Tim Cook has told Apple employees he’s “deeply offended” by the BBC’s critical documentary Apple’s Broken Promises that investigated working conditions inside Apple’s supply Asian supply chain.
In an email obtained by The Telegraph from Apple VP Jeff Williams to the company’s workers in the UK, Williams said he and Cook are offended by the BBC’s suggestion that Apple broke promises with workers in the supply chain, and that no other company is doing “as much as Apple does to ensure fair and safe working conditions.”
Williams also countered the BBC’s claims that Apple uses tin sourced through child labor in Indonesia, saying Apple is spearheading the movement to hold the tens of thousands of artisanal miners more accountable, rather than getting out of the country altogether.
This isn’t the first time Apple’s labor practices in China have come under fire. Apple was hit with a barrage of bad press for Foxconn working conditions back in the days of Steve Jobs, after 14 Foxconn factory workers committed suicide in 2010.
Tim Cook has made a push to improve working conditions by visiting China regularly and holding suppliers to a maximum 60 hour work week. In his letter, Williams says Apple now has 1,400 managers stationed at factories in China to oversee working conditions and to speak up when they see safety risks or mistreatment. As a result, 2014 is the first year Apple hit 93% compliance for its 60-hour limit rule.
Despite all the improvements Apple has made, Williams did admit that Apple can do better and he says they will. “You can rest assured that we take all allegations seriously, and we investigate every claim. We know there are a lot of issues out there, and our work is never done. We will not rest until every person in our supply chain is treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.”
You can read the full letter below:
UK Team,
As you know, Apple is dedicated to the advancement of human rights and equality around the world. We are honest about the challenges we face and we work hard to make sure that people who make our products are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve.
Last night, the BBC’s Panorama program called those values into question. Like many of you, Tim and I were deeply offended by the suggestion that Apple would break a promise to the workers in our supply chain or mislead our customers in any way.
I’d like to give you facts and perspective, all of which we shared with the BBC in advance, but were clearly missing from their program.
Panorama showed some of the shocking conditions around tin mining in Indonesia. Apple has publicly stated that tin from Indonesia ends up in our products, and some of that tin likely comes from illegal mines. Here are the facts:
Tens of thousands of artisanal miners are selling tin through many middlemen to the smelters who supply to component suppliers who sell to the world. The government is not addressing the issue, and there is widespread corruption in the undeveloped supply chain. Our team visited the same parts of Indonesia visited by the BBC, and of course we are appalled by what’s going on there.
Apple has two choices: We could make sure all of our suppliers buy tin from smelters outside of Indonesia, which would probably be the easiest thing for us to do and would certainly shield us from criticism. But it would be the lazy and cowardly path, because it would do nothing to improve the situation for Indonesian workers or the environment since Apple consumes a tiny fraction of the tin mined there. We chose the second path, which is to stay engaged and try to drive a collective solution.
We spearheaded the creation of an Indonesian Tin Working Group with other technology companies. Apple is pushing to find and implement a system that holds smelters accountable so we can influence artisanal mining in Indonesia. It could be an approach such as “bagging and tagging” legally mined material, which has been successful over time in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We are looking to drive similar results in Indonesia, which is the right thing to do.
Panorama also made claims about our commitment to working conditions in our factories. We know of no other company doing as much as Apple does to ensure fair and safe working conditions, to discover and investigate problems, to fix and follow through when issues arise, and to provide transparency into the operations of our suppliers.
I want you to know that more than 1400 of your Apple coworkers are stationed in China to manage our manufacturing operations. They are in the factories constantly — talented engineers and managers who are also compassionate people, trained to speak up when they see safety risks or mistreatment. We also have a team of experts dedicated solely to driving compliance with our Supplier Code of Conduct across our vast supply chain.
In 2014 alone, our Supplier Responsibility team completed 630 comprehensive, in-person audits deep into our supply chain. These audits include face-to-face interviews with workers, away from their managers, in their native language. Sometimes critics point to the discovery of problems as evidence that the process isn’t working. The reality is that we find violations in every audit we have ever performed, no matter how sophisticated the company we’re auditing. We find problems, we drive improvement, and then we raise the bar.
Panorama’s report implied that Apple isn’t improving working conditions. Let me tell you, nothing could be further from the truth. Here are just a few examples:
Several years ago, the vast majority of workers in our supply chain worked in excess of 60 hours, and 70+ hour workweeks were typical. After years of slow progress and industry excuses, Apple decided to attack the problem by tracking the weekly hours of over one million workers, driving corrective actions with our suppliers and publishing the results on our website monthly — something no other company had ever done. It takes substantial effort, and we have to weed out false reporting, but it’s working. This year, our suppliers have achieved an average of 93% compliance with our 60-hour limit. We can still do better. And we will.
Our auditors were the first to identify and crack down on a ring of unscrupulous labor brokers who were holding workers’ passports and forcing them to pay exorbitant fees. To date, we have helped workers recoup $20 million in excessive payments like these.
We’ve gone far beyond auditing and corrective actions by creating educational programs for workers in the same facilities where they make our products. More than 750,000 people have taken advantage of these college-level courses and enrichment programs, and the feedback we get from students is inspiring.
I will not dive into every issue raised by Panorama in this note, but you can rest assured that we take all allegations seriously, and we investigate every claim. We know there are a lot of issues out there, and our work is never done. We will not rest until every person in our supply chain is treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.
If you’d like to learn more about our Supplier Responsibility program, I encourage you and our customers to visit our website at apple.com/supplierresponsibility.
Thanks for your time and your support.
Jeff
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
29 responses to “Tim Cook ‘deeply offended’ by accusations of labor abuse”
Makes us even, because I am deeply offended by everything about Mr Cook.
Really.. why? Or was it just something you thought sounded witty?
If you have something useful to add, just say it. But to make a comment like that is just lame. I do not think Cook is perfect, but he has gone a long way to address social issues and charity. Not too bad IMHO.
Easy for you to say. You haven’t been buried under a wall of collapsed sand in an Apple tin pit mine. Struggling to breathe as the sand fills your mouth and throat and you gasp to fill your shattered lungs with oxygen, only to have them fill with blood instead.
Oh, but Tim Cook donated $250K to fight Prop 8, so it is no big deal.
I am assuming that you have not been buried either. Why do you call it an ‘Apple pit’, when the tin is sold to many, many industries. In fact it goes into the solder used in every electrical component. Drive a car, watch a TV, own a computer, listen to a radio,?.. You have some other agenda going to write such crap.
Get some fresh air man…
IG Farben made a similar argument at Nurnberg. It was not successful.
You seem to really care…about what I don’t know.
Human beings. I understand that is difficult to understand for some.
But you don’t care enough to hold everyone accountable who uses tin from these mines, just Apple.
Exactly!
Some here don’t care about anything except their hate for a company. Wrapping it in I care about “human beings” is shameful.
I do care, as my posts below will show, because I care enough to understand the problem beyond the headline and the real solution beyond Apple’s bank account.
The rest of this, like the original TV show, is just manipulation of a long standing problem to make money or serve an agenda.
That’s an awfully big, not to mention inaccurate, statement. I just happen to think that the largest and most powerful tech company, which often boasts that it earns most of the profit in the industry and has most of the resources in the industry, should live up to all of its advertising claiming to be ethical.
Whereas you appear to believe that it is okay for them to actively facilitate continued crimes against humanity because Xiaomi also does.
Good point. Why should Apple be accountable? They only invented the Chinese supply chain, earn the lion’s share of the industry’s profits, and advertise that they’re a different, unique and superior company in terms of ethics. None of that suggests that they should have high enough standards to not profit from child labor, slave labor, extreme hours, illegally-mined materials, and other crimes against humanity.
Because FoxConn makes more (a lot more) than Apple stuff. But someone who obviously hates gays wouldn’t admit to that. At least you can throw sympathy at Russia – they’ve been putting the screws to the homosexual community a lot lately.
Wow, that’s interesting. So far in this discussion, I’ve been called a homophobe and anti-Semite. Which is funny, because I am a gay Jew. Oh the self-flagellation! ;)
The Apple Volunteer PR team is working overtime at Dadaist defenses on this issue. Gotta give credit where it is due.
Something about your username seemed familiar.
Then I remembered!
In the 1990s, you authored a CRAYYYYYYZAY anti-Apple web site. It was called something like the Apple Deathwatch, and it’s header graphic was a pin about to pop a balloon.
As a wee little college homo, I wrote a rebuttal of sorts for a long-dead Mac web site, to which you responded quite… Ummm… Enthusiastically.
And to think, 18+ years later, you’re now an Apple-Can-Do-No-Wrong Fanboy. Ha!
Yup. Apple sucked before they incorporated a real OS like NeXTstep and dumped their chipset for Intel. You seem surprised by this. I’m not surprised you’re an old responder of the satirical hobbysite since most who did were rather psychotic. Some even played ‘Apple reps’ at Best Buy stores and the like. I’m not kidding that one even blew his own brains out : http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/06/53316?currentPage=all.
The people who responded most to the satire of the ADC are pretty much the same kind of Aspergers patients who spend every waking hour responding to boring article threads and dredging up Nazis. Of course – you wouldn’t have any notion of such things. That’d be crazy.
Not too keen to indulge further, other than to thank you for a fascinating glimpse at the psyche of the brand fanatic. Peace to you. :)
PS, you should really watch the BBC documentary. It has nothing to do with Foxconn.
Hate gays I’m guessing. How’s the weather in Topeka KS? Picketed a lot of Military funerals this month?
I only hate some gays. Like my first ex-boyfriend of some years ago. He’s a bit of a dick.
Mr. Cook needs to just move all non-US facilities BACK to the US. Put Americans to work! SJ would approve! :)
Because GT Advanced worked out so well.
You’re out of your mind. Americans are never going to work for the pennies that these Foxconn workers are paid.
Anyone with even a sense of good TV in the UK knows that Panorama these days has a reputation amongst decent journalists of at best tabloid pantomime TV
I’d believe that Apple had worked hard of this issue, but it’s not enough. Because improving working condition means more investment, or less productivity. Since the later one is top priority, and the top level administrator gives you only policies but not fundings, what can you do if you’re the chief of production line ? The solution is simple: dealing with labours under the table. The word “dealing” means bribing labour union leaders, suppressing protests with threatening, differentiation and false promises. This is the open secret that why you can buy cheap products in the mall. Everyone knows it, and everyone choose to ignores it.
Why sir is this Apple’s issue and not a Chinese government or Foxconn issue?
Why should Apple be the one to place itself at a competitive disadvantage to satisfy people with an agenda or looking to make money off this serious issue? Why do these things ignore that Foxconn makes products for many companies and is itself one of thousands in China that do this and MUCH MUCH worse?
Make no mistake this is a China problem! They need to keep a billion people employed! So you lure manufacturing jobs by pushing low wages, lax environmental and labor laws, to do it. The result you have smog filled cities, polluted water, dangerous food, and child labor.
All these articles do, that make no mention of the above, is ignore the real issue and the only solution which is government reform and oversight. Anything less is looking for click revenue on the backs of these workers and to me far worse than anything Apple is accused of here.
In short,…..pathetic!
Neither Apple or China government can do anything to it. It’s beyond the law or regulation.
In short, the China government do have labour protection laws, and Apple set a much higher standard for the suppliers. Apple even invested more than local official bureau on supervising. In fact, if Apple did not choose these manufacturer as supplier, the condition of these workers would be even more pathetic.
As I said, Apple did work hard on this issue, but it’s not enough. Why? Because people don’t understand the source of problem.
People always had unrealistic imagination about the “China labourer.” No, these people did not live in the slums as plotted in all those first world movies. They’ve not-good-but-decent salary, medical care, dormitory, and even meals and commodities are supplied by enterprise. In fact, they eat more healthy than most Americans.
So what else are these people asking for ? Why medias like BBC are crazy about these “pathetic” stories ? What is the “source of problems” I’ve mentioned ?
The answer is simple: poverty, education, and competition.
The inequality problem is China is severe. 1% of the Chinese population possesses 1/3 of the country’s wealth. For the “ordinary” people who have had only basic education, the living standard as a labour is much more wealthy than being a farmer in the countryside. But the question is, when billions (you read it right, billions) people have the same idea, what will it be ?
Suppose you’ve successfully entered the enterprise. You’ll soon learned that your treatment is closely tied to performance. Not your personal performance but the overall performance of your production line, and the performance index is ridiculously high. And you’ll also learned that you’ll be the target if you can not keep pace with you colleague. The result ? Overtime work under the name of “volunteer,” high mental stress, and even bullying — if you can not “fit into the group” (which means “keep quite” in most cases).
Sound familiar ? Of course you do. It is the standard capitalism problem, and it’s now severely strike the social of this communalism country, how ironic.
So what else Apple can do to “keep the promise” ? Nothing. It’s not something Apple can do or should do to this issue. Apple is only the scapegoat, a particularly noticeable one. It’s meaningless to blame Apple or other enterprise “not treating labours well,” but Mr. Cook should act better than expressing how he is “feeling offended,” because the problems do exist.
People, and Mr. Cook, need understand this: if you think you understand China, you don’t understand China.
Oh yeah,,,the Foxconn suicides! I remember! The ones where the number of suicides were less as a percentage of the population, given the number employed, AND per thousand, than the general Chinese population, Those suicides? Meh!
Gawd it would have been stellar to have someone claim things must be awesome at Foxconn as there are fewer suicides there than China overall. Not going to happen, doesn’t generate clicks, but oh well!
It’s truly pathetic that stuff like this gets printed these days, for clicks, and passed off as reporting. It’s no wonder their offended!
Critical THINKING should be a requirement for this line of work!
Carry on!
It is time to call out this BBC ‘documentary’ for what it is: a lie! BBC – a british con artist.
The factory workers are employed by Foxconn but Apple is to blame for their poor working conditions because of? – billions of profits.
The miners in Indonesia are portrayed to be supplying tin for Apple because of the ‘Apple Bullshit’ with the Indonesian accent statement in this so called ‘expose’. Jeez, one could just imagine how small percentage the whole computers of Apple is compared to that of the entire Windows PC! Not even a tenth!
And I could not fathom the assertions this Chinese department of labor head made against Apple.
Well, I’m not viewing my news from Britain but this so called ‘documentary’ from BBC about Apple is just beyond the pale and should be called as such – a deception.
The 14 suicides were blown out of proportion. Foxconn had roughly 470,000 employees at the time. They live and work on campus. It’s like a big university. People in America don’t realize this. There are plenty of suicide happen in America all the time. Boyfriends and girlfriends have nasty breakups and this is what you have. It wasn’t because of horrendous working conditions.
Also, slamming Apple is something people enjoy doing and get away with it. Mike Daisey deserved to get slammed for his article about poor working conditions at Apple factories and then admitted to fabricating his story. That wasn’t the end of it however. The NY Times, being the upstanding publisher they are, republished Daisey’s article without an ounce of fact checking or having a solid “second source”. The NY Times eventually put out a retraction.
People think Apple is “sue happy” and that they love to sue companies at the drop of a hat. Nothing could be further from the truth. Apple had all kinds of opportunity to sue both Daisey and the NY times and choose not to do so.
I go to OfficeMax and I see bluetooth keyboards that look exactly like Apple’s wireless bluetooth keyboard. I look at Logitech’s trackpad for the PC. All these designs are rip offs from Apple’s designs. People look at the lawsuit between Apple and Samsung. Samsung supplies over half the components for iPhone. Do you really think Apple was looking forward to suing a partner that is so critical to their success?