While Foxconn has received media attention in the last few years for deplorable working conditions and the consequent suicides of some of its workers, there are other Chinese factories within the Apple supply chain guilty of the same, if not worse, practices. These practices, which include excessive work hours, low wages and lack of work breaks, are against Apple’s supplier code of conduct as well as many Chinese labor laws.
One such plant, investigated and reported on by China Labor Watch (CLW), is Jabil Wuxi. CLW published a scathing report in September of 2013 of the many labor violations it found Jabil guilty of including hiring discrimination, imposed hiring fees, lack of safety training and gear, 110 hours of overtime per month, mandatory and sometimes unpaid overtime, a lack of effective grievance channels, occupational safety hazards, etc. Some workers were said to have been forced to stand for 11 consecutive hours during a shift while only receiving half-hour meal breaks (1, 2, 3).
On their website, Apple claims 95 percent of its manufacturers comply with it's standard of no more than 60 hours per week, the Chinese legal limit is 49 hours (5, 1). Apple also claims, in response to these accusations, that the Jabil plant has an "excellent track record" of compliance with Apple standards. Apple did, in fact, complete an audit in early 2013 which found that some Jabil employees had worked more than six consecutive days, but added that the factory was working towards better regulating overtime. Jabil responded separately that it would correct any issues found when it conducted its own audit (4).
One year later, little seems to have changed at the factory. According to CLW, who investigated the plant for a second time in September of 2014, working conditions had not gotten better but may in fact have gotten worse since sales of the iPhone 6 have continued to soar and Jabil production lines are straining to keep up with demand. CLW claims workers at Jabil “perform even more overtime (up to 158 hours), where they are not permitted to talk or even look up from their work,” while working in unsafe buildings that are still under construction and where ceiling slabs have been reported to fall down around the production line (1).
Here again, given the repeated reports of abuses at many factories, it is difficult to believe that Apple is doing everything in it's power to prevent such conditions. If CLW’s findings are representative of the working environment at Jabil, Apple has failed to make good, as yet, on its promise of improved labor practices within its supply chain. This is perhaps especially true in the wake of newly released Apple products and where demands for increased production of iphones have soared.
On September 30, 2014 yet another
Foxconn worker committed suicide. Xu Lizhi was 24 when he died at Foxconn’s
Shenzhen plant after working there for four years. A post from Libcom.org’s Nao
blog has translated Xu’s obituary as well as several of the poems Xu wrote
about his life at the factory, several of which were published in Foxconn’s internal newsletter, Foxconn People.
We wanted to share a few of
these with our readership in order to keep awareness of the conditions of
Chinese migrant workers alive and highlight the need for further progress in these
factories towards creating humane working conditions for their workers. Besides describing the feelings of one young
worker’s devastating struggle, they are also heartbreakingly beautiful.
Under pressure from the media and labor
rights organizations after a spate of suicides at the Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant,
Apple hired the U.S.-based Fair Labor Association (FLA) to conduct an
independent audit of working conditions at the plant.
The FLA report (released this past March and
based on 35,500 worker interviews) identified numerous major problems including
very long work hours (up to 80 hours per week), excessive and often unpaid overtime,
as well as safety violations. In response to the report Apple and Foxconn both pledged
their commitment to improving conditions by cutting workloads, improving safety
protocols and bettering worker dormitories (1). But have they?
There is some evidence of change at
Foxconn. In response to the FLA report they raised the
wages of some workers in Shenzhen by 16 to 25 percent (2, 3). They have also reportedly dropped the number of overtime hours
worked though the exact total now being worked is unclear. Chinese labor laws
permit a maximum of 49 hours per week.
Despite the higher hourly wages, Foxconn’s compliance with Chinese weekly work limits
has resulted in an average overall decrease
in salaries for many. Though hourly cuts may better the physical health of
workers who said they experienced pain and fatigue after long shifts, many reported to
the FLA that, because their wages “were not sufficient to
pay for health care or education, ….they wanted to work more to earn more
money” (4, 5). Additionally workers now complain that they
are forced to work unpaid overtime and
are even less able to support themselves and their extended families without the
extra income earned through overtime. (6, 7). There is also some debate
as to whether work hours have actually been cut, and if so by how much. The China
Labor Watch (CLW) reports in their June 27th publication on Apple
suppliers in China that work hours at the plant still far exceed 49 (8).
So far, changes
at the plant seem more geared at appeasing the press than actually improving the
health and safety of their workers. It’s hard to imagine that the Chinese
government is unaware of working conditions at Foxconn plants and that they
have not given tacit approval to Foxconn policies. This is particularly true in
light of the fact that the FLA found 43
instances of Foxconn violations of Chinese labor laws and regulations, only
one of which seems to have been partially remedied (work hours) (5, 9).
According to Foxconn
workers interviewed by CLW, nothing appears to have been done about existing physical
environmental hazards and they are quoted as saying that “there are occupational hazard issues in
some workshops, mainly radiation, chemicals and dust. Even though the factory
provided occupational safety and health training to workers, there is little
content, making the training largely symbolic.” Joint, musculoskeletal, and
other types of injuries due to jobs with repetitive motions have also not been
addressed.
In their investigation the FLA found that
many workers did not realize that there was union representation and if they did they doubted that
the unions available to them provided “true worker representation” due to the
fact these groups are dominated by management-selected nominees, (4, 5). Following
the FLA study, workers interviewed by both CLW and Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) were still unaware of their overall rights as workers and whether or not
they themselves were represented by any sort of union (7, 8). Of course, functional unions
representing worker’s interests have proven themselves critical to the process
of improving working conditions.
Additionally, there is also a conspicuous
lack of news on changes addressing non-work conditions – such as quality of
food (which many Foxconn workers complain is unhygienic and tasteless) and poor
living accommodations (see CLW report), – even though both Apple and Foxconn promised improvements to
the over-crowded worker dormitories.
One important issue continues to be
ignored and this is the poor psychosocial work environment at the plants and
the role work stressors play in the negative health outcomes of workers. Work stressors
include, work intensity and speed-up, long work hours (this appears to have been
partially addressed), organizational justice, effort-reward imbalance, low
social support, job strain and threat-avoidant vigilance, to name a few. The FLA
as well as CLW either ignore psychosocial factors or aren’t aware of their
importance. Nor has anyone examined the impact of these psychosocial stressors on
the negative psychological health outcomes plaguing this population of workers -
observable by the significant number of suicides the plant has experienced over
the last few years. Until these issues are addressed work life at Foxconn will
not significantly improve and we can expect continued and perhaps increasing negative
health outcomes.
Apple,
Foxconn vow wide revamp of worker conditions
Reuters – Thursday
March 29th at noon Los Angeles time
Readers,
The
following story and my blog are preliminary. I have not yet read the FLA report
and I am sure I will have some criticisms of the report given the approach
taken by the FLA. However, without reservations, it has to be a good thing for
Chinese working people that Apple and Foxconn are acknowledging issues and
promising to take action. So read the news story below, and realize that the attention
of American news and you the reader motivated much of what is reported below.
Congratulations.
Peter Schnall
Highlights below are mine. One goal mentioned in the article below
of maintaing wages for individual workers seems unlikely, especially if hours
go from 80 hours to 49 hr/week. Also, remember that workers wanted overtime.
By Poornima Gupta and Edwin Chan
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - In a landmark
development for the way Western companies do business in China, Apple Inc said
Thursday it had agreed to work with partner Foxconn to substantially improve
wages and working conditions at the factories that produce its wildly popular
products.
Foxconn -
which makes Apple devices from the iPhone to the iPad - will hire
tens of thousands of new workers, clamp down on illegal overtime, improve
safety protocols and upgrade worker housing and other amenities.
The moves came in response to one of the
largest investigations ever conducted of a U.S. company's operations abroad.
Apple had agreed to the probe by the independent Fair Labor Association in
response to a crescendo of criticism that its products were built on the backs
of mistreated Chinese workers.
The Association,
in disclosing its findings from a survey of three Foxconn plants and over
35,000 workers, said it had unearthed multiple
violations of labor law, including extreme hours and unpaid overtime.
Apple, the world's most valuable corporation,
and Foxconn, China's biggest private-sector employer and Apple' main contract
manufacturer, are so dominant in the global technology industry that their
newly forged accord will likely have a substantial ripple effect across the
sector.
Working conditions at many Chinese
manufacturers that supply Western companies are considerably inferior to those
at Foxconn.
"Apple and Foxconn are obviously the two
biggest players in this sector and since they're teaming up to drive this change,
I really do think they set the bar for the rest of the sector," FLA
President Auret van Heerden told Reuters in an interview.
More immediately, the Apple-Foxconn agreement
will raise costs for other manufacturers who contract with the Taiwanese company,
including Dell Inc, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon.com Inc, Motorola Mobility
Holdings, Nokia Oyj and Sony Corp.
The agreement will likely result in higher
prices for consumers, though the impact will be limited because labor costs are
only a small fraction of the total cost for most high-tech devices.
Foxconn said it would reduce
working hours to 49 hours per week, including overtime, while keeping total
compensation for workers at its current level. The FLA audit had
found that during peak production times, workers in the three factories put in
more than 60 hours per week on average.
To compensate for the
reduced hours, Foxconn will hire tens of thousands of additional workers. It
also said it would build more housing and canteens to accommodate that influx.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, who company critics hoped
would usher in a more open, transparent era at Apple after he took over from
the late Steve Jobs last fall, has shown a willingness to tackle the global
criticism head-on.
The much-anticipated report marks the first
phase of a probe into Apple's contract manufacturers across the world's most
populous nation. With 1.2 million workers, Foxconn - an affiliate of Taiwan's
Hon Hai Precision Industry - is by far Apple's largest and most influential
partner.
The letter below was written by Gou Rui-Qiang and Jia Jing-Chuan, and translated from Chinese for SumOfUs members. They worked in an Apple factory in Suzhou, China cleaning iPhone touch screens until their nerves were permanently damaged by chemicals used during cleaning.
You don't know us but you have seen our work. Until recently, we worked long hours assembling Apple’s iPhone touch screens in Suzhou, China. In early 2010, it was independently confirmed that137 workers, including us, were poisoned by a chemical called n-hexane which was used to clean iPhone screens.N-hexane is known to cause eye, skin and respiratory tract irritation, and leads to persistant nerve damage. Apple admitted to gross labour rights violations more than a year later.
If more people know about what we went through, Apple will feel pressured to change so other workers don’t have to suffer like we did.
We have been pressuring Apple, and its new CEO Tim Cook, for years to compensate those of us who were injured working for them, and demanding reform of working conditions at their Chinese factories so that their workers don’t suffer like we do. Now we need your help as customers or potential customers of Apple.
We need your help to send a message to Apple before their shareholder meeting on Thursday, Feb. 23rd. We want to see a strict corporate social responsibility and reform of the audit system to prevent similar tragedies in the future. He will listen to you as current or potential consumers.
You’ve already signed the petition, and 82,000 others have too -- for that, we thank you.We believe it’d be symbolicly powerful if 100,000 people signed the petition before SumOfUs delivers it to Tim Cook on Thursdayat their shareholder meeting. We’re really close to that goal, but we need you to share our request with your friends to get over the edge.
It has been over two years since many of us were hospitalized and treated but our debilitating symptoms continue. Rui-Qiang still can't find work because he can no longer stand for the long hours most jobs require. Jing-Chuan has to spend nearly $100 a month on health supplements.
But with all of us working together to pressure Apple to change, we can make sure what happened to us doesn’t happen to others too.
David Barbosa reported in The NY Times today, Feb 19th 2012, that Foxconn has announced it will sharply raise salaries for workers in its Chinese factories by 16 to 25% bringing wages to about $400 month which is $16 day (1).
This is a large wage increase but will it really solve the problems related to overtime as well as those due to the organization of work at Foxconn which includes a militaristic work environment, reports of punitive actions for rule breaking, monotonous work, lack of breaks, low social support, inability to talk with co-workers during working hours, among many other issues?
One psychosocial factor associated with work is called “effort reward imbalance” or ERI for short. This model of work stress was pioneered by Johannes Siegrist and defines threatening job conditions as a “mismatch between high workload (high demand) and low control over long-term rewards" When ERI is present this results in stress and has serious health outcomes (e.g., depression and hypertension) See www.unhealthywork.org for more details about psychosocial work stressors.
Long-term rewards include job security and possibility for upward mobility (promotion prospects) as well as wages. So raising wages may help here but the key issue is not simply the absolute level of wages but the nature of the rewards and the imbalance between effort and reward. Workers by all reports are putting in enormous effort (80 hours of work per with overtime), and the rewards workers are looking for include support on the job, job security, opportunity for advancement and a sense of purpose (2). After all, what is the point of having money if one doesn’t have a community in which to live and a future.
Most of the problems reported at Foxconn have little to do with whether workers are receiving an adequate wage. This is implicitly acknowledged by Foxconn, which also announced yesterday that they would begin reducing “mandatory” overtime hours at its factories. Unfortunately 60 hours of work per week, which is the law in China, is not enforced and is also excessive and harmful. Still moving toward 60 hours work/week with higher wages are both steps in the right direction.
When will Foxconn and Apple begin to acknowledge and address the issues of work organization, which many have been documenting over the past several years? When will China enforce its own labor laws regarding work hours?
Below we are printing the letter from Li Qiang, Director of China Labor Watch to Mr. Tim Cook, CEO at Apple Corporation concerning working conditions and the health of workers at Foxconn Corporation, a supplier of Apple iPads and iPhones. China Labor Watch is one of the foremost authorities on working conditions in China, a country with a seriously under-developed occupational health and safety infrastructure. China also appears to have little commitment to improving the conditions of working people in China. In a subsequent blog this coming week we will expand on the issues raised in the letter from Li Qiang to Apple.
Peter Schnall and Erin Wigger
“Dear Mr. Cook,
…Although the international anti-sweatshop movement has recently trained its focus on Apple's supply chain, I find that the labor conditions in Apple's Chinese supplier factories are actually not the worst of the factories used by multinational electronics companies there.
However, this is what "not the worst" means for workers in the factories that make your products:
- They have to work as long as 11 hours a day, 7 days a week with only one hour-long break during lunch. For this they only make about 2000 RMB a month, which at current exchange rates is only $320.
- Those that work in the iPad case polishing workshop are exposed to vast amounts of aluminum dust and may be injured or even killed in an explosion should the dust ignite. This has happened twice in the past year. First, in May 2011 at a Foxconn plant in Chengdu (3 killed, 15 injured) and then in December 2011 at a Foxconn plant in Shanghai (61 injured).
- At the factories of Foxconn, one of your largest suppliers, 13 workers committed suicide in 2010. Foxconn's response of putting up nets on factory buildings to catch suicidal jumpers indicates that it believes this is an ongoing concern, since many of the environmental factors that may have led to the workers taking their lives -- including long working hours, social isolation and loss of agency -- remain unchanged.
As a result, that Apple's suppliers aren't the worst in the Chinese electronics industry probably says more about other Chinese factories than it does about the ones your company uses.
As you said in your letter of January 26th to Apple's employees, Apple has done more recently to improve these conditions, having disclosed its full list of supplier factories, made efforts to "inspect more factories" and "educate workers about their rights" and even "opened our supply chain for independent evaluations by the Fair Labor Association." This assumes that the problem is with Apple's suppliers, rather than with Apple itself. However, there are still two big questions that Apple needs to answer before it can truly claim that this is the case.
First, how can a company that claims to make working conditions a priority make such astronomical profits at a time when those making its products are obviously suffering? Recently, Apple has seen its profitability soar to new heights. In the first quarter of the 2012 fiscal year, Apple made $46.33 billion in revenue and made a net profit of $13.06 billion, its largest profit ever and one of the largest quarterly profits of any American company in history. And you, personally, received stock options worth $380 million shortly afterwards. Let's do some simple math. The $13.06 billion net profit Apple made in one single quarter is equal to the combined salary of 300,000 workers at Foxconn's assembly line over the course of eleven years. And the value of your options alone could pay for those 300,000 workers' salaries for that extremely profitable quarter. And remember, those workers have to work 240 hours a month or more and some workers are required to stand all day long without a restroom break.
Second, how can a company with as much control over its manufacturing process as Apple has not already know what labor conditions are like in its supply chain? From our research, the production processes (and by extension, the intensity of the work that employees have to perform) at supplier factories have been approved by Apple. Apple's quality controls mean that only those who meet the standards Apple design can get a production order. The raw materials the factories use have to be purchased from the suppliers Apple designates. As a result, most supplier factories manufacture products according to Apple's specific guidelines and have no ability to alter them.
We believe that the answer to these questions is that the problem is not a result of a few "bad apples," in the midst of the supply chain but is rather deeply rooted in your company's business model. It's a systemic problem resulting as much from decisions made in Cupertino, California as from those made in Chengdu, China.
We believe the most basic cause of the problems at Apple's supplier factories is the low price Apple insists on paying its supplier factories, leaving next to no room for them to make a profit. The demand for astronomically high production rates at an extremely low price pushes factories to exploit workers, since it is the only way to meet Apple's production requirements and make its factory owners a profit at the same time.
To be fair, Apple's problems are not unique. They are faced by the entire electronics industry and its customers as they attempt to manage a global manufacturing system that locates factories wherever the cost of production is cheapest. The key choice Apple has to make as a company is whether it will try to shift the attention of journalists and the public towards the individual factories that make their products, or will sincerely acknowledge its responsibility for these factories' deplorable working conditions and make systemic changes to its supply chain.
Over the years, China Labor Watch has sent many letters to Apple about our investigations of its Chinese supplier factories, hoping that we could work together to find a way to solve the problems workers face. But Apple has never responded. However, we now feel that perhaps the time for analysis has ended. There is a simple solution for the problems we have observed in Apple's supply chain. And it doesn't even involve raising the prices on the American consumer who buys its products. It is simply sharing a larger proportion of Apple's sizable profits with the supplier factories it contracts with, and by extension, the people who make its products. And perhaps if Apple's customers no longer have to worry about the ethical implications of buying an iPhone, it will be able to go on to earn even more in the future.
By Ellen Rosskam, Ph.D., MPH, Center for Social Epidemiology’s European Associate
The conditions described by workers at Foxconn are, unfortunately, not an isolated case. Foxconn just happens to be in the limelight right now because of recently reported worker deaths and its connection with Apple, which stands solidly behind its values of corporate social responsibility. Apple is in a similar press spotlight. Nike got the same kind of bad publicity when descriptions of its Asian sweatshops hit the Western press. Improvements in some Nike manufacturing plants were due largely to student-led movements across the USA, which threatened sales. For a vivid picture of work conditions typical in China’s manufacturing factories, watch the documentary film “China Blue.” The film documents, as an example, workers in textile manufacturing companies in China using clothespins to keep their eyes open while working, because of extreme sleep deprivation from working 18 hours/day (8 a.m. until 2 a.m.), 7 days/week. Those workers earn $0.06 (six cents) an hour, in other words $1.08/day, or $7.56/week. Workers at Foxconn on the other hand, earn $22/week - 3 times more than workers in textile factories.
More skills are required to work in tech manufacturing as compared to other industrial sectors (such as textile manufacturing) so wages will not be the same. Therefore, the focus should not be simply on wages, but the overall working conditions. While work conditions and wages are poor at Foxconn, the textile sector is even worse than the tech sector, and other manufacturing sectors are equally bad - they just haven’t been in the western press as much as Foxconn, Apple, and Nike.
It’s a positive sign that Foxconn made some response to recent worker protests and several suicides at some of their manufacturing plants (e.g. wage increase, payoffs to quit, counselors, introducing stress management programs, building safety netting around the factory.) Even so, not all of the promises made to workers were kept by the company and, the reality is that Foxconn’s responses just barely begin to deal with the working conditions in these factories.
No occupational health and safety or epidemiological data are available to assess what’s happening to workers in these plants, and no one knows what happens to sick or injured workers when they leave a company. If Apple is serious about improving working conditions in its Chinese suppliers’ factories, then its first step should be to ensure that occupational health data is collected.
Hopefully the information, training, and interventions being introduced in some of the plants will be based on state of the art knowledge and practice. For example, stress management programs being implemented by Foxconn aim to teach individual workers skills to cope with existing conditions. Unfortunately, these programs do not aim to change the causes of the stress, which includes excessively long work hours. Moreover, individual stress management programs have been demonstrated to yield more positive results when accompanied by structural changes in the organization of work.
If Management asks “where to begin?” the easiest starting point is to ask workers their priorities for change. Easy-to-use, low-cost tools and solutions exist, e.g. Barefoot Research: A Workers’ manual for organizing on work security[1] and Ergonomic checkpoints: Practical and easy-to-implement solutions for improving safety, health and working conditions.[2]
China needs, as a country, an occupational health system capable of monitoring the working conditions of its people. In addition, they need a solid social protection system that is proactive and prevention oriented. This system needs to be able to provide for the needs of workers who are no longer capable of performing in China’s modern workplaces.
[1]Barefoot Research: A Workers’ manual for organising on work security, M. Keith, J.Brophy, P. Kirby, E. Rosskam, ILO (Geneva), 2002 -- Mandarin and Cantonese versions are available from the Hong Kong Workers’ Health Center,
[2]Ergonomic checkpoints: Practical and easy-to-implement solutions for improving safety, health and working conditions, K. Kogi, I. Kuorinka, et al., ILO (Geneva), 1996 (2nd printing 2011) -- also available in Mandarin.
