Tim Cook Responds To Foxconn Worker Abuse Report: Apple Not Turning 'Blind Eye'

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc has never turned "a blind eye" to the problems in its supply chain and any suggestion it does not care about the plight of workers is "patently false," Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an email to employees.

Cook was responding to a report in The New York Times about working conditions at Apple's main contract manufacturer, Foxconn, in China, an issue that for years has been a thorn in the company's side.

Apple responded in the past by launching independent audits and publishing the results. Earlier this month, Apple for the first time published a list of all its main suppliers.

"What we will not do - and never have done - is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain," he said in the email. "On this you have my word."

The email was first reported by the blog 9to5Mac and Reuters confirmed its authenticity.

"Any suggestion that we don't care is patently false and offensive to us," Cook said in the email.

Apple said earlier it agreed to let an outside agency monitor condition in the factories of its suppliers.

The company has said it made major efforts to improve and communicate its policies following high-profile labor problems at its foreign suppliers and manufacturers, including Foxconn.

The suicides at the plants associated with Apple cast a harsh spotlight on what critics dubbed a militaristic culture that pushed workers to the brink to meet unceasing demand for the company. In response, Apple stepped up the number of facilities it audits, to ensure they meet its code of conduct.

(Reporting By Poornima Gupta; editing by Andre Grenon)

Comments

[bigbubba90210]

06:02 AM on 02/01/2012

No offense, but for all those who say "Bring back the jobs!" please don't waste your bandwidth or your breath. It's NEVER going to happen. Even Jobs, when asked about "bringing back" such jobs, admitted as such.

The answer, as far as the US worker is concerned, is to become involved with emerging industries. And those industries are "unpalatable" to many blue collar workers. Not to mention that becoming involved with such industries would involve the demise of very profitable, very influential, existing industries, or becoming involved with industries for which a good number of US workers would take issue against on moral grounds.

So unless there is a radical sea shift in thought, and a highly unlikely triumph over certain all too well intrenched industries, then the "ship will be in danger," and "the situation will be grim." And no James Tiberius Kirk (or Jean-Luc Picard, for the blue-state crowd) will be available to save the ship and crew...

[JohnBryansFontaine]

04:34 PM on 01/31/2012

UPDATE :

Mark Shield's petition to Apple regarding the exploitati­­­­on and abuse of Chinese Workers has now passed 150,000 signatures :

Apple: Protect Workers Making iPhones in Chinese Factories

http://www.change.org/petitions/apple-ceo-tim-cook-protect-workers-making-iphones-in-chinese-factories

( Please sign it if you haven't already )

[ahammerjack]

07:30 PM on 01/31/2012

the american people are getting abused ,by the company's giving the work to china
i sign to bring back the jobs to the american people .MADE IN AMERICA
THE UNION LABEL

[JohnBryansFontaine]

09:06 PM on 01/31/2012

I could not agree with you more that America needs more and stronger Unions. This is why I am constantly posting the following link :

EMPLOYEE RIGHTS
UNDER THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT

http://www.dol.gov/olms/regs/compliance/EmployeeRightsPoster11x17_Final.pdf

However, I refuse to remain silent about Apple's inhuman and shameful exploitation of it's Workers, even if these Workers happen to live in another country.

[bigbubba90210]

04:43 AM on 02/01/2012

Apple makes the profit it does because it pays workers $22 *per day* to assemble and polish (yes, polish) iOS devices. And those employees work 12 hours per day, and some six days a week. That's an hourly rate of $0.55, which in the US is quite illegal. And even if it was legal, very few Americans would consent to living in company barracks, having little to no direct contact with family, and being subject to returning to work in less than 12 hours time, which, again, is illegal for hourly employees.

There'd be no making the soccer/football game for parents, no attending the school play, potentially no children at all, and potentially no significant other. In order to square with US law, and what US workers would stand for, Apple would have to give up BILLIONS. And that is never going to happen. It would take a change in US law to FORCE a company such as Apple to "bring back all the jobs." And that's never going to happen - even if Apple is heavily subsidized.

[Rob Huggins]

02:33 PM on 01/30/2012

There are certain companies with such bad reputations about how they treat their employees, its mind boggling. I remember Walter Isaacson talking about his biography of Steve Jobs and how one of the great things about the man was he could get engineers to do what they thought was impossible in an impossible time frame. When you set an impossible deadline on a salaried employee its like an indirect threat to work more than 40 hours or get fired. Sure you aren't saying you will fire him if he doesn't work 40 hours, but do you really expect him to meet the consistant impossible deadlines any other way.

Is it any wonder they use the same indirect employee manipulation through their suppliers. Sure they aren't telling their suppliers to treat employees like scum, but is it possible for their suppliers to meet the impossible demands of Apple any other way?

[TheLastNameNotInUse]

01:05 PM on 01/30/2012

Look, we had no idea that when we forced our suppliers, which already had known issues with worker safety and human rights violations, to lower their price (which they had to do because we are most of their business) by threatening to walk so we could maintain our 60% profit margin (yes you read that correctly)... we had no idea that they would make conditions even worse at the factory.

Seriously, how could you blame that on us. It's like you think we should have been able to predict the future.

[edenooch]

11:38 AM on 01/30/2012

well now how much team spirit / work ethic do u expect a 11yr old making 46 cents an hour to have... you should be ashamed to buy apple products

[bryanzth]

09:20 AM on 01/30/2012

Tim Cook, you bring the jobs home. Then we will pay $50 to $100 more per unit, even as labor costs go down because of more efficient processes but US labour.

Think on it, friend.

--Apple user.

BZ.

[edenooch]

11:39 AM on 01/30/2012

you smoking crack? tim crook aint gonna bring manufacturing operations to the USA

[bryanzth]

12:02 PM on 01/30/2012

There is already a thing in the pipeline. And this goes for Dell, HP, Asus, etc. Cook, unfortunately stuck his head above the trench and is in view. His analog at these other firms are just as culpable, and when daylighted will either change the Foxconn thingee or bring manufacturing back to the US.

Don't accuse me of smoking crack. Do you realize what that is? Listen to Magnificent Obsession on WBEZ 91.5 Chicago at 5:30 am on sunday mornings. There's some real witnessing.

Meanwhile for your insult, you're flagged.

BZ.

[White Raven]

07:29 AM on 01/30/2012

I don't think anyone's saying Apple turns a blind eye toward the bad labor conditions they take advantage of. I think what we're saying is they know it's been going on, have known it, and only care because the word's been passed around enough and Apple invests so much in its image that it can't afford to ignore anymore.

HP, Dell, Asus, etc etc do business with the same slavedriver named Foxconn, but they don't market their products as if they're designed by Jesus and buying one recovers a full acre of rainforest.

[bryanzth]

09:22 AM on 01/30/2012

HP, Dell, Asus etc.'s products are not designed well. I am using one right now. Bleechhh.

They can bring the work home too. It's about time.

BZ.

[frank1946]

07:18 AM on 01/30/2012

Apple is a Business, Business is all about market share and profit margins.

Most Consumers are Hypocrites ?

Answer: Get Compeitive with China Foxconn, solves the Problem, not Symptoms.

[bryanzth]

09:24 AM on 01/30/2012

Yes, solve the problem. I think that's a good analysis. The problem is the lack of labour unions, worker support and fair trade.

This free-trade nonsense has caused this. End that, too. Tax the income-rich, corps. and politically-active religious groups until their eyes bulge out.

BZ.

[edenooch]

11:41 AM on 01/30/2012

hard to find crap not made in china...just avoid the greediest of all wich is apple.. they got rich on the blood of poor asians and just want more

[psnyder325]

06:47 AM on 01/30/2012

The partial solution to this is to penalize companies that ship jobs overseas, just like the President said in his SOTU address on Tuesday. Tax them much higher than companies that keep jobs HERE. At least here unions exist to protect the workers' health and a fair and living wage.

[tomjones]

05:31 AM on 01/30/2012

The Chinese government don't care about the suffering in the fabrics and I don't think the American government care. The American market is now inundated with China's mobile phones. http://bit.ly/wjlsM8

[RobertFromMN]

05:28 AM on 01/30/2012

Thank you "free trade" and globalization. Exploiting cheap labor will always have unforeseen costs and consequences. Bring these jobs back to America.

[dracula2]

05:06 AM on 01/30/2012

It seems like no one cares.

[jsarets]

10:16 PM on 01/29/2012

Tim Cook is the man behind Apple's consumer electronics supply chain revolution in China.

When he joined Apple Computer, they were assembling those jelly bean iMacs in Elk Grove, CA. Cook's idea was that Apple should be a consumer electronics company, not a computer company. They dropped the word "computer" from the name of the company and developed the iPod, Apple's first true consumer electronics device, using contract manufacturing in China.

Today, Apple employs about 30,000 people, mostly in the United States. Apple's contract supply chain employs over 700,000 people, mostly in China. Make no mistake, this "post-PC revolution" credited to Steve Jobs is really Tim Cook's brainchild. He invented the way Apple brings these devices to market, and in the process, he invented a whole new style of mass production.

Consumer electronics vendors don't own factories anymore. Contract manufacturers like Foxconn own the factories. These contract manufacturers specialize in rapid scaling and retooling. They can reallocate their pool of factories between customers on demand. If one device is a hit, they expand production onto lines that were used for another device which flopped. 

This has revolutionized the industry. Vendors don't have to bet the company on a new device. They just put it out for contract manufacturing, and if it doesn't pan out in the marketplace, they're not left holding the bag with idle production lines. The contract manufacturer just retools for a different device, possibly for a different vendor.

Foxconn is the manufacturing equivalent of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. It's X different products manufactured in Y different factories with dynamic resource allocation and provisioning on demand.

Nothing like Foxconn exists in the United States. Henry Ford invented mass production in the United States, and Tim Cook reinvented mass production -- in China.

[bryanzth]

09:28 AM on 01/30/2012

Let Foxconn's next competitor arise in the US, Canada, Brazil or in Latin America.

BZ.

[jsarets]

10:29 AM on 01/30/2012

Vancouver would be a reasonable place to build a contract manufacturing colossus. Pacific seaport with cheap hydroelectric power, a highly livable metropolitan center, and a government which doesn't necessarily shy away from industrial policy.

[don]

08:02 PM on 01/29/2012

CBS Sunday Morning in a report this morning pointed out that Foxconn produces 50% of the world's electronics, which is staggering. It is also a company based in Taiwan, our old Nationalist Chinese friends. It's up to the mainland Chinese to deal with the mistreatment of their citizens, and it's possibly time for our state department to get involved, ascribe these human rights violations to the proper source and exert pressure on the Taiwanese government to take action as well. After all, we wouldn't want any sort of blow-up to occur that would resurrect the the conflict that would put us on a collision course with 1.3 billion angry Chinese.

[tripas de leche]

09:09 PM on 01/29/2012

What we want is to do business with China because of their emerging middle class. We can do business as long as we never talk about Tibet or their human rights violations. We will continue to look the other way and play nice. I'm afraid the dollar trumps everything.

[justlw]

06:46 PM on 01/29/2012

Congratulations on not owning an Apple product. Do you also not own a Kindle, PlayStation 3, Wii, or Xbox?

Do you also not own a computer sold by Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, or Lenovo?

How about products sold by Cisco, Motorola, Netgear, Nokia, Panasonic, Samung, or Sharp?

Foxconn makes a *lot* of stuff.

This is a huge problem, and it'd be great to see some company take the lead in addressing it.

Apple has a huge cash balance right now; wouldn't it be great if they took that money and invested in an ethical manufacturing concern, if not in the US, at least in some company with a better human rights track record than China?

[Monte924]

03:24 AM on 01/30/2012

Agreed, with how much money Apple has in the bank and how much they make in profit per year, they are in a great position to start changing things. They can afford to start moving towards a higher standard.