Everyone should check out this YouTube video of a Professor talking about and debunking anti-union myths. She makes important points that are often overlooked when talking about the importance of organized labor – esp. that individuals who are not in a union have a difficult time enforcing their labor rights and protections without reprisals from employers. Unions have the power to act collectively to protect and enforce labor laws. The film also makes a case about how rampant wage theft is…
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Friday, January 2, 2015
Apple 'failing to protect Chinese factory workers'
The
below is an article by BBC journalist Richard Bilton on the discoveries he and
several undercover investigators made at Pegatron, an Apple supplier, as well
as problems with Apple's sourcing of raw materials. You can watch a short clip of the program here.
By
Richard Bilton
BBC
Panorama
Filming
on an iPhone 6 production line showed Apple's promises to protect workers were
routinely broken.
It found
standards on workers' hours, ID cards, dormitories, work meetings and juvenile
workers were being breached at the Pegatron factories.
Apple
said it strongly disagreed with the programme's conclusions.
Exhausted
workers were filmed falling asleep on their 12-hour shifts at the Pegatron
factories on the outskirts of Shanghai.
One
undercover reporter, working in a factory making parts for Apple computers, had
to work 18 days in a row despite repeated requests for a day off.
Another
reporter, whose longest shift was 16 hours, said: "Every time I got back
to the dormitories, I wouldn't want to move.
"Even
if I was hungry I wouldn't want to get up to eat. I just wanted to lie down and
rest. I was unable to sleep at night because of the stress."
'Continuous
improvement'
Apple
declined to be interviewed for the programme, but said in a statement: "We
are aware of no other company doing as much as Apple to ensure fair and safe
working conditions.
"We
work with suppliers to address shortfalls, and we see continuous and
significant improvement, but we know our work is never done."
Apple
said it was a very common practice for workers to nap during breaks, but it
would investigate any evidence they were falling asleep while working.
It said
it monitored the working hours of more than a million workers and that staff at
Pegatron were averaging 55 hours a week.
The poor
conditions in Chinese factories were highlighted in 2010 when 14 workers killed
themselves at Apple's biggest supplier, Foxconn.
Following
the suicides, Apple published a set of standards spelling out how factory workers
should be treated. It also moved some of its production work to Pegatron's
factories on the outskirts of Shanghai.
But
Panorama's undercover reporters found that these standards were routinely
breached on the factory floor.
Overtime
is supposed to be voluntary, but none of the reporters were offered any choice.
In addition to the excessive hours, one reporter had to attend unpaid meetings
before and after work. Another reporter was housed in a dormitory where 12
workers shared a cramped room.
Apple says
the dormitory overcrowding has now been resolved and that it requires suppliers
to retroactively pay workers if it finds they haven't been paid for work
meetings.
Pegatron
said it was carefully investigating Panorama's claims and would take all necessary
action if any deficiencies were found at their facilities.
"Worker
safety and well-being are our top priorities. We set very high standards,
conduct rigorous training for managers and workers, and have external auditors
regularly visiting our facilities to find areas for improvement," a
statement said.
Dangerous
conditions
Panorama
also travelled further down Apple's supply chain to the Indonesian island of
Bangka.
Apple
says it is dedicated to the ethical sourcing of minerals, but the programme
found evidence that tin from illegal mines could be entering its supply chain.
It found
children digging tin ore out by hand in extremely dangerous conditions - miners
can be buried alive when the walls of sand or mud collapse.
Twelve-year-old
Rianto was working with his dad at the bottom of a 70-foot cliff of sand. He
said: "I worry about landslides. The earth slipping from up there to the
bottom. It could happen."
Panorama
tracked down a gang who collect tin from the area where Rianto was working. One
of them said they sold tin to a smelter on Apple's list of suppliers.
Johan
Murod, who runs one of the smelters on Apple's list, said 70% of the tin that
is exported comes from the small-scale mines.
"At
the smelter there's everything from both large and small scale mines. It's all
mixed. There's no way to know what is legal and what is illegal."
Apple
says it is a complex situation on Bangka with tens of thousands of miners
selling tin through many middle men.
"The
simplest course of action would be for Apple to unilaterally refuse any tin
from Indonesian mines. That would be easy for us to do and would certainly
shield us from criticism.
"But
that would also be the lazy and cowardly path, since it would do nothing to
improve the situation. We have chosen to stay engaged and attempt to drive
changes on the ground."
Friday, December 26, 2014
Apple supplier Pegatron plans changes after BBC report on worker mistreatment
"In response to a BBC investigation alleging mistreatment of workers at one of its factories, Apple partner Pegatron has vowed to look into the matter and implement any necessary improvements.
In a statement issued to the Taiwan Stock Exchange, Pegatron Technology said on Monday that plans to investigate the claims that appeared last week in the BBC report. The company also said that employee safety is its top priority, and it is working to ensure all of its workers are safe.
Pegatron also touted the strict training it requires for its employees and management, and noted it uses external inspectors to audit its facilities.
Pegatron also touted the strict training it requires for its employees and management, and noted it uses external inspectors to audit its facilities.
The statement made no mention of Apple, but BBC One focused on Pegatron's relationship with the iPhone maker, exposing multiple instances of poor treatment of workers on one of its production lines. The investigation by BBC Panorama used hidden cameras to discover a variety of infractions violating Apple's own Supplier Responsibility report, including illegal ID card confiscation, excessive working hours, poor living conditions, and underage workers.
But the report itself has also come under fire, as Apple responded last week with an internal memo saying officials at the company were "deeply offended" by the allegations made in the telecast. Apple executive Jeff Williams said certain details provided by the company to the BBC were "clearly missing" from the special that aired on the news channel last week.
Williams noted that that Apple's audits and tracking show that it has achieved an average of 93 percent compliance with its 60-hour workweek limit. He also admitted that the company can do better, and vowed that it will.
'We know of no other company doing as much as Apple does to ensure fair and safe working conditions, to discover and investigate problems, to fix and follow through when issues arise, and to provide transparency into the operations of our suppliers,' Williams wrote."
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Excessive Work Hours Still the Rule at Apple Suppliers
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.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
"I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like That"
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.
"I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like
That"
"The paper before my
eyes fades yellow
With a steel pen I chisel on
it uneven black
Full of working words
Workshop, assembly line,
machine, work card, overtime, wages ...
They've trained me to become
docile
Don't know how to shout or
rebel
How to complain or denounce
Only how to silently suffer
exhaustion
When I first set foot in this
place
I hoped only for that grey
pay slip on the tenth of each month
To grant me some belated
solace
For this I had to grind away
my corners, grind away my words
Refuse to skip work, refuse
sick leave, refuse leave for private reasons
Refuse to be late, refuse to
leave early
By the assembly line I stood
straight like iron, hands like flight,
How many days, how many
nights
Did I - just like that -
standing fall asleep?"
- 20 August 2011
"The Last Graveyard"
Even the machine is nodding off
Sealed workshops store diseased iron
Wages concealed behind curtains
Like the love that young workers bury at the
bottom of their hearts
With no time for expression, emotion crumbles
into dust
They have stomachs forged of iron
Full of thick acid, sulfuric and nitric
Industry captures their tears before they have
the chance to fall
Time flows by, their heads lost in fog
Output weighs down their age, pain works
overtime day and night
In their lives, dizziness before their time is
latent
The jig forces the skin to peel
And while it's at it, plates on a layer of
aluminum alloy
Some still endure, while others are taken by
illness
I am dozing between them, guarding
The last graveyard of our youth.
- 21
December 2011
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
A 15-year old worker dies of pneumonia at Pegatron! Was it preventable?
China
Labor Watch and the New York Times reported this past December 11th
on another death at Pegatron’s Shanghai plant (an Apple Corporation contracted
supplier of the new iPhone 5C) that employs 100,000 Chinese workers (1,3).
On
October 9th Shi Zhaokun, a 15-year-old Chinese laborer, checked
himself into a hospital and passed away shortly thereafter of pneumonia. Shi
had been hired using his cousin’s identity card that stated he was 20 (1, 3).
The legal working age in China is 16. Documents provided from his family show
he had worked 79 hours in his first week, 77 in his second and 75 in his third,
all in violation of Chinese law (and Apple’s supplier responsibility
commitment) prohibiting more than 60 hour work weeks. In his only month at
Pegatron Shi worked nearly 280 hours, often 12 hours a day, six days a week (2,
3).
Pegatron
claims his death cannot be attributed to unhealthy working conditions within
the plant, yet China Labor Watch reports that there have been at least four
other similar deaths of young people at the Shanghai plant in recent months (1,
2). Moreover, Pegatron had declared the youth healthy in a pre-employment
physical only a month before his passing making it unlikely that a precondition
accounted for his pneumonia. Alternatively, the screening exam was faulty and a
sick person was hired. Either way, something is amiss (1, 2).
Apple
sent its own team of medical professionals to assess the situation and they agreed
in a statement to Reuters that
Shi died of pneumonia and that there was nothing in the factory that could have
caused the illness (4). We concur that the contraction of pneumonia from any
one physical ‘place’ or hazardous ‘material’ in the factory is unlikely, but
find it unsettling that there’s been no mention of what the physical strain of
a 70+ hour work week for many weeks does to a young person’s immune system. We
believe this added strain, if not the cause of Shi’s illness, was likely a
contributing factor to the development and severity of his illness.
If this seems unlikely to you, be aware that there is an
emerging body of research demonstrating a relationship between work stress,
long work hours and impaired health and immune system deterioration (5, 6). Combine
this with over-crowded living conditions and possible exposure to someone with
pneumonia – is it really a surprise that he got sick? No it’s not, but it is surprising
that he died. How was it that Shi’s illness could have gone untreated? Are
there many unreported cases of pneumonia in this factory? What does it say
about the quality of the medical surveillance of these tens of thousands of
working people that this 15-year-old could get sick and die virtually
unnoticed?
Li
Qiang, who runs China Labor Watch says, “Considering the sudden deaths of five people and the
similar reason of the deaths, we believe there should be some relations between
the tragedy and the working conditions in the factory,” (2). We concur.
5.
McEWEN, B. S. (1998), Stress, Adaptation, and
Disease: Allostasis and Allostatic Load. Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences, 840: 33–44. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1998.tb09546.x
6.
The Workplace and Cardiovascular Disease, Schnall et al, Hanley
& Belfus, Inc. Occup Med 15(1), 2000 – http://unhealthywork.org/category/theworkplaceandcvd/
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Apple CEO Tim Cook supports rights for U.S. workers, but what about workers in it's supply chain?
Early last week Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Corporation wrote that workplace equality is “good for business,” in a show of his and the company’s support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) - a landmark civil rights legislation that would make it illegal to discriminate against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees (LGBT) in the workplace - which was approved last Thursday in a landmark decision by the Senate (1,2). Apple’s own corporate policy prohibits discriminatory hiring practices against its LGBT effectively giving them more protection than they currently receive under Federal law (4).
Cook wrote Tuesday in an op-ed in the Washington Post,
“At Apple, we try to make sure people understand that they don't have to check their identity at the door. We're committed to creating a safe and welcoming workplace for all employees, regardless of their race, gender, nationality or sexual orientation…
Those who have suffered discrimination have paid the greatest price for this lack of legal protection. But ultimately we all pay a price. If our coworkers cannot be themselves in the workplace, they certainly cannot be their best selves. When that happens, we undermine people's potential and deny ourselves and our society the full benefits of those individuals' talents.
So long as the law remains silent on the workplace rights of gay and lesbian Americans, we as a nation are effectively consenting to discrimination against them. Congress should seize the opportunity to strike a blow against such intolerance by approving the Employment Nondiscrimination Act” (3,4,5).
President Obama also wrote in support of the bill, pointing out the importance of equality and non-discrimination in the workplace and emphasizing the fact that the majority of Fortune 500 companies and small businesses already have nondiscrimination policies that protect LGBT employees saying,
“These companies know that it's both the right thing to do and makes good economic sense. They want to attract and retain the best workers, and discrimination makes it harder to do that. …
If we want to create more jobs and economic growth and keep our country competitive in the global economy, we need everyone working hard, contributing their ideas, and putting their abilities to use doing what they do best. We need to harness the creativity and talents of every American" (6).
Though getting through Senate was a major success, ENDA still faces considerable opposition as by Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and the Republican-controlled House (3).
The passing of ENDA would be a great and long sought after win for all those who support equality in the workforce and it our personal opinion that it is great that Apple supports this legislation. But dear reader, it’s hard for us to ignore the fact that Apple remains an integral part of a network of overseas companies (e.g, Foxconn and others ) that highly exploit workers whose socioeconomic status renders them vulnerable. Exploiting this vulnerability of its overseas workforce is a major contributing factor to the success and profitability of Apple corporation. If equality for all is truly what Apple is interested in, it should include ensuring that less privileged workers in the Apple supply chain are provided with a living wage and decent working conditions. What will stockholders think of this idea?
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