Tag Archives: Apple

Blowing Smoke

Posted on by

The deadly explosion Friday at Foxconn’s Chengdu site killed three workers and injured 15 others. Will the company, at long last, feel its workers pain?

It says here, no.

Apple, one of the larger customers for the site, released a statement that was at once nonjudgmental and noncommittal. In it, the iPad maker had this to say: “We are deeply saddened by the tragedy at Foxconn’s plant in Chengdu, and our hearts go out to the victims and their families. We are working closely with Foxconn to understand what caused this terrible event.”

Whoopee.

For a company that takes incredible umbrage at the slightest hint of disclosure, I suppose it would be asking too much for it to reveal any hint of emotion now. But Apple has long shown itself to be disinterested in the ugly goings-on at its largest supplier. Report after report has ripped Foxconn for worker abuses ranging from environmental conditions to overtime and penalties for mistakes generally associated with penal colonies.

Reportedly as much as 30% of the highly profitable iPad 2 tablets are built in Chengdu. If that’s the case, there is absolutely no reason Apple should not have an employee on site, 24/7, ensuring operations are running smoothly. This begs the question, where was that employee? Did he or she not know about the conditions in the polishing department where the explosion reportedly took place, and how workers complained “the department is full of aluminum dust” and “(e)ven though they have worn gloves, their hands are still covered by dust and so (is) their face and clothes?”

Other major Foxconn customers, such as H-P, Dell and Motorola, generally have avoided the scrutiny that Apple gets, but that doesn’t — or shouldn’t — make them any less culpable. It’s a convenient excuse to hide behind the veil of outsourcing as a means to ignore what goes on inside your supplier’s factories.

To me, it’s corporate-sanctioned cannibalism. We are supposed to be better than that.

Apple’s Bad Form

Posted on by

Reports today are crediting Apple for moving quickly after a number of suicides at Foxconn last year put the iPhone maker’s largest supplier in media peril.

But what, exactly, did Apple do? From its progress report, released yesterday, it’s hard for me to tell. Yes, Apple upped its supplier audits to 127 last year from 102 in 2009. But is that significant? After all, Apple’s report does not say how many suppliers it has, or whether that number changed from 2009 to 2010. Of the 127 sites audited, 97 were looked at for the first time. For a company that relies so heavily on Third World labor, that’s nothing to be proud of.

Then there’s the little matter of the relationship between Foxconn and Apple. Apple reportedly owns the lines inside Foxconn’s Shenzhen facility. Foxconn builds almost all of Apple’s many lines of iPhones, iPads and iPods, not to mention its other PC products. Few other suppliers have the capacity to handle the volumes of these lines. Thus, can the two really be parted? And if not, then what teeth do Apple’s audits truly have?

Handing Over the Reins

Posted on by
Great article in this week’s Newsweek by Yale dean Dr. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld recapping the struggle a technology innovator has in ensuring his or her vision lives on after he/she leaves the scene. Key quote:

How do you maintain the DNA that the founders have imprinted into the business? … Time and again, they share a disdain for any distraction about their own mortality. Like monarchs, they often believe they can and should reign as long as they live.

One nit: While this tale of hits and misses among ground-breaking tech companies (Apple, Digital Equipment Corp., IBM, Polaroid) makes for a fascinating trip back through time, Dr. Sonnenfeld doesn’t save much discussion on how to properly prepare your own bench for someday manning the ship.

Gou Motors On

Posted on by

Under different circumstances, would Foxconn’s Terry Gou be considered the second coming of Henry Ford?

This Business Week article suggests so. I’ll have to study my Henry Ford history, because while the piece breaks little new ground, it is filled with Gou quotes that are ironically delicious: “Work itself is a type of joy”; “A harsh environment is a good thing”; “Hungry people have especially clear minds”;  “An army of one thousand is easy to get, one general is tough to find.”

All this from a man worth an estimated $5.9 billion. It doesn’t sound like the man who said of the Model T, “”When I’m through, everybody will be able to afford one, and about everybody will have one.”

Also, the new Madison Avenue p.r. agency’s touch is coming through, as Business Week reports on how Guo’s family fled the China and the Mao-led Communists in the late 1940s. There also is background fodder on his personal family tragedies — his wife and son both died of cancer in the same year — and how he practices yoga and regularly takes his 85-year-old mother for Taiwanese noodles.

The article attempts to smooth over criticism of the employee suicides (calling it a classic cluster, despite evidence by the Wall Street Journal to the contrary), and completely misses the boat on how overtime works in China, finding several workers who say they welcome the extra hours, without bothering to acknowledge the reason they work OT is because they need the money.

The gold nuggets come when Gou intimates his strategy to move workers off the company rolls and onto the government’s. “I think we need to change the way things are. Businesses should be focused on business and social responsibility should be government responsibility.” Comparisons of Foxconn to Wal-Mart sound more apt than ever before.

I don’t expect a smear job. However, this piece has the fingerprints of a PR agency at its finest all over it. Read it with that in mind.

Twisted Realities

Posted on by

The latest failed attempt to write off the spate of suicides at Foxconn comes courtesy of the Global Supply Chain Council.

First, consider the source. The GSSC is China based, and because of the relationship (read: censorship) of that nation’s government and domestic businesses, it calls into question the basic perspective any organization will have when it comes to critically examining the local landscape.

Second, by putting “crisis” in quotes, it seeks to diminish what reasonable people consider appalling: a host of suicides across multiple manufacturing campuses. Further, it calls the discussions of Foxconn and Apple “headline hype,” akin to the military phrase for civilian deaths, “collateral damage.” These are human lives at stake. If there is something more precious, I don’t know what it is.

Then there are minor factual liberties, such as the suggestion that a February 2010 CSR investigation into child labor practices was initiated by Apple, when indeed it was spurred by widely disseminated media reporting.

And then there’s this monstrous statement:

In any population of 300,000 young people in urban China, one should statistically expect at least as many suicides per year as seen at Foxconn recently. Factory workers are overwhelmingly younger than 25, and the suicide rate among Chinese youth (similar to youth everywhere) is higher than the overall average. Many U.S. universities would be ecstatic if their suicide rates fell to levels as low as those at Foxconn China.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. As we’ve noted before, the proper context for the suicides at Foxconn is not how they stack up against China (or US schools, for that matter) at large, but rather against other large industrial manufacturing operations within China.

To understand whether working at Foxconn decreases the suicide rate, as the GSSC argues, the suicide rates at operations like ECS must also be baselined. And if people are jumping off tall buildings at Honda in Shenzhen, I haven’t read about it.

What has taken place over the past year at Foxconn is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster. I’m not surprised a Chinese-based organization is defending its benefactors, but that doesn’t make them right.

http://www.hopkinschildrens.org/Depression-Lack-of-Social-Support-Trigger-Suicidal-Thoughts-in-College-Students.aspx

Apple Bites Man

Posted on by

While no company outshines Apple when it comes to design and marketing, some of its other endeavors need work.

Apple has a long and tiresome history of using alleged sweatshops to build its latest gizmos, and outsources heavily to Foxconn, where no fewer than 10 workers have committed suicide this year.

Apple’s response? As reported in the Wall Stree Journal today:

Apple spokeswoman Jill Tan: “We are definitely concerned … but would like to emphasize that Apple is committed to ensuring the highest standards of social responsibility wherever Apple products are made.”

Her quote is followed by this damning statement: “Apple conducts annual reviews of final assembly manufacturers to uncover any possible violations of its Suppliers’ code of conduct. In its 2010 Supplier Responsibility Report, it found that 65% of the 102 facilities it audited were paying the wages and benefits due to workers.”  [itals mine]

What, in Apple’s eyes, constitutes “highest standards?” Would it accept a 65% yield on its iPods or iPhones?

I don’t think so.

At the Barrel of a Gun

Posted on by

Apple takes a fair amount of guff — and deservedly so, in my opinion — for looking the other way while its main suppliers take wild advantage of their workers.

But while Apple is the poster boy for the need to improve worker conditions, the heat for the gruesome and short lives of the Congolese encompasses a much wider cast.

As a new report by Global Witness makes clear, manufacturers are not doing nearly enough to combat the mass murder and exploitation taking place near the mines, from which the bulk of the world’s supply of such precious metals as coltan, cassiterite (tin ore) and wolframite are derived.

As our supply chains become more disjointed, this is exactly the type of shameful behavior that is too easily dismissed with the wave of a hand and the contrived notion that they can’t pull out of the Congo because will hurt the Congolese.

I am critical of Greenpeace because I think that its repeated public scoldings puts the attention and resources on red herring problems in which the “cure” is worse than the disease. I think this is a much bigger deal. Sub-Saharan Africa is the future of manufacturing — not tomorrow, not 10 years from now, but certainly down the road. It is home to more than one billion people, is in a more convenient time zone than is the Pacific Rim for OEM customers both in Europe and the Americas, and is the epitome of “low cost.”

The West must work to develop positive relationships with African nations now, lest China (which is aggressively courting the subcontinent) win over the nations which sometime in the future will be the region to which it outsources. And this starts with OEMs taking a hard line over insisting clear, unambiguous materials declarations — and hitting suppliers with harsh, and public, penalties for any failure to comply.

Many Congolese youth spend their days on their hands and knees, grubbing for cassiterite with their bare hands, in forced servitude to one of the local armies. The leaders of our industry shouldn’t need a gun to their heads to try to right such injustice.

Red Over Greenpeace

Posted on by

Another day, another whine from Greenpeace.

This time, the would-be environmental group complains that several large PC makers are “backtracking” on promises to eliminate certain chemicals from their computers.

In a press release issued today, Greenpeace cites Hewlett Packard, Dell and Lenovo – for “failing to improve their low scores.”

Dell and Lenovo are called out for delaying their migraton to non-PVC and BFR materials, while HP is cited for “[postponing] its 2007 commitment to phase out PVC and BFRs from its computer products from 2009 to 2011. [I]t is not even putting PVC and BFR-reduced products on the market.”

“Greenpeace takes voluntary commitments very seriously and holds companies accountable for their promises. There are no excuses for backtracking, and no reason for these companies not to have PCs free of PVC and BFRs now,” said Greenpeace International Toxics Campaigner Tom Dowdall in the statement.

Which is great, except it’s also wrong.

Keep in mind those scores are set and tabulated by Greenpeace. And note that those targets are constantly moving. Greenpeace exists only to wag its finger at large corporations. It needs enemies in order to survive, even if that means conjuring up ghosts and bogeymen.

Meanwhile, Greenpeace also ignores that the science does not yet support the elimination of BFRs, and in fact, may suggest otherwise. As Dr. Arlene Blum, executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute and a member of Chemists Without Borders noted in her blog in May, “it is difficult to make a causal connection between chemical exposure and health impacts.”

And it ignores that all the major PC vendors now have significant takeback programs in place, providing some level of protection against these chemicals entering the waste stream.

While it pats Apple on the back, claiming its new PC lines “virtually free of PVC and completely BFR-free,” Greenpeace misses that Apple is perhaps the worst of the bunch when it comes to auditing and ensuring its vendors — which include Foxconn — follow acceptable labor practices.

BFRs may be bad, but what’s the alternative? Remind me: Does fire cause pollution?