Sharek M. Khan
Management
29/02/2012
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Mr. Mumtaz Khan
APPLE SCANDAL IS GETTING SMELLIER
The biggest story in tech for the past few weeks has not been about a phone or tablet, but a set of poorly treated workers in China. When the New York Times published an expose about dangerous and abusive working conditions at Foxconn’s Apple production facilities, the paper started a wave of news coverage about labor abuses and inspired a number of activist groups to demand a “ethical iPhone.” Sensing the damage to its reputation and potential impact on sales, Apple has responded by inviting third party inspectors from the Fair Labor Association into its suppliers’ plants and Foxconn has announced that it’s giving workers a 16 to 25 percent raise.
Unfortunately, neither raises nor inspections that double as photo ops will fix the system-wide problems that should bother us. By focusing their attention on Apple alone, both activists and press are minimizing the scope of abuses that are much worse at non-Foxconn facilities. If you were a fly on the wall at a Chinese electronic factory and could see everything without being detected, would it be the low pay checks given to the workers that really pulled at your heart strings? Or would it be:
Abusive Supervisors: At many factories, workers are berated and verbally abused by their bosses in ways that wouldn’t even fly at a prison labor facility in the U.S. According to an investigation conducted by China Labor Watch (CLW), At Catcher Electronics, a supplier that makes phones and notebooks for Dell, Apple, Nokia, ASUS, Acer, Sony, Motorola and IBM, the supervisors often berate workers and even worse “the department head will sometimes use corporal punishment, physically hitting workers.” At other facilities, workers aren’t physically struck, but are punished like bad children and