drive its labor force to death and into animal-like stupidity.
Further, as you seem to believe in the free market, let's look at it another way -- by pulling workers out of the labor pool, we are making the labor resource more scarce making the resource more valuable and therefore raising the rates of pay for those who remain at work. So child labor laws might also serve to improve the amount of money that comes into individual families.
The very idea of nations "growing up" more quickly using the broken backs of 10 year olds is simply too repugnant to discuss. Even if this were viewed as a grand sacrifice, we know that only very few would benefit from this growth while the masses would remain in suffering.
Look at Korea (Score:2, Interesting)
South Korea is a notable example of this, because it's right next to North Korea, which shares the same culture and history, up to 1950. Then the country was split in two and each half adopted a different economic orientation. Look at the results today.
Re:Bring back the jobs to the US! (Score:4, Interesting)
Ummm, seriously? Assuming the average fully laden cost of a US worker is $50,000 a year, you are talking about $6-$7 billion dollars in direct labor costs here in the US. But now your factories need to be built here in the US, you need US land, factory equipment and machines sourced in the US (these can be 3-4 times more expensive than the equivalent sourced in China), you raw materials have to be sourced here, and you need to maintain larger inventories of components that are still only made in Asia. I would imagine that this would add at least $12-15 billion dollars in total cost to Apple's business, perhaps even more (direct labor costs usually are less than half the cost difference between manufacturing in the US and manufacturing in Asia). Their EBITDA is currently around $14B, and net income is about $9B. You have now taken a highly profitable company and made it into another large American manufacturing company selling lots of product but hemorrhaging *billions* of dollars a year. Just like our auto industry.
Anyway, just pointing out how the economics work. There's a reason relatively little manufacturing is done in the US anymore, except for highly taxed and protected industries like defense or aerospace, high end or luxury niches, and products where the value/volume ratio makes it unprofitable to manufacture abroad and ship to the US.
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hong Kong. Taiwan. Most of what we now consider to be the first world.
It sucks that children have to work, but that's not the worst option in underdeveloped countries. My grandfather had to start working at around 13, and that was in the worker's paradise that was the Soviet Union.
Re:Exactly the opposite, genius (Score:5, Interesting)
Yet again Apple is heralded on Slashdot for "inventing" something the rest of the business has been doing for years.
Please provide a citation.
See EICC [eicc.info] or Dell's [dell.com] involvement in it which started in 2004.
What Apple has done differently that I see, is they actually openly published the results of their audits so others can check and so the public can see how long they keep doing business with companies that violate their code of conduct. Clearly Dell and every other company has a published code of conduct created by their PR department. So far I haven't yet found any other company that has actually published the results of an audit yet, nor what companies they have stopped doing business with. Mostly I just see weasel words like about making partners progress towards less human rights violations, which does not even make it clear if they refuse to do business with companies that make no progress and don't stop these abuses, if said companies even know about it.
I'm not even excusing Apple here. I'm just saying they took one small step towards transparency and real accountability in the industry and that deserves our praise. I'll be just as loud decrying them if in two years Apple hasn't checked back, hasn't stopped doing business with these companies, and it is discovered the unfair practices have not been stopped.
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
As someone who grew up in a "3rd-world country" I have news for you. Most people are finished with school by age 12. A 15-year-old is considered an adult and often is married and has at least one kid by then. We treat teen-agers like children in the US and Canada and they fulfill that expectation spectacularly - in fact, you aren't a "real" adult until 21 and then insurance companies rape you and you can't rent a car, etc., until you are 25. We put up with and even encourage infantile behavior by our teens and young-adults. And then we impose our beliefs on the rest of the world.
If Apple wants to make it's world-wide policy match our expectations, fine. They talk about these companies hiring workers "as young as 15". Well, that 15-year-old, who very possibly is married with a family and obviously wanted the job (I didn't hear that they were rounding up workers at gun-point) and obviously capable of doing the job (what job was that? Taking out the garbage? Putting the manual and CD in it's sleeve?) otherwise they wouldn't have been hired.
I would applaud Apple for standing up for what they believe in, but I fear that it's more to appease the ignorant, myopic American public and their America-centric world-view than any real conviction on the subject. And I feel bad for the young adults who were fortunate to land an excellent, high-paying job (for that part of the world) who will now be unemployed.
Re:Bring back the jobs to the US! (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I was talking about the *average*, *fully laden* cost of your staff in a manufacturing operation. I'm assuming an average salary of something like $35k. By the time you finish paying payroll taxes, health insurance, benefits, and so on, you are easily at $50k. The standard practice is to add about 50% to the base salary to account for these other costs when doing budgeting, probably slightly more now that health insurance costs have gone up so much.
Even in rural areas where manufacturing still occurs in the US, I'd say $25-30k is the minimum you can pay a semi-skilled, decent factory worker. And you need a mix to make a factory run of manufacturing engineers, skilled technicians, HR personnel, managers and the like who all get paid more like $45k-$75k depending on their background (again, not including benefits, etc.). So that's where I get $35k as an average figure.
Maybe the average would be slightly lower in Canada, but I'm not really confident that's the case when taxes and everything else are taken into account. And in any case, the point here was about US labor costs vs. Asia labor costs and what it would cost a company to move this scale of manufacturing to the US.
Re:Wait a minute (Score:1, Interesting)
Minimum wage increases ensure that people can actually afford to live. I mean its all nice and stuff having me work at 5 dollars an hour, but if you expect me to continue being able to work, you should pay me more, i mean if i cant afford good housing from the elements, ill get sick and cant work, if I cant afford healthy food, ill get sick and cant work, if I cant afford car gas and insurance (for many areas in the US) then I cant make it to work.. see the problems here, you have to pay me enough to survive, so when things in the open marketplace get more expensive, if you want reliable hard workers, you will need to pay them more... This is a hard concept for you?
Re:Apple reaches a new low (Score:4, Interesting)
except you know, they dont charge any more than anyone else. There IS NO APPLE TAX anymore. Stop comparing POS computers to a standard Apple configuration and actually you know configure a Dell to match a Apple. You WILL be surprised.
And you *still* won't get the Dell to match the Mac in terms of screen quality, battery life, thinness, sturdiness, etc.
But I guess those things are simply the "aesthetics" and "form over function" that people keep trying to pretend are unimportant or something...
Hmm, 15? (Score:4, Interesting)
I also worked in the school holidays at that age.
Anyone even considered that they may already have finished school?
Depending on the school-system (entering at age 5 and having 8-9 years of school) they may well be lucky to get a job straight after school.
Re:Apple reaches a new low (Score:5, Interesting)
You do realize that they did nothing to these suppliers?
Wrong.
Do you also realize that Dick Durbin is all over them about this right now, hence the audit?
Them, and 29 other high profile companies.
It has been almost 4 years since they started this 'code of conduct' BS.
Wait, I thought you said they just started this right now in response to Durbin?
Yet the violations continue..... think about that for a minute.
Of course they do. It's China. But they don't continue with Apple's consent. It's like saying, "there are laws against murder, yet murders still continue... think about that for a minute."
They audit, it gets Durbin off of them.. he is happy.
Again, they've been at this for four years. It's very clever of them to have allocated precious resources to their time machine to go back to 2006 and start this process, all to appease one Senator.
Business goes on as usual.... what has Apple actually DONE here but make some baseless threats, the same ones they made back in 2006.
You're absolutely correct. A Code of Conduct is an unassailable mechanism that instantly forces all who are subject to it into compliance. It's truly magical that way.
Here's the thing. This Code of Conduct applies to other companies. Sure they may agree to it, but that doesn't mean they are going to follow it. That's why Apple audits them, and takes action as necessary. But don't forget, this are independent third parties, who operate in a different nation with a different culture than Apple's, and are not going to change their standard practices just on someone else's say so. It's going to have to harm them financially (or legally, but in China, we can pretty much ignore that aspect regarding the current topic). Apple can only do so much, and what they *can* do, they are doing *something*, which is far more than can be said for their competitors.
It's ironic that Apple is being taken to task for doing the right thing and looking into the human rights practices of their suppliers, instead of turning a blind eye like everyone else. It's like blaming a doctor for finding cancer, because he actually performs the tests, and giving the doctors who don't a pass...
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not about "culture" but about the rights of mankind. It's not that they have to go to school, it's that they have a choice. How about you ask your wife if she would have preferred the chance at education over working at crappy jobs?
We have the advantage in the "developed" world of not forcing our kids to work 12 hours a day in manual labour positions. We arrived at this advantage in part through exploitation of workers in other countries. Do you not think we have a moral obligation to try and correct this situation?
Re:Child labor laws keep millions in poverty. (Score:3, Interesting)
anwer is she was so happy as teen to be making more money than her mother who sold groceries at street market. she had plenty of food to eat for the first time in her life and good clothes and could go to dentist. For more than eight years prior, hungry, bad clothes, sore teeth and other problems. "job better than school", she says.
Re:Apple reaches a new low (Score:2, Interesting)
And the power plug for the laptop is kinda fragile for my liking.
Are you referring to that magnetic connection? It depends on the person, I think. I'm not much for it, but I've got a friend who RAVES about it, it's probably her favourite feature. She's tripping over the cord almost every time she gets up off the couch, and assumes - probably rightly - that it's saved her laptop some serious damage by now. Not owning one myself, I don't have an opinion of my own but I think it's a pretty clever design and it does fit into that "just works" ideal that Apple keeps presenting.