Not Quite the Apple of My Eye

There’s been a lot in the news lately about Apple and the working conditions violationsfound at one of its Foxconn manufacturing facilities in China. The response to this news has been very interesting to follow, with fingers pointed in every which direction — some blaming Apple, some blaming Foxconn, some blaming the Chinese government, some blaming the American government, some blaming consumers, and some even blaming the Chinese workers themselves.

To get a sense of how Apple’s other Chinese suppliers might feel about the Foxconn news, I reached out to a personal source (who we’ll call Mike, as he asked not to be named) who used to work for one of Apple’s other Taiwan-based suppliers and has inside knowledge of what it’s like to do business with Apple in China.

Mike’s take on the situation is that suppliers like Foxconn are often forced into workplace violations because buyers demand a lot but continue to operate on what, to him, are antiquated assumptions of cheap Chinese labor. According to Mike, Apple epitomizes such a model, demanding the cheapest, most efficient, and most accommodating suppliers that can crank out new products at a moment’s notice (see this article about Steve Jobs’s notorious last-minute overhaul of assembly lines in 2007). These expectations are impossible to meet without someone getting the short end of the stick—in this case, the laborer. For instance, Mike recounted several instances where Apple asked suppliers to work overtime during Chinese New Year, promising to pay triple wages, only to negotiate their way out of overtime payments later by promising more business (which ultimately never surfaced). The longest overdue payment he handled with Apple took more than three years, which he attributes to a lack of accountability among various buyers.

Not Quite the Apple of My Eye