Last year in May Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior issued a warning against abuses to workers. The abuses cited in the warning include not being paid for hours worked, mandatory extended overtime without breaks, failure to advise workers about how to handle toxic chemicals, paying ridiculously low wages, and various other mistreatments of employees.
Apple’s standpoint on the abuses can be viewed on their website. Auditing is a regular part of how they do business and they perform regular audits in areas of human rights and environmental impact. Apple also enforces a code of conduct for manufacturing based on standards developed by the “Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC), an organization established in 2004 to promote common codes of conduct for the electronics and information and communications technology industry”.
Li Mingqi, a former manager at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple largest manufacturing partners reports to the contrary about how Apple does business claiming, “Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost.”
Allegations like the one’s from above have Apple CEO Tim Cook really pissed off. He refutes the accusations and claims ,”…accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are.”
Cook also defends Apple by reminding Americans of the progress they have made in the area of human rights in foreign manufacturing:
“Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners and going deeper into the supply chain. As we reported earlier this month, we’ve made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers. We know of no one in our industry doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people.”
Cook goes on to say, “What we will not do — and never have done — is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain.”