Employees: Dignity and Workers’ Rights

Abstract

In June 2006, a story appeared in the British tabloid, Mail on Sunday, accusing Foxconn of running a “sweatshop” where it produced Apple iPods. The story immediately stirred up a controversy in which the stakes were particularly immense for Apple because such an accusation could seriously tarnish its reputation particularly in the USA and the EU. After the initial wave of outraged denials, both Foxconn and Apple agreed to open the alleged sweatshops to investigation and urged that their operations be judged by the standards already established in Apple’s Supplier Code of Conduct. When the investigative report was released later that summer, it found no evidence that Foxconn used either child labor or forced labor, and while admitting that the average weekly hours of Foxconn employees exceeded the legal limit in China of 60 hours, it denied that these employees had been coerced into overtime work. A few years after the controversy appeared to have died down, it burst open again with news in 2010 regarding a wave of suicides—14 deaths in all—among mostly younger Foxconn employees. What more compelling evidence could there be for confirming that Foxconn was, indeed, running a sweatshop? Why would employees be committing suicide, if not in protest against the inhumane working conditions there?

A moralistic response to this story would have been to play the blame game, and use it to shame China into living up to the promises of Communist ideology, while demanding that Apple cut off its business with any subcontractors, Chinese or otherwise, who fail to make drastic changes in the way workers are treated in their factories. But while such a response might soothe the moral outrage of those who assume that everything made in China must be produced under sweatshop conditions, at best it reflects only part of the story. In what follows we attempt to present a fresh and unbiased study of Apple-Foxconn that raises important questions about what any company owes its workers, starting with a commitment to respect their human dignity and honor their human rights. Our intent is to move the discussion away from playing the blame game, and toward a better understanding of how and why it is in the interests of all stakeholders to monitor working conditions and improve them whenever possible.

“To increase productivity, provide safe and healthy working conditions.” (Stephan Rothlin, Eighteen Rules for ecoming a Top Notch Player, 2004)