Apple iPhone 11 Launch Relies on Illegal Use of Temporary Workers

Raise your hand if you think Apple is still a relevant tech company. What if those new iPhones were made by unfair worker conditions though? Does that change how a consumer buys a product or supports a brand in 2019?

That is the question I pose to you today.

It appears that Apple and Foxconn broke a Chinese Labor Law to build the latest iPhones.

Apple today, September 9th, 2019 denied most of what is in a report which alleges that the iPhone maker and its manufacturing partner Foxconn violated Chinese labor law.

Where they broke the law for sure is by employing too many temporary workers at the world’s biggest iPhone factory. That’s not great for Apple’s brand image.

BigTech Willing to Skirt the Law

So what happened? China Labor Watch published a report Sunday claiming that Apple and Foxconn violated workers’ rights in Foxconn’s Zhengzhou factory, the biggest iPhone factory in the world.

It was a pretty extreme violation. Investigators went undercover for as long as four years to uncover working conditions in the factory. In August 2019, 50% of the factory’s workforce was made up of temporary workers, even though Chinese law caps the proportion of temporary workers at 10%, the report said.

Some of the other findings are a bit concerning:

• The report also lists a slew of other alleged workers’ rights violations, including forced overtime.
• Apple and Foxconn denied the majority of allegations listed in the report, but confirmed in statements to several media organizations that the proportion of temporary workers at the factory was higher than 10%.

Under China’s labor laws, temporary workers can only comprise up to 10 percent of any given company’s workforce. But according to China Labor Watch, roughly 50 percent of workers at the Zhengzhou Foxconn factory where iPhones are being produced are temporary.

How do you justify this kind of activity by Apple and Foxconn?

The poor working conditions for these temp workers is well known compared to Western standards. How poor?

Workers earn roughly $1.68 US per hour standard and $2.52 US per hour for overtime, a wage, “insufficient to sustain the livelihood for a family living in Zhengzhou city,” says China Labor Watch.

Apple, it appears, was behaving illegally to offset the impact of the trade war initiated by Trump. The report said Apple and Foxconn increased those numbers as a means of offsetting the cost of the US-China trade war. Trump thinks Cook is a great businessman, I think I can see why now.

The 51-page report about alleged labor violations, first reported by Reuters, comes just as Apple is expected to announce its latest version of the iPhone at an event in California this week.

China Labor Watch claimed the companies committed a slew of additional workers' rights violations in the factory, all of which both Apple and Foxconn denied in their statements. However, for the record, we should dig deeper to see what Apple is probably doing in China for the phones we are using.

Those allegations included:

• Workers putting in 100 hours of overtime per month, well in excess of China’s legal limit of 36 hours per month.
• Student-workers being forced to work overtime during peak season.
• The factory didn’t provide the workers with adequate protective equipment, even though workers said they were exposed to toxic chemicals every day.
• The factory didn’t report work injuries.

All of these accusations are highly believable given what we know about how companies like these operate.

Workers earn a base wage of 2,100 yuan ($295), which is “insufficient to sustain the livelihood for a family living in Zhengzhou city,” according to the CLW report.

Being underpaid and overworked is the story of our lives in how the consumer goods we get in America are so competitively cheap. As consumers, we have to support companies with good reputations who don’t exploit their workers.

I feel bad that Apple is likely guilty of many of these claims. Especially in China where it likely doesn’t have a right to be, considering the U.S. blocked Huawei from the U.S.

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