Although some might argue the company has bigger fish to fry when it comes to rights abuses at its supplier factories given the recent riots and the instances of forced student labor, Apple has said it is making work-hours compliance a top priority this year in its ongoing struggle to get its suppliers to adhere to its code of conduct. Recently, the company updated its Supplier Responsibility site with new data that says it achieved 97 percent supplier compliance on working-hour standards in July and August. Here’s the graph they shared:
It’s an impressive jump from 2011, when Apple’s yearly progress report found only 38 percent compliance with this standard. Apple asks that workers work no more than sixty hours per week and be given at least one day of rest except in “unusual” or “emergency” situations, and getting suppliers to meet that standard has required a number of measures. In 2011 the company began weekly shift tracking at facilities with a history of violations. This year Apple has also been doing training and management consultations to get suppliers into compliance.
It appears Apple has engineered an impressive about-face in its working-hours regulation compliance, but there are a few reasons to be skeptical. First and foremost, these are self-reported numbers and it isn’t entirely clear how Apple calculates them. Does 97 percent compliance mean that no one at any of those suppliers worked more than sixty hours per week over the course of the last few months? That seems a little difficult to believe, especially given that the push to meet the September iPhone launch deadlines apparently had Foxconn strung so tight that it had to rely on forced college “interns” to complete the orders.
Moreover, if Apple is capable of achieving such an incredible turnaround in such a short period of time, one has to wonder why it didn’t do this earlier, and why it hasn’t placed a similar level of focus on arguably more important goals like completely ending instances of “core violations.” The forced student labor at Foxconn, for example, is by Apple’s own standards a massive core violation that could be grounds for termination of the company’s contract as an Apple supplier.
Somehow, though, I don’t expect Foxconn has to worry too much about losing its Apple contract. If these new numbers are accurate, it’s great that Apple is taking work-hour compliance seriously, but I can only hope the company will be as swift and successful in addressing the other violations that occur at its suppliers.
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