Apple admits use of child labour in China
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
I think all American companies should know that, if they take it upon themselves to reveal what is already happening in China in an attempt to right the wrong, they will be rewarded with sensationalist headlines, public outrage, and bad press all for the sake of page views.
Oh, and you might want to read the other side of this story: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/02/27/apple_taken_to...
"Jobs also has a daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs (born 1978), from his relationship with Bay Area painter Chrisann Brennan. She briefly raised their daughter on welfare when Jobs denied paternity, claiming that he was sterile; he later acknowledged paternity."
The moral character of the company is being discussed here. The moral character of the CEO is completely germane to this discussion.
Seriously, who the hell asks their suppliers if they have been audited by other clients?
I think its great Apple audited their supplier, but I'm not convinced we have the full story (in fact, its possible they were tipped off in this case too, and that's why the age audit was initiated). I should also add that we shouldn't praise hardware companies for performing an audit once or twice. Furthermore, they certainly aren't penalising their suppliers for their poor working conditions!
All that will happen is a few underage workers will stop working. The living conditions will still be a joke, workers mistreated, and the dodgy supplier wont suffer in any way (other than needing to find replacements).
Who says anyone asked? If I was the only company auditing my suppliers, they would probably say "I don't understand why you're doing this; none of our other clients have ever audited us."
"Child labour" should mean either young children or sweatshop style working. How many US/EU teens work paper rounds for less than minimum wage? :D
It's not a trivial thing.
P.S I had two paper routes simultaneously when I was fourteen.
P.P.S Can kids even get paper routes in the US these days? My limited observation is that it's now large routes driven by adults who throw papers from car windows.
I think it's a combination of fewer newspaper subscribers (meaning larger distances between each subscriber, so less practical for bikes/walking) and a culture where parents are afraid that their children will be harmed if allowed to bike around delivering papers (because cars or pedophiles or something else).
How about this form of outsourcing? Rather than Apple owning and managing the factory in question they contract it out so they can assuage their guilt when children end up working there.
Cite for this, please. As far as I know, we outlawed child factory labor purely because children, with their small bodies that could fit into more-easily-constructed mineshafts, dexterous hands that could assemble small parts, and lesser demand for pay, were being preferred for most jobs, and so adult workers basically had a union action against them to make sure their own jobs were safe. This decreased efficiency, took a source of discretionary income away from children who wanted it (these weren't forced workers; they just took jobs to better their life), and artificially lowered the unemployment of adults who couldn't compete with kids.
Not that we should let people in general subject themselves to danger they don't understand, and kids might lack judgement about that. And education absolutely shouldn't be blown off. But there's something appealing to me about kids being able to work real jobs if they're willing and capable.
Something like this . . . http://www.bigheadpress.com/eft?page=14
Cite for this? Or a source on the topic in general?
I don't mean to sound incredulous, it's just that you seem to be familiar with the subject.
Notably, the US also decided for themselves when to pass such laws--they didn't have the matter dictated to them by the countries they exported goods to.
The title is is misleading, as well: Apple contracts these oversea factories; they don't hire or force children to work for them. It's all a bit inflammatory.
"In its report, Apple revealed the sweatshop conditions inside the factories it uses. Apple admitted that at least 55 of the 102 factories that produce its goods were ignoring Apple's rule that staff cannot work more than 60 hours a week."
Social safety nets aren't the same everywhere.
Either those children working is a bad thing, or it's not. If they're making money necessary to feed themselves and their families, then you should be proud of paying part of those money.
Of course, we don't really know if it was a good thing. We don't know if they were 17 or 10, whether they really needed the money or how many hours they worked. The situation is much murkier then the knee jerk "I can't exploit it". And unfortunately not trying to think more about it doesn't help those kids one bit.
I wonder if your working conditions were the same as the Chinese kids' working conditions. Hmmm...I wonder if you would be willing to work under the same conditions as these kids work in.
Meanwhile there's a much bigger problem: "The technology company's own guidelines are already in breach of China's widely-ignored labour law, which sets out a maximum 49-hour week for workers." If there were no children, would it be ok? Would the article even be written? This rule affects all the workers. And since the rule is "widely-ignored" I expect many more factories with even worse conditions.
Unfortunately "Apple fails" + "Won't somebody please think of the children?" seems to be more important than specific law being broken on a nation scale.
Right now, it's not clear what those conditions were; my comment was meant to address the only clear-cut part of this vague article: that 15 year-olds were working in a factory.
I'm not justifying poor working conditions, nor am I justifying overwork (though I find it interesting that we don't see it as criminal when professionals spend around 130 hours a week working.) I was simply astonished at the knee-jerk reaction so many have when children... gasp... work!
Substantiated claims that the working conditions of these children were poor can be addressed separately.
But, by all means, protect these children from feeding their families.
That rather depends upon what the possible alternatives are, doesn't it? The average middle-class, privileged westerner wouldn't, but the average middle-class, privileged westerner has much better options--and for that matter, turns his nose up at the idea of living without cable TV or a microwave oven.
If there's a way up to the developed world's standard of living that doesn't involve sweatshops, it hasn't been discovered yet. Thankfully, the sweatshop stage is growing shorter and shorter over time.
Panama has done quite well without America and their wages have improved. This isn't universally true but the justification that this is just something that every country must go through is wrong factually and morally. It is immoral for us to profit off of forced labor, unsafe working conditions, and child labor. That our country turns a blind eye is repugnant.
If the choice is between paying someone in another country the same amount you'd pay someone at home and not hiring them at all, the simple fact is, they're not going to be hired at all. The unspoken assumption, of course, is that we can let the whole rest of the world languish in poverty so long as we're sure that every appliance in our electrified houses and every damned faucet for our hot and cold running water was made by American hands in an American factory. That's even a consistent worldview--but you have to acknowledge what you have to give up in order to maintain that consistency. If we have to consistently choose not to interfere with cultures less technologically and economically advanced as our own, that means no interference. That's a hard pill for most people to swallow. What's more imperialistic--contracting with a Chinese company for manufacturing or "rebuilding Haiti" (in our own image, of course).
Corporations aren't building factories in China so that China benefits. They are building the factories so that they benefit. There are lots of reports of forced labor in China, of unsafe working conditions, and of worker exploitation. Our companies are fine with this arrangement because they fall back on the, "But we don't actually hire these workers. We contract this out." It's wrong.
The American public is OK with the arrangement because it means we can buy cheap crap. We don't mind migrant laborers in this country being exploited because we want cheap food.
What we lose sight of is the damage that this does to us and the world. That pollution that the factories produce in China to make cheap shit for us, in the long run, will do a lot of harm to China and the world. It's immoral for us to benefit from this.
What we could do is make trade contingent on a base level of standards being met. Make companies run the factories instead of hiding behind, "We don't actually hire the workers." The externalities need to be addressed.
That's exactly what Apple does, and that's exactly why you're reading this story about Apple, instead of Asus or Lenovo or any other company--because Apple, unlike almost every other company, does the audits and enforces the standards on their contractors.
I'm not exaggerating. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,119125,00.html
Alien as it may seem to our culture of riches and comfort, there are places where these jobs are a significant blessing. Slavery is evil, and should never be supported by the west. But taking a job from a willing worker (or even a child), in a poor country is NOT helping him.
Suppose it's voluntary. If so, then if you stop them from having that job, they will believe you've hurt them, by taking away their preferred life option. Correct?
"Apple admits using child labour […] At least eleven 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple.[…]"
apple.com/supplierresponsibility/auditing-compliance.html:
"In 2009, our audits identified 17 core violations: eight violations involving excessive recruitment fees; three cases where underage workers had been hired; three cases where our supplier contracted with noncertified vendors for hazardous waste disposal; and three cases of falsified records provided during the audit."
"Apple discovered three facilities that had previously hired 15-year-old workers in countries where the minimum age for employment is 16. Across the three facilities, our auditors found records of 11 workers who had been hired prior to reaching the legal age, although the workers were no longer underage or no longer in active employment at the time of our audit."
EDIT: Emphasis added to highlight relevant bits.
"Apple has admitted that child labour was used at the factories that build its computers, iPods and mobile phones."
There's a world of difference between those two statements. The first being the headline, the second being the quick summary.
Talk about link bait.
Still reads as if Apple is doing this directly.
My overall point stands and it is sad that it has been down voted so much. It reflects poorly on the social awareness of the rich.
It says as much in the linked article.
Apple enjoys high margins because of a very effective marketing strategy, excellent product design, and an extremely loyal customer base. It has nothing to do with the fact that their subcontractors were employing a few underage workers.
This story is the moral equivalent of turning "Apple fires employee for kicking co-worker in crotch" to "Apple caught kicking employees in crotch".
There are lots of perfectly non-cynical reasons to outsource manufacturing--or for that matter, anything your business itself isn't exceptionally good at.
Apple could easily run the factory itself. If this meant a loss in profit then we must ask ourselves why it would mean a loss in profit. It would mean a loss in profit because Apple itself would never run a factory that was unsafe or exploited the workers. And this is the reason Apple and other Western companies share in the blame.
This is a fallacious and ignorant argument. To understand why, stop and consider why things like AWS and Google Apps exist, just for starters. Then think about why Apple doesn't own their own cargo ships for international distribution, and why Apple uses FedEx rather than driving their own delivery trucks. There's no essential reason that manufacturing is any different. Apple's a design, development, and marketing company, not a manufacturing company. They don't know shit about manufacturing and they wouldn't be able to accomplish much by hiring the people who do.
If you'd really rather buy a laptop from a company that runs their own manufacturing, buy a Lenovo. Of course, they're manufactured in China, and Lenovo doesn't do anything to audit the labor practices of their own factories, so we'll never know what goes on in there. But at least they're not evading responsibility for things they'll never tell us about.
The factories in the article are not Apple's. They are Chinese factories owned by Chinese companies run by Chinese people. This isn't old school imperialism. This is new school global trade. Apple already leans on the Chinese to clean up their labor practices, which is arguably more imperialistic behavior than doing business with them.