The first major report was in the UK’s Daily Mail, published in August 2006. It described workers at Foxconn’s Longhua factory living in high-security dorms “100 to a room, arriving with a few possessions and a bucket to wash their clothes.” Overtime, laborers told the journalists, was mandatory, and shifts could last fifteen hours a day. “We have to work too hard, and I am always tired,” one worker said. “It’s like being in the army. They make us stand still for hours. If we move we are punished by being made to stand still for longer.”
The article went viral, and after conducting an audit, Apple acknowledged that more than a third of workers exceeded its maximum workweek of sixty hours. Within a month Cupertino established a Supplier Responsibility team, vowing to improve conditions and hold vendors to account. This cat-and-mouse pattern—of the media finding problems in the supply chain and Apple pledging to do better—would be replicated over and again in the decade plus to follow. The periodic exposes helped to shine a light on working conditions and likely caused some positive change. But the media’s forays into what Apple was up to overlooked wider questions of company strategy, business development, and the management of product cycles. In histories of Apple, both in articles and books, China usually enters the conversation to explain the company’s problems, not its successes. But an early exception emerged in a wonky report on supply chain efficiency that came out just before the iPhone went on sale.
No comments:
Post a Comment