by Mickey Huff
The NGO report also provides evidence of worker mistreatment and unsafe workplace conditions as far back as 2007, when Apple launched the iPhone to consumers. The report reveals through interviews of workers at Apple touchscreen supplier Lian Jian Technology, a Taiwanese-owned facility located in the Suzhou Industrial Park, that workers had been poisoned and left with long-term illnesses. They were sickened while cleaning touchscreen glass for the iPhone after n-hexane was substituted for an alcohol-based cleaner, and the report notes that exposure to this poison “leads to peripheral neuropathy, numbness of the limbs, and impedes movement and sense of touch.”22 Workers reported losing strength in their bodies, fainting and collapsing at work, and doctors found nerve damage to be a result of the poisoning. Of the forty-nine young workers that were admitted to hospital for treatment, many are now classified with an occupational disability, and were given only a modest stipend by the company, which will not cover their lifelong medical bills. Workers reported that Apple representatives had visited the facility before workers became ill, and that Apple never communicated with any of the sickened workers.
At Yun Heng Hardware and Electrical, a factory of about thirty employees, poisoning of workers was also a problem. In 2010, five workers were still in hospital after being poisoned by n-hexane. Workers stated that they were never informed of the hazards, and reported the same ailments as those at Lian Jian. At the Yun Heng factory, Yuhan Photoelectric Technology (Suzhou) Co., Ltd., contracted workers to clean Apple logos and affix them to film. Workers reported the poisonings to the Wujiang Health Bureau in January 2010, and the Worker Safety Bureau subsequently found that the toxic work was done between April 2009 and January 2010. The investigation revealed that workers had labored in unventilated spaces without safety equipment, which led to eight cases of n-hexane poisoning. For some, the cost of treatment decimated family funds, which caused them to stop medical treatment before they were well. The report indicated that workers were also sickened in 2009 at Dongguan Wanshida, a sister company of Lian Jian. The Dongguan Health Bureau found that 234 workers had a history of exposure to occupational hazards, and that some had suffered hearing loss and anemia.
In The Other Side of Apple II, the second report of the three-part series, published in August 2011, the coalition of NGOs pointed out that despite Apple’s claims that it rigorously audits its supply chain, the Foxconn Chengdu facility, which was contracted by Apple to manufacture the iPad2, was the site of an explosion that resulted in the death of three workers and the injury of fifteen others.23 The production facility was constructed in just seventy-six days, and through a media investigation it was found that workers had only been trained for a maximum of three days before entering the production line.24 The report noted that the granting of this contract to Foxconn raises serious questions about Apple’s auditing process.
In addition to serious health and safety hazards, the first report recounted that workers suffered humiliation at the hands of management. At Dafu Scientific Building Material Co., Ltd., in Changsu, the Southern Daily news outlet found and published in December 2009 that women workers were forced to remove belts and submit to a body inspection when leaving the workplace. An anonymous worker posted on a website about this and stated that she left her job because of it. The worker recounted, “Watching a younger girl stand on the inspection platform with her pants suddenly falling down and run away as everyone laughed at her, my eyes filled with tears and I did not laugh. That day, I don’t know how I ended up leaving. To this day I still do not dare recall those humiliating memories.”25
This first report noted that Apple speaks broadly about how it manages its supply chain and never mentions specific sites in the supplier responsibility reports it publishes on its website, which prevents external monitoring of its claims of compliance with its supplier code. The report also spotlights Apple’s pattern of nonresponse, denial, and stated nondisclosure when complaints are registered from Chinese NGOs or state and regional Chinese authorities. Apple denied using Lian Jian Technology as a supplier of touchscreens, despite worker-provided evidence of Apple-related production. More damning, the report stated that poisoned workers from this site wrote a letter to Steve Jobs in 2011, but they never received a response from Apple.
COMMUNITY IMPACTS OBSCURED BY CORPORATE
MEDIA ACCOUNTS
US corporate media reports additionally contribute to the simplification of the factory workers’ situation by ignoring their backgrounds and their motivations to work for Apple suppliers. Chinese news stories note that many Foxconn workers are student interns who do not fall under the protections provided by labor laws.26 The US news outlets do not explain, however, as Pun and Chan found in their research, that students in vocational schools report that pro-growth priorities in China encourage the government officers in charge of their schools to connect students to Foxconn internships.27 A Chinese story written by Xiaotian Ma, titled “Interns Behind the iPhone 5” and published online for Nanfang People Weekly on September 21, 2012, explained that school officials who arrange “involuntary internships” threaten to withhold degrees from college students who leave their Foxconn jobs and ask the interns to sign forms that suggested that they willingly took part in the internships.28 Records of these interns’ workdays fail to capture the overtime hours assembly line leaders demanded from them. Western media sources leave out the emotional consequences of the interns’ forced labor, especially the reactions from the parents of the interns who feel that the school fees they pay are going toward the exploitation of their own children.29
Additionally, the US corporate media ignores the fact that most workers are migrants who have left their homes in rural areas for stable jobs in cities. A Chinese article published in Henan Social Sciences in 2011 by scholar Fang Qixiong sheds light on this issue.30 Qixiong analyzed thirty-nine reports from the Nanfang Weekend on the topic of China’s migrant workers and found that, for rural Chinese, Foxconn has provided a source of consistent, if not significant, income. A letter from Shenzhen migrant worker Feng Ji to Steve Jobs, written in September 2011, highlighted the difference between the state of the Chinese factory worker and the American Apple executive, illustrating the way Apple’s leaders—and Americans in general—can distance themselves from the feelings of assembly line workers. Feng Ji reminded Steve Jobs that his employees in Cupertino return to their homes at the end of a workday and spend time with their spouses and children. Migrant workers, on the other hand, are physically separated from their own families for months or even years at a time.
The distance between the migrant workers and their families, in combination with the stress of factory work, makes the workers especially prone to psychological distress and is damaging to familial relationships. As Qixiong details, Nanfang Weekend reports that migrant workers who wish to see their families during major holidays like the Chinese New Year are thwarted by limited numbers of train tickets.
Many workers remain stranded in the city, the site of their difficult work lives, during periods of national celebration. Workers face disappointment and helplessness in this unfamiliar city and are cut off from the kind of intimate emotional care they would receive at home. In fact, many—10 percent, according to Fiona Tam in 2008—Shenzhen-based migrant workers who are able to return to their rural-area homes for the Lunar New Year resolve to stay there.31 They may forgo the stable factory wages for farming work that will resume only in the spring, but they restore the healing familial bonds the factory environment fails to offer.32
Additionally, Tam reported in 2008 that relocated migrant workers are not granted residency in their place of work and thus do not have voting rights in their districts.33 In June 2010, this policy was changed, though workers felt the change was mostly symbolic because most of them do not meet the educational and community activities requirements for residency.34 This means that in addition to suffering the stress of being separated from their families, being regularly overworked, and sometimes injured on the jo
b, they are politically disenfranchised too.
The children of workers, their parents, and extended families also suffer the burden of the flight of young Chinese from rural areas to factory jobs. A July 2010 Chinese report published in China Business News details the phenomenon of “left-behind kids” who remain in rural villages with grandparents or other kin when one or both parents leave to work in a factory for an extended period of time. In a very sad case, four “left-behind” children about thirteen years of age attempted suicide together by consuming an agricultural chemical mixed with beer.35 Fortunately all of the children survived, but their suicide attempt is indicative of the struggles children face when growing up without their parents, which is a widespread problem for Chinese families.
China’s role as the world’s factory not only sucks its young adults out of their communities, but sometimes factories encroach upon and displace rural communities too. A December 2010 report in Nanfang Weekend exposed the social effects of village displacement with the story of a ten-year-old child who is now the only pupil in her school because all other residents accepted the terms of forced relocation offered by Foxconn while her parents have not.36 The story showcases a sad, lonely child who bursts into tears at a school staffed by a few dedicated teachers who insist on providing her education. All but one of the school’s 161 pupils left within a month of relocation notice, signaling the scattering of rural families and the disruption of community and social networks.
In fact, fourteen villages across fifteen square kilometers were displaced by Foxconn’s building plans in Deyuan Town to clear the way for factory dormitories.37 South China Morning Post reporter Fiona Tam emphasized in 2009 that rural citizens have been most affected by the mainland’s shift to a manufacturing economy, as they have had to send their resources, including people, into the city for pro-duction.38 Reports like these illustrate that Apple’s presence in China has changed the geographic location, migratory patterns, familial structures, and even democratic participation of Chinese citizens in significant and harmful ways. These facts have been completely and irresponsibly ignored by both corporate and independent US media outlets.
AN ENVIRONMENT DESTROYED
Although corporate media have recently reported on air quality in China, and some independent media have covered China’s “cancer villages,” US establishment media have ignored the pollution of China’s rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and ground water as a result of wastewa-ter disposal at tech production facilities. This is particularly egregious in the case of Apple and its suppliers; a study of twenty-nine information technology (IT) brands operating in China found that most had similar problems in their supply chains, however Apple was hands down the most evasive and resistant to hearing complaints and taking appropriate action in response to them.39
As of the August 2011 publication of the NGO report The Other Side of Apple II, Apple had continued to fail to act on the complaints detailed in the first report,40 though other brands had publicly responded and taken responsibility. Some of the chronic and systemic problems that have been documented at Apple suppliers in China include hazardous and excessive wastewater runoff and toxic airborne emissions. The NGO report found that more than twenty-seven suspected Apple suppliers had significant environmental problems, and noted that Apple had not reported any of them in its 2011 Supplier Responsibility Report.41 Because Apple has only recently begun to respond, the company was ranked last of all twenty-nine IT brands in terms of environmental responsibility.
Meiko Electronics, a Japanese company, is one of Apple’s admitted suppliers of printed circuit boards (PCBs) for the iPad 2. The report states that the Guangzho site is a known serious polluter in the region. The state has regularly monitored the site since 2009, and it has been found in breach of state standards for wastewater and gas emissions and listed as one of seven violators in need of enforcement. One resident of Nansha District reported a noxious smell that irritates the throat—evidence that points to the serious health implications of these emissions. Investigation by the Nansha District Environmental Supervision Unit found that the site was discharging gases from three outlets without use of required carbon scrubbers, and the facility was fined at the time for emitting exhaust from a generator that violated standards. Investigations also found that the company routinely attempted to conceal its violations.
The NGO report also cited another Meiko site in the Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone, located in Hubei province, also in violation of Chinese environmental laws.
Research found that residents have long been concerned about the growth of the production facility, as its wastewater discharge contains the heavy metals nickel and copper. Local investigation of the waste-water discharge found contamination in both a channel that leads to Nantaizi Lake and in the lake itself. A sample of the water tested by the Hongshan district’s Wuhan Environmental Protection Bureau monitoring station was found to contain copper and nickel, and that the concentration of nickel was 11.15 times over the legal standard for water destined for human consumption. The report describes the lake as “an ash grey color with white bubbles accompanying groups of black floating objects.” The report notes that the contamination in the lake has spread to the Yangtze River, where the copper level is 56 to 193 times the normal amount. The amount of copper found indicates that the likelihood of harmful toxicity is very high.
Another known Apple supplier, Kaedar Electronics located in Kun-shan, Jiangsu province, holds the 2006 pollution record in the organization’s Pollution Map Database for its excessive levels of untreated wastewater discharge.42 Another facility in the region, Unimicron Electronics, owned by the Taiwanese Unimicron Group, is a suspected PCB supplier to Apple, and also holds a pollution record for 2005. Kaedar is noted to produce exteriors and interiors of notebook computers, which result in emissions from sprays used in the production process, while Unimicron emits acid gas and dust.
An audit found that, given the proximity to residential areas, even if Kaedar abided by official standards, their operations would still be disruptive to residents.43 Some residents reported that they have been living in fear of poisonous gases for six years. They do not open their windows because of this, and if they leave them open while sleeping, “they will wake in the middle of the night choking.” The report noted that Tong Haiyi, a student at a kindergarten that abuts the factory, said to his mother, “Sometimes when I come back home and I’m studying, I have chest pains, and when you come to fetch me, I feel really dizzy. Sometimes there is a really strange smell at school.” The mother noted that the child suffers from regular headaches, dizziness, and nose bleeds.
The report also noted that residents of nearby Tongxin Village explained that, prior to Kaedar Electronics coming to their area, their village was thriving. However, the facility consumed much of the arable land and blackened their previously clean stream. Residents noted a sharp increase in cancer rates since the facility was established, and said that when the state inspects the factory, the smell disappears— but it always returns. One villager, Zhu Guifen, had to have her stomach removed due to gastric cancer. The researchers reported that she and others fell to their knees and begged for help during the conversation. Following up on the cancer reports, the researchers found that more than nine people in a village of just sixty had contracted or died from cancer in recent years, while in the 197os only one person from the village died of cancer. Some residents have sent their children to live in other locations over fears for their health.
BEWARE OF CORPORATE WASHING
In early 2013, the coalition of Chinese NGOs released its third report, titled Apple Opens Up: IT Industry Supply Chain Investigative Report.44 In it, they stated that in response to the pressure brought by the previous two reports, Apple has begun working with them and with third-party auditors to remedy some environmental problems in its Chinese supplier base. In a few cases, suppliers have made significant and satisfactory improvements, while in others more still needs to be do
ne. The report noted that significant improvements to the wastewater management system were made at the Meiko Electronics facility described previously after the company agreed to an audit in April 2012. Action was also taken at Tripod (Wuxi) Electronic Co., Ltd., which had been identified in the previous report as a generator of massive amounts of hazardous waste, and a water-recycling program was instituted at Ibiden Electronics (Beijing) Co., Ltd., to significantly reduce water consumption at the PCB production plant. We emphasize, however, as does the report, that much of the supply chain remains unexamined.
On the labor side, the final installment of the New York Times’ iEconomy series reported that targeted improvements in labor conditions had been made at one Foxconn site in Shenzhen.45 Yet, critics have pointed out that Apple’s partnership with the Fair Labor Association (FLA) to provide auditing of labor conditions at Chinese suppliers raises serious questions, as the FLA was founded in part by leading corporations in the global garment industry to monitor themselves.46 Apple was also applauded by Gene Sperling, director of the US president’s National Economic Council, when it announced in late 2012 that it would make some Macbooks here in the US in a move to bring production back home.47
While we praise Apple and these few suppliers for taking action in these cases, we point out that this level of response leaves much to be desired given the systemic nature of the problems in the supply chain. Given the scope of the issue, these moves strike us as a mostly symbolic response designed to protect Apple’s brand, rather than a commitment to the well-being of Chinese citizens. For instance, although it is nice that Apple will create some US jobs for Macbook production, when over 70 percent of company revenue comes from iPods, iPads, and iPhones made in China, it is clear that this is not a substantive change in their production model.48 Further, while the “amenities” available to Foxconn workers have been touted in both corporate and independent media, in 2010 workers reported such long hours that they are not able to swim in the Olympic-sized swimming pool onsite at one of the Shenzhen factories, and that they spend their lunch break in a crowd of over 400,000 trying to access the provided meals.49
