Labor Relations

Labor Relations

Company's stance toward labor

In the past, precisely during the year 2006, Apple has been criticized for its practices related to the working conditions of its employees, in certain places. It had been previously reported that the working conditions that existed that in the factories present in China were not according to the rules of law, and that was the contract manufacturers Inventec and Foxconn were involved in producing the iPod (Moyer, 2012). A research was carried according to which, it was found that one of the complex type of factories that was involved in the manufacturing of the iPod, besides other items, had employed about 200,000 workers who worked and lived in the factory, and the employees spent more than 60 hours per week working at the factory. It was also reported that the workers only earned $100 per month and were also required to live pay for rent and food from the company, which usually amounted to a little above half of the suffering worker's earnings.

Upon recognizing that such issues had been reported regarding the working conditions of factories where Apple products were manufactured, Apple immediately brought on board an investigation panel that worked and investigated the issue by contacting the respective manufacturers in order to ensure that the working conditions were accepted by the rules of law and were in line with the required conditions.

Labor-related issues

In the year 2007, Apple initiated yearly auditing of all of its suppliers of products in order to assess the prevailing position of worker's rights, whether they were being given or not, and to what extent those rights were given and granted to workers. Apple then raised the standards that were to apply to the working conditions of the workers who were making products for Apple, and also began to prune the suppliers who were not complying with its standards (Engardio et. al, 2007). Since then, yearly progress reports get published which give details about the working conditions prevalent in factories manufacturing products for Apple, and these reports have been getting published regularly since the year 2008.

During the year 2010, the workers in China decided to sue contractors of iPhone over the poising which was caused by usage of a cleaner used for cleaning LCD screens. According to one worker, it was claimed that he and his coworkers were not informed beforehand about the possible illnesses that would be related to occupation (Chen, 2010). The workers started to commit suicide. These suicides were taking place at the Foxconn facility located in China where iPhones and iPads were made, at a lower rate than in China as a whole (Engardio et. al, 2007). The workers were later on forced to sign a document that bounded them legally and made them guarantee that they would not kill themselves. However, in the year 2011, Apple admitted that the child labor practices enforced by its suppliers in the region of China had in fact worsened with the passage of ...