“Apple’s iPods are made by mainly female workers who earn as little as £27 per month, according to a report in the Mail on Sunday yesterday. The report, ‘iPod City’, isn’t available online. It offers photographs taken from inside the factories that make Apple music players, situated in China and owned by Foxconn,” Macworld UK reports. “The report claims Longhua’s workers live in dormitories that house 100 people, and that visitors from the outside world are not permitted. Workers toil for 15-hours a day to make the iconic music player, the report claims. They earn £27 per month. The report reveals that the iPod nano is made in a five-storey factory that is secured by police officers.”
Macworld UK reports, “Another factory in Suzhou, Shanghai, makes iPod shuffles. The workers are housed outside the plant, and earn £54 per month – but they must pay for their accommodation and food, ‘which takes up half their salaries,’ the report observes. A security guard told the Mail reporters that the iPod shuffle production lines are staffed by women workers because ‘they are more honest than male workers.'”
Full article here.
“The situation is too murky for a rush to judgment on Apple’s ethics here, and it may well meet minimum global standards. But for a company that has staked its image on progressive politics, Apple has set itself up as a potential lightning rod on global labor standards. Sweatshops came back to bite Nike after its customers rose up in arms; and Apple can expect a similar grilling from its upscale Volvo-driving fans in the months ahead,” Leander Kahney writes for Wired News. “Tech companies’ records in China are in the spotlight for a wide variety of human rights issues. Google and Yahoo have weathered a lot of criticism — quite rightly — for censoring search results and cooperating with the Chinese authorities cracking down on dissidents. I’m not naïve enough to expect companies to behave morally like individuals, but I find Google’s corporate mantra ‘Don’t be evil’ to be especially galling. They dropped that one pretty quick.”
“All of this should put Apple on notice that doing business in China in anything less than an exemplary fashion is a recipe for a PR disaster,” Kahney writes. “Apple is just one of myriad companies using Chinese factories to make its products. And of course, it does so purely because of China’s low wages and other costs. The iPod is assembled by Invatec and Foxconn, two manufacturers headquartered in Taiwan that own factories in China and elsewhere. Foxconn is a trade name of Hon Hai Precision Industry, a $16 billion giant and one of the largest electronics manufacturers in the world, which makes everything from Playstations for Sony to iPods for Apple. Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the pro-globalization International Institute for Economics, said Hon Hai has an ‘excellent reputation.’ He says factories in China operated by big global companies like Hon Hai are very different from smaller, indigenous operations. International giants usually enforce the same work practices in China as they do in other parts of Asia, or Europe and United States, according to Lardy.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Regardless of the story’s validity (we need to know more from more sources first), Apple should make sure that the people who are assembling Apple products in China and all other countries are treated better than the accepted base standards. It’s good business, it’s the right thing to do, and it’s what we expect of Apple.
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