Sustainability Issues or Business Opportunities
Smita Pandey Mishra
Sustainability | SDG Strategy| ESG Evaluation| BRSR | Supplier Sustainability| Responsible Businesses | Responsible Investors |Keynote Speaker
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., trading as Foxconn Technology Group and better known as Foxconn, is a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturer with its headquarters in Tucheng, New Taipei City, Taiwan.
The company is in news for all the wrong reasons. In past, it has been involved in several controversies relating to employee grievances or treatment. In 2010, following a series of?employee suicides?at its factory in?Shenzhen, Foxconn was criticized by labor activists, who accused the company of providing low wages and allowing employees to work past legal overtime limits.
Internet says – on 15th December 2021 - ?256 workers at Foxconn's Sriperumbudur?factory developed Acute Diarrhoeal Disease due to food poisoning, after eating food at the company provided hostel. As a result of which 159 workers were hospitalized. The workers were provided no information about this, due to which a rumor started spreading among the workers through WhatsApp that two workers had died. By 17 December there were sit-in protests in worker dormitories, by 10 pm of the same day, thousands of women workers of the factory staged protests on the Chennai-Bengaluru national highway, this was met by police detainment of 67 women protestors and arrest of one journalist, with many of them being released a day later. Following the protests the factory was shut down for a week, with the state government and district administration investigating the worker conditions. On 22 December the Food safety department sealed the kitchen of the dormitory?finding rats and poor drainage. The rooms provided to workers were overcrowded with them being forced to sleep on the floor, some even lacking toilets with a running water supply. Following the revelation of substandard living conditions, on 29 December Apple put the Foxconn plant on probation, with both Apple and Foxconn issuing statements on the dormitory and dining rooms conditions.
Foxconn, apologized for the lapses and said it will revamp local management team and systems to ensure high standards needed are achieved and maintained. Apple has put Sriperumbudur factory of iPhone assembler Foxconn on 'probation'?. Clearly insufficient action by team Apple who should see themselves as responsible for the mishaps under the Supplier sustainability concept. It will be of interest to many to see the supplier sustainability audit report of Apple might have done on Foxconn in 2019 and 2020. Hopefully they make it public.
?The S of the ESG factors has been deeply disturbed. Employee well-being proved to be a huge social risk in this case.
The Sustainable Development Goal that was violated is - Target 8.8 :Protect labour rights and promote safe and secure working environments for all workers, including migrant workers, in particular women migrants, and those in precarious employment.
?Apple along with Foxconn have an opportunity to clean the house for once and for all and start building a healthier and decent work conditions. And maybe this could be an example of why developed nations and businesses that come from there need to take up ?Target 8.A, more genuinely.
Target 8.A : Increase Aid for Trade support for developing countries, particularly LDCs, including through the Enhanced Integrated Framework for LDCs.
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Governments can play a bigger role and have better regulations to audit such setups. Making the applicability of Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting to such businesses as mandatory can be a deterrent for such situations of human exploitation and blatant disrespect for human rights. And the organizations need to look at sustainability issues as opportunities to do better business.
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