Who Makes Your Iphone?

 

Who Makes Your iPhone?

The popularity of iPods, iPhones, and iPads around the world shows that Apple products are wanted by many people. If you do not own one of these gadgets, you probably know someone who does.

 

Apple has been celebrated for products that are easy to use and work great. Apple founder, chairman, and CEO Steve Jobs, who died in October 2011, has been honored not only as a brilliant inventor but as a major "job creator."

 

But how good are those Apple jobs? Like virtually all of its competitors - including Dell, Hewlett Packard, and Sony - Apple uses Chinese labor to manufacture its products. These companies want to pay their workers as little as possible to increase profits (the money that they make) by outsourcing production overseas (setting up factories in other countries) where workers' wages are way lower than in U.S.

 

What is it like to work in a factory that manufactures Apple products? According to recent reports, it's not very pleasant. Chinese workers spend long hours standing on the assembly line, they are paid poorly for their labor (around $42 per week, according to recent estimates), and some have been exposed to toxic chemicals. Earlier this year, the New York Times published several stories in what it calls its "iEconomy series" that discussed conditions inside of some of the Chinese factories making iPhones and iPads. As reporters Charles Duhigg and David Barboza wrote in a January 25, 2012 article:

 

Employees work long hours, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple's products, and the company's suppliers have not disposed of waste safely. More troubling, the groups say, is they don’t seem to care about their workers' health.

 

In the factories of an Apple supplier called Foxconn, 14 workers committed suicide in a 16-month period. According to the British newspaper the Daily Mail, the string of suicides prompted the factories to require prospective workers to sign pledges not to kill themselves before being hired:

 

At least 14 workers at Foxconn factories in China have killed themselves in the last 16 months as a result of horrible working conditions.

  

After a lot of suicides last year, managers at the factories ordered new staff to sign pledges that they would not attempt to kill themselves, according to researchers.

And they were made to promise that if they did, their families would not be paid very much in damages.

Apple has made a ton of money from these low wages. As the New York Times reported, "Last year, [Apple] earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google."

 

There is some disagreement over whether the Chinese factories that make Apple products constitute "sweatshops." Nevertheless, the reports about these factories should remind us to stop and think about how the products we buy are made, by whom, and under what conditions.