They will continue to behave this way until the damage to their profits is higher than the damage from a supply chain interruption. To quote fight club:

> Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

But what would you think if you were a child in a poor country and that was your only way to eat?

I'm getting so tired of people defending Apple on this.

Like...No. This is a red line. Do a better job before you find a supplier.

It’s doubtful that any large bureaucracy can execute that decision quickly, though I do agree 3 years is way too long. I’d put 3 months as hard minimum even assuming every internal decision process went as smoothly as possible, and 6 months as a more realistic amount.

Just legal validation alone would take weeks even under emergency round-the-clock conditions. It’s the same with most open and shut zero-tolerance style firings as well, for all but the most fungible roles.

This largely has nothing to do with how grievous the transgression is or how sincerely the management wants to do the right thing. It has to do with red tape that is designed from first principles to permit zero exceptions or special cases that can cut through it quickly.

It would require refactoring not just Apple’s red tape infrastructure but the entire concept across virtually all of corporate America to optimize for speed of firing vendors based on child exploitation.

It’s like choosing an O(n^2) algorithm, baking it in as a load-bearing centerpiece, then being upset something doesn’t happen in O(1).

Make it a law, or expect companies to follow the $. It's sad, but it's the state of our capitalism in the US.

> does it now mean all the vendors are locked in for that period?

Probably contractually, yes. For large scale manufacturing there are agreements and purchases that look ahead years in advance. Parts and labor are allocated. If you have quality control issues at any point (which is common), you fix them.

> No parent no matter how poor wants their child to work unless they cannot afford to feed them. As anyone who has grown up in a country where child labor was normal will tell you, this is patently false. If it is the norm in the country in question, everyone does it and it is expected. Children who do not work and their families are in many cases ostracized. Then of course there are jobs and jobs, and a certain type of parent might vie for a job for their child that is less backbreaking than the average. But not working at all is frowned upon. Source: lived experience in Soviet Union.

> No parent no matter how poor wants their child to work unless they cannot afford to feed them.

Okay, I was a child when my father (who could very much afford to feed our family) set up my first paid (cash, completely under-the-table) computer-related gigs. I would say parents often would want children to work if the work was something that would aid the child’s development and future prospects, even if not necessary for immediate support.

What that looks like for a middle class family in a first world information economy and what it looks like for a poorer family in a less developed country is likely to be very different.

But its worth noting that child labor standards are historically adopted to force up wages for adult laborers, so that child labor is not necessary for employed parents to be able to feed their children. So while I don’t agree that “no parent, no matter how poor wants their child to work unless they cannot afford to feed them” is true, I do think there are dead-end, body-ruining factory jobs for which that is true, and those are exactly the jobs into which that horrible choice is forced on parents by the economic conditions created by the absence of child labor standards.

Outside of the other concerns people have raised, it is important to remember even if all parents are making the right choice for their kids, it isn't always (and in many cases, isn't) the parent making this decision. For example, another case where Apple has gotten outed, they were actively aware of the forced child labor by the schools: https://www.channelnews.com.au/apple-admits-to-using-child-l...

And if you believe the children, they also weren't really being paid and had no choice to participate in these "internships".

Parents make plenty of awful decisions for their kids. They beat them, rape them, and more. Why is there an assumption that they’re doing the “better alternative” by putting them to work?

If American companies condone child labor, then they’re encouraging it.

While still meeting delivery targets? Even if budget weren't a concern, how do you scale up new employees that quickly?

I'm NOT condoning the behavior. This is disgusting. Still, "the supplier would (within a few hours) stop using child labour" is completely unrealistic.

Apple should have cut ties immediately even if it meant a breach of contract or shortage of inventory.

You'd think they call that supplier and the supplier tries to convince them they've stopped using child labour.

For some reason I was looking at pictures of textile equipment recently. Some of that equipment is built so that it's only accessible to growing children or adults with growth disorders. That's structural bias to such a degree that it is in fact literal. The requirement of child labor is literally built into the factory. I have no way of knowing if that's true for this factory, but if they're capitalistic at all then accessibility for (local) above-average humans is an opportunity cost that would have been eliminated in the name of efficiency. And if that worked so well why not try it again on the next assembly line, only goosed a little harder?

In any case, there is no "overnight" because you have to train new people for a high throughput task. But would you even believe them once they did?

For the west that's such a basic boundary at this point that if someone goes past it, it's because their ethical model is so different from yours that you can't reason about whether they've actually done what you've asked, or they've employed a new coping mechanism to seem 'normal'. Like just rearranging the factory so that your section has all the people over 16, which means the other building is now almost entirely children (making the situation more dangerous, not less). Or the children work second shift when you won't be around to audit, which is both dangerous and more unhealthy.

They didn't get your objection to begin with. Their response is likely to resemble the sort of thing a sociopath would do: identify your discomfort and arrange for it never to be triggered, rather than truth and reconciliation.

Maybe not hours, but days or months. I don't understand why they haven't done anything in 3 years to not lose Apple.

I'm worried if Apple didn't push hard enough during all that 3 years, and later they moved to a different supplier for other reasons.

They have leverage if they’re the only gig in town, though.

You'd think within a few hours and not right away?