Apple Hit by Boycott Call Over Worker Abuses in China

Apple, the computer giant whose sleek products have become a mainstay of modern life, is dealing with a public relations disaster and the threat of calls for a boycott of its iPhones and iPads.

The company's public image took a dive after revelations about working conditions in the factories of some of its network of Chinese suppliers. The allegations, reported at length in the New York Times, build on previous concerns about abuses at firms that Apple uses to make its bestselling computers and phones. Now the dreaded word "boycott" has started to appear in media coverage of its activities.

"Should consumers boycott Apple?" asked a column in the Los Angeles Times as it recounted details of the bad PR fallout.

The influential Daily Beast and Newsweek technology writer Dan Lyons wrote a scathing piece. "It's barbaric," he said, before saying to his readership: "Ultimately the blame lies not with Apple and other electronics companies – but with us, the consumers. And ultimately we are the ones who must demand change."

Forbes magazine columnist Peter Cohan also got in on the act. "If you add up all the workers who have died to build your iPhone or iPad, the number is shockingly high," he began an article that also toyed with the idea of a boycott in its headline.

The New York Times's revelations, which centred on the Foxconn plant in southern China that has repeatedly been the subject of accusations of worker mistreatment, have caused a major stir in the US. Although such allegations have been made before in numerous news outlets, and in a controversial one-man show by playwright Mike Daisey, this time they have struck a chord.

The newspaper detailed allegations that workers at Foxconn suffered in conditions that resembled a modern version of bonded labour, working obscenely long shifts in unhealthy conditions with few of the labour rights that workers in the west would take for granted. It also mentioned disturbing events elsewhere in China among supplier firms, such as explosions at iPad factories that killed a total of four people and another incident in which 137 workers were injured after cleaning iPhone screens with a poisonous chemical.

Apple has come out fighting, which is no surprise given the remarkable success that the company has seen in recent years.

Through the iPod, iPhone and now the iPad tablet computer, Apple has revolutionised lifestyles across the world and built up a cult of worshippers. It has also generated billions of dollars in profits, in part due to the cheapness of Chinese labour.

But much of the firm's success rests on its reputation for "cool" among hip urban professionals and a generally positive corporate image. Stories of worker abuse at Chinese firms are a direct threat to that winning combination.

In a lengthy email sent to Apple staff, chief executive Tim Cook met the allegations head-on. "We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern," Cook said. He went on to slam critics of the company. "Any suggestion that we don't care is patently false and offensive to us… accusations like these are contrary to our values."

Earlier this month Apple took the unusual step of releasing a list of all the firms in its worldwide supply chain as part of its 2011 audit of human rights conditions at factories where it has partnerships.

However, the company's own list made for grim reading. It revealed that a staggering 62% of the 229 facilities that it was involved with were not in compliance with Apple's 60-hour maximum working week policy. Almost a third had problem with hazardous waste.

Cook insisted in his email that Apple did not turn a blind eye to conditions in its supplier network. But he did warn that the firm was likely to discover more problems. "We will continue to dig deeper, and we will undoubtedly find more issues," he said.

China: Another suicide at Foxconn

Nationalise Foxconn under workers’ control and management – end the scourge of ‘blood factories’

”It is not a sweatshop. You go in this place and it’s a factory but, my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools. For a factory, it’s pretty nice.”

This was the comment of Apple boss Steve Jobs, defending the conditions at Foxconn’s China factories, where 18 young workers have attempted suicide in the last 12 months, 15 of them successfully. On 7 January 2011, the latest victim jumped to her death from the 10th-floor Shenzhen apartment of her brother. Wang Ling, 25 years old, had reportedly received a “harsh reprimand” from a supervisor and was told to resign after serving the company for five years – a long time at Foxconn.



The Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn is the single largest exporter from China. It manufactures high-end equipment for Apple, Dell, HP, Nintendo, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and a clutch of other global brands. Owned by Taiwan’s richest man, Terry Tai-Ming Gou, who commands a personal fortune of $5.9 billion according to Forbes magazine, Foxconn’s militarised sweatshops are the secret behind the super-profits of companies like Steve Jobs’ Apple, which is now the most valuable tech company in the world (currently valued at US$65 billion) and the second most valuable US company after Exxon Mobile.

Apple’s dream = workers’ nightmare

As a book about Terry Guo points out, “Steve Jobs’ achievements wouldn’t be possible without Terry.” Foxconn’s Longhua factory in Shenzhen makes 137,000 iPhones each day – about 90 a minute. Most of the profits made from Foxconn products are taken by the branded companies based in the US, Japan and Europe. For example, for every iPad it assembles, which retails abroad at US$499, Foxconn receives only US$11.2. How much do its assembly line workers receive? Well, once costs for fuel, raw materials, transportation and other running costs are deducted, its clear Foxconn’s employees only receive a tiny fraction of the inflated final price tag.

Foxconn’s business model is based on mass production at thin margins, realised by driving its young workforce (the company hardly ever employs people over 30) to the maximum. “I am not interested in knowing how much [money] I have,” said Guo last year. “I don’t care. I am working not for money at this moment, I am working for society, I am working for my employees.”

Yeah, right!

Militarisation and repression

While Foxconn has largely remained anonymous despite being the world’s largest maker of electronic gadgetry, its shocking suicide rate has catapulted the company to global notoriety. It’s mastodon factories – Foxconn employs a million workers in China – which resemble medium-sized cities, are run like a military dictatorship. The brutal, dehumanising reality of Foxconn life has also become symbolic of the complicity between the Chinese one-party dictatorship and the biggest global corporations, to squeeze profits out of the blood and sweat of unorganised Chinese workers.

All the suicide victims at Foxconn’s two Shenzhen factories have been migrant workers in the 17-25 age group. One obvious factor is overwork – employees are forced to work double or triple the legal limit on overtime on a regular basis, according to independent surveys. While the maximum legal amount of overtime is 36 hours per month in China, researchers report that 80 to 100 hours of overtime is normal at Foxconn. Other violations of China’s labour laws are legion, according to interviews with employees and ex-employees.

Another factor is systematic repression. The company prefers to employ ex-army officers from Taiwan as line supervisors. Militarisation of the production process is a feature of the ‘Foxconn model’. Nearly 28 percent of workers have been verbally insulted by supervisors or security personnel, and 16 percent have suffered physical abuse, according to a 83-page dossier on Foxconn produced jointly by 20 Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese universities last October.

“Workers aren’t allowed to talk, smile, sit down, walk around or move unnecessarily during their long working hours, which require them to finish 20,000 products every day,” the report states. More than one in eight employees interviewed for the report said they had passed out on the assembly line due to the high pressure and long working hours. One in four women workers said they suffered menstrual disorders due to overwork.

What’s changed?

The only labour representation permitted at Foxconn’s plants is its own pseudo trade union, as is the case throughout China. In response to the suicides, the company made a show of boosting its “soft power” including the recruitment of several hundred psychiatric counsellors. But most of these are former employees with little or no psychiatric training. Employees complain things are worse than before as this ‘mental health service’ are used to spy upon workers who behave “suspiciously” – including of course those with genuine grievances against the company and its management. Likewise, Foxconn boasts its social amenities, film theatres and badminton courts, which so impressed Steve Jobs. But how many workers have any strength left to enjoy such facilities after 12 hours on the assembly line?

Foxconn factories are run like a police state. If you call to the police emergency line, for example, the chances are you’ll actually be connected to Foxconn’s own security guards. The company is notorious among journalists as it heavily restricts their access, subjecting them to even greater controls than the one-party state outside Foxconn’s gates! Such is the pressure of work that even undercover journalists who have taken jobs at Foxconn in order to expose its conditions, have themselves developed psychological problems and had to abandon their assignments.

Last summer, under massive public pressure, Foxconn promised to increase wages by around 30 percent. This was also a result of China’s ruling party offering the company a “carrot-and-stick” deal to relocate into lower-wage provinces such as Henan and Hubei, while introducing reforms on wages and conditions at its Shenzhen plants, to shed its “blood factory” image. The workforce in Shenzhen is being downsized from 800,000 to 300,000 or less as the company moves inland. But, as chinaworker.info has reported, while some sections of the Shenzhen workforce are now on higher earnings, working conditions have not improved and, furthermore, hundreds of thousands of student “interns” are now being forced by their schools to work at Foxconn at its new assembly plants in inland provinces.

Democratic trade unions and workers’ control

“It is truly a scandal that a company like Foxconn is allowed to continue such exploitative practises. But it is a profit machine for the big global technology companies and a key source of employment and investment for the Chinese regime,” says Chen Lizhi of chinaworker.info. “What’s needed, as a minimum, are democratic and independent trade unions that can fight for workers’ rights, and exercise control over working hours, speed of assembly lines, as well as represent workers’ in fighting for a decent living wage.”

Socialists and the chinaworker.info website call for the nationalisation of Foxconn under the democratic control and management of working people. Such a step, which would make it possible to end today’s inhuman production methods, would of necessity require supportive action by workers in the global tech industry with which Foxconn is so integrated. A few industry giants such as Apple, Nokia, etc., that dominate the market for consumer electronics, have built their business models on outsourcing and super-exploitation of workers in low-wage economies such as China.

As campaign groups have pointed out in connection to Foxconn’s suicides: “there is blood on those iPhones”. Only action by the international working class to reorganise these companies under public ownership, with democratic management and planning by the majority of society, rather than maximising “shareholder value” for a financial elite, can eradicate the inhumanity of Foxconn’s ‘blood factories’.

Apple goes low-tech to solve iPhone woes

The California gadget-maker is hoping a $29 rubber-and-plastic case will put an end to the debate over the antenna on what Apple chief executive Steve Jobs calls "perhaps the best product we've ever made."

The bumper, which fits around the sides of the phone, will be offered free to all buyers of the iPhone 4 through the end of September, and customers who have already purchased the case will be reimbursed.

Abhey Lamba of the International Strategy and Investment Group said the financial impact of the expense would be "fairly insignificant" to the company behind the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPhone and the iPad.

"Assuming the cost of distributing a bumper to be about five dollars per unit and the number of bumpers as 10 million, total cost to the company could be about 50 million dollars," Lamba said.

Noting that Apple has sold more than three million iPhones in just three weeks, Lamba also said "clearly, the antenna issue has not made any dent in demand for the new phone."

"We expect the strong momentum to continue," said said, estimating that Apple will sell 37 million iPhones in fiscal 2010 and 44 million in fiscal 2011.

The iPhone 4 has been bedeviled with complaints about dropped calls from the moment it appeared on store shelves three weeks ago.

Some iPhone 4 users claimed they lost reception when holding the lower left corner of the phone -- whose unusual antenna wraps completely around the device -- in what has been referred to as the "death grip."

Consumer Reports, the influential product review magazine, said it could not recommend the device because of the problem, forcing Jobs to cut short his Hawaii vacation and return to San Francisco to address the controversy.

The Apple chief said the whole issue had been "blown so out of proportion" but apologized to any customers who experienced problems and offered the free cases as a fix.

"A lot of people have told us the bumper solves the signal strength problem," Jobs said at an event held at Apple headquarters to address "Antennagate." "OK, so let's give everybody a free case."

Jobs acknowledged "there's a problem" but stressed "it's affecting a small percentage of users and some of that problem is inherent in every smartphone."

"We're not perfect," he said. "Phones aren't perfect either."

Jobs acknowledged the iPhone 4 drops slightly more calls than the previous model, the iPhone 3GS, but said said other smartphones also drop reception if held in a certain way.

"It's certainly not unique to the iPhone 4," he said. "Every smartphone has this issue."

Gartner analyst Charles Smulders said problems such as those experienced by Apple are to be expected by firms operating on the cutting-edge.

"There are inherent risks when any company pushes the design and technology envelopes," Smulders said. "Apple pushes very hard on both fronts."

"I don't think they've had a lot of serious product issues over the years," said Mike McGuire, another Gartner analyst, adding that he expects the issue to blow over.

"From a consumer perspective, they've now told me how this is going to be dealt with," he said. "And they even said if I'm really still unhappy, I can return it.

"You can't ask for much more than that."

Scuffles erupt at Foxconn protest

SCUFFLES have erupted in Taiwan as activists alleging labour abuses by IT giant Foxconn tried to enter an exhibition centre where President Ma Ying-jeou was opening Asia's biggest technology fair.
The protesters, who were shouting "capitalists kill people" and holding placards and pictures of Foxconn chief Terry Gou, fought with uniformed police as they tried to deliver a letter to the President while he launched Computex Taipei.

Five other IT tycoons, including Apple chief executive Steve Jobs and Cher Wang, chairwoman of Taiwan's leading smartphone maker HTC Corp, were also targeted.

Foxconn, a unit of the Hon Hai group, makes a range of popular products including Apple iPhones, Dell computers and Nokia mobiles phones.

"All the products on display at the exhibition inside are made with workers' sweat and blood," demonstration leader Liu Nien-yun said.

They were campaigning as 10 workers at a Foxconn plant in the Chinese city of Shenzhen fell to their deaths in apparent suicides this year.

An 11th worker died at a factory run by the firm in northern China.

Demonstrations over the deaths have also taken place in Hong Kong.

The deaths have raised questions about the conditions for millions of factory workers in China, especially at Foxconn, where the activists say long hours, low pay and high pressure are the norm.

But the accusation of "blood and sweat" has been flatly rejected by Mr Gou, who for the first time last week organised a tour of the Shenzhen plant.

The firm is planning to give its staff a 20 per cent pay rise as it battles to stem the spate of suicides, according to Taiwanese media.

The conglomerate employs more than 800,000 people worldwide.

The five-day Computex Taipei, which has attracted more than 1700 exhibitors, features 4861 booths and is expected to attract about 120,000 visitors, including 35,000 international buyers, organisers say.

Read FULL ARTICLE HERE

Taiwan's Foxconn raising pay for workers

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The Taiwanese electronics company buffeted by a spate of suicides at its China factories said Friday it will raise the pay of workers by an average of 20 percent.

The pay raises at Foxconn Technology Group have been in the works for months to cope with a labor shortage following China's recovery from the global recession, said a company official speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

But the official said the big jump in pay could help to lift worker morale. "Feeling sad is contagious, and so is feeling happy," he said. "We hope the workers will have a positive attitude toward their lives."

The basic salary at the China plants of Foxconn Technology Group - which makes iPhones and other popular gadgets - is currently about 900 yuan ($130) per month.

Ten workers have killed themselves and three have attempted suicide at Foxconn's operations in southern China this year, involving mainly workers who jumped from buildings. The most recent suicide attempt involved a 25-year-old man who slashed his wrists in the factory dormitory Thursday. One additional Foxconn worker in northern China also committed suicide this year.

Labor activists accuse the company of having a rigid management style, an excessively fast assembly line and forced overwork. Foxconn denies the allegations.

The company, part of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., is the world's largest contract maker of electronics. Its long list of big-name customers include Apple Inc., Sony Corp., Dell Inc., Nokia Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co.

Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou led a media tour of the company's mammoth industrial park in Shenzhen earlier this week and promised to work harder to prevent more deaths.

See FULL ARTICLE

Justice Department Shifts Scrutiny to Apple’s Music Store

The Department of Justice is reportedly looking into Apple’s bullying ways in the digital music market, where its iTunes music store accounts for 70 percent of digital music sales and 28 percent of all music sales in the United States.

At issue: Apple’s objection to Amazon’s sale of certain albums exclusively, for one day and sometimes in advance of their official release dates, as part of a Daily Deal program launched nearly two years ago.

Since then, Amazon’s program apparently became too successful for Apple’s liking. Jobs and company began complaining to music executives about Amazon’s alleged special treatment around March of this year, according to Billboard.

For Apple, the situation came to a head when Amazon began asking labels participating in the program for free promotion on MySpace and other sites. “When that happened,” an anonymous music executive told Billboard, “iTunes said, ‘Enough of that shit.’”

Read more HERE

Alarm over Apple factory suicides May 27, 2010

The Chinese government has expressed concern over a series of employee suicides at a factory which makes electronic products including Apple's iPod and iPad.

So far this year nine Foxconn workers at the Taiwan-owned Foxconn plant in the southern city of Shenzhen have died after jumping from buildings.

Another employee committed suicide at a plant in northern China.

Critics have said employees at the factory are forced to work extended hours for low pay in sweatshop conditions.

A spokesman for China's state council said on Wednesday officials were working with Foxconn to implement effective measures to avoid further deaths.

"We welcome and encourage Taiwan companies to invest in the mainland," Yang Yi said in a statement.

"We also hope the employers would take care of their employees."

California-based Apple computers has said it is also evaluating steps taken by Foxconn to prevent further suicides.

'Saddened'

In a statement to the AFP news agency on Wednesday, Apple - which is preparing to launch its iPad computer tablet in countries outside the US on Friday - said it was committed to making sure workers in its supply chain were safe and treated
with respect.

Read FULL ARTICLE HERE