Not a week goes by in which I don’t hear students complain about their Dell laptops. Girls at Hewitt constantly wonder why the school doesn’t use Apple products. We’re constantly told the reason has to do with insurance and the financial benefits that Dell offers. But recent working conditions at Apple factories, along with Apple’s response to this situation, have provided two new reasons that support the school’s choice of products.
Insurance and convenience may be two practical reasons as to why Hewitt chooses to use Dell products, but does the state of Apple’s factories serve as an ethical reason as well?
Last month, Apple Inc. released an audit stating that nearly 100 of its factories force more than half of their employees to work over 60 hours every week under extremely abusive conditions. Apple also took responsibility for multiple aluminum dust explosions that have killed four workers and injured 77 others. Workers are reportedly woken up in the middle of the night, having slept in crowded dorms on-site, and are forced onto 12 hour shifts whenever product adjustments need to be made. In addition to these violations, Apple admitted to what is perhaps the cruelest factory violation of all: child labor.
Many fooled by Apple’s presence as a reputable company relied on Apple executives to fix the surprising dilemma quickly. However, while the company took this situation more seriously than they took a previous string of over 20 worker suicides, Apple’s actions suggest that they are interested in changing only the image of working conditions in factories, and not the conditions themselves.
Terry Gou, CEO of one of Apple’s manufacturers, Foxconn, referred to his workers as ‘animals’ just last week.
Through “reputation management” consultants, Apple has apologized for their general behavior without specifying their plans to prevent future factory violations. Although this apology seems to suffice for the media and certain activists, the company’s vague words and lack of concrete solutions have not slipped by the more doubtful thinkers who have rightfully stated that these apologies were driven purely by consumer pressure.
The way Apple is handling this leak of knowledge mirrors how Nike first handled a situation when information of their horrible, sweatshop-like factories slipped out to the public. Like Nike, Apple has recently affiliated themselves with the FLA (Fair Labor Association). But hopefully Apple will diverge from the path that Nike followed, which ended in spending hundreds of million of dollars on factory “monitoring,” all of which led to little avail.
The reason why this “monitoring” does not make any real impact is because the workers’ rights ‘expert’ monitors are often employed by the very individuals they are supposed to be criticizing. A government agent would be much more critical of a company’s habits, given that the government agent works on behalf of the government and not the company under inspection. Other monitors work in NGO mode. These monitors are not employed directly by the company, but rather by a third party with little incentive and little power to improve factory conditions. As stated in an article on AlterNet, “NGOs sell their monitoring services to the big brands that are seeking cover while their supplier factories continue the same profitable patterns of worker abuse.” Through Apple’s employment of this almost useless monitoring method, it is clear that the company has not made astounding progress. As further proof, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1289811/Terry-Gou-billionaire-manufacture-Apple-Dell-products-spent-21m-penthouse–turns-lights-save-money.html, CEO of one of Apple’s manufacturers, Foxconn, referred to his workers as ‘animals‘ just last week.
Watch the video below to explore real clips and photographs about workers at Foxconn, the Apple factory under the most scrutiny for abusive conditions.
The amorality in Apple’s attempt to conceal what goes on in their factories is much more transparent than the company hopes to make the factory conditions themselves. The fact that Apple is trying to hide these horrible conditions in order to save its reputation actually has the opposite effect. Having these conditions present in the first place is wrong, but apologizing solely to please the media and not to alleviate the conditions of their overworked and (in some cases) underage workers is far worse.
That being said, imagine the toll that an order of over 500 Apple laptops, chargers, disk drives, and other accessories would most likely take on these strained factory workers. Insurance and convenience may be two practical reasons as to why Hewitt chooses to use Dell products, but does the state of Apple’s factories serve as an ethical reason as well?
When asked if the sacrifices being made to manufacture a product would change her choice of company, Julia Wolinsky said, “I do care about how my computer is being made, out of what, and whom it is harming. I have no plans to buy a new Mac any time soon, along with an Apple iPhone because, although Apple’s products look nicer, the people who are making them would be suffering for my ‘pleasure.'”
Lily Landau responded, “I’d rather have Apple laptops because they’re more physically durable than Dells and because they rarely get viruses. I fully support safety in the workplace, but I personally would not buy a laptop that is not of the best possible quality. However, I thoroughly support workers’ unions and the integrity that is essential to all workers.”
Before writing this article, I myself would have probably prioritized the quality of products over many other factors. However, it is now clear to me that there is always much more to something than the finished product. The quality of the workers’ lives should be more important than the quality of the computer. So no matter how many trips we make to the tech office because of expired Mcafee software, we should stick with Microsoft until Apple makes some serious adjustments.