Apple’s new statement on “Our Commitment to Human Rights” promises the company will make devices that respect human rights, including freedom of speech. But the company will also follow national laws.
Apple received the highest possible score on the Human Rights Campaign’s 2019 Corporate Equality Index. This means it took steps to provide greater equity for LGBTQ workers and their families.
It’s one of 571 businesses earning the CEI’s top score of 100, meeting new and higher benchmarks.
A U.S. senator is asking Apple and Google to pull an app in Saudi Arabia that men use to track and restrict the movements of women.
Sen. Ron Wyden wrote a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google boss Sundar Pichai asking them to “immediately remove” the app Absher, from their app stores.
Apple may be very happy to talk environmental issues and human rights when it suits it to do so — but not at its shareholder meetings.
According to a new report, Apple is “pushing back” on four activist shareholder proposals to discuss these issues at its annual general meeting (AGM) early in 2018. The reason? Because Apple says they relate to “ordinary business” and are already areas that Apple is dealing with. In other words, don’t worry about it!
After Apple ranked third in Fortune’s annual list of companies that Change the World, Tim Cook sat down for a wide-ranging interview to discuss how Apple is making a dent in the universe now.
The Apple CEO talked about everything from education and health initiatives to how Cupertino thinks different about charity. He also revealed that some of Apple’s research and development regarding health and wellness won’t ever be about making money.
Here are some of the highlights:
Horrible sleeping conditions. Bad food. And boring tasks.
That’s what you can expect if you ever land at job at an iPhone factory, according to an ex-Pegatron employee and NYU grad student who went undercover at one of Apple’s factories in China.
President Donald Trump has called on Apple to bring iPhone manufacturing jobs to the U.S., but if Americans learn what it’s really like inside an iPhone factory, filling those jobs might be impossible.
The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights has added Apple CEO Tim Cook to its board of directors to help the organization in its pursuit of a more just and peaceful world.
The International human rights organization that was founded by Bobby Kennedy’s family 50 years ago honored Cook last year with the Ripple of Hope Award, now Cook will help carry on his personal hero’s unfinished work of fighting against oppression for all people.
Spain’s government has passed a series of laws that criminalize some forms of protest. But authorities may find it challenging to arrest holograms.
The group No Somos Delito, or We Are Not Crime, fired back at the government Friday using irony and digital technology with a projected hologram rally in front of Spain’s parliament.
Human rights groups were outraged when the conservative government passed laws in December that were seen as silencing protests over Spain’s austerity programs.
Although Apple has been taking unprecedented measures in the industry to remedy the problem, the truth is that working on an assembly line mass-producing iPhones just sucks. But how bad a job is building iPhones in the grand scheme of things?
The Worst Jobs in the World Matrix, from Lapham’s Quarterly, tries to put the craptitude of working at Foxconn in a broader historical perspective. As you can see, slaving away in an electronics factory for 300 hours per month for $0.76 an hour is a difficult job, but it’s far less disgusting than being a Roman vomitorium attendant, less tedious than being a World of Warcraft gold farmer, less treacherous than being a Japanese subway pusher, and less fatal than being the court food taster for a 16th-century emperor. Perspective, people!
Source: FastCo. Design
Last year, Apple launched its Labor and Human Rights page to give some transparency to the human rights controversy’s it’s been having with supply chain workers. Along with numerous explanations on what Apple is doing to make sure its supply chain workers are treated fairly, the company releases the percentage of supplier work-hour compliance every month.
For the first time since Apple started tracking its supplier work-hour compliance metric, they just hit 99% compliance in January 2013.
Back from the holidays, Apple has just filed a preliminary proxy statement with the SEC today in preparation for its annual shareholder meeting in 2013. It’s filled with a lot of insight into the inner workings of our favorite company, and while the biggest news is probably Tim Cook’s remuneration for 2012, there are also other interesting tidbits, including Apple’s resistance to the idea of the appointment of a Board Committe on Human Rights, and the fact that Scott Forstall’s departure lead to a pay raise for the rest of Apple’s executive team.
While we all know that most consumer electronics are manufactured in places like China, Apple has become the public face of the current practice. While the company continues to rake in huge profits from their iPhone and iPad devices, there has been much finger-pointing in Apple’s direction when unfair and degrading labor practices in manufacturing plants in China, like Foxconn, are brought to the forefront in Western media.
Apple seems pretty aware that it’s fighting this public relations battle on their own. The company’s Labor and Human Rights webpage has just been updated to include data on how many hours per week the 800,000 production workers in their supply chain have to work.
