Technology giant Apple has admitted that child labour is a growing problem in Chinese factories that manufacture its computers, iPods and mobile phones.
The US company also acknowledged for the first time that 137 workers were poisoned at a Chinese company that makes its products and said that less than a third of the facilities it audited were complying with its code on working hours compared with 46% in 2009.
Apple is the only major technology company to audit its supply chain and publish the results in a Supplier Responsibility Report.
The Report revealed that 91 children under the age of 16 (the legal working age in China) were found to be employed in 10 Chinese factories owned by its suppliers last year compared with only 11 in 2009.
“In recent years, Chinese factories have increasingly turned to labour agencies and vocational schools to meet their workforce demands. We learned that some of these recruitment sources may provide false IDs that misrepresent young people’s ages, posing challenges for factory management,” it said.
The firm does not name individual suppliers, which means that outside scrutiny impossible, but it said that it had ordered most of the offenders to pay the children’s education costs. It also fired one contractor that employed 42 minors and had “chosen to overlook the issue”.
A vocational school that arranged the employment had likewise been reported to the authorities for falsifying student IDs and threatening retaliation against any students who revealed their ages. Apple also said that it had strengthened its own age checks because of concerns that other schools and labour agencies were likewise falsifying information.
But the report also showed a marked drop in the number of factories complying with its requirements on working hours, which allow a maximum 60-hour week plus one day off. While 46% of employer met the demands in 2009, the figure fell to just under a third last year. Fewer factories likewise conformed to health and safety standards (72%) and only 57% met Apple’s code on preventing working injuries.
But the study also admitted that 137 workers at a supplier in Suzhou were poisoned by the hyrdrocarbon n-hexane last year. It said that Apple was “disturbed and deeply saddened” by the deaths and that chief operating officer Tim Cook and other executives both went to see the facilities for themselves and commissioned an independent review of conditions there.
