Apple Reports Impressive Progress in Improving Supplier Working Conditions

As the world’s largest company, Apple has often faced criticisms for issues related to employment and working conditions among its Chinese manufacturing partners, and while these problems aren’t unique to Apple — they plague most Chinese factories — many have justifiably felt that Apple is the kind of company that should be leading the efforts to improve these kinds of conditions.

These concerns haven’t been falling on deaf ears, either. For the past few years, Apple has not only touted a strong commitment to improving the lives of workers in its supply chain partners, but has put its words into action with a Supplier Code of Conduct and regular audits of its facilities to ensure that its mandate to reduce employment violations is actually being upheld.

Each year, Apple also releases a Supplier Responsibility Report that acts as a sort of “score card,” tallying up the company’s progress in addressing these issues and always reiterating its emphasis on doing better by its workers.

We care deeply about the people who build our products, and the planet we all share. So we hold ourselves and our suppliers to the highest standards to ensure everyone is treated with dignity and respect. And we share our work openly so others can follow our lead.

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While there’s always more progress to be made — human nature and the culture of foreign factories make it almost impossible to ever reach 100% compliance — Apple deserves to be lauded for how far the company has come in improving the lives of its workers. The 2019 Supplier Responsibility Report notes that from 1,049 supplier assessments conducted in 45 countries, Apple found only a single case of underage labour, and only two cases of “bonded labour.”

In the underage labour case, Apple discovered one youth who was only 15 years and 10 months old who had obtained their job through the use of false identification. Apple had the teen immediately transported home and enrolled in their choice of school to continue their education, while the supplier was also required to continue paying wages. The former underage employee was given the option to return to work at the supplier when they reached legal working age.

The other major issue uncovered by Apple’s audits was debt-bonded labour. This is where potential employees are required to pay “supplier recruitment fees” in order to secure a job, which often requires the potential employee — usually foreign contract workers — to go into debt to a recruitment agency or the supplier itself. The employees are then basically forced to work to repay the original “recruitment fee” before they can actually receive wages.

Apple pulls no punches on calling this sort of behaviour exactly what it is: “a form of modern slavery” and notes that the company has included it as a violation of its Supplier Code of Conduct since 2008. While permissible fees were originally limited to a maximum of one month’s wages, in 2015 Apple dropped that number to zero, even in countries where the practice was otherwise legally permitted.

Last year, the two incidents of debt-bonded labour identified by Apple affected 287 employees, and required the repayment of $616,000 in “recruitment fees” to the affected employees — an average of $2,146 per affected employee — as well as placing both of the suppliers on an immediate one-year probation. Apple notes that since the policy first went into place in 2008, $30.9 million in debt-bonded labour fees have been repaid to a total of 36,137 supplier employees.

Apple’s report also reveals that it uncovered 24 cases where working hours were being falsified, although no specific details were provided other than the suppliers involved being placed on immediate probation while Apple auditors reviewed their ethics policies and management systems to correct the issues. In the report, Apple adds that suppliers’ compliance for overall working hours for 2018 was 96 percent.

Notably, Apple had zero serious, or “Core Violations,” last year in the areas of wages and benefits, discrimination, grievances, harassment and abuse, health and safety, or environmental issues.

While this year’s problems shouldn’t be dismissed, it’s definitely worth recognizing Apple for making great progress in improving the conditions for the workers in its foreign factories. As Bloomberg notes, the bonded labour cases alone represent an 82 percent improvement over the prior year’s numbers, when 10 violations were found impacting 1,558 staff. Similarly, this is the first year only a one solitary case of underage labour has been found, and is the result of the employee falsifying documentation rather than the employer deliberately hiring underage labour.

As with underage employment, falsification of working hours remains the biggest issue that Apple struggles with simply because many employees are eager to work additional hours for additional pay. Suppliers such as Foxconn have handed out massive pay raises intended to allow employees to stay within working hours limits while still taking home a reasonable salary, but ironically this has encouraged many staff to work even more due to the higher hourly overtime rate.

Regardless, Apple remains one of the only big tech companies to note only be making significant efforts to improve the working conditions in its supply chain, but actually reporting on these efforts with transparency. While this doesn’t let Apple off the hook in terms of doing better — even one case of bonded labour is one too many — it should hopefully provide the leadership and consumer pressure that will encourage other major U.S. companies to follow suit.