Authors: Mickey Huff
Pun's report explained that workers organized a strike in 2004 without much help from trade unions or labor organizations.
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The 2011 NGO report also documented an April 2009 strike of 7,000 workers at Dongguan Wanshida in protest over high-volume production demands and thirteen-hour workdays. Interviews with and studies focused on the factory workers thus elucidate their frustration and strategic rebellion, whereas in US corporate media accounts, workers are portrayed either as victims or happy to have a job, if they are touched upon at all. Further, the absence of coverage of the work of Chinese labor groups, unions, and NGOs, in addition to the workers themselves, contributes to the erroneous Western perspective that China is a lawless land of capitalism run amok.
US corporate media coverage also suggests that the Chinese themselves are to blame for the labor and environmental abuses, rather than the American corporations, like Apple, that create these conditions by allotting suppliers the slimmest possible profit margin, which encourages suppliers to sidestep regulations and labor laws in the economic interest of their companies.
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The NGO report also provides evidence of worker mistreatment and unsafe workplace conditions as far back as 2007, when Apple launched the iPhone to consumers. The report reveals through interviews of workers at Apple touchscreen supplier Lian Jian Technology, a Taiwanese-owned facility located in the Suzhou Industrial Park, that workers had been poisoned and left with long-term illnesses. They were sickened while cleaning touchscreen glass for the iPhone after n-hexane was substituted for an alcohol-based cleaner, and the report notes that exposure to this poison “leads to peripheral neu
ropathy, numbness of the limbs, and impedes movement and sense of touch.”
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Workers reported losing strength in their bodies, fainting and collapsing at work, and doctors found nerve damage to be a result of the poisoning. Of the forty-nine young workers that were admitted to hospital for treatment, many are now classified with an occupational disability, and were given only a modest stipend by the company, which will not cover their lifelong medical bills. Workers reported that Apple representatives had visited the facility before workers became ill, and that Apple never communicated with any of the sickened workers.
At Yun Heng Hardware and Electrical, a factory of about thirty employees, poisoning of workers was also a problem. In 2010, five workers were still in hospital after being poisoned by n-hexane. Workers stated that they were never informed of the hazards, and reported the same ailments as those at Lian Jian. At the Yun Heng factory, Yuhan Photoelectric Technology (Suzhou) Co., Ltd., contracted workers to clean Apple logos and affix them to film. Workers reported the poisonings to the Wujiang Health Bureau in January 2010, and the Worker Safety Bureau subsequently found that the toxic work was done between April 2009 and January 2010. The investigation revealed that workers had labored in unventilated spaces without safety equipment, which led to eight cases of n-hexane poisoning. For some, the cost of treatment decimated family funds, which caused them to stop medical treatment before they were well. The report indicated that workers were also sickened in 2009 at Dongguan Wanshida, a sister company of Lian Jian. The Dongguan Health Bureau found that 234 workers had a history of exposure to occupational hazards, and that some had suffered hearing loss and anemia.
In
The Other Side of Apple II,
the second report of the three-part series, published in August 2011, the coalition of NGOs pointed out that despite Apple's claims that it rigorously audits its supply chain, the Foxconn Chengdu facility, which was contracted by Apple to manufacture the iPad2, was the site of an explosion that resulted in the death of three workers and the injury of fifteen others.
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The production facility was constructed in just seventy-six days, and through a media investigation it was found that workers had only been trained for a maximum of three days before entering the production line.
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The report noted that the granting of this contract to Foxconn raises serious questions about Apple's auditing process.
In addition to serious health and safety hazards, the first report recounted that workers suffered humiliation at the hands of management. At Dafu Scientific Building Material Co., Ltd., in Changsu, the
Southern Daily
news outlet found and published in December 2009 that women workers were forced to remove belts and submit to a body inspection when leaving the workplace. An anonymous worker posted on a website about this and stated that she left her job because of it. The worker recounted, “Watching a younger girl stand on the inspection platform with her pants suddenly falling down and run away as everyone laughed at her, my eyes filled with tears and I did not laugh. That day, I don't know how I ended up leaving. To this day I still do not dare recall those humiliating memories.”
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This first report noted that Apple speaks broadly about how it manages its supply chain and never mentions specific sites in the supplier responsibility reports it publishes on its website, which prevents external monitoring of its claims of compliance with its supplier code. The report also spotlights Apple's pattern of nonresponse, denial, and stated nondisclosure when complaints are registered from Chinese NGOs or state and regional Chinese authorities. Apple denied using Lian Jian Technology as a supplier of touchscreens, despite worker-provided evidence of Apple-related production. More damning, the report stated that poisoned workers from this site wrote a letter to Steve Jobs in 2011, but they never received a response from Apple.
COMMUNITY IMPACTS OBSCURED BY CORPORATE
MEDIA ACCOUNTS
US corporate media reports additionally contribute to the simplification of the factory workers' situation by ignoring their backgrounds and their motivations to work for Apple suppliers. Chinese news stories note that many Foxconn workers are student interns who do not fall under the protections provided by labor laws.
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The US news outlets do not explain, however, as Pun and Chan found in their research, that students in vocational schools report that pro-growth priorities in China encourage the government officers in charge of
their schools to connect students to Foxconn internships.
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A Chinese story written by Xiaotian Ma, titled “Interns Behind the iPhone 5” and published online for
Nanfang People Weekly
on September 21, 2012, explained that school officials who arrange “involuntary internships” threaten to withhold degrees from college students who leave their Foxconn jobs and ask the interns to sign forms that suggested that they willingly took part in the internships.
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Records of these interns' workdays fail to capture the overtime hours assembly line leaders demanded from them. Western media sources leave out the emotional consequences of the interns' forced labor, especially the reactions from the parents of the interns who feel that the school fees they pay are going toward the exploitation of their own children.
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Additionally, the US corporate media ignores the fact that most workers are migrants who have left their homes in rural areas for stable jobs in cities. A Chinese article published in Henan Social Sciences in 2011 by scholar Fang Qixiong sheds light on this issue.
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Qixiong analyzed thirty-nine reports from the
Nanfang Weekend
on the topic of China's migrant workers and found that, for rural Chinese, Foxconn has provided a source of consistent, if not significant, income. A letter from Shenzhen migrant worker Feng Ji to Steve Jobs, written in September 2011, highlighted the difference between the state of the Chinese factory worker and the American Apple executive, illustrating the way Apple's leadersâand Americans in generalâcan distance themselves from the feelings of assembly line workers. Feng Ji reminded Steve Jobs that his employees in Cupertino return to their homes at the end of a workday and spend time with their spouses and children. Migrant workers, on the other hand, are physically separated from their own families for months or even years at a time.
The distance between the migrant workers and their families, in combination with the stress of factory work, makes the workers especially prone to psychological distress and is damaging to familial relationships. As Qixiong details,
Nanfang Weekend
reports that migrant workers who wish to see their families during major holidays like the Chinese New Year are thwarted by limited numbers of train tickets.
Many workers remain stranded in the city, the site of their difficult work lives, during periods of national celebration. Workers face disappointment and helplessness in this unfamiliar city and are cut off
from the kind of intimate emotional care they would receive at home. In fact, manyâ10 percent, according to Fiona Tam in 2008âShenzhen-based migrant workers who are able to return to their rural-area homes for the Lunar New Year resolve to stay there.
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They may forgo the stable factory wages for farming work that will resume only in the spring, but they restore the healing familial bonds the factory environment fails to offer.
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Additionally, Tam reported in 2008 that relocated migrant workers are not granted residency in their place of work and thus do not have voting rights in their districts.
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In June 2010, this policy was changed, though workers felt the change was mostly symbolic because most of them do not meet the educational and community activities requirements for residency.
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This means that in addition to suffering the stress of being separated from their families, being regularly overworked, and sometimes injured on the job, they are politically disenfranchised too.
The children of workers, their parents, and extended families also suffer the burden of the flight of young Chinese from rural areas to factory jobs. A July 2010 Chinese report published in
China Business News
details the phenomenon of “left-behind kids” who remain in rural villages with grandparents or other kin when one or both parents leave to work in a factory for an extended period of time. In a very sad case, four “left-behind” children about thirteen years of age attempted suicide together by consuming an agricultural chemical mixed with beer.
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Fortunately all of the children survived, but their suicide attempt is indicative of the struggles children face when growing up without their parents, which is a widespread problem for Chinese families.
China's role as the world's factory not only sucks its young adults out of their communities, but sometimes factories encroach upon and displace rural communities too. A December 2010 report in
Nanfang Weekend
exposed the social effects of village displacement with the story of a ten-year-old child who is now the only pupil in her school because all other residents accepted the terms of forced relocation offered by Foxconn while her parents have not.
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The story showcases a sad, lonely child who bursts into tears at a school staffed by a few dedicated teachers who insist on providing her education.
All but one of the school's 161 pupils left within a month of relocation notice, signaling the scattering of rural families and the disruption of community and social networks.
In fact, fourteen villages across fifteen square kilometers were displaced by Foxconn's building plans in Deyuan Town to clear the way for factory dormitories.
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South China Morning Post
reporter Fiona Tam emphasized in 2009 that rural citizens have been most affected by the mainland's shift to a manufacturing economy, as they have had to send their resources, including people, into the city for pro-duction.
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Reports like these illustrate that Apple's presence in China has changed the geographic location, migratory patterns, familial structures, and even democratic participation of Chinese citizens in significant and harmful ways. These facts have been completely and irresponsibly ignored by both corporate and independent US media outlets.
AN ENVIRONMENT DESTROYED
Although corporate media have recently reported on air quality in China, and some independent media have covered China's “cancer villages,” US establishment media have ignored the pollution of China's rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and ground water as a result of wastewa-ter disposal at tech production facilities. This is particularly egregious in the case of Apple and its suppliers; a study of twenty-nine information technology (IT) brands operating in China found that most had similar problems in their supply chains, however Apple was hands down the most evasive and resistant to hearing complaints and taking appropriate action in response to them.
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As of the August 2011 publication of the NGO report
The Other Side of Apple II,
Apple had continued to fail to act on the complaints detailed in the first report,
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though other brands had publicly responded and taken responsibility. Some of the chronic and systemic problems that have been documented at Apple suppliers in China include hazardous and excessive wastewater runoff and toxic airborne emissions. The NGO report found that more than twenty-seven suspected Apple suppliers had significant environmental problems, and noted that Apple had not reported any of them in its
2011 Supplier
Responsibility Report.
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Because Apple has only recently begun to respond, the company was ranked last of all twenty-nine IT brands in terms of environmental responsibility.
Meiko Electronics, a Japanese company, is one of Apple's admitted suppliers of printed circuit boards (PCBs) for the iPad 2. The report states that the Guangzho site is a known serious polluter in the region. The state has regularly monitored the site since 2009, and it has been found in breach of state standards for wastewater and gas emissions and listed as one of seven violators in need of enforcement. One resident of Nansha District reported a noxious smell that irritates the throatâevidence that points to the serious health implications of these emissions. Investigation by the Nansha District Environmental Supervision Unit found that the site was discharging gases from three outlets without use of required carbon scrubbers, and the facility was fined at the time for emitting exhaust from a generator that violated standards. Investigations also found that the company routinely attempted to conceal its violations.